Maybe it's just New Year's optimism, but I am sometimes tempted to wonder whether we're reaching some sort of turning point in the battle to establish a culture of life in the United States. While getting a haircut just before Christmas, I indulged myself by reading the latest issue of Vogue magazine. There -- amidst advertisements for $3,690 (!) Gucchi purses, maps of the great fashion houses of Paris, and an article on Christmas gift-giving that pondered, "But how can I spend less than $100 and not feel chintzy, you wonder? In point of fact, this is almost surpassingly easy." -- I was surprised by two powerful pro-life articles.
One was a tribute to Oriana Fallaci by a journalist named Janine di Giovanni. Giovanni described how Fallaci had been her model for much of her journalistic life -- and her private life. Upon reading Fallaci's Letter to a Child Never Born, in which Fallaci explores her tortured feelings about the fact that she never had children, Giovanni wrote: "I decided I had enough. . . I flew . . . to meet up with the love of my life, a French reporter I had met in Sarajevo. For many years, we'd had a tempestuous Fallaci-style relationship -- passionate about our work, but also about each other. We married a few weeks after I left Baghdad, and barely nine months later, our son, Luca was born. Seeing how Fallaci had lived -- burning with conviction but with no tranquil private life -- inspired me to change my destiny."
The second article was a haunting story by John Burnham Schwartz about the heartbreak he and his wife experienced during their multi-year quest to have a child. The article was extraordinary in its focus on the suffering caused by the failure of multiple pregnancies and the imagery he used to describe this suffering. He begins with this story:
I have a good friend, a lovely and unfailingly optimistic woman some 30 years older than I am, who over lunch a couple of years ago quietly announced that she'd had seven pregnancies and two beautiful children. Her faint smile let me know that she wasn't complaining about her history -- on the contrary, she considered herself blessed -- while the flicker of sorrow in her eyes attested to the fact that she would never foget the pain. I have no memory of my inadequate response, though I remember being shocked. The numbers seven and two seemed to speak for themselves, the stark difference between them -- that unspoken five -- like a ledger of ghosts suddenly written on our lunch table. I'd had no idea that beyond her children, both grown into wonderful adults, there had been, long before our friendship, a series of tragically unoccupied places in her family.
And, towards the end of the article, he writes:
Every morning on my way to my third-floor office I stop in for a visit with my son, Garrick, who is eight months old. I do this just to remind myself; to pray at the altar; to take a whiff of his life. I think to myself: If any of the others had worked, we wouldn't have him. And I can imagine no one but him. I don't know God very well, but it's my belief that God can imagine no one but him.
In Vogue magazine? Not one, but two, married couples wanting children? The suggestion that we are all created in the image and likeness of God? Take a look for yourself, if you can find a copy of the the December 2006 Vogue at your doctor or hairdresser or barber. It's the one with the picture of Nicole Kidman on the cover, dressed in what looks like a gold-plated bustier.
Lisa
Sightings 1/1/07
Even Where Eagles
Fly
-- Martin E. Marty
Weary as we have a right to be after the
wearying December Wars that pit one kind of Christian versus all kinds of
everyone else, or after ringing the latest changes on Muslim-Christian and
everyone-else issues, let's turn away and lift our eyes, which means to do our
"sighting" high above such conflicts and issues. We can take a day, or a
week, off and train our eyes on soaring eagles, thus escaping such mundane
things as church-state rulings and contentions.
Fat chance. We
can't evade such issues merely by scanning the horizons and clouds and cliffs
where eagles fly and land. "Church and state" battles are not to be evaded
or avoided. Here's an illustration, described by Wyoming author Brodie
Farquhar in one of my favorites, High Country News. We are told of
a Northern Arapaho named Winslow W. Friday, who violated the Bald and Golden
Eagle Protection Act by shooting a bald eagle on the Wind River Indian
Reservation in Wyoming. Don't think that aeries are far from the world of
dockets and the long reach of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, followed by
conflicting 9th and 10th Circuit Court rulings.
Stick to your subject,
Sightings, the subject being religion. Well, we are sticking to it,
the eagles being sacred and their feathers necessary for religious rituals of
the Northern Arapaho, and protecting them being sacred to the Wildlife
Protection people. A Hopi, Berra Neil Tawahongva, spiritual kin to Winslow
Friday, last August killed a golden eagle but did not convince the 9th Circuit
Court that needing to get a permit to kill the bird violated the "free exercise
of religion" clause in his case. The judge: "It is clear to this Court
that the Government has no intention of accommodating the religious beliefs of
Native Americans except on the law's own terms and in its own good
time."
Over against it, a 10th Circuit Court ruling wants to add emphasis
to "the sanctity of the Sun Dance and the obligation of the Arapaho people to
nurture our sacred ceremonies for generations." The Arapaho say they will
not endanger the survival of the eagles, which "the Creator gave ... to the
Arapaho. We want more eagles. We want them to flourish." Some
picture that the conflict of court rulings will destine this to a Supreme Court
future, while others think not. Some dream of compromise of the sort
worked out by some tribes who are given some wounded eagles, and then breed them
for feathers. The Arapaho say that feathers alone won't do; for some
religious rites they need the whole bird.
We bring this up here not to
side with the 9th versus the 10th Circuit Courts, or the "whole bird" versus the
"single feather" tribes, or the hunters versus the breeders, the "don't cares"
versus the "cares," the American Indians versus the others, or any other
versuses. Instead, this instance shows once again that to be born into the
realm of civil law, which is everywhere, is to be planted, individually or in a
tribe, in a place that can create issues when realizing that one is also born
into a realm where the transcendent is honored.
This is a way of
saying that we will not reach a moment in a free society wherein church-state or
religion-and-regime issues will be resolved. It is also a way of saying
that changes of scenery and venues for conflict can be both refreshing and
plaguing.
References:
"Tribal religion trumps eagle protection" (High
Country News, November 13, 2006) by Brodie Farquhar
([email protected]) can be read at:
http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=16679.
----------
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
Monday, January 1, 2007
Michael Perry asks our readers to compare and cntrast my take on executing Saddam with that of Michael Joseph. Joseph makes a powerful case against the licitness of Saddam's execution, but I remain unpersuaded. I updated my original post to reply to Joseph here (scroll down).
What is "freedom"? What does it mean for freedom to be "authentic"? What is the relationship between "freedom" and "liberty"? And so on. All questions of interest to those working to understand and expound "Catholic legal theory." So, check out this review, by Gary Rosen, of Charles Fried's new book, "Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government". Here's a bit:
As Fried sees it, the free development of individuals, choosing and judging by their own lights, must “come first” as a social and political priority. Much as we might talk about other public goals — virtue, equality, national glory — they all amount in the end to mere metaphors, especially as compared with the “rock-bottom, indigestible fact” of our “lonely individuality.” To capture this idea of personal liberty, and to give it some normative force, Fried asks us to imagine ourselves surrounded by a protective “bubble” of rights, carefully negotiating the terms of every relationship and attachment. This, he writes, is the “moral space” we inhabit, and no one may “trespass upon it” without wronging us. . . .
. . . Fried tends to press his philosophical claims too far, especially in asserting the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the sovereign individual. His hyperrational Mr. Bubble is a theorist’s fiction. No one’s life really takes shape so antiseptically, without unchosen attachments and the habits of mind imprinted by family, friends and nation.
[MOJ-friend--and Trinity College Dublin law prof--Gerry Whyte responds to these posts: here and here:]
Reading today’s MOJ, I came across the item
about El Salvador and the questionable reporting of a case by the New York Times magazine. While
I understand that the thrust of the item is about the obligation on reporters
to check facts, what struck me about the case was the fact that a woman guilty
of what we would call infanticide was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment. From
time to time, new born infants are found dead in this country but the
authorities always proceed with great sensitivity towards the mother and prosecutions
are rarely taken. (Back in the 1980s, there was a controversial case in Co.
Kerry that achieved notoriety and resulted in a public inquiry but that was
controversial because of the manner in which the police investigated the case,
not because of the fact that a newborn infant was found dead.) Now it may be
that the Irish cases are entirely cases of abandonment and not deliberate
killing, so that the Irish response might not be directly comparable to that of
the authorities in El Salvador. Nonetheless, isn’t thirty
years for infanticide somewhat harsh, given that in the immediate aftermath of
childbirth, the mother might not be fully responsible for her actions?
