"A Culture of Life"

This editorial, from the September 26 issue of America, is worth a read:

Our church and society stand in need of renewed and sustained discussion regarding an ethic of life. Serious conversation has largely devolved into sloganeering and sound bites. The prevailing metaphor, “culture of life versus culture of death,” has galvanized people’s imaginations and inspired outcries on issues ranging from abortion to third world debt. Yet at times the image has been co-opted into polemic, and the conclusions reached have both obscured the long and nuanced tradition of the church and belied the range and complexity of the issues involved. . . .

The church . . . must help shape the discussion with questions, images and principles that illuminate, inspire and challenge. And Catholics can and should be prophetic in their challenge of contemporary mores, never more than when the lives of innocent persons are at stake. Yet in today’s divided, either/or world, our faith calls us to precision in our claims and temperance in our rhetoric. What will make us truly prophetic in this conversation is not edicts but example, the willingness to wrestle with complexity and show love for all. “You will know them by their deeds.... Any sound tree bears good fruit” (Mt 7:16, 18).

An ethic of life for today also calls for poetry. “Church people are like other people,” the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes. “The deep places in our lives—places of resistance and embrace—are not ultimately reached by instruction. Those places of resistance and embrace are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.” The language of metaphor and story finds a place for the held tensions and contradictions, loveliness and mystery of human life that are missing from the discourse of argument alone. . . .

To build a culture of life, we must commit ourselves to what a culture is: a body of mutually sustaining and self-critical symbols and practices, in dialogue with the broader world, that enable us to understand that world and inform our practices within it. No one image or idea can bear the weight of the whole conversation. . . .

I suspect that I would disagree with the editorial writer about whether, how, or to what extent the "culture of life" image been "co-opted into polemic[.]"  I liked, though, the call for poetry.