My friend Michael Baxter is an inspiration, to me and to many others. He is truly the real deal -- like Dorothy Day, he is both radical and orthodox. I'm told his courses -- like "A Faith Worth Dying For" and "The Dynamite of the Church" -- change students' lives. Because I'm not a pacifist, and think capitalism is (pretty much) a good thing, and think the United States is (pretty much) a force for good in the world, I'm sure it's only Mike's charity that keeps him from being quite disappointed with me.
In any event, here is a provocative essay of his, published in "The New Pantagruel" (a fascinating new electronic journal), called "Why Catholics Should be Wary of 'One Nation Under God': Richard Neuhaus in a Time of War." The essay is full of bracing contentions and suggestions. For example, Baxter writes:
While it would be a dreadful mistake to treat the United States and al-Qaeda as moral equivalents, it is also a mistake to overlook the possibility, as Neuhaus seems to do, that neither the United States nor al-Qaeda may be on the side of freedom and justice (properly understood) or that both may be given to spreading cruelty and fear. Possibilities such as these do not appear when the world is viewed through the simplistic lens of Neuhaus and President Bush. For another thing, after identifying the cause of the United States with the cause of freedom and justice, Neuhaus employs a flawed argument to align both of these causes to the purposes of God. The argument is flawed because while it is true, as Neuhaus argues, that God is not neutral when it comes to freedom and justice, it is also true that God’s purposes may well be aligned with a form of freedom and justice that is represented neither by the United States nor by al-Qaeda, but rather by some other political body or by the church itself.
Baxter (here as elsewhere) never lets any particular ideological "camp" get too comfortable. Consider this:
[T]he most obvious problem in Neuhaus’s claim that America is a Christian nation is that it does not account for the fact that Americans in large numbers engage in practices that run clearly counter to the Christian way of life, practices related to marrying and having children. If the United States is a Christian nation, what are we to make of the fact that roughly fifty percent of all marriages in America end in divorce? Further, if the United States is a Christian nation, what are we to do with the fact that each year in America there occur more than one million abortions?
There's a lot more to the piece -- these two quotations don't begin to capture the argument -- and I strongly encourage MOJ readers to check it out.
I should emphasize my own view that, with all due respect, Baxter gets Neuhaus wrong. To use Baxter's own word, his "take" on Neuhaus strikes me as a bit "simplistic." I'm not a trained theologian, but I've been reading Neuhaus for a long time, and I do not think it is fair to Neuhaus to suggest that he is blind or indifferent to America's failings. Particularly with respect to the issue of abortion, cited quite rightly by Baxter, it should be emphasized that few in public life have spoken as eloquently and forcefully as Neuhaus has against the abortion license. Nor do I think it plausible or fair to build an argument on the claim that Neuhaus is blind to the possibility that God's purposes might not be, or might go beyond, America's. Yes, I take Neuhaus to believe that America can serve, and has, at times, served, a providential purpose, and helped to promote justice, properly understood. But I don't think that, read carefully and completely, Neuhaus has ever lost sight of the facts that America is not the Church, and that God has bigger plans and aims than America's.
Now, in terms of the present conflict between America and Islamic terrorism, and certainly not for all purposes and times, I am -- like Neuhaus, I suppose -- comfortable "identifying the cause of the United States with the cause of freedom and justice." This strikes me -- again, with all due respect to Baxter -- as neither idolatrous or "simplistic." Still, Baxter sounds, as he so often does, an important warning.
Professor Ann Althouse has an excellent post, dealing with James Madison's views on church-state relations and religious freedom, and responding to a misguided polemic -- "a collection of decontextualized quotes of various founding fathers saying things that are antagonistic to religion," in Althouse's words -- in a recent issue of The Nation. Althouse's point, in a nutshell, is that Madison's arguments for church-state separation (like those of many in the Founding era and before) were (generally speaking) not anti-religious, or even (what we today might call) "secularist." Instead, these arguments tended to emphasize the importance of religion, and the importance to religion of legal constraints on the power of government to exploit and regulate it.
Apparently the College Republicans at Marquette have fully embraced the notion of the Iraq invasion as a just war.
Rob
UPDATE: Reader Conor Dugan insists that my post "begs the further question: What should our stance be toward our soldiers in this war? If this is an unjust war -- and I must admit I've never been fully satisfied of its justice (nor incidentally fully convinced of its injustice) -- what should our posture be towards our troops?"
For the record, I agree that we must support our troops fully. What I object to is the seemingly celebratory stance toward the human suffering caused by war. (In exchange for a donation to buy equipment for American snipers, the Marquette College Republicans were handing out bracelets that read, "One Shot One Kill No Remorse I decide.") Alas, Marquette's decision that these bracelets are not consistent with the school's mission is dismissed by at least one commentator as emanating more from political correctness than from the school's Catholic identity.
The Guild of Catholic Lawyers of the Archdiocese of New York held its 22nd Annual Charles Carroll Award Reception this evening. The recipient of this year's Charles Carroll award was MOJ blogger, Amy Uelmen, recognized for her outstanding work as Director of Fordham Law School's Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer's Work and for her example in living an integrated life of faith. It was a privilege for me to be there (along with fellow MOJ blogger Rob Vischer) to share in the honoring of a member of our community.
Amy's remarks at the award reception were very inspiring and I am hopeful that she will post them here.
There are a lot of things I don't like about George Bush, but as a Catholic who takes very seriously my Church's Gospel of Life, I hear a fellow traveller in Bush that over comes my doubts on all other issues:
Because a society is measured by how it treats the weak and vulnerable, we must strive to build a culture of life. Medical research can help us reach that goal, by developing treatments and cures that save lives and help people overcome disabilities -- and I thank the Congress for doubling the funding of the National Institutes of Health. (Applause.) To build a culture of life, we must also ensure that scientific advances always serve human dignity, not take advantage of some lives for the benefit of others. We should all be able to agree -- (applause) -- we should all be able to agree on some clear standards. I will work with Congress to ensure that human embryos are not created for experimentation or grown for body parts, and that human life is never bought and sold as a commodity. (Applause.) America will continue to lead the world in medical research that is ambitious, aggressive, and always ethical. (SOTU Link)
The requirement that science promote human dignity could have come straight out of Evangelium vitae. Which calls to mind one of the Pontiff's observations in that encylical that speaks directly to those of us who participate in this blog:
Intellectuals can also do much to build a new culture of human life. A special task falls to Catholic intellectuals, who are called to be present and active in the leading centres where culture is formed, in schools and universities, in places of scientific and technological research, of artistic creativity and of the study of man. Allowing their talents and activity to be nourished by the living force of the Gospel, they ought to place themselves at the service of a new culture of life by offering serious and well documented contributions, capable of commanding general respect and interest by reason of their merit.
Are we doing enough? Am I? I do know that tonight I feel a renewed call to action.
This week's New Republic features a short essay by Andrew Sullivan, "Life Lesson," in which he discusses what he calls Senator Clinton's "superb speech earlier this week on the politics and morality of abortion."
This speech was widely characterized in the press as suggesting a "move to the center" on the abortion question, though I'm not sure why. At no point in the speech does she retreat from her absolutist, abortion-on-demand, for any reason, at any time position. What does it say about our politics that her willingess to concede that abortions are undesirable, and that not all abortion opponents are monsters, is hailed as significant political shift? In any event . . .
There is a lot to cheer in Sullivan's essay. It would be good if his audience (e.g., New Republic readers and leaders in the Democratic Party) listened. Still, at the end, I'm not sure I get his point. Sullivan interprets -- remakes? -- the Senator's speech as setting out a powerful "pro-life, pro-choice" position. He concedes that "Democrats can still be, and almost certainly should be, for the right to legal abortion." Two sentences later, though, he states, "abortion is always wrong." But why does Sullivan think this (i.e., that "abortion is always wrong").
To be clear -- I understand, and might even concede the force of, the argument that, given political realities, it is not possible, or even desirable, to ban abortion altogether. But this does not seem to be Sullivan's argument. Instead, Sullivan appears in his essay to link the Democrats' present abortion-rights position with the requirements of a "free society." What notion of "free[dom]" is doing the work in Sullivan's argument if the nature of a "free society" (and not the fact that we live in a second-best world) requires permitting (without limitation, apparently) something that is "always" -- and gravely -- "wrong"?
Here is a provocatively titled essay, "When a Killer Wants to Die," by Andrew Cohen, dealing with the Connecticut case of Michael Ross, a convicted killer who says he wants to be executed. I wrote a law-review article, a few years ago, about "death-row volunteers," in which I tried to draw on some of the "moral anthropology" ideas we've kicked around on this blog. (In a nutshell, I suggested that, although I oppose capital punishment, I do not believe that standard autonomy-based arguments do a very good job of explaining why lawyers may or should oppose their clients' desire to be lawfully executed).
As Cohen explains, these "volunteer" cases often come down to questions about the inmate's "competency":
There is nothing inherently unusual about a death row inmate wanting to expedite his own execution. Many capital offenders decide for one reason or another to forgo their appeals in order to "escape" the misery of death row. In most of these cases, the competency of the inmate to make this call is unquestioned. The lawyer, convinced that the condemned man's waiver of his appeal rights is "knowing" and "voluntary," signs off on it and the judge overseeing the case does as well, usually after a colloquy in which the judge asks the offender a number of questions designed to ensure competency. The Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, is probably the best-known example of a death row inmate who expedited his own death by ordering a halt to all of his appeals.
But sometimes, a condemned man says he wants to die quickly when he does not have the legal competency to mean what he says. Sometimes, "death row syndrome" kicks in and a capital offender, under duress, just decides to give up and commit suicide by inaction. Sometimes, the prisoner decides he or she is going to toy with counsel and the courts by zig-zagging back and forth between waiving appeals and trying to pursue them. And, sometimes, a man gets put on death row even though his competency was suspect long before his trial. The Constitution requires the government to ensure the competency of a person before execution. But how that happens isn't always neat and pretty.
Another wrinkle in all this, though, is the fact that committed capital-defense lawyers often use an inmate's understandable desire not to pursue further (likely unsuccessful) appears as conclusive evidence of incompetence. Any thoughts on this problem?
