A Thinking Reed

  • Papa don’t blog

    On April 28th my wife gave birth to our first child, a beautiful baby girl. All is well and we’re extremely happy. Needless to say, though, blogging is likely to be sporadic at best for the foreseeable future. Not just because of time constraints and lack of sleep leading to fuzzy thinking, but also because…

  • Creation Sunday

    The ELCA and other churches have adopted the tradition of observing the Sunday closest to Earth Day as “Creation Sunday” (or Care of Creation Sunday). To some this no doubt seems like another in a long line of mainline capitulations to political correctness. The reality, though, is that care for God’s creation should be a…

  • Friday Metal: Day after Earth Day edition

    Gojira, “Embrace the World” I sit on a rock Cannot be touched by struggle & confusion I reclaim my space inside my structure Look at this point All is about nothing, everything comes near The remotest parts of the world By silence We can dissolve disruptive vibrations I have to try Gaia’s alive for good…

  • McLaren and the mainline

    A while ago I posted about the controversy over Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. I noted that it seemed McLaren and his critics were recapitulating a battle waged over a century ago between Christian modernists and fundamentalists. This review of McLaren’s book in the Christian Century seems to confirm that hunch: The central…

  • Property and justice

    My earlier post wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive critique of libertarianism, but one interesting issue that came up in the comment thread was the justice of initial property acquisition. Libertarianism, at least in its natural-rights form, says that holdings in property are just if they are the result of just initial acquisition and voluntary…

  • Emancipation Day

    D.C. observes April 16th as Emancipation Day. From Wikipedia: On that day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act for the release of certain persons held to service or labor in the District of Columbia. The Act freed about 3,100 enslaved persons in the District of Columbia nine months before President Lincoln…

  • Friday Metal: Peter Steele, RIP

    I was never a big Type O Negative fan, but was sad to hear about the death of frontman Peter Steele this week. Here’s “Black No. 1”:

  • Rights, liberties, and taxation

    A point that I’ve tried to make before, but which may bear repeating since it’s Tax Day: the distinction between “positive” and “negative” rights, or liberty, is largely illusory–or at least not that important. Libertarians sometimes use this distinction to differentiate their position from “welfare” liberals. In the libertarian utopia, rights are guarantees against interference…

  • Friday Metal: Barren Earth, “Curse of the Red River”

    “Supergroup” may be stretching it a bit for some, considering the band members are drawn from relatively obscure European death metal bands, but Barren Earth’s full-length debut is very good. Here’s the title track:

  • Red Toryism revisited

    Philosopher and political gadfly John Gray has what seems to be a balanced take on Philip Blond’s “Red Toryism,” which has been making waves in politico-theological circles. Blond is an acolyte of John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy and an advisor to British Tory leader David Cameron who proposes a program of economic “relocalization” combined with political…