A Thinking Reed

  • Intelligent dissent on the food movement

    I’m obviously sympathetic to a lot of the proposals of Michael Pollan, et al., but some of what passes for criticism of our system of food production can come across as simplistic, naive, or nostalgic. That’s why I was happy to discover the blog of historian and author Maureen Ogle who, among other things, subjects…

  • Friday Metal: The Red Chord, “Fixation on Plastics”

  • Annals of Lewisania

    Saw the movie “An Education” yesterday. A small subplot turns on one of the characters pretending to know C.S. Lewis and forging an autograph on a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Debate ensues about whether he goes by “Clive” or “C.S.” I know that he went by “Jack” with friends and…

  • A day of anger and horror

    Various bloggers have been offering reminders of the original meaning of Armistice Day, the reason for the season, if you will. See Jim Henley, John Quiggin, and Jacob T. Levy. Levy in particular gets to the heart of the matter: A Veteran’s/ Armistice/ Remembrance Day observed on November 11 in particular shouldn’t just mean a…

  • Quotes for Brother Martin’s birthday

    From Kim at Connexions: Happy birthday, Martin!

  • Two “fall of the Wall” songs

    I was a young buck of 15 at the time, so naturally my memory of the events is filtered through rock music: Jesus Jones, “Right Here, Right Now” Scorpions, “Winds of Change” [Edited because of embedding issues.]

  • Close encounters of the religious kind

    The Post had an article this morning on a conference being sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences on religious implications of the possible discovery of extra-terrestrial life. In principle, I’m not sure most the challenges posed by such a discovery would be all that different from ones we’re already used to. We’re already…

  • Incarnation and animal redemption

    I recently got my hands on an excellent anthology of essays–Creaturely Theology: God, Humans, and Other Animals, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough. It brings together essays on history, theology, philosophy, and ethics to deepen the conversation about the place of animals in Christian theology and practice. So far I’ve only read a few…

  • Health care reform and Catholic social teaching

    Commonweal has an interesting article on Catholic critics of health care reform. The principle of subsidiarity, a key tenet of Catholic social teaching, is often conflated with the kind of small- or anti-government rhetoric you sometimes get from the Right. J. Peter Nixon argues that this is a mistake. His conclusion: Catholic critics of health-care…

  • Friday Metal: going Dutch

    The Dutch band Textures clearly has some heavy Meshuggah influences, but I find their melodic aspects (which are more pronounced in their more recent material) make them a bit more accessible: