Mirror of Justice

Monday, June 21, 2010

"Neither Beast Nor God"

On a recent plane trip, I read Gilbert Meileander's Neither Beast Nor God (buy it here), which is a succinct examination of the ideas of human and personal "dignity." He writes (among other things):

I doubt whether we can understand dignity well without at least a modest anthropology -- without some notion of what it means to be the sort of creature a human being is. And I, at least, do not think this understanding can possibly be right if we abstract the human beings we seek to understand from their relation to God. Abstracted from that relation, they are simply abstract -- not really what human beings are.

Food for thought!

Marriage and Individualism

By Susan Stabile

I just started reading Andrew Cherlin's 2009 book, The Marriage Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family Today. One of the observations he makes is that although we often think of a nation's culture as consistent and unified - a "set of values and expectations that fit togehter to create a coherent whole," it is often the case that culture "contains multiple, inconsisten ways of viewing the same reality, and invididuals choose, sometimes without even realizing it, which view to adopt."

He sees this reflected in the state of marriage in America: Not only do a higher proportion of Americans marry at some point in their lives than in most other Western nations (and marry earlier), but Americans are more likely to breakup and divorce. "American children were more likely to see their parents break up. In fact, children born to married parents in the United States were more likely to experience their parents' breakup than were children born to cohabiting parents in Sweden."

Cherlin suggests this reflects a contradiction in American culture, that our strong culture of marriage and strong culture of individualism "form a contradictory set of models." This contradiction is reflected in the fact that despite that most Americans (76%) agree that marriage is a lifetime relationship that should never be ended except under extreme circumstances," they also believe that individuals who are unhappy in their marriages should easily be able to end them. "What Americans want, in other words, is for everyone else to have a covenant marriage."

"Who is Jewish Enough for Anglo-Jewish Schools?"

By Rick Garnett

There have been a few posts up, here at MOJ, about the controversial case involving the recent decision by the U.K.'s new Supreme Court in the Jewish Free School case. Here, in a Sightings column, Heather Miller Rubens weighs in, and warns that "[t]here are tragic consequences when an essentially secular court of law attempts to police the boundaries of religious identity and to answer the question: Who is a Jew?"

A Sino-Vatican "entente"?

By Rick Garnett

Here is an interview by Global Times reporter Li Yanjie with Zhuo Xinping, director of the Institute of Religions at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Liu Ping, director of the Pushi Institute for Social Sciences, on the state and future of "Sino-Vatican relations". It is interesting to hear how the religious-freedom issues are described, and perceived, by the interviewees. For example:

GT: The Financial Times recently reported that China has begun to ordain "Vatican-approved" bishops. How many such bishops have been approved by China? Can you give us a review of Sino-Vatican relations?
Zhuo: . . . China, as a sovereign state, requires that bishops appointed by the Vatican should be approved by the government, as has been the case with other religions in China historically. But the Vatican holds the idea that the ordination of bishops is an issue of freedom of religion. . . .

"How Anti-Catholicism Helped Fuel the American Revolution"

By Rick Garnett

Here is a worthwhile online series of essays -- about two years old now -- by Steve Waldman of "Beliefnet":

Pope Benedict XI, it is said, admires America’s religious freedom and history. I do too, especially where we have ended up. But as we focus this week on the role of Catholics in America, it’s worth remembering just how loathed Catholics were at the founding of this nation.

Indeed, to an extent rarely acknowledged anti-Catholicism helped fuel the American revolution.

If that sounds harsh, consider the evidence . . .

Riley-Smith on the Crusades

By Rick Garnett

It seems to me -- and has seemed to me for a while -- that a distressing large number of educated and engaged people have embraced -- either uncritically or insufficiently critically -- inaccurate and often tendentious narratives about historical events, developments, and personalities involving the Church. Whether the question involves the causes and characteristics of the so-called "Dark Ages" or the rise of America's common-school system, it too often seems that an I-would-have-thought-by-now-discredited-or-at-least-problematized "whiggish" bias shapes the telling of the relevant stories and that even Catholics (perhaps in an effort to over-compensate for some other Catholics' "triumphalism") buy and repeat them.

So, I'm reading this summer (among other things) Jonathan Riley-Smith's The Crusades: A History (buy it here), and encourage other Catholics who aspire to an accurate (and therefore instructive) understanding of the past to read it, too. At the very least, the book helps with the task of ministering to the poor souls who sat through Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (link).

Here, by the way, is a review by the great scholar of late antiquity, Robert Louis Wilken, of two other Crusades-related books:

. . . The recorded past and the remembered past are seldom the same. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Crusades. . . .
[T]he "remembered" history of the Crusades might better be called an imagined or invented history. Mr. Asbridge, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, puts it this way: The Crusades "have come to have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely through the agency of illusion." Mr. Phillips, a professor of history at Royal Holloway University of London, says that we have seen only "shadows of the crusades, not true shapes." . . .

Smith on "marriage equality" and begging the question

By Rick Garnett

My friend and former colleague Steve Smith has an interesting post up, at "Law, Religion, and Ethics" about the deployment in the same-sex-marriage debate of the term "marriage equality". His post reminds me of conversations we've had over the years here at MOJ about the use of the term "discrimination" in conversations about the rights of religious institutions to hire, fire, etc., "for mission."

Gedicks on Fundamentalism and Postmodernism

By Rob Vischer

Fred Gedicks has posted a new paper that should be of interest to MoJers titled God of Our Fathers, Gods for Ourselves: Fundamentalism and Postmodern Belief. (HT: Solum) Here's the abstract:

Prepared for a symposium on “Families, Fundamentalism, and the First Amendment,” this essay uses the “death of God” as a frame for recent developments in law and religion in the United States. Western culture has been obsessed with the death of God at least since Nietzsche. During the 1900s, this obsession took the form of a prediction that modernization had so undercut belief that the latter would eventually disappear entirely. That prediction turned out to be spectacularly wrong in the United States; popular and academic literature is now filled with triumphant - and regretful - expositions of the contemporary vibrance and vitality of religion. God has cheated death (or, at least, Nietzsche).

Or has he? The God whose death was widely predicted and the God who today is alive and well are not the same God. The God who died is the God of Christendom, who bound together western society with a universal account of the world that did not survive the advent of postmodernism; this God, indeed, is dead. The vibrant God of today is the one adapted to postmodernism; the vitality of that God is on display in contemporary American religion, especially in the spirituality movement. The most pressing religious problem now confronting the world is posed by believers who refuse to recognize the demise of the first God and the rise of the second; these “fundamentalists” continue to press for government recognition and enforcement of absolute religious truths. All three of these phenomena - the death of God, his rebirth in postmodernity, and his remnants in fundamentalism - are manifest in recent Religion Clause decisions.

An Altar in the World

By Steve Shiffrin

I am reading a wonderful book by Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. America magazine describes it as a “delight to the eyes, mind and heart.” The title refers to the presence of God in our living world in many natural altars, not merely within church buildings. In a chapter on The Practice of Wearing Skin, she discusses the need for reverence of the body. She observes that the central claim of the incarnation is that “God trusted flesh and blood to bring divine love to earth.”

When Taylor hears about the decline of organized religion, she hears many things, but she thinks the intellectualization of faith is more important than inept clergy, bad faith, and “preoccupation with intellectual maintenance.” She wisely remarks: “In an age of information overload, when a vast variety of media delivers news faster than most of us can digest - - when many of us have at least two e-mail addresses, two telephone numbers, and one fax number – the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frightenly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God."

cross-posted at religiousleftlaw.com

Sunday, June 20, 2010