According to this press release from a group called Faith in Public Life:
Catholic social justice leaders, priests, religious sisters and evangelical Christians want a “ceasefire in the Christmas culture wars.” These leaders are challenging Bill O’Reilly of Fox News and others who have lashed out against a so-called secular “War on Christmas” to join them in a new campaign that restores a focus on the common good during this holy season.
In an “Open Letter to Christmas Culture Warriors” to be published as an advertisement in the New York Post, Washington Times and National Catholic Reporter, the group says that outrage over some department stores using “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” fails to address the profound moral challenges we face in confronting the threats to human dignity in our world.
“We believe the real assault on Christmas is how a season of peace, forgiveness and goodwill has been sidelined by a focus on excessive consumerism,” the letter states. “The powerful message Christ brings to the world is ‘good news for the poor.’ Instead, Christmas is being reduced to a corporate-sponsored holiday that idolizes commerce and materialism.”
I'm basically sympathetic to this kind of critique. Isn't it true that many of the "keep America Christian" efforts seem to be motivated more by the idea of retaining (cultural) power than the idea of pursuing Christ-like servanthood?
But there's a big potential pitfall in this criticism too. The culture warriors may often overlook servanthood, but they are right to oppose secularism -- and the social-justice Christians need that opposition to secularism in order for there to be public space for their own critique. If it's improper to bring up Jesus's name in pluralistic public settings (including department stores), then you can't proclaim, "Jesus came to bring good news to the poor and oppressed," in those settings. The social-justice types need to give one cheer, maybe two, for the culture warriors.
The "Christian nation" notion can be criticized for promoting arrogance rather than servanthood; the critique can even be "secular" in the sense that it emphasizes what Jesus means for this world, not just for the church or for our souls after death. But those critics should not, as they sometimes do, buy into secularism in the sense of "leave Jesus out of public settings so as to respect others" -- because that cuts the ground from under their own proclamations.
I've explored this distinction between servanthood and secularism in this article (posted at the right), and in this one called "Christianity and the Secular in Modern Public Life" (link is near the bottom of page, not the top).
Tom
Rick's recent post described Prof. Russell Korobkin's arguments in the wake of the announcement of the discovery of an alternative to embyonic stem cells -- the ability to induce a pluripotent state in skin cells ("induced pluripotent state", or "ipc"). Korobkin repeats the basic argument for continuing with embryonic research despite this development -- that there's nothing ethically problematic about the use of embryonic stem cells for research.
There's an interview with biologist Lee Silver on the NYT site that demonstrates a twist on this basic argument. He argues that the ipc cells aren't morally distinguishable from embryonic stem cells because they, too, could develop into embryos. Is that true? (Carter?) I haven't gotten that impression from anything I've read. His claim is that this whole discovery is a cynical semantic game that's going to allow scientists to essentially continue embryonic stem cell research because the vocabulary is being manipulated. (But I gather that doesn't trouble him, because he shares Korobkin's view about the ethics of embryonic cell research.)
The interview is worth watching, for a sobering sense of the way some scientists argue about this issue. Listen carefully around 4 minutes, 30 seconds into the interview for the most chilling description of the human soul you're likely to hear!
Monday, December 3, 2007
As expected, the Dialogue of Cultures conference at Notre Dame was great. David Solomon, Dan McIinerny, and our own Elizabeth Kirk are to be commended for their work in bring the conference together. In addition to the talks, the conference also provided a great opportunity for discussion during breaks, meals, and late night with old friends and new. One of my new acquaintances works in the recording industry in California. He paid his own way to the conference to present a paper largely because one of his former professors (another conference speaker) had inspired and challenged him 30 years ago. What a testimony to the professor’s use of his gifts as teacher! As time permits over the next few days, I’ll blog on some of the conference talks. I heard wonderful things about the “Natural Law in American Catholic Social Ethics: John Ryan, Jacques Maritain, and John Courtney Murray” panel, but I had to be at another panel. Perhaps Patrick Brennan can offer us a synopsis of what he, Michael Moreland, and Zach Calo discussed in that session. I would also ask others who were at the conference to send me their reflections on the various talks for possible posting.
As everyone not living under a rock now knows, researchers have managed to reprogram human skin cells and make them "pluripotent." The discovery of these "induced pluripotent state" (iPS) cells is, I gather, huge. It has, my law-and-science colleage, O. Carter Snead, observed, "solved one of the most vexed issues at the intersection of science, ethics and public policy."
“The nation was morally and politically divided on the proper role of the government in regulating human embryonic stem cell research,” Snead said. “Now, researchers have developed the means to pursue their scientific goals in a manner that is both scientifically superior to prior approaches and ethically acceptable to all sides of what seemed to be an intractable debate about scientific freedom, the goal of alleviating suffering, and respect for human life. Their work is a model of ethical scientific research for a morally pluralistic society.”
In two recent posts, though -- one at Concurring Opinions and one at Balkinization -- Prof. Russell Korobkin seems not to agree.
Continue reading
My brother sent me this, from James Taranto, WSJ OpinionJournal. I liked the irony.
Death With Dignity
The New York Times reports on an effort in Washington state to legalize physician-assisted suicide via ballot measure:
The [proposed] law would let doctors prescribe lethal doses of narcotics to terminally ill patients who ask to end their own lives. It would be modeled closely on a statute in Oregon, the only state where the movement has been successful.
This may be a solution to another problem, on which the Times reported in October:
Moments before a Mississippi prisoner was scheduled to die by lethal injection, the Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution on Tuesday evening and thus gave a nearly indisputable indication that a majority intends to block all executions until the court decides a lethal injection case from Kentucky next spring. . . .
While there is no schedule for that review, it will almost surely not take place until the court decides the Kentucky case, Baze v. Rees, which will be argued in January. The issue in that case is not the constitutionality of lethal injection as such, but rather a more procedural question: how judges should evaluate claims that the particular combination of drugs used to bring about death causes suffering that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
Why not just execute murderers using the Oregon assisted-suicide drug combo, which has been established to be compassionate?
