Thursday, June 10, 2010
Given his conception of rationality, Rorty wouldn't say that, e.g., creation science is irrational either. So for Rorty to say what he did about Christian theism shouldn't be misconstrued as a compliment to Christian theism.
By the way, what *is* Rorty saying in the quote: that Christian theism is not irrational--or that it is "no more irrational" than atheism. Like you, I assume he's saying the former, not the latter. But, again: not a compliment--or not much of one.
I just ran across this quote from Richard Rorty:
I do not think that Christian theism is irrational. I entirely agree . . . that it is no more irrational than atheism. Irrationality is not the question but rather, desirability. The only reason I can think of for objecting to Christian theism is that a lot of Christians have been bigoted fanatics. But of course, so have a lot of atheists. . . . Atheism is more practical only if you wish to form a pluralistic, democratic society. In that situation, the persistence of the theist who claims to know that this or that is against God's will becomes a problem. So atheists find themselves wishing that these groups would wither away.
(Stephen Louthan, "On Religion -- A Discussion with Richard Rorty, Alvin Plantinga, and Nicholas Wolterstorff," 27 Christian Scholar's Review 178, 183 (1996))
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Stanley Hauerwas provided
what I think is the best response to Peter Singer’s question in an article he wrote
back in 1977, called “Having and Learning to Care for Retarded Children.” [Which you can find in a great collection edited
by John Swinton, Critical Reflections on
Stanley Hauerwas’ Theology of Disability , Haworth Pastoral Press
(2004).] Hauerwas argues that viewing
our children as choices, rather than gifts, is corrosive. As Christians, he argues, we should
understand that we have children because we are commanded to, and we follow
that command because we accept that God’s creation is good. He writes that children are our “promissory
notes”, our sign to the present and to the future, that we trust God and his
creation. In his words:
[O]ur having children draws on our deepest convictions
that God is the Lord of this world, that in spite of all the evidence of misery
in this world, it is a world and existence that we can affirm as good as long
as we have the assurance that He is its creator and redeemer . . . Children are
thus our promissory note, our sign to present and future generations, that we
Christians trust the Lord who has called us together to be his people. . . .
Once having children is put in the context of this story
and the people formed by it we can see how inappropriate the language of choice
is to describe our parenting. For
children are not beings created by our wills – we do not choose them – but
rather they are called into the world as beings separate and independent from
us. They are not ours for they, like
each of us, have a Father who wills them as his own prior to our choice of
them.
Thus, children must be seen as a gift, for they are
possible exactly because we do not determine their right to exist or not to
exist . . . . [G]ifts come to us as a given they are not under our
control. Moreover, they are not always
what we want or expect and thus they necessarily have an independence from us.
Insofar as gifts are independent they do not always
bring joy and surprise, but they equally may bring pain and suffering.
I think Hauerwas is
right. We have to understand our
children as gifts, rather than choices.
Singer’s question is ultimately about whether or not we trust the
goodness of creation and of our Creator.
Of course, Michael Sandel, in The Case against perfection , argues that it is possible to hold a vision of humanity based on this same notion of ‘giftedness’ that has nothing to do with God, that is based instead on the moral concepts of humility, responsibility, and solidarity. I’m not so certain he succeeds, but I do think he’s on the right track.
The "urbanist" work of my friend and colleague Philip Bess is well known, I suspect, to most longtime MOJ readers. Here, thanks to Public Discourse, is an adaptation of his recent speech, "Toward a Renewed Culture of Building":
Read the whole thing![E]ven modern human beings fare better in good places. Indeed, persons best able to successfully navigate the changes and uncertainties of the modern world and of life itself are most often those persons most deeply rooted in stable families in good places. And this suggests a true rationale for traditional building even in the context of the modern world: A durable and beautiful built environment provides the best physical and spatial context for human life, and thereby supports the different kinds of inventiveness and daring that modern life demands. If one grows up in a loving family in a good home in a good town or city, one is likely to carry within oneself a foundational sense of home throughout one’s entire life, whatever other uncertainties, dangers and adventures life presents. Making places in which we are able to be at home in the world—even if we can never be entirely comfortable in the world—is therefore a primary task of traditional building properly understood. . . .
[T]here are spiritual goods that follow from building traditionally. Notwithstanding the mundane purposes that good buildings satisfy, the highest purpose of the building arts is beauty. What can one say objectively about beauty in a culture where it is widely taken for granted that beauty is subjective? Whether painting or photography or music or sculpture or buildings, our encounter with something beautiful pleases us almost instantly. We have an intuitive understanding that beautiful things are well made; were they not, we would not understand them to be beautiful. Beautiful things somehow both embody clearly and reveal the essence of the thing they are. Beautiful things appear to us complete; we would never think of changing them, and they could not be altered but for the worse. Beautiful things not only attract us, they make us grateful. Beautiful things judge us; they change us, and make us want to be better than we are. Beautiful things elevate us. . . .
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
A very perceptive person I was talking with today opined that most Americans oscillate between bald individualism, on the one hand, and totalitarianism, on the other, leaving little (or only awkward) conceptual room for what Catholic social doctrine prizes in the terms of subsidiarity and solidarity. I hadn't thought of it quite that way before, but it immediately struck me as right on the money. The Church's claim is that there must be -- in that marvelous phrase of Caritas in veritate, which phrase I am told comes from the Missal of Pius V -- "breathing space." The liturgical source of the phrase underlines the shared or associational nature of "breathing space."
This week I'm participating in a St. Thomas faculty seminar titled, "Must Knowledge Be Secular?" The seminar is being led by Notre Dame history prof Brad Gregory, and Brad is using it to try out portions of his forthcoming book, Disentangling the West: The Reformation Era and the Makings of Modernity. The book should generate lots of conversations on MoJ and elsewhere. He's pushing back against many of the dominant historical narratives, including the story that science's eclipse of theology was an inevitable byproduct of the nature of scientific inquiry. Brad complicates the story -- e.g., arguing that the widespread and seemingly unresolvable disagreements about Christian doctrine during the Reformation era helped drive the trend toward the privatization of religion and the secularization of knowledge. In order to move beyond the doctrinal disputes, the conversation retreated to a plane of "natural" reason, becoming more and more disconnected from substantive Christian claims.
The history has opened up a range of questions within the seminar: When a historian is open to theology, is that openness aimed simply at a better understanding of the subject, or should the openness encompass the possibility that theological claims are actually true? What would it look like for universities (secular as well as Christian) to make space for theology (or more broadly, the transcendent)? And should a Catholic university do more than "make space" for theology? If so, what exactly should it look like? In any event, Brad's work reflects the extent to which many of our current debates are shaped by the historical narratives we embrace.
Monday, June 7, 2010
"Nietzsche, the child of a Lutheran pastor, radicalized this argument, painting all of Christianity—indeed all of Western religion, going back to Judaism—as a slave morality, the psychic revolt of the lower orders against their betters. Before there was religion or even morality, there was the sense and sensibility of the master class. The master looked upon his body—its strength and beauty, its demonstrated excellence and reserves of power—and saw and said that it was good. As an afterthought he looked upon the slave, and saw and said that it was bad. The slave never looked upon himself: he was consumed by envy of and resentment toward his master. Too weak to act upon his rage and take revenge, he launched a quiet but lethal revolt of the mind. He called all the master's attributes—power, indifference to suffering, thoughtless cruelty—evil. He spoke of his own attributes—meekness, humility, forbearance—as good. He devised a religion that made selfishness and self-concern a sin, and compassion and concern for others the path to salvation. He envisioned a universal brotherhood of believers, equal before God, and damned the master's order of unevenly distributed excellence. The modern residue of that slave revolt, Nietzsche makes clear, is found not in Christianity, or even religion, but in the nineteenth-century movements for democracy and socialism:
Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the "equality of souls before God." This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights: mankind was first taught to stammer the proposition of equality in a religious context, and only later was it made into morality: no wonder that man ended by taking it seriously, taking it practically!—that is to say, politically, democratically, socialistically.
When [Ayn] Rand inveighs against Christianity as the forebear of socialism, when she rails against altruism and sacrifice as inversions of the true hierarchy of values, she is cultivating the strain within conservatism that sees religion as not a remedy to but a helpmate of the left. And when she looks, however ineptly, to Aristotle for an alternative morality, she is recapitulating Nietzsche's journey back to antiquity, where he hoped to find a master-class morality untainted by the egalitarian values of the lower orders.
Though Rand's antireligious defense of capitalism might seem out of place in today's political firmament, we would do well to recall the recent revival of interest in her books. More than 800,000 copies of her novels were sold in 2008 alone; as Burns rightly notes, "Rand is a more active presence in American culture now than she was during her lifetime." Indeed, Rand is regularly cited as a formative influence upon an entire new generation of Republican leaders; Burns calls her "the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right." Whether or not she is invoked by name, Rand's presence is palpable in the concern, heard increasingly on the right, that there is something sinister afoot in the institutions and teachings of Christianity.
I beg you, look for the words "social justice" or "economic justice" on your church website. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes.
That was Glenn Beck on his March 2 radio show, taking a stand against, well, pretty much every church in the Christian faith: Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist—even his very own Church of Latter-day Saints."
[Here for the entire essay.]
[HT: Mollie Wilson O'Reilly, "Ayn Rand and Aristotle, @ dotCommonweal.]
As I was recently paging through my copy of Heinrich Rommen’s The Natural Law, I came across this passage of his:
When little or no respect any longer exists for any authority; when marriage generally ceases to be differentiated from concubinage and promiscuity; when the honor of one’s fellow citizen is no longer respected and oaths no longer have force, then the possibility of social living, of order in human affairs, vanishes together.
Although his thoughts were penned in 1935 when he and his family were still living in Germany where he had been a guest of the state police, they ought to provide us with insight about many of the issues we tackle here at the Mirror of Justice seventy-five years later.
RJA sj
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