At Commonweal, my friend and colleague John McGreevy has a piece up, responding to Fr. Wilson Miscamble's recent essay on Catholic-hiring in America magazine. I agree with much of what John says. As I have already discussed privately with him, though, I was not sure about these few lines:
Framing the problem simply as recruiting Catholic faculty is also ungenerous. Conspicuously absent from Miscamble’s essay are other faculty-Protestants, Muslims, Jews, unbelievers-enthusiastic about the university’s mission. The History department recently hired Mark Noll, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and perhaps the nation’s leading evangelical intellectual. (It has long been the home of George Marsden, another evangelical and the Bancroft Prize-winning biographer of Jonathan Edwards.)
On Miscamble’s abacus they do not count. But they make Notre Dame not just a better university but a better Catholic university. . . .
I did not understand Fr. Miscamble, in his America piece, to be denying that wonderful non-Catholic ND scholars like Mark Noll and Christian Smith "count" as great "mission" hires, but only to be reminding us that -- as great as these scholars are -- they do not "count" toward the particular goal of maintaining a numerical preponderance of Catholics on the faculty. Should we care about this goal? I guess I think we should, even though it is certainly true that the mere fact a faculty member identifies as Catholic does not mean he or she will be interested in, understand, or support, the mission (broadly understood) of a Catholic university. Numbers are not enough. But -- I take Fr. Miscamble to be arguing -- they do matter, as a starting point. John also writes:
[S]tudents need intellectual formation too. We can’t guarantee faith. But we can help students learn. And a test of a serious Catholic university is whether we can cultivate the intellectual abilities of our Catholic students so that they become thoughtful, reflective Catholic adults. Most of this is the ordinary hard work of teaching students to write, paint, measure, build, experiment, and think. Some of it is more specific: some students at Notre Dame enter the university unable to locate a Bible passage, much less identify Augustine. They don’t know that Thomas Aquinas immersed himself in Islamic texts, or that the work of Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo is inseparable from his Catholicism. They are unaware that American Catholics are not a majority in American society, or that American Catholics are a tiny percentage of Catholics in a global church.
Here, oddly enough, lies an opportunity that all of us concerned with Catholic education should seize. As institutions that take religion and matters of ultimate concern seriously, in an academic world often content to bracket these subjects as mere matters of opinion, Catholic universities can contribute to the wider world of learning in unusual ways. At the same time, they can attempt to nurture the future leaders that our church, and for that matter our society, so desperately need.
Here, it sounded to me like John was more in agreement than disagreement with Fr. Miscamble. Wasn't the latter's claim -- at least, his implicit one -- that the "opportunity" John (correctly) identifies is one that a university without a mission-committed faculty -- and, more particularly, a preponderance of Catholic faculty -- can seize? That is, in order for a Catholic university to do what John says, in these paragraphs, it should be doing, does it need (as Miscamble contends) a predominantly Catholic faculty? This, it seems to me, is a hard, but really important, question.
Here (thanks to First Things) is a bit from a recent address, given by Archbishop Chaput, in Indianapolis:
. . . We don’t just profess belief in the Incarnation. We say we believe that God took flesh at a precise moment in time and in a definite place. Pontius Pilate and Mary are mentioned by name in the creed—and the reference to Mary, his mother, guarantees Christ’s humanity, while the reference to Pilate, who condemned him to death, guarantees his historicity.
All this ensures that we can never reduce the Incarnation to an abstract concept, a metaphor, or a pretty idea. It ensures that we can never regard Jesus Christ as some kind of ideal archetype or mythical figure. He was truly a man and truly God. And once he had a place he called home on this earth. There’s something else, too. We believe that this historical event, which happened more than 2,000 years ago, represents a personal intervention by God “for us men and for our salvation.” God entered history for you and me, for all humanity.
These are extraordinary claims. To be a Christian means believing that you are part of a vast historical project. And it’s not our project. It’s God’s. . . .
This Christianity thing? It's about reality. It's about a real person, who lived, walked, breathed, slept, laughed, and cried in time, in a real, identifiable place. It's not just about values, principles, commitments, and messages. Heavy.
Several MOJ-ers haveblogged about the recent CST conference at Villanova, on markets, the state, and the law. I asked my NDLS colleague, corporate-law scholar Julian Velasco, for a summary of the paper he presented at the conference. Here it is:
I focused on developing some guiding principles to help me in trying to put CST into practice in corporate law in the real world. First, we have to give due consideration to the status quo in enacting reform. Thus, for example, if shareholders are the owners of the corporation, then we must respect those ownership rights — even if only to pay just compensation before abolishing them. Second, “more” CST is not necessarily better. Thus, we cannot say things like, “my plan demonstrates greater solidarity than yours and therefore is more Catholic.” Plans that are strong in some areas of CST may well be considerably weaker in other areas. Third, it is not necessarily the case that every aspect of CST is speaking to each society with the same urgency. Thus, for example, it may be that, in America today, the universal destination of goods is a greater concern than the right to work. We probably should focus our efforts accordingly. Finally, it may be too much to expect corporate law, or even all of business law, to solve all of the world’s problems. Maybe it is enough that they do what they can. And CST does not necessarily say what that is. Ultimately, CST should not be expected to provide specific solutions to complex moral problems. Instead, it should be understood as providing important principles that are intended to be embraced and applied in good faith.
I trust my co-authors will forgive me for briefly hijacking the blog to make an announcement. My personal blog, ProfessorBainbridge.com. has been transformed into a landing page that serves as a planet (a.k.a. hub) site for three content blogs:
RSS feeds are available either for the combined set or for any one of the individual blogs. For more info, go here. We now return you to your regular programming.
The ImmigrationProf blog is "pleased to announce that at 8 A.M. PST on Tuesday morning [Sept. 25], the ImmigrationProf blog will post an exclusive interview with Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill), one of the candidates vying for the Democratic Presidential nomination. We prepared a list of questions for Senator Obama on a range of difficult immigration issues, including immigration reform, undocumented immigration, family immigration, deportation and immigration raids, local (anti-)immigration ordinances, integration of immigrants into U.S. society, the deaths along the U.S./Mexico border, and his vote in favor of the Secure Fence Act. Readers will see that Senator Obama's responses made for a very interesting dialogue!"
A few weeks ago, I posted this and this in response to Nicholas Frankovitch's First Things post, "The Seamless Garment Reconfigured." Frankovitch has returned to the discussion with these thoughts. Here's a bit:
Our right to abort entails the duty to accept that others have the right to have aborted us. Now, maybe the train of thought leading to that conclusion strikes you as abstract and remote from the way most of us think about this issue in real life. “People are not that logical!” So wrote J. Budziszewski in “The Revenge of Conscience,” an essay published in First Things. “Ah,” he continued, “but they are more logical than they know; they are only logical slowly. The implication they do not grasp today they may grasp in thirty years; if they do not grasp it even then, their children will. It is happening already. Look around.”
We know what abortion does to the aborted. To the aborting it does the psychological equivalent. “Do unto others . . .” is a principle that moves along a straight and narrow path and, please note, in both directions. As I would have others do unto me, I ought to do unto them. And so if I have already done unto them, I am now committed to wishing the same for myself. If I abort my unborn child, well, that’s nothing I would deny my parents had the right to do to me.
Self-hatred is what I end up with when I carry to its logical conclusion the proposition that abortion rights are morally necessary, that justice demands them. . . .
Theory, Practice, and Tradition: Human Rationality in Pursuit of the Good Life
The Second Annual Conference of the International Society for MacIntyrean Philosophy
The International Society for MacIntyrean Philosophy invites submissions focusing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s accounts of theory, practice, and tradition as a foundation for ethical and political work. Diverse philosophical approaches and methodologies are welcome and the theme can be broadly interpreted. Papers should not exceed 30 minutes reading time.
Select papers may be published in a special journal for the International Society for MacIntyrean Philosophy.
The International Society for MacIntyrean Philosophy was founded by the participants of “MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia,” a conference organized by Kelvin Knight, held at London Metropolitan University in June 2007.
The society includes professional philosophers from different traditions, experts in political theory, the social sciences, the humanities and education, as well as members of non-philosophical communities and practices, and others interested in the relevance of their commitments and professions. Please submit a 100 word abstract no later than January 10, 2008 by email.
Conference Dates: July 30 through August 3, 2008
Location: Saint Meinrad School of Theology, St. Meinrad, Indiana, USA
Once when Mormon origins were being radically questioned by a man who
turned out to be a forger, I asked Jan Shipps, foremost Gentile scholar of
Latter-Day Saints, what if the publicized fake documents turned out to be
authentic? Wouldn't such shaking of the foundations bring down the whole
edifice? No, she reminded me: The faithful have ways, indefinite and maybe
infinite, of responding with new explanations. Without cynicism, Shipps noted
that religions do not get killed by surprises that would seem to necessitate
revision.
I thought of Shipps' dictum this month when a beautifully sad or sadly
beautiful book by the late Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light, saw the light
of day and met the glare of publicity. Aha! was the instant and general
response of well-selling a-theists: This shows that a character on the way to
sainthood was inauthentic, and her failure to experience God "proves" God's
non-existence.
Not to worry, was the main literate Catholics' response. Catholic apologists
and experts on mysticism addressed Teresa's agony over her non-experience of God
and her disappointment in the Jesus in whom she believed but whom she did not
experience. They scrambled to show how her story would more likely lead people
to the search for faith than it would disappoint them and drive them away. But
if Mother Teresa had trouble feeling the presence of God, wrote critics, the old
hypocrite should not have hung in there as a model, a self-sacrificing but not
always easy to applaud rigorist. We were told that she would be a challenge to
every right-thinking and right-experiencing Catholic.
Wrong. Her published diary is likely to sell as well as those attacking
her. From what I have read, it is a cry of the heart to a heaven evidently
empty and silent to her: "Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me?"
In response, historically informed commentators reached back to the Psalms or
medieval precedent for analogies. Those familiar with mysticism were ready with
"Is this the first time you've heard of this?" or "Let's make this a teaching
opportunity." Eileen Marky in September 14th's NationalCatholicReporter laid it out well, as did colleagues in most
weekly Catholic and many Protestant papers. Most asked what any of this had to
do with the existence of God.
Then followed, in most accounts, learned revisitations of believers who had
doubts or were victims of what medievalists called accidie or, deeper than that,
"The Dark Night of the Soul." While few who value the experience of God's
presence would envy Mother Teresa, most expressed sympathy to a now deceased
figure who always offered compassion but did not always receive it. The Jan
Shipps dictum did not even have to be put to work. Catholics and other
Christians did not need to reinvent the faith--austere, threatening experiences
like Teresa's are as old as faith itself. It was asked: If there are bright
sides to this darkness or palpitations to replace the numbnesses of spirit, so
that the darkness can be, conditionally, a boon, why don't believers put more
energy into preparing their fellow devotionalists, showing that such silence may
be in store for them, and then telling them not to fear.
[Sightings comes from the
Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.]
Here in South Bend, we've been celebrating the beatification of Basil Moreau, C.S.C. (the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross). Here is a quote that reminded me how central the distinctive mission of Catholic schools is, and should be, to Holy Cross, to Notre Dame, and to the Church:
"We shall always place education side-by-side with instruction; the mind will not be cultivated at the expense of the heart. While we prepare useful citizens for society, we shall likewise to our utmost to prepare citizens for heaven."
Greg's post, below, on economics education for religious leaders -- and also the recent posts about the latest CST-fest at Villanova -- remind me that I've been meaning to link to Ryan Anderson's recent review of a new book by Acton Institute director of research Dr. Samuel Gregg called "The Commercial Society: Foundations and Challenges in a Global Age." (Here's a link for the book.) Here's a bit:
Democracies often focus so much on who is making the decisions (the people!) that they don't consider whether the state should be acting in the first place. Pierre Manent explains that "the modern idea of representation leads naturally to a continuous increase in the state's power over society, because it continually erodes the intrasocial powers that ensure the independence and solidity of this society." Citizens become slaves to the state under "the illusion that they are obeying their own will." Combine the politics of redistribution with this soft despotism and you get a government that eliminates the voluntary associations and platoons of civil society that best serve the immediate needs of the poor, while at the same time wrecking the economic institutions that best secure their long-term well-being.
For all his focus on problems posed to commercial societies, Gregg entirely ignores problems they create for human flourishing. Consider the tendency of commercial society to become commercialist society: Gregg entirely ignores the materialism so rampant in the West today, and his discussion of the pitfalls of equality-as-sameness ignores one important truth. While it is certainly the case that the poor in wealthy societies are often better off than the rich in poorer societies, Gregg forgets that much of human fulfillment is social fulfillment. The wide, and widening, gap between rich and poor is cause for concern, and man's absolutewell-being (measured in material terms) is insufficient.
These quibbles aside, The Commercial Society is eminently reasonable, particularly for its closing discussion of the possibility of "forced" commercial order. While we shouldn't view humans as passive victims of history, neither should we assume that generations of habits and institutions can be reorganized overnight--or by force. Whether it is European economic and demographic stagnation, Middle Eastern political turmoil, or Latin American and African liberationist policies, culture must be the driving force of economic and legal change. This places a special responsibility on religious leaders, who must understand and communicate social values to their flocks. Many religious leaders still harbor disdain for commercial order, but The Commercial Society could go a long way to educating them in the basics. In fact, this book is important for anyone who seeks to do what Gregg's home institution, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, advocates: To "connect good intentions to sound economics."
