Joe Carter, the author of the world's most popular Christian blog, Evangelical Outpost, has compiled his list of the 100 best Christian blogs. In my evangelical upbringing, "Catholic" and "Christian" were two separate categories. Nevertheless, perhaps as a sign of the growing evangelical-Catholic synergy, MoJ has made the top 20.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Best Christian Blogs
Rudy Giuliani, the Catholic, Revisited
[Lifted from the New York Times online:}
July 18, 2007, 9:29 am
Giuliani, the ‘Nixon Republican’
Rudy Giuliani is “Nixon’s political twin,” writes former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in his latest Washington Post column. Gerson elaborates:
In his elections, Nixon appealed to conservatives and the country as a culture warrior who was not a moral or religious conservative. “Permissiveness,” he told key aides, “is the key theme,” and Nixon pressed that theme against hippie protesters, tenured radicals and liberals who bad-mouthed America. This kind of secular, tough-on-crime, tough-on-communism conservatism gathered a “silent majority” that loved Nixon for the enemies he made.
By this standard, Giuliani is a Nixon Republican. He is perhaps the most publicly secular major candidate of either party — his conflicts with Roman Catholic teaching make him more reticent on religion than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But as a prosecutor and mayor of New York, he won conservative respect for making all the right enemies: the ACLU, advocates of blasphemous art, purveyors of racial politics, Islamist mass murderers, mob bosses and the New York Times editorial page.
Gerson worries that Giuliani, like Nixon, is “a talented man without an ideological compass, mainly concerned with the accumulation of power.”
Just to underscore the point that he thinks nominating Rudy Giuliani for president would be a really, really bad idea, Gerson adds that he fears nominating a Republican who is “in direct conflict with the Roman Catholic Church.” He writes:
Giuliani is not only pro-choice. He has supported embryonic stem cell research and public funding for abortion. He supports the death penalty. He supports “waterboarding” of terror suspects and seems convinced that the conduct of the war on terrorism has been too constrained. Individually, these issues are debatable. Taken together, they are the exact opposite of Catholic teaching, which calls for a “consistent ethic of life” rather than its consistent devaluation. No one inspired by the social priorities of Pope John Paul II can be encouraged by the political views of Rudy Giuliani. Church officials who criticized John Kerry on abortion are anxious for the opportunity to demonstrate their bipartisanship by going after a Republican. Those attacks on Giuliani have already begun.
Romney as Rawls
Houston law prof Leslie Griffin has posted her new paper, Political Reason. (HT: Solum) Here is the abstract:
This essay examines some of comments made about religion and politics by three of the 2008 presidential candidates - Sam [Mike?] Huckabee, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. I argue that, surprisingly, if one holds the three candidates to the standard of liberal politics, then Romney appears closest to the Rawlsian standard of public (or political) reason. The goal is not for the Mormon, or Baptist, or Church of Christ candidate to figure a secular way to lead others to his faith. That approach to politics undermines political stability and demonstrates disrespect for one's fellow citizens. Instead, politicians should employ political reason as the starting point for their decision-making on matters of law and politics.
Abstinence & Abortion
Today's New York Times has a fairly balanced overview of the state of government-funded abstinence education. Today's Chicago Tribune reports on the Democratic presidential candidates' promises of universal health care coverage, including coverage of abortion.
CST and the City: Work/Family Balance Issues
This recently-posted article suggests an interesting angle for the "CST and the City" conference, an aspect of the exploration of "how physical settings contibute . . . to strengthening the family as a social and spitual institution."
Baird Silbaugh, Katharine, "Women's Place: Urban Planning, Housing Design, and Work-Family Balance" . Fordham Law Review, Vol. 76, 2008.
Abstract:
In the past decade a substantial literature has emerged analyzing the role of work-family conflict in hampering women's economic, social, and civil equality. Many of the issues we routinely discuss as work family balance problems have distinct spatial dimensions. 'Place' is by no means the main factor in work-family balance difficulties, but amongst work-family policy-makers it is perhaps the least appreciated. This article examines the role of urban planning and housing design in frustrating the effective balance of work and family responsibilities. Nothing in the literature on work-family balance reform addresses this aspect of the problem. That literature focuses instead on employer mandates and family law reforms. This article fills the gap by evaluating the effect of 'place' on work-family balance and the role law plays in creating our challenging geography. I argue that effective work-family balance requires attention to the spatial dimensions of the work-family conflict.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
"Everybody does it"
Rob is right, of course, that "Protestant ministers engage in sexual abuse or in sexual activity with minors, too" is hardly the most important thing to be said about the clergy-abuse scandal in the Catholic context. And, just to be clear, please insert here ________ the most unyielding and furious denunciation one can imagine of those priests and bishops who have engaged in or mishandled the abuse of children. Still, it seems to me that the following are true, and troubling:
(1) Non-Catholics have, in my experience and reading, too often indulged the temptation to smugness, as if there were something particularly "Catholic" about the conduct at issue ("Ah, that celibacy thing . . . ", or worse.). There just isn't.
(2) The press has -- and no, to point this out is not to blame the press for the sins and errors of priests and bishops -- systemically (one might even suspect "gleefully") presented this issue as (almost) entirely a "Catholic" one and has, in addition and in many ways, mis-reported the issue in unsurprising but still irritating ways.
(3) The sex-abuse-litigation to date, and the reporting about that litigation, has been Catholic-centric in part, I suspect, because Catholic institutions, leaders, and dioceses are more attractive defendants for big-money purposes.
Is the sexual abuse of children a "Catholic problem?"
Headlines today are trumpeting the Vatican's emphasis that the sexual abuse of children is not just a problem for the Catholic Church, and that other religious organizations also need to take public steps, as the Church has done, to combat abuse within their ranks. Obviously, child abuse occurs in lots of Protestant churches and other organizations. But hasn't there been something distinctive about the Catholic Church's hierarchical structure, secrecy, and greater tendency (compared to Protestants) to defend its institutional autonomy? In this regard, isn't the institutional culpability greater in the episodes of abuse within the Catholic Church? Have there been any statements from the Vatican recognizing and/or apologizing for this dimension of the crisis (rather than the individual acts of the priests involved)? I realize that the litigation climate may not be especially welcoming to such introspection, but I also think the Church should avoid statements that sound like "everybody else does it too."
No-fault divorce
Maggie Gallagher and Douglas Allen have released a study finding that no-fault divorce laws increase the divorce rate by about ten percent, though the effect fades with time. Newsweek interviews Gallagher about the study here.
Monday, July 16, 2007
George on the Neo-Blanshardites
Robert George is troubled by the anti-Catholic reaction to the partial-birth abortion ruling, and he thanks evangelicals for being the only group to rise to Catholics' defense. An excerpt:
Had the partial-birth abortion decision come out the other way, turning on the votes of the two Jewish justices, and had a prominent conservative professor have made an issue of their religion and a conservative newspaper published a cartoon depicting them wearing yarmulkes and prayer shawls, there would have been howls of outrage and loud denunciations of the bigotry on display. People across the spectrum of religious and political belief, including those who oppose partial birth abortion, would have condemned the cartoon and demanded apologies. And they would have been right. Religious prejudice should be unacceptable in American public life. Period.
But while the writings of Professor Stone and the cartoon in the Philadelphia newspaper drew a certain amount of criticism and generated discussion on some blogs, the neo-Blanshardites were not reprimanded or even criticized by prominent liberal civil rights leaders or by leading liberal civil rights and civil liberties organizations. Perhaps I missed something, but I heard no denunciations from those secular or religious liberals who have long proclaimed themselves mortal enemies of all forms of prejudice, and from whom therefore one would have expected a firm condemnation of bigotry even when manifested in support of a cause they like.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Go, George!
New York Times
July 15, 2007
Bush Is Prepared to Veto Bill to Expand Child Insurance
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON, July 14 — The White House said on Saturday that President Bush would veto a bipartisan plan to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program, drafted over the last six months by senior members of the Senate Finance Committee.
The vow puts Mr. Bush at odds with the Democratic majority in Congress, with a substantial number of Republican lawmakers and with many governors of both parties, who want to expand the popular program to cover some of the nation’s eight million uninsured children.
Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said: “The president’s senior advisers will certainly recommend a veto of this proposal. And there is no question that the president would veto it.”
The program, which insured 7.4 million people at some time in the last year, is set to expire Sept. 30.
[To read the rest of this inspiring story, click here.]
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