A Thinking Reed

  • Jonathan Balcombe on the lives of animals

    Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe has a new book called Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals and was recently interviewed on the Diane Rehm show (listen here). Not a lot of earth-shattering information in the interview if you’ve read much in this area, but it provides a nice overview. Balcombe also makes a good case for…

  • First Things still unable to grapple with animal rights arguments

    I know I should stop expecting First Things to publish thoughtful pieces on animal issues, but this review of a review of Safran Foer’s Eating Animals by David Mills is particularly bad: The reviewer seems to assume, but does not even try to argue, that food animals deserve a long and fulfilling life (whatever fulfilling…

  • Luther’s fourfold (fivefold?) garland of prayer

    Chris at the Lutheran Zephyr has a clear and helpful summary of some of Martin Luther’s teachings on prayer, particularly his commendation of the “fourfold garland” method of prayer and his emphasis on making use of the materials contained in the catechism. As Chris says, in “A Simple Way to Pray,” Luther advised his barber…

  • Another thought on religion and values

    In thinking about the relation between ethics and theology, it helps to distinguish the metaphysical aspects of this problem from the epistemological ones. Or, as St. Thomas would say, the order of being from the order of knowing. Value, or ethics, may depend metaphysically on the existence of God, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that…

  • Friday Metal: Paradise Lost, “Praise Lamented Shade”

  • God, value, and “secular reasons”

    Camassia and Eve Tushnet have been discussing this Stanley Fish column that takes aim at the idea of “secular reasons”–reasons which, according to Fish, “because they do not reflect the commitments or agendas of any religion, morality or ideology, can be accepted as reasons by all citizens no matter what their individual beliefs and affiliations.”…

  • God-blogging

    This is pretty funny.

  • Gary Steiner on the moral status of animals and the “intellectualist” bias

    Marilyn tipped me off to this very interesting-looking book by philosopher Gary Steiner: Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship. Looks like the book came out in 2008, but I wasn’t previously aware of it. Steiner provides a summary of the book’s argument here . Interestingly, Steiner takes a tack that…

  • Friday Metal: Overkill, “Bring Me the Night”

    One of the veteran thrash bands (they’ve been putting music out continuously for 30 years!), still going strong:

  • Edwards on animal redemption

    If the entire creation–not just human beings–is to be taken up into the divine life (deified, to use the term Edwards prefers), then it makes sense to ask whether individual, sentient, non-human creatures (i.e., animals) will participate in the new creation. Edwards thinks that, based on the character of the God revealed in Jesus, we…