Why Animals Matter: Essays on Ethics, Scripture, and the Body
The question of why animals matter is not new. It runs through Aristotle and Bentham, through Kant and Korsgaard, through the Hebrew Bible and the parables of Jesus. What is new — or at least newly urgent — is the recognition that the question cannot be answered from within any single discipline. Animal ethics needs theology. Theology needs philosophy. Philosophy needs animal studies. They all need literature, film, and music.
The essays gathered here represent my ongoing attempt to think across boundaries. They draw on Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, Carol Adams’s feminist-vegan criticism, Jacques Derrida’s meditation on the animal gaze, Matthew Scully’s conservative case for mercy, and the postcolonial biblical criticism of Stephen Moore and Homi Bhabha. They also draw on my own experience: growing up around hunting, becoming a vegetarian, and coming to believe that how we treat animals is inseparable from how we treat one another.
This is not a syllabus. It is a reading list — a guided path through work that I believe matters, organized roughly from the philosophical to the personal to the scriptural. Each entry links to a full essay on this site. At the bottom, you will find a shelf of the books that inform this work, available through Bookshop.org in support of independent booksellers.
The Essays
Martha Nussbaum, Justice for Animals, and the Ethical Problem of Animal Predation
Martha Nussbaum argues that most animals are subjects of justice — creatures whose “significant striving” can be wrongfully thwarted — and that animal predation, far from being natural and untouchable, constitutes an ethical problem that requires a smart human response. This essay traces the full arc of her argument in Justice for Animals, from the inadequacy of utilitarian and Kantian approaches to the radical implications of the capabilities approach for life in “the wild.”
Stealing the Film: On Bud’s THREE DIFFERENT NAMES
In Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing (2025), a cat named Bud is not a prop but a main character — and, following T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a character with three different names. This essay reads the film through Eliot, Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, Lacan on love as a change of discourse, and R.D. Laing on birth narratives, arguing that Caught Stealing takes on a godlike character by inspiring us to chase after an animal’s name rather than its hide. A meditation on the cat’s gaze, the naming of cats, and what it means to return that gaze.
Rest from Cruel Dominion: Embracing Mercy on the Sabbath Day
What does it mean to hold dominion? The Bible’s answer, taken seriously, is not license but obligation: dominion demands mercy. Drawing on Matthew Scully’s Dominion and Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals, this essay reads the Sabbath commandment as a mandate for rest — not just for humans, but for all creatures under our care. If the Sabbath is about ceasing from exploitation, then our treatment of animals is not a side issue. It is the test.
Compassion Is for the Dogs
In Luke’s Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the dogs who lick Lazarus’s sores are usually treated as background detail — a sign of his degradation. But what if the dogs are the moral center of the story? This essay rereads the parable through Nussbaum’s account of compassion as a political emotion, arguing that the dogs model an unconditional, non-retributive care that the parable’s human characters — and many of its interpreters — fail to achieve.
Ash Wednesday: The Animal Body
A visual meditation on what it means to hear “remember that you are dust” while inhabiting a body that bleeds, hungers, and decays. Moving through the work of Mark Ryden, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, and Kiki Smith, this essay confronts the Christian tendency to spiritualize the body away from its animal reality. Ash Wednesday asks us to face what we are. These artists help us do it.
Animal Changes
This is the personal essay/podcast in the collection — a journey from a childhood spent around hunting in rural America to vegetarianism and a slow reckoning with what it means to call someone “an animal.” Drawing on Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, Carol Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Val Plumwood’s The Eye of the Crocodile, the podcast asks what changes when we stop treating “animal” as an insult and start treating it as a description of what we all are.
On the Urgent Matter of the Bible; Or, On How Vegetarians Should Use The Bible
The Bible, in its material history, was written on animal skin. Its narratives are structurally wedded to a predator-prey dynamic. So what should vegetarian and vegan readers do with it? This essay, drawing on Carol Adams, Stephen Moore’s postcolonial biblical criticism, and Homi Bhabha’s account of colonial resistance, proposes a queer vegetarian hermeneutics — a way of reading that refuses the “common sense” of divine predation and lets fall through the meaty sheet of scripture possibilities for anti-predatory relations.
The Gay Thoughts Bookstore
The books below have shaped the thinking behind these essays. With one exception, the links point to the Gay Thoughts Blog Bookstore on Bookshop.org, in support of independent sellers.
Martha Nussbaum, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility (2022) The philosophical foundation of much of this work. Nussbaum extends the capabilities approach to animals, arguing that sentient creatures are subjects of justice whose significant striving must not be wrongfully thwarted.
Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (2013) On the role of wonder, compassion, and outrage in building a just society — and why these emotions are not peripheral to politics but central to it.
Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (2016) Nussbaum’s case for “transition-anger” — a forward-looking form of anger that seeks a better future rather than retribution.
Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory (1990/2024) The classic text linking the oppression of animals to the oppression of women through the concept of the “absent referent.” As Adams writes, “Vegetarianism is an act of the imagination.”
Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (2002) A conservative case for animal mercy, written by a former speechwriter for George W. Bush. Elegant, moving, and unsparing in its critique of factory farming and the hunting industry.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) Derrida’s late meditation on what happens when his cat watches him naked — and what it means that Western philosophy has systematically denied the gaze of the animal.
Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile (2012) Plumwood, who survived a crocodile attack in Australia, writes about what it means to become prey — and how that experience transformed her understanding of human-animal relations.
Christine Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (2018) A Kantian argument for treating animals as ends in themselves. Nussbaum engages and ultimately departs from Korsgaard’s approach in Justice for Animals.
Ken Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies (2017) A pioneering work in biblical animal studies that reads scriptural texts through the lens of contemporary animal ethics and posthumanism.
Steven Wise, An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Dominion on the Banks of the Cape Fear River (2009) Wise, the most prominent advocate of the “So Like Us” approach to animal rights, connects the history of slavery, industrial animal agriculture, and dominion in the American South. Available via ThriftBooks (not currently on Bookshop.org)
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (2004) Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicry and resistant reading — applied in these essays to the question of how colonized vegetarians subverted the colonial Bible.
Theodore Jennings Jr., Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel (2005) A queer reading of the Hebrew Bible’s most intimate and violent encounters between men — and between men and animals.
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