A Thinking Reed

  • Beyond “traditionalism vs. liberalism”

    Nice piece from Harvard Divinity School professor Mark Jordan attempting to complicate the simplistic “traditional Christianity vs. liberalism” narrative that almost inevitably appears in reporting about religious controversies: What we are living through is not a fight between a pristine Christianity and the encroaching world, but a divide within Christianity over what exactly should count…

  • “Speciesism”: a red herring?

    There have been some great comments on the “veganism versus vegetarianism” post below, which you should check out if you’re interested. But I thought I’d shift gears and look at some of the other arguments in Tzachi Zamir’s book. A major concern of Zamir’s is arguing that “speciesism” is a red herring in arguments over…

  • Friday Metal: Jon Stewart edition?!

    Here’s a clip I came across of Helmet performing “Wilma’s Rainbow” on the Jon Stewart show in the early ’90s.

  • The fundamentalist hangover

    It occurred to me that there may be something more personal driving some of the points I tried to make in the previous post. I’ve enountered a fair number of people who were raised in very conservative or fundamentalist churches, and who had bad experiences in some cases. For some of these folks, encountering the…

  • On not exactly identifying as a “progressive Christian”

    I’ve noticed a trend recently of Christians in mainline chruches, often self-identifying as “progressives,” developing an alternative “canon” of books, Sunday school curricula, approved authors, etc. parallel to those of their conservative counterparts, but which offers an interpretation of Chrisitianity more to their liking. Anyone who’s hung around moderate-to-liberal mainline churches will recognize some of…

  • Vegan versus vegetarian utopia

    In his book Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir makes an interesting “speciesist” case for animal liberation. But for the purposes of this post I want to focus on his argument in favor of moral vegetarianism, and against veganism. That he makes this argument is surprising since most liberationists, I think it’s safe to say,…

  • The call strategy

    Afghanistan expert Rory Stewart offers a sympathetic, yet not uncritical, analysis of President Obama’s war strategy. For my part, I remain skeptical: I was initially supportive of the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which I thought amply justified, but over time the justification for staying on in a nation-building capacity seemed increasingly elusive. Nevertheless,…

  • A debate on animal rights

    Just catching up on some of my post-Christmas reading: in Sunday’s Washington Post there was a mini-debate between Andrew Linzey and neuroscientist Adrian Morrison over the rights of animals. Linzey is certainly right that Morrison misses the thrust of his central argument. The question isn’t whether humans are different from non-human animals, but whether that…

  • It’s br00tal, Charlie Brown

  • 2009: the year in music

    With the sheer amount of music being released nowadays, it would be presumptuous for anyone who’s not a professional music critic to declaim on the “best” music of a given year. And that’s true even if you confine yourself to a particular genre. Nevertheless, it might be worth mentioning the music that I personally enjoyed…