I’ve just returned from an intellectually enriching and research inspiring weekend at the third annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies. The conference is a joint project of the Cornell, New York University, and Texas law schools and was hosted this year at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
The Conference on Empirical Legal Studies at Cornell attracted more than 300 people with the presentation of more than 120 original works of empirical scholarship by a diverse and interdisciplinary array of scholars at dozens of sessions, as well 25 more papers presented in a poster session. Sessions were held on law and psychology, courts and judges, securities regulation, medical malpractice, tax, law and society, CEO salaries, bankruptcy, criminal law and procedure, litigation, corporate governance, international and comparative law, law and finance, property and contracts, employment law, intellectual property, the legal profession, employment discrimination, gender, and race (and this is not an exhaustive list).
As I participated in the conference and attended sessions from dawn to dark, at which empirical work of the highest quality was presented and critically discussed by both an assigned discussant and a well-informed audience, it slowly dawned on me that not a single session was devoted to matters of religion either directly or indirectly (such as religious liberty, religious influences on culture or legal institutions, the role of religious institutions in society, etc.) Looking more closely, I discovered that not a single paper presented at these sessions appears to be have been devoted to that subject.
Now given the wide-ranging diversity of topics that were explored, the welcoming character of the empirical legal studies community, and the inquisitive environment of the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (as well as my personal familiarity with our excellent hosts), the dearth of empirical presentations on religious topics certainly cannot be attributed to the sponsors of the conference or the participating scholars. Rather it served to bring home to me the stark fact that very few of us interested in law and religion or in the relationship of faith to legal subjects are doing empirical work. (Admittedly patting my own back, some of my past (here, here, and here) and ongoing empirical research is about religious liberty decisions in the lower federal courts.) Why is this?
Catholic teaching has always had a solid grounding in the material world, rejecting the Gnostic error that separates the spiritual world from the created physical world. While not neglecting the spiritual element or forgetting that we are in the World but not of the World, we Catholics are openly and joyfully a material bunch. The Incarnation of Christ, the physicality of the Body and Blood of Christ, the Resurrection of the Body –- all are central to our beliefs and rites. We readily find the presence of God in the world that He created. As G.K. Chesterton once said, Catholicism is “a thick steak, a glass of stout, and a good cigar!” Thus, should not we as Catholic scholars be among the first people of faith attracted to the study of what is, that is, to empirical research? And how can we encourage Catholic scholars to become more involved in the empirical legal studies movement?
Greg Sisk
The newest issue of Commonweal, in addition to our own Mark Sargent's insightful review of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (which takes on even greater relevance given the most recent bank and insurance failures), contains a provocative article by Robert Bellah in which he engages key ideas from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Instead of emphasizing the historical fact of secularism, he focuses on Taylor's vision of authentic religion that engages those formed in a culture of secularism. According to Taylor, this authenticity is found in communion rooted in love.
At the heart of orthodox Christianity, seen in terms of communion, is the coming of God through Christ into a personal relation with disciples, and beyond them others, eventually ramifying through the church to humanity as a whole. God establishes the new relation with us by loving us, in a way we cannot unaided love one another. [We love because he first loved us, 1 John 4:19.] The lifeblood of this new relation is agape [the biblical Greek word for love], which can’t ever be understood simply in terms of a set of rules, but rather as the extension of a certain kind of relation, spreading outward in a network. The church is in this sense a quintessentially network society, even though of an utterly unparalleled kind, in that the relations are not mediated by any historical forms of relatedness: kinship, fealty to a chief, or whatever. It transcends all these, but [is rather] a network of ever different relations of agape.
John Allen has some interesting things to say about Pope Benedict's visit to Lourdes. In a very interesting piece describing the evolution of the Pope's thinking about Marian devotion, Allen concludes:
To sum all this up in a sound-bite: In contrast to both cold skepticism and hot devotion, Benedict XVI embodies what one might call “Marian cool.” Neither cynical nor credulous, he harbors deep feeling for Mary and a keen sense of her theological importance, combined with reserve about the signs and wonders that surround eruptions of new Marian enthusiasm.
Whether “Marian cool” will sweep the Catholic world remains to be seen, but it may well be the most original feature of Benedict’s two and a half days in Lourdes.
In anticipation of the upcoming election, this year Villanova Law's annual conference on Catholic social thought will focus on "Catholic Social Thought and Citizenship." We hope to see many old friends and to make many new ones on Saturday, October 11. Details about attending are here and here. Speakers include: Michael Baxter, John Breen, John Coleman SJ, Bruce Frohnen, Ed Gaffney, Greg Kalscheur SJ, Christine Kelleher, John Leown, Kevin Lee, Eugene McCarraher, Michael Moreland, Aidan O'Neil, Tisha Rajendra, Mark Sargent, Jeanne Heffernan Schindler, Amy Uelmen, and Michael J. White.
Please plan to join us for what promises to be a spirited exchange of views on topics that are on everyone's mind.
The folks at America have invited me to contribute occasionally to their Election blog (which I mentioned here). And, I posted some thoughts, here, at the First Things "On the Square" blog, about (what I believe to be) Doug Kmiec's recent mis-reading of Cardinal George's statement on abortion and the common good.
There is also going on, at the Commonweal blog, and post-and-comments thread -- initiated by our own Eduardo Penalver -- about (among other things) the responsibility of political actors to respect democracy by speaking honestly and fairly and the question whether those who some commenters call "pro-life activists" should, given their commitments, be willing to go to war, or tear down the constitutional order, to end abortion. Plus ca change . . .
