Here's a link to an interesting collection of interviews with people like Francis Fukuyama, Stephen Pinker, and others, regarding such issues as the relationship between science and religion, the role of religion in a global society, etc. Very interesting stuff for study breaks.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Interesting Interviews Regarding Morality, Religion, Meaning of Life
More Data
Josh Marhsall has a nice summary of yesterday's devastating 60 Minutes interview. It seems to me that this information is extremely relevant for any consideration of the justification of the Iraq war and the moral seriousness of the people who sold it to us.
Followup to Eduardo's Post
[For Eduardo's post, click here.]
The Tablet [London]
April 22, 2006
Editorial
What really harms the family
The family is under stress, of that there is little doubt. But there is a realistic way of expressing that crisis, based on what families themselves say; and an unreal one, conjured from the imagination of those out of touch with reality. The most recent example was contained in the prayers used at the Good Friday Stations of the Cross in Rome, brought to the media’s attention by the fact that it was the Pope himself who led the prayers even if he did not write them. “Today we seem to be witnessing a kind of anti-Genesis, a counter-plan, a diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family,” one such prayer declared. Another spoke of “a slick campaign of propaganda ... spreading an inane apologia of evil, a senseless cult of Satan”.
Perhaps prayers designed to encourage a mood of penance should not be exposed to forensic scrutiny. Perhaps, then, Archbishop Angelo Comastri, Vicar General at the Vatican City, who wrote them, was only doing his job. But real families will not feel such lurid and melodramatic prayers do much justice to their situation. They are harassed by concrete problems like debt, lack of childcare, the high cost of housing, unemployment or excessive hours of work, and the now perpetual juggling act known as the work-life balance. These pressures are often confusing and contradictory, pulling in all directions, sometimes good and bad simultaneously.
The survey called Listening 2004, conducted for the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, analysed many people’s own accounts of their problems, and many of their stories led back to what it labelled the dual-earner economy. In order to meet the high cost of a mortgage on an over-priced house, both partners felt obliged to work. This meant finding affordable childcare, which is often not easy. Many women felt financially pressured to return to work after the birth of a child before they felt they, or their child, were ready. Then they faced managing a home as well as pursuing a career, as even now it is usually the woman who bears the brunt of homemaking. Often they and their male partners were victims of the long-hours work culture that is as much a threat to a healthy family life as anything.
Needless
to say, such factors place relationships under strain. Some marriages
(and Catholic marriages are by no means immune) buckle under it. But
there is no solution in a return to the conventions of the past, nor in
inventing implausible scapegoats for present difficulties – gay couples
often find themselves unfairly cast in that role. The opportunities
available to women with children to fulfil themselves in paid work are
good, not bad; and the role of the Church, if it has one here, is to
ease the institution of the family into the future by encouraging
strategies to mitigate the pain and maximise the pleasure. But any
realistic family policy would recognise that the family is still the
centre of most people’s hopes of happiness. And there really is no
“counter-plan”. That is just paranoia.
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Keeping Holy the Sabbath
Employee believes in the importance of the Sabbath and the biblical requirement that all work cease on that day. When interviewed for his job as a Home Depot sales associate in Henrietta, NY, he made his supervisors aware that he could not work on Sundays, and was hired. A year later, a new supervisor arrived in the Henrietts store and told the employee he must work on Sunday. He refused. She offered him a late shift so he could attend services, but he said that violated the Sabbath. Was the offer of a late shift a reasonable accomodation for religious discrimination?
A federal judge in the Western District of New York ruled yes. However, the Second Circuit reversed, finding that the trial judge had incorrctly concluded that an offer to require the worker to work only Sunday afternoons and evenings was a sufficient accomodation for religious beliefs. The Court cited an earlier Sixth CIrcuit ruling that an employer does not fulfill its obligation when it accomodates one religious objection (need to attend religious services) but not another (not working on the Sabbath). The Second Circuit did suggest that the store's offer of part-time employment (which the employee rejected because of his economic need to work full-time) or offering the possibility the employee could change shifts with his co-workers from week to week, might be sufficient accomodation under Title VII and remanded to the district court for determination of these issues. In my view, it is hard to see how either of those constitutes a sufficient accomodation. (The case is Baker v. The Home Depot, 2006 U.S. App. LEXIS 9891.)
Public University Funding of Religious Student Groups
A couple of days ago, Rick posted a report of a dipute in California over funding the activities of a religious student organization that selected members or officers on the basis of religious and secual orientation. To expand the subject a bit: the Associated Press reported the other day about a controversy over whether the University of Wisconsin-Madison should allow a Catholic student group to use student fees for religious purposes. The chancellor takes the position that allowing the student group to use any university funding for religious purposes (e.g. printing Lenten booklets) would violate the First Amendment. The Cathlic group (which "serves the university's estimated 12,000 Catholic students, faculty and staff") argues that scholls must disburse funds without regard to ideology or viewpoint and that withholding funds would amount to discrimination on the basis of religion.
I'm not a Constitutionl Law scholar and would be interested in hearing anyone's view on the arguments being made here.
Interesting NY Times Article on Gay Marriage
I thought this was an interesting article in today's NY Times about a push to pass a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Apparently, a number of Catholic cardinals have signed on to the effort. (According to the Times, Robert George has been leading the charge on this recent push as well.) I don't think we need to rehash our prior discussions of the Church's position on homosexuality and gay marriage (or, for that matter, the continuing silence from the Catholic right on torture).
But I would like to make one observation. As Jean Porter pointed out in her talk at Fordham's Natural Law Colloquium a couple of months ago, it's just hard to understand why anyone views gay marriage as the main (or even a major) threat to the traditional family. If the point is to protect the family, why not, for example, a constitutional amendment banning no-fault divorce? (To be clear, I'm not endorsing such an amendment, but no-fault divorce strikes me as a far greater threat to the traditional family than gay unions.) As Stephen Macedo has noted, focusing on gay unions in the face of far more obvious threats that are perpetrated by heterosexuals comes across as blaming a traditionally marginalized minority for the effects of sins that are committed on a daily basis by the in-group, including some of those very people calling for a constitutional prohibition of gay marriage.
(In fact, why not go back to some of the themes of CST and talk about economic inequality and the virtual necessity of the two-income family as threats to the traditional family? It's no accident that in the time that two income families have become the norm, middle class income has stagnated and the income of the wealthiest one percent has rocketed. Income inequality is now at levels we have not seen since the Gilded Age, a change that has occurred almost entirely since 1980. So it seems to me that the Reagan/Bush II economic policies are more plausibly a threat to the traditional family than gay marriage.)
Again, I don't want to get into it over Church teaching on homosexuality or even gay unions. My point is that (even assuming those teachings to be cogent), given limited resources, it seems incredible to suggest that the actions of this very small community consitutes the most serious threat to the family, one worthy of all the attention it's getting. And I don't think it's a satisfying response to talk about the expressive value of law, etc. when the power of that expressive value in this case is largely a consequence of (or at least greatly magnified by) the nearly obsessive acitvism oriented towards gay marriage by its opponents.
Catholic Law Reviews
Rick yesterday posted the comment of a MOJ reader regarding the potential role of law reviews at Catholic law schools and asked for our thoughts.
I think it is fair to say that the primary journals of most Catholic law schools (i.e., the school's "law review" or "law journal" vs. its secondary, often specialized journals) do not see themselves as any different from the primary journals of non-Catholic law schools. That is, they seek to publish the best articles they can (or, at least, articles by the most prominent legal scholars who will publish with them), regardless of subject matter. I did a quick, admittedly non-exhaustive, check of the webpages of the primary journals of a number of Catholic law schools and their statements of their journal's philosophy/aim reads no differently from that of non-Catholic law schools. One notable exception (there may be others - I just did a random check of a number of schools) is the University of St. Thomas Law Journal, whose web page states that the journal seeks to "embod[y] the school's unique mission by publishing excellent legal scholarship that inspires ethical and moral decision-making with an emphasis on social justice."
Having said that, it is the case that a number of Catholic law schools do have journals specifically devoted to advancing Catholic legal thought, e.g. St. John's Journal of Catholic Legal Studies and Villanova's Journal of Catholic Social Thought. I agree with the author of the post that these, and other journals like then, fill an important role.
Where is justice?
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has just published an informative and important article in First Things (Here) entitled “Suing the Church.” He addresses points made earlier by some MOJ contributors including the disparity of treatment of the Church versus other institutions in which child abuse has occurred. His article presents the legitimate and real concerns of a pastor who wonders if the Church, the People of God are being treated in a discriminatory manner. Some of us raised and developed a number of his points in the discussions from early this year and late last year about the denial of equal protection and other problems with legislative proposals to amend statutes of limitations. While there were others who adhered to what this court and that court said in some particular case, I just wonder if Catholic legal theory is prepared to go beyond the simply positivist approach to these cases. In other words, does Catholic legal theory have something to offer a better form of justice? The Archbishop indicates that one class seems to be doing well in abuse cases brought against the Church: personal injury lawyers. But, at what price? Who is being harmed? Is justice being served for all? Recalling Rick’s recent allusion to Don Altobello, to whom can the Body of Christ go for justice? How about Catholic legal theory and its suggestions for resolutions to the problems and legal predicaments that are surfacing more and more in abuse cases? Once again, changing statutes of limitations so they only affect the Church is unwise. It also casts a shadow on the notion of due process of law and equality before it. Maybe Don Corleone did have one thing to offer us for our consideration. When he spoke about revenge: “You talk about vengeance. Is vengeance going to bring your son back to you? Or my boy to me?” Revenge will do little to help the harmed in these cases, and, as the Archbishop indicates, it may be producing a new and much larger class of those harmed. RJA sj
Sunday, April 23, 2006
The Establishment Clause in Chicago
If any MOJ-readers with an interest in Establishment Clause jurisprudence will be in Chicago next Saturday, April 29, read on ...
At the Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago. Saturday afternoon, April 29, from 2:30-5:30. At the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division). A special session devoted to "State, Religion, and the Establishment Clause Today." Presenters/discussants include Robert Audi (Notre Dame, Philosophy), Kent Greenawalt (Columbia, Law), Steve Shiffrin (Cornell, Law), and yours truly. (The latter two are, of course, MOJ-bloggers.) The moderator of the session: Lucinda Joy Peach (American University).
The title of my paper: "Why Rick Garnett Is Wrong About the Establishment Clause (Among Other Things)". :-)
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Human Reality vs. Theological Abstraction
[I started to edit this, but couldn't decide what to omit.]
New York Times
April 19, 2006
A Boy, His 2 Mothers and Some Unlikely Support
NEEDHAM, Mass.
WHEN Jesse Powers-Patey was 10, and living in foster care, a Boston television station did a "Wednesday's Child" feature on him, in hopes of getting the boy adopted. A local newspaper printed an article emphasizing his friendliness and love for baseball. Still, no family responded.
By then, he'd been to six schools, could barely read and was in special education. He'd lived in a homeless shelter with his drug-addicted birth mother and in eight foster homes. At 4, he was adopted by a single mother, but when he was 8, that woman returned him to the state. She claimed that he was hard to manage. Jesse said, "She dumped me because she was getting married and moving into a big house and the guy didn't want me around."
Finally, one couple who heard about Jesse at their church showed an interest: Laura Patey and Leigh Powers. The two began going to his baseball games, then having him visit their place, a few blocks from his foster home. Jesse played basketball with Ms. Patey, and PlayStation with Ms. Powers. After school, he'd wait on the front stairs for them to get home from work. Soon, he was leaving important things at their house, like his baseball cards.
When it was time for "the talk," Jesse was ready. "He told his friend Sam that there were these two neat women that he met and liked a lot," Ms. Powers recalled. "And Sam said, 'You mean Leigh and Laura, the two lesbians down the street?' And since Sam was cool with it, Jesse was."
Jesse's Moms are not rich — they rent one side of a two-family house on a busy street here — but their home enriched Jesse. It's a house full of books as well as computers, along with three cats and a bird feeder.
To help Jesse with school, Ms. Powers, a researcher who's a computer whiz, installed a program that reads his writing aloud to him. To make summer reading lists more manageable, they would get books on tape to listen to as he read along. "He'd been told he was stupid," Ms. Powers said. "We wanted to show him he could read."
Ms. Patey, who oversees disability services at Lesley University, concluded that he did not have learning problems — "just big gaps in his education from all the disruptions" — and got him switched to mainstream classes.
When it was time for high school, the Moms knew what they wanted. "A Catholic school," said Ms. Patey, who attended parochial schools and reluctantly left Roman Catholicism as an adult for an Episcopalian church where she could worship openly with her partner. "They say, 'A Catholic education is an advantage for life,' and I agree. It helps develop a moral compass, a sense of right and wrong and how to treat people with respect."
There were other reasons. She figured Jesse would have trouble passing the state graduation tests, which are not required at private schools. Plus, he hit puberty early — he was six feet tall and shaving at age 12.
"Jesse was pretty girl-crazy," Ms. Patey said. "I liked the idea of an all-boys school."
When they filled out the forms, the women crossed out "father" and wrote in their names. Jesse had to do two essays; one was on his Moms. "We didn't hide a thing," Ms. Patey said.
Last month, Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley announced that Catholic Charities of Boston, which has handled more foster care adoptions than any other private agency in the state, was getting out of the adoption business, rather than comply with Massachusetts laws mandating that gay men and lesbians be allowed to adopt.
Boston church leaders cited statements approved by Pope John Paul II in 2003 calling gay adoption "gravely immoral." "Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children," the Vatican said.
Still, this may not have been a fight the Boston church was spoiling for. The archdiocese's decision came only after an article in The Boston Globe pointed out that in the last two decades, 13 of 720 Catholic Charities adoptions involved gay families. In the weeks leading up to the policy change, eight Catholic Charities board members resigned.
Jesse's Moms were angered by the official church position, but they also know this: At the two Catholic high schools Jesse has attended — Catholic Memorial in Boston and Saint Clement in Medford, where he will soon graduate — they have not been treated like "gravely immoral" people. They have been embraced and made to feel welcome.
Jesse plays three sports, and from Day One, Ms. Powers said, "We joined the booster clubs and we were out there."
"The parents got together before football games and we'd all go to breakfast," she added. At basketball games, Ms. Powers kept the score book for the team.
Jesse started on probation at Catholic Memorial, because of his weak academic history, and at the end of first semester, Ms. Patey met with an admissions officer, Brother Stephen Casey. "He told me, Jesse is a great kid," Ms. Patey recalled. "He said: "At dinner the other night, the brothers were all talking about you guys. We're really impressed. You two are doing a wonderful job with this kid.' " When the couple adopted a second boy, Alex, Catholic Memorial welcomed him, too.
Jesse still struggles. He gets by with C's, and one semester he was ineligible for baseball because of his grades.
When he was younger, he said, he'd get teased. "Kids would say, 'Shut your mouth, you have two moms.' Big joke," he said.
But there were adults to go to, he said, like his theology teacher, Daniel Dion. "I could tell him about kids giving me a hard time and problems at home with my Moms," Jesse said. "We talked, and it wouldn't boil up inside me."
At Saint Clement this year, Jesse was a football co-captain and baseball captain. Among the family's photographs is one of Jesse with the principal. But school officials do not appear comfortable speaking publicly about the kindnesses to Jesse and his family. A Saint Clement coach said he would be happy to talk to a reporter, and a few minutes later called back, saying he couldn't. The Saint Clement principal, Robert Chevrier, did not return several calls.
THE REV. J. BRYAN HEHIR, president of Catholic Charities of Boston, said that while the Vatican's strong positions on family had dictated the adoption policy, the social service agency's 130 other programs were committed to serving all people, including gays. "I'm not surprised to hear that these schools would welcome this family," he said.
Jesse has been accepted to two local colleges and hopes to play baseball, but will defer admission. He's spending next year at an Americorps program working with poor children. He could have picked a program anywhere, but chose Boston so he could live at home.
It's not perfect at home. He wishes his Moms were less strict; they took away his cellphone when his grades dropped, and Ms. Powers, the computer whiz, can track every Web page he visits. "I'm 18!" Jesse said.
When Jesse was little, an adoption social worker said, "This is your forever family — for the rest of your life." If the Powers-Patey household is having a bad day, someone will make a face and shout, "For the rest of your life!" as if they're all lashed together, going down with the ship.
But they're not; it's a house afloat with love. The two Moms juggle
their jobs, so one is always there for Saint Clement school events and
games. "It's a must," Jesse said. "Who else do I have to look at in the
stands? When I hit a massive home run, I can't wave to someone else's
Mom."
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