Avery Cardinal Dulles is, of course, a giant. Here's a story about his final McGinley Lecture at Fordham. Were any MOJ-folks there? Any reports? Here's a taste:
In his lectures, which have always been well attended, the cardinal has defended Catholic orthodoxy and explored oft-debated topics.
He said his principal aim in his lectures was "to present and classify the existing opinions" and "to criticize views that are inadequate."
He always tried "to incorporate the valid insights of all parties to the discussion, rather than perpetuate a one-sided view that is partial and incomplete," he said.
"I think of myself as a moderate trying to make peace between (opposing) schools of thought. While doing so, however, I insist on logical consistency. Unlike certain relativists of our time, I abhor mixtures of contradiction," Cardinal Dulles said. . . .
"Western thought," he said, "followed in the path of cognitive realism for many centuries before the revival of agnosticism in the Renaissance." The cardinal repeated Pope John Paul II's admonition that philosophy should seek to "resume its original quest for eternal truth and wisdom."
"Science, we all know, does not rest on a treasury of revealed knowledge handed down in authoritative tradition," the cardinal said. "Science has wonderfully increased our powers to make and to destroy, but it does not tell us what we ought to do and why.
"It does not tell us where the universe came from, or why we exist, or what our final destination is. And yet some scientists speak as though their discipline were the only kind of valid knowledge," he said. . . .
"The most important thing about my career, and many of yours, I feel sure, is the discovery of the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field -- the Lord Jesus himself," he said. . . .
Cathy Kaveny has an interesting essay in the new Commonweal marking the 20th anniversary of John Paul II's Mulieris dignitatem, the apostolic letter on the dignity of women. Kaveny explains that many (most?) Catholic women greeted the letter with wariness because the pope "makes claims about the nature of women that were in fact used in the last century to argue for what most of us would consider to be unjust political, economic, and social subjugation." For example, the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia asserts that:
[T]he political activity of man is and remains different from that of woman, as has been shown above. It is difficult to unite the direct participation of woman in the political and parliamentary life of the present time with her predominate duty as a mother. If it should be desired to exclude married women or to grant women only the actual vote, the equality sought for would not be attained. On the other hand, the indirect influence of women, which in a well-ordered state makes for the stability of the moral order, would suffer severe injury by political equality.
Both the Encyclopedia and John Paul II, according to Kaveny, "strongly defend a divinely ordained difference and complementarity between men and women," and both "are worried about the baleful effects of blurred gender lines." John Paul II cautions that "women must not appropriate male characteristics contrary to their own femine originality." But what, Kaveny asks, are those characteristics? Are they the same as those that were identified in 1912 -- impacting women's claims to equality in the educational, employment, and political spheres? If they're not the same, on what basis does John Paul II accept the traditional anthropological claims regarding gender, yet resist the traditionally espoused implications of those claims? As Kaveny puts it, "We know that Pope John Paul didn't endorse [the Encyclopedia's] view. We just don't know why he didn't."
I realize that there will be an entire conference dedicated to Mulieris dignitatem this fall, but I'm wondering if anyone has initial thoughts on Kaveny's important questions.
A little while back, Fr. Neuhaus generously wrote the following in First Things: "Lexington Books has just published a volume called Civilizing Authority: Society, State, and Church. Edited by Patrick McKinley Brennan, it is a collection of essays written in response to Arendt’s claim [about the disappearance of authority]. Each is worth reading." As so often happens, I find myself in agreement with Father.
I hope you'll treat yourself and others to a copy or two here or elsewhere. In addition to the foreword by H. Jefferson Powell, it includes chapters by Cardinal Dulles, Joseph Vining, Michael J. White, Glenn Tinder, John Coons, Thomas Kohler, Russell Hittinger, J. Budziszewski, Steven Smith, and Brennan.
In the New Republic, Brink Lindsey explores why low-income Americans tend not to go to college. Based on his review of the relevant studies, it's more about culture than money:
A lack of money is the most common explanation for why lower-income children don't go to college, and it's the impetus for proposals, like those put forward by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to increase tuition subsidies. But James Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago, is convinced that additional subsidies would do little good. Heckman recognizes the strong correlation between family income and college matriculation, but he argues that income is just a proxy for more fundamental differences in family and environmental conditions — like parental education — that ultimately show up in test scores and scholastic achievement. In a 2001 study co-authored with Stephen Cameron from Columbia University, Heckman tested the attendance gap between blacks, whites, and Hispanics, controlling for academic ability using scores from the Armed Forces Qualification Test (afqt), and found that family income did not really matter when it came to getting kids into college. In fact, "at the same afqt level Blacks and Hispanics enter college at rates that are substantially higher than the White rate," regardless of how much money their families made. The problem was that relatively few blacks and Hispanics reached a sufficiently high afqt level in the first place. In other words, the main reason fewer African Americans and Hispanics go to college isn't that they can't afford it. It's that they lack the skills to do the work.
And here's where culture comes in:
To put it in a nutshell, the upper-middle-class kid grows up in an environment that constantly pushes him to develop the cognitive and motivational skills needed to be a good student; the low-income kid's environment, on the other hand, pushes in the opposite direction.
Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley have tested the effect of class on the differences in how parents interact with their young children. After observing several dozen families with toddlers over the course of a couple of years, they were able to document dramatic differences in the intensity and nature of the verbal stimulation the kids were getting: Professional parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" per hour toward their children, as compared to 301 for workingclass parents and only 176 for welfare parents. The quality of those utterances was also very different: Among professional parents, the ratio of encouraging to discouraging utterances was six to one; for working-class parents, the ratio slipped to two to one; and welfare parents made two discouraging utterances for every encouraging one. The consequences were predictable: By the time the children in the study were around three years old, the ones from professional families had average vocabularies of 1,116 words; the working-class ones averaged 749; the welfare kids, 525.
William Saletan discusses new evidence that sex selection is occurring in the United States:
What's old is sex selection. What's new is the combination of ease, safety, and privacy with which you can now do it. This is a fundamental dynamic between technology and culture: Technology can coax cultures one way or the other by making it easier to do what you want to do, with less difficulty and without other people knowing about it.
Charles Larmore' has a review, in the latest New Republic, of Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age." Larmore finds the book "deeply disappointing". Larmore is, no doubt, smarter and more learned than I am, but I was not "disappoint[ed]" (even if I was exhausted) by Taylor's book at all. It is fascinating and provocative read.
Now, Larmore criticizes Taylor for writing a "book written by a Catholic for Catholics." But, A Secular Age is not such a book. (Though, even if it were, so what?). I'm not even sure what Larmore is getting at by labelling Taylor an "ardent" Catholic (I don't know anything about the "ardor" of Taylor's faith), but I'm pretty sure that (contrary to Larmore's suggestion) Taylor's attention -- which Larmore contrasts with Weber's approach -- to the connections between our world and that of medieval Christianity is not merely a function of this "ardor".
Larmore also points out some "slip-ups" in Taylor's book, but then proceeds to report, matter of factly -- but incorrectly -- that the "separation of church and state" "emerg[ed] in the seventeenth century after one hundred years of religious war in Europe."
Anyway . . . here is a link to a bunch of posts, over at the "Immanent Frame" blog, on Taylor's book. Check it out.
In 2003, John Yoo, then of the Office of Legal Counsel, sent a memo to the Pentagon in which he asserted that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming, and other crimes do not apply to military interrogators given the President's commander-in-chief authority. The memo was finally released yesterday. (HT: Lederman) Yoo told the Washington Post that his successors at the OLC have "ignored the Department's long tradition in defending President's authority in wartime," and that legal advice set forth in the memoranda that have subsequently been withdrawn was "near boilerplate."
I have not yet read the memo released yesterday, but I've written elsewhere about Yoo's previously released 2002 "torture memo," and it's quite a bit of a stretch, to say the least, to call it "boilerplate."
