Those who throw out accusations of “speciesism” seek to subvert human exceptionalism. Their framework should be rejected as a prescription for tyranny every time it is proposed. Continue Reading »
Children are not exposed to enough violence. Yes, I know the grim statistics, how a child who enters middle school has already witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 other violent acts on TV. As he and his friends enter adolescence, they take up first-person shooter video games. In college, he becomes . . . . Continue Reading »
The ultimate goal of animal rights is not to improve our treatment of animals, but to end all animal domestication. Continue Reading »
Wayne Pacelle’s rather rudderless quest to make the world safe for animals seems to be taking us to a world without any livestock at all. Continue Reading »
We appeal to other animals to help us arrive at self-understanding in these perplexing times. But we struggle to understand non-humans in a productive way. Therefore we cannot ultimately understand ourselves. Continue Reading »
My oldest son once spent a summer on staff at a Scout reservation. Underneath his tent platform lived a family of skunks. They would amble by, mama and her kits (baby skunks are kits, as baby goats are kids), with nary a hint of animosity and rarely a spark of curiosity. Who knows how many summers . . . . Continue Reading »
Blaise Pascal spoke of the contradiction in every human heart. Man is an animal at once godlike and depraved. It is not that our dreams are great and our behavior base, but that our dreams are simultaneously wonderful and vile. Perhaps nowhere is this more obvious than in our treatment of other . . . . Continue Reading »
Ribs are getting harder to eat. I was gnawing on some nice tender bones in Memphis recently, but those bones were gnawing on me. Try as I might—and there are many days that I do indeed try to recapture the bliss of ignorance—I know too much about where that pork comes from to just devour it . . . . Continue Reading »
no disciplineI am writing to express my shock and disappointment at the profanity in the article “Freedom Within the Disciplines” (June/July). The word “bullshit” appears multiple times. I have encountered this word and its ilk in the New Yorker, Fast Company, and The Economist, but I . . . . Continue Reading »
• Richard J. Mouw has written a wonderful book, Called to the Life of the Mind: Some Advice for Evangelical Scholars (Eerdmans, 2014). A bright young student raised in a tradition of conservative Evangelical pietism, Mouw recalls that his pastors “often viewed the intellectual life . . . . Continue Reading »
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