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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Rights-talk and some distinctions
I think I unhelpfully ran a few ideas together in the post on libertarianism that should be more clearly distinguished. First, there is the distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights. That is, I asserted that, in practical political terms, this distinction is fuzzier than often imagined because the protection of any right–positive or negative–requires dedicated…
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In praise of diminished expectations
Paul Krugman makes the case for passing the Senate version of health-care reform: With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail. At its…
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Baillie on the problem of the historical Jesus
In light of some of the reading I’ve doing lately on the historical Jesus, I decided to re-visit D.M. Baillie’s God Was In Christ, which was published around the middle of the last century and addressed the then-current controversy about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It holds up…
