Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Conference: Epiphanies of Beauty

By Rick Garnett

Here is a link to a conference, "Epiphanies of Beauty: The Arts in a Post-Christian World," sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. And, here's the "blurb" and description:

"Even beyond its typically religious expressions, true art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that, even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience." -- Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists

Pope John Paul II addressed his 1999 Letter to Artists "to all who are passionately dedicated to the search for new 'epiphanies' of beauty, so that through their creative work as artists they may offer these as gifts to the world." In using the word "epiphany," the Holy Father drew attention to art as the manifestation, or "shining forth," of the glorious beauty of God's creation. Accordingly, as the pope says elsewhere in the letter, beautiful works of art serve as "a kind of bridge to religious experience," and thus as a genuine source of moral, spiritual and cultural renewal.

The Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture's fifth annual fall conference will examine the variety of ways in which the fine arts can help build a more genuinely Christian civilization in an era that is ever more deeply post-Christian in its character. Our first triennial series culminated in proposals on how to build a genuine culture of life, and last year's conference reflected on the renewal and formation at the heart of such a culture. This conference will focus our reflection on the fine arts and their place in a culture of life.

Rick

Florida school-choice decision

By Rick Garnett

Thanks to Howard Bashman, here is a link to the decision by a Florida appeals court, invalidating that State's school-choice program.

In a nutshell, the state court ruled that the program violates a provision of the Florida Constitution, which states that "no revenue of the state . . . shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid . . . of any sectarian institution." In the view of the majority, Florida's no-aid provision is more restrictive than the U.S. Constitution's "Establishment Clause." And, the court ruled that the no-aid provision did not violate the First Amendment's "Free Exercise Clause."

The opinion includes a long and -- in my view -- regrettably laundered version of the history of "no-aid" provisions like Florida's. These provisions were, as MOJ readers likely know, designed not to "separate church and state", or to secularize education generally, but to counter perceived Catholic influence. (For a discussion of these "Blaine Amendments" and their premises, see this paper). (It should be noted that the majority's suggestion, in a footnote, that expert opinion on the Blaine Amendments is evenly split on the question whether anti-Catholicism "played a significant role in the[ir] development" is quite mistaken. The Blaine Amendments were not, as the majority suggests, about "religious schools"; they were about "Catholic schools.")

The court's conclusion that Florida's exclusionary provision does not violate the Free Exercise Clause -- and that this result is supported by the Supreme Court's recent decision in Locke v. Davey -- is also debatable. In Davey, the Court agreed that the Free Exercise Clause did not require the State of Washington to fund college-level training in ministry and theology. I do not believe, though, that Davey necessarily authorizes more generalized discrimination in education-funding programs. On this matter, the dissent seems to have the better of the argument.

In any event, the opinion is worth a look.

Rick

Miscellanea from COMMONWEAL

By Michael Perry

This week's COMMONWEAL, which many of you no doubt read, is particularly rich, I think. There are two excellent "Open Letters"--one to John Kerry, the other to the U.S. Catholic bishops. There are also two articles well worth our attention--one by MOJ's own Rick Garnett, on "the Supreme Court on religious freedom"; the other by Charles Morris, "Economic Injustice for Most: From the New Deal to the Raw Deal". Each is these four items is included in the attached PDF document:

Commonweal.pdf

Michael

Moral obligation as hopeless burden

By Rob Vischer

A recent piece in the New Yorker raises some interesting questions about personal sacrifice and the moral life. Zell Kravinsky gave essentially his entire forty-five-million-dollar real-estate fortune to charity, but still felt like he had not done enough, so he made an unrestricted donation of one of his kidneys. His selflessness is inspiring to a certain extent, but he also provides a good case study in the hopelessness that arises from a rejection of the localized moral responsibility embodied in subsidiarity. Asked about his moral responsibility to his own children, Kravinsky asserts that "the sacrosanct commitment to the family is the rationalization for all manner of greed and selfishness," and denies that "two children should die so that one of my kids might live." Our culpability for others' deaths is expansive, in his view, for we cause death by our omissions as much as our action, so failing to donate our organs renders us, in his eyes, "murderers." (He embraces the universal focus of Peter Singer's approach to morality.)

Certainly moral responsibility does not end at the boundaries of the family unit (as subsidiarity emphasizes), and "saving for our kids" does serve as a too-convenient vehicle by which we ignore pressing needs around us. But that is not a reason for disregarding the primacy of the local altogether. Indeed, subsidiarity lets us address needs in a way that allows us to have a discernible impact, rather than being saddled with the crushing burden of all human suffering. Not surprisingly, the New Yorker article focuses on Kravinsky's pervasive despair.

Rob

Monday, August 16, 2004

A democratic and republican religion

By Rick Garnett

Here is a provocative essay, in The New Criterion, by Fordham law professor Marc Arkin. Among other things, Arkin states:

The tension between secularism and religion is a fundamental and enduring part of American culture, a tradition as longstanding as the Puritan jeremiad itself. Instead, I would argue that the present-day issue is not the absence of religion from the public arena, but that religion has become a commodity like any other product of mass culture, leaving it all but bereft of its power to support independent moral norms.


After an interesting historical presentation, Arkin concludes:

This democraticization—and religious proliferation—may be the inevitable accompaniment of the voluntarism that is American religion’s great source of strength and energy. To be at once “republican and democratic” is an inherently unstable state of affairs, as the founding generation well understood. In that vein, today’s last word should go to Matthew Arnold. In Culture and Anarchy, he wrote, “One may say that to be reared a member of a national Church is in itself a lesson of religious moderation, and a help towards culture and harmonious perfection. Instead of battling for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man … has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides of his nature as well.” Of course, Arnold was thinking about an English church of a bygone era, but it remains true that having to confront and conform one’s thoughts to a received body of faith and tradition is a steadying influence in life, if only as a matter of self-discipline and its moral consequences. In succumbing to the forces of democraticization and becoming an indistinguishable part of the wider culture, American religion has to a great degree relinquished that role.

Rick

A Call for Reckoning: Religion and the Death Penalty

By Rick Garnett

A new book is out, published by Eerdman's, called "Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning." The book grew out of a conference held at the University of Chicago a few years ago, and includes contributions by Mario Cuomo, E.J. Dionne, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Avery Cardinal Dulles, Gilbert Mailaender, Stanley Hauerwas, Khaled Abou El Fadl, George Ryan, and many more. A paper of mine is also included. Order the book for your institution's library!

Rick

Sisk and Reid on Bishops, Abortion, and Communion

By Rick Garnett

Our colleague Greg Sisk has a new paper, co-authored with Charles Reid (also at University of St. Thomas School of Law), "A Question of Communion." The paper, in my view, is excellent, and well worth reading. It treats, in a measured and charitable way, a number of the issues we (and many others) have discussed about the role of Catholics in public life, the responsibilities of bishops, etc.

Rick

The Missionary Position

By Michael Perry

[I thought that the following item, by Martin Marty, would interest readers of this blog.]


Sightings 8/16/04

The Missionary Position
-- Martin E. Marty

"Strange bedfellows: Paul Wolfowitz and Hillary Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld
and Michael Ignatieff, Thomas Friedman and William Safire" applauded the
last State of the Union Address (2002) with its claim (paraphrased
accurately here by anthropologist Richard A. Schweder) "that there are
non-negotiable demands for the design of any decent society;"
non-negotiable "because they are grounded in matters of fact concerning
universal moral truths" and that they can be defined "in ways that are
(a) substantial enough to allow the United States to lead the world ...
in the direction of reform, and also (b) objective enough to avoid the
hazards of cultural parochialism and ethnocentrism -- for, as [the
President stated] We have no intention of imposing our culture."

Schweder, a former colleague and lively skeptical questioner, calls this
triad "the missionary position." Advice: haste ye to the library and
read his "George W. Bush and the Missionary Position" in Daedalus
(Summer, 2004), as it would make an excellent charter for discussion in
church, state, school, town hall, or Great Books Club. I'm serious.
Reaction to the State of the Union's claims suggest a notable divide,
"not between Left and Right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and
Republican" but "between those who embrace universalizing missionary
efforts of either a religious (Christian, Islamic) or secular (human
rights, international liberationist) sort -- and those who react to such
missions with diffidence, doubt, distrust, indignation, and even fear."

Schweder, of course, is in the second group. For what it's worth, with
Isaiah Berlin, I would be ready to say that there are absolutes, but
that no one can be sufficiently sure of one's own grasp of any to impose
them on societies. Schweder's analysis is so tightly packed that I
cannot reproduce it here; he is not interested in promoting mere
relativism. But he does show that past attempts -- I'd say every past
attempt -- to live out, always by force (for states need force of arms
or capital or clout), this "missionary position" has been shown in later
times or by others to have been parochial, provincial, and
culture-bound. Exhibit A: when the British took the missionary position
in the 19th century, accepting "the white man's burden" to impose its
civilization on a savage world. Schweder illustrates by referencing the
different ways freedom of speech, freedom of religion, family privacy,
and respect for women have been lived with, often creatively, beyond the
scope of any missionary position and imposition.

My question, using his four illustrations: we "Bible believers" would be
hard pressed, would we not, to find Old or New Testament or Christendom
era (313-1776?) discoveries, claims, or supports for what the President
called defenses of liberty and justice "because they are right and true
and unchanging for all people everywhere." All people? Ancient Israel?
Early, medieval, or most "Reformation" Christianity? We had to borrow
from the Enlightenment (1776, 1789) to find the right and true things
that we have come to support.

One Christian "right and true and unchanging" virtue professed in the
biblical tradition is humility. Even with Bob Dylan's phrase, "with God
on our side," the "missionary position" always lacks that central motif.

Reference: Daedalus:
Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Volume 153, No. 2,
pp. 26-36. Schweder's essay is one of eight on "Progress."

----------

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center
at the University of Chicago
Divinity School.

Saturday, August 14, 2004

An Addendum to Rob's "Summer Book Report"

By Michael Perry

The Church and JPII have an ally in Noam Chomsky, who wrote the following in his book For Reasons of State (1973) at page 404:

"A vision of future social order is . . . based on a concept of human nature. If in fact man is an infinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for 'shaping behavior' by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species . . . will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community."

Michael

Friday, August 13, 2004

Summer Book Report

By Rob Vischer

Alas, the downside of letting a bunch of law profs operate a blog, as MoJ readers have invariably realized, is its tendency to ebb and flow with the rhythms of the law school calendar, and August represents the last gasp of the summer break. In that regard, I've just returned from an extended visit to the heartland, with infrequent internet access. But I have spent some time with books, and one in particular deserves a mention. I haven't always embraced everything George Weigel has written, but his Letters to a Young Catholic is well worth reading. He offers glimpses into various physical landmarks of the Catholic faith, using them to reflect on broader aspects of the Catholic self-conception and worldview.

Weigel has an uncanny ability to capture the essence of complex ideas in accessible language, as reflected in his discussion of G.K. Chesteron's espousal of orthodoxy as a bulwark against oppression. Weigel brings Chesteron's thought forward into the debate over the biotech revolution, noting that for today's scientist revolutionaries,

Humankind . . . is infinitely plastic; remanufacturable, if you will. And that's what they intend to do -- remanufacture the human condition by manufacturing human beings.

Anyone who imagines that that can be done without massive coercion hasn't read Huxley. The brave new world . . . is a world of overwhelming coercion in the name of the highest ideals. The sacramental imagination is a barrier against the brave new world because it teaches us that the givens in this world have meaning -- including the final givenness, which is death. (96-97)

I was reminded of this passage when I heard news reports of the Vatican's purportedly anti-feminist statement on women. Extracting meaning from "the givens" was the task undertaken by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in its letter on The Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World. Tackling an uncommonly volatile topic, the CDF concludes that "[t]he defence and promotion of equal dignity and common personal values must be harmonized with attentive recognition of the difference and reciprocity between the sexes where this is relevant to the realization of one's humanity, whether male or female." The challenge, of course, is to identify the contours of authentic human realization, which requires distinguishing gender differences embodied in creation from differences constructed by society. (You can read a critical religious take on the CDF's letter here.)

In any event, Weigel's highly personal glimpse into what it means to be Catholic is a refreshing read for those accustomed to seeing the Church defined primarily by its rejection of prevailing cultural norms; he offers an affirmative articulation of the faith through an array of its real-world embodiments.

Rob

Previous Articles More Articles

Recent Posts

Categories

Monthly Archive