Today’s TheNew York Times published and editorial entitled “A Nominee’s Abnormal Views.” [HERE] The subject of this editorial is the nomination of Dr. James Holsinger to be the next Surgeon General of the United States. If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Holsinger would lead the country’s Public Health Service; moreover, he would have for the foreseeable future a platform from which to offer his views on a wide range of medical issues that would presumably draw on his many years of public service dealing with health issues. As the editorial correctly notes, he would serve as the nation’s “chief health educator” and would have “potentially enormous capacity to shape public opinion.”
Curiously The New York Times does not refer to its own enormous capacity to shape public opinion, but I would disagree with the editorial’s authors that Dr. Holsinger’s views on homosexual sex are abnormal. From what the Times alleges about him, I suspect that Dr. Holsinger and I would disagree on questions regarding cloning and embryonic stem cell research. The fact that he and I might differ on this vital issue would not allow me to reach the same conclusion that the Times is so quick to reach. In my opinion, the Doctor would be wrong if he, in fact, supports human cloning for embryonic stem cell research. I would not, however, characterize his perspective on this matter as “abnormal” since it is held by many influential people whom I also believe are wrong.
Abnormal means: irregular; nonstandard; uncharacteristic; atypical; anomalous; strange; odd; peculiar; deviant; aberrant; or malformed. Ironically, the Times (as it suggests when it states that it is “difficult to pigeonhole [him] ideologically”] and Dr. Holsinger probably share similar views on human cloning that leads to stem cell research and the destruction of the human embryos involved in this research. What is “troubling” to The New York Times about this nominee is that Dr. Holsinger is also an active lay leader in the United Methodist Church who opposes homosexual practice.
I may not have written this posting on this Times editorial if it simply asserted its disagreement with the Doctor’s views on homosexual practices. However, for this influential paper and powerful shaper of public opinion to brand and condemn the Doctor’s view on this important topic as “abnormal” should be of grave concern not only to Americans, in general, but to Catholics, in particular. It will be all the more easy in the future for the Times to oppose and denounce a faithful Catholic nominee to any national, state, or local post whose views differ with theirs. Now, that action, should the Times pursue it, would be abnormal.RJA sj
I have enjoyed the robust exchange amongst MOJ participants regarding the Church and parish life in rural, urban, and suburban areas. I may be one of the few MOJ participants who has had the opportunity to serve as a priest the Church in these diverse communities in the United States, e.g., Manhattan, Long Island, Dighton MA, Bethesda MD, Washington DC, Spokane, Los Gatos CA. In response to a question which Elizabeth raised, I have also had some modest experience abroad in Rome, Jordan (where I served as a Jesuit scholastic prior to my ordination), and England where I have also served the local church. I would not want to suggest that any of these diverse communities is more authentically Catholic than some others, nor would I want to propose that Catholicism is more vibrant in any one of these places than it is in another. In all of them, I have met disciples of Christ—sons and daughters of the Church who are generous, thoughtful, and caring Christians. The challenges to practicing their faith are as diverse as their locales, but first and last they are Christians, they are Catholics who labor hard at implementing what God asks of us all. Two of this week’s Gospels (Sunday and today, Tuesday) have reminded us, through Saints Luke and Matthew, that the harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few—nonetheless, the master of the harvest has sent out laborers for the harvest in all these sundry places.RJA sj
OK, I can't help myself. I have a question for you Catholic urbanites. How many of you are sending your children to your local public shool? If you are, instead, sending your children to a local parochial or private school, what's the percentage of kids in those schools with special needs? Does it come close to approximating the percentage of the general population with special needs?
I'll bet some of your neighbors with school-aged children (OK, maybe not your immediate neighbors, but maybe neighbors four or five blocks away from you) do not feel quite as content with urban life, or feel quite as welcome in your urban Catholic parishes, as you do. The only Catholic school I've ever known to actually recruit kids with special needs (OK, well, maybe just one kid, the daughter of a friend of mine) is the school of my comfortably suburban parish.
If we're going to start talking about what kinds of parishes "feel" more Catholic to us than others, I think we're going to end up finding it very, very, hard to generalize.
Here's Cal Thomas holding forth on Hilary Clinton's religious faith (HT Digby):
Liberal faith, which is to say a faith that discounts the authority
of Scripture in favor of a constantly evolving, poll-tested relevancy
to modern concerns -- such as the environment, what kind of SUV Jesus
would drive, larger government programs and other "do-good" pursuits --
ultimately morphs into societal and self-improvement efforts and
jettisons the life-changing message of salvation, forgiveness of sins
and a transformed life.
If the newspaper story is accurate, this
is where Clinton is on her faith: "In a brief quiz about her
theological views, Mrs. Clinton said she believed in the resurrection
of Jesus, though she described herself as less sure of the doctrine
that being a Christian is the only way to salvation." This is a politician speaking, not a person who believes in the central tenets of Christianity.
The
same book that tells of the resurrection, also quotes Jesus as saying
"I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but
by me" (John 14:6). One might ask, which the reporter did not, that if
there are other ways to God than through Jesus, why did Jesus bother to
come to Earth, allow himself to be crucified and suffer rejection?
I can't quite tell what Thomas means by liberal Christianity here. But I know I disagree with his characterization of the view that "being a Christian is the only way to salvation" as a central tenet of Christianity, unless Catholics do not count as Christians. (Of course, we've seen that one before as well.)
The fight over a popular health insurance program for children is
intensifying, with President Bush now leading efforts to block a major
expansion of the program, which is a top priority for Congressional
Democrats. . . . Democrats have proposed a major expansion of the program, the State
Children’s Health Insurance Program, to cover more youngsters with a
substantial increase in federal spending.
Administration
officials have denounced the Democratic proposal as a step toward
government-run health care for all. They said it would speed the
erosion of private insurance coverage. And they oppose two of the main
ideas contemplated by Democrats to finance expanded coverage for
children: an increase in the federal tobacco tax and cuts in Medicare
payments to private insurance companies caring for the elderly.
I agree with Rick that there's something just not quite Catholic about suburbs, although, like him, I have a hard time putting my finger on it. I've attended urban, rural, and suburban Catholic parishes. And the first two just feel more Catholic to me, particularly the urban parishes. I think part of the answer is the immigrant experience, which has really defined the culture of Catholicism in the United States and which has been an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon. (This actually reminds me of another book to add to the list: Gerald Gamm's Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed.)
But, aside from perceptions of authenticity, I also think there's a moral case to be made against suburban living on grounds of justice, community, and the environment. I think all three objections revolve around the car-dependence that suburban patterns of development literally mandate. Car-dependence separates people from one another, isolates the very young and very old, burdens the poor and harms the environment. The justice and communitarian objections to the suburban lifestyle resonate strongly with traditional themes of CST. The environment, on the other hand, has been something of an ugly stepchild within CST. The Church has had things to say about the environment from time to time, though, and I think (or at least hope) it will have much more to say about it in the future.
Mark -- It might be interesting to include a (long range) historical perspective in your CST and the City conference, too. Maybe my perspective's warped a bit right now, because I'm still immersed in the Europe of late antiquity & the Middle Ages, but this came up in some class reading I'm doing this morning, from Christopher Dawson's Religion and the Rise of Western Culture:
The late Ernst Troeltsch, following Max Weber, went so far as to maintain that it was the medieval city which first provided the favourable conditions for a thorough-going Christianization of social life such as had existed neither in the city culutre of the ancient world, which was based on slavery, nor in the feudal agrarian society which had been built up so largely by the strong at the expense of the weak.
Dawson goes on to quote Troeltsch (from Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen):
The very condition of existence of the city as an essentially economic association is peace, the freedom and the common interest of all the citizens, together with freedom to work and the basing of property on personal effort and industry.
In all these respects the city corresponded to a great extent with the demands of Christian ethics. As a non-military peaceful community of work, using the military element only for its defence and still devoid of capitalistic urban features, the medieval city was a pattern of Christian society as we find it in Thomist theory.
It also seems to me that this would be a conference where an international perspective might be particularly interesting and important. The vast differences between what we as American Catholics experience as city life and what the inhabitants of cities such as Mexico City, Beijing, and Mumbai experience must have implications for CST.
On MoJ we've had some good discussion about (and with) Brian Tamanaha and his work highlighting the dangers of legal instrumentalism (see, e.g., here, here, and here). In the new Harvard Law Review, Harvard law prof Adrian Vermeule reviews Tamanaha's book, Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law. An excerpt:
My basic suggestion, in Part I, is that there is no such thing as “instrumentalism." There is only a variety of instrumentalisms, offered in different theoretical contexts for different purposes. The merits of these different instrumentalisms must be evaluated locally rather than globally. Furthermore — this is a separate point, but a complementary one — there are several antonyms for legal instrumentalism that are materially different. It is no more coherent to praise all of them, just because they are not instrumentalism, than it would be to praise all of anarchism, fascism, and communism because they are alternatives to liberal democracy.
Subsequently, in Part II, I ask what prescriptions for the legal system follow from a critique of legal instrumentalism. I suggest that in a legal culture pervaded by instrumentalism (in all of its possible senses), there are powerful discursive pressures to justify an antiinstrumental view by reference to the beneficial effects that holding such a view will produce — by reference, that is, to the instrumental benefits of anti-instrumentalism. When combined with the claim that anti-instrumentalism requires certain beliefs, not merely certain actions, this is an intrinsically paradoxical stance; it leads, perhaps unavoidably, to a type of esoteric legalism, under which the theorist is quite willing to promote a false belief in the truth of antiinstrumentalism in order to secure the benefits of that belief. Unfortunately, however, there are well-known paradoxes of esotericism that make views of this sort self-defeating.
When it comes to education, Democrats are uneducable.
One candidate after another lambasted George Bush, the Republican Party and, of course, the evil justices of the Supreme Court. But not a one of them even whispered a mild word of outrage about a public school system that spends $13,000 per child -- third highest among big-city school systems -- and produces pupils who score among the lowest in just about any category you can name. The only area in which the Washington school system is No. 1 is in money spent on administration. Chests should not swell with pride.
The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Not a single candidate offered anything remotely close to a call for real reform. Instead, a member of the audience could reasonably conclude that if only more money was allocated to these woe-is-me school systems, things would right themselves overnight.
Here is Will Saletan's review of Michael Sandel's "The Case Against Perfection." Here's the end:
In a world without givens, a world controlled by bioengineering, we would dictate our nature as well as our practices and norms. We would gain unprecedented power to redefine the good. In so doing, we would strip perfection of its independence. Its meaning would evolve as our nature and our ideals evolved. The more successfully we engineered I.Q. and muscle-to-fat ratio, the more central these measures would become to our idea of perfection. We already see this phenomenon in our shift of educational emphasis from character to academic testing. We might create a world of perfect SATs, E.R.A.’s and C.E.O.’s. But it would never be a perfect world, because the point of perfection is that its definition doesn’t bend to our will.
This is the real problem with self-engineering. It seizes control of humanity so radically that humanity can no longer judge it. We can’t be certain it’s diminishing us. But we can’t be certain it’s perfecting us, either.
