As part of my current research, I've been reading a lot of books by and about Martin Luther King Jr. Many of these works are familiar to MoJ readers, but one that might have escaped your radar screens, but is well worth checking out, is Martin Luther King Jr. and the Image of God by Richard Wayne Wills Sr (Oxford UP 2009). Rather than focus on the more particular (and often analyzed) elements of King's theology (e.g., agape, personalism, realism), Wills traces the extent to which King's ministry was shaped by his belief that we are created in God's image. He writes that "the image of God provided the question of civil rights with an ontological reason for reinforcing the meaning and experience of just political and judicial affairs," and that "a conversation concerning rights and the political documents that prescribed them necessarily backed into a conversation about that which preceded sociopolitical reality." In this regard, the Declaration of Independence was enormously valuable to King's work because, by "underscoring this theological fact [the Imago Dei] as a fundamental truth," it was an expression "of sacred design" with significant sociopolitical implications.
Monday, January 17, 2011
King and the Image of God
"I have a dream"
A video, well worth watching today (and on other days, too).
The "lazy slander" of pro-lifers
"One of the most frequently repeated canards of the abortion debate is that pro-lifers really don’t care about life," writes Helen Alvare and others at Public Discourse. Certainly, we've all heard this charge in our public conversations. In this essay, Alvare et al. push back. She concludes:
While the pro-life cause has always been animated by the conviction that life begins at conception, it has never forgotten that it continues after birth. The pro-life movement’s message has been vindicated by 40 years of legalized abortion: the personal dignity, happiness, and prosperity of women, children, men, and the nation is advanced when life is cherished both before and after birth.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
The Scarpa Conference at Villanova Law: Eskridge, Ferejohn, Finnis, and many others
Please mark your calendars for the next Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics, and Culture to be held on Friday, February 11, 2011, at Villanova Law. As previously announced here, this year's version of the annual conference will be dedicated to study of the important and controversial new book A Republic of Statutes: The New American Constitution (Yale University Press, 2010). The book's distinguished co-authors, Bill Eskridge (Yale) and John Ferejohn (NYU), will co-keynote the conference. Other speakers will include Henry Paul Monaghan (Columbia), Thomas Merrill (Columbia), Jane Schacter (Stanford), David Stras (Minnesota Supreme Court), Kristin Hickman (Minnesota), Martin Shapiro (Boalt Hall), Ted Ruger (Penn), and Brennan (Villanova). More information about attending the conference will be available here. It's sure to be a great intellectual time -- please try to attend!
For those who really like to plan ahead, I am delighted to announce that the sixth-annual Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics, and Culture will feature John Finnis (Notre Dame and Oxford) as its keynote speaker. The conference will be held on Friday, September 30, 2011. Oxford University Press will soon publish The Collected Essays of John Finnis (in five volumes) and a new edition of his classic Natural Law and Natural Rights, which makes 2011 an especially apt time to celebrate and explore the work and legacy of Professor Finnis. Details about the conference will follow in due course. We at Villanova are very pleased to be hosting this event to honor John Finnis and his pioneering work on topics ranging from practical reason and nuclear deterrence to action theory and Shakespeare.
First Prize for the Loopiest Establishment Clause Theory (of the week)
It goes to the plaintiffs in Murray v. Geithner (h/t to the spectacular Religion Clause blog), whose claim was that the government bailout of AIG violated the Establishment Clause because AIG offers and apparently "has advertised itself as the market leader" in loans which are compliant with certain dictates of Islamic law (You may be wondering what would qualify a loan as Sharia-compliant. The court gives a list at pp. 5-6 of the order -- interestingly, one of the conditions strikes me as highly laudable: "a certain percentage of any net surplus, if any, derived from the collection of premiums is paid to charitable organizations").
The plaintiffs' theory is that by bailing out AIG, the government violated the Establishment Clause, and by agreement of the parties, the standard the court applied was the Lemon test. The failure of the purpose prong is so patent as, in my view, to rise to the level of frivolousness. Could any reasonable human think that the government purchased AIG preferred stock in order to promote or favor Islam? On the effects prong (not my favorite, I admit), there was evidence that the Sharia-compliant loans constituted 0.022% of AIG's revenue when the government intervened. Not a shred of evidence that this government "aid" to religion, such as it was, results in "religious indoctrination attributable to the government." No evidence at all that the "aid" defines its recipients by reference to religion. And if this is "entanglement" then the standard is practically void of meaning.
Why loopiest theory of only the week? Actually, I was thinking about how a fully subjectivized endorsement test might apply in this kind of case; perhaps using that theory, the plaintiffs would have had a stronger leg to stand on (what EC plaintiff wouldn't?). But no matter how anyone might feel about the bailout of AIG, this seems to me a truly odd way to complain about it.
The fact that this dog of a case made it to summary judgment and was not dismissed on the pleadings is indicative of the absurdity of some of the Establishment tests in circulation (the "pervasively sectarian" presumptions that the court discusses seem unwarranted to me, but whatever a "pervasively sectarian" institution is, AIG ain't it). Undeterred, plaintiffs have filed an appeal to the Sixth Circuit.
Ave atque vale.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Ooops!!
John Allen sets the record straight on the upcoming Discovery Channel reality show "The Exorcist Files" that I mentioned earlier. Still sounds interesting to me..... but Allen's article is even more interesting.
God, Suffering, Schillebeeckx, and Kung
Mary Catherine Hikert has an illuminating article about the beliefs and writings of the great theologian Edward Schillebeeckx in the National Catholic Reporter. Schillebeeckx's writings were instrumental in the leadup to Vatican II and he reshaped the study of Christology in the Catholic Church in the last half of the 20th century. One of Schillebeeckx's many major themes was focused on the relationship between God and suffering. As Hilkert puts it: "Writing in the context of radical and senseless human suffering around the globe and growing ecological devastation, Schillebeeckx wanted to retell the story of Jesus as disclosing the mystery of a God 'bent toward humanity' in compassion, not a God who demanded suffering and death as recompense for sin. In one of his memorable ways of capturing this mystery, Schillebeeckx wrote: 'God’s cause is the human cause' (and the cause of all of God’s creation)." But, as Hilkert observes, "God is not a deus ex machina who intervenes in the events of human history. Schillebeeckx argued that the Christian interpretation of the biblical 'God of promise' was not a 'God of the gaps' but rather a loving Creator who empowers and trusts creation, but who does not violate creation’s autonomy or the freedom of human persons. In the face of the apparent absence of God, Schillebeeckx maintained that God’s creative and saving active presence (grace) sustains and empowers human efforts on behalf of humankind and the Earth and holds open the future even for those whose lives appear to have been destroyed by sinful humanity or the destructive forces of nature."
This, of course, leads to the problem of evil. Why does God permit suffering if God is opposed to it? Schllebeeckx maintained that God has not given Christians a theoretical response to the problem of evil, but a personal response in the life of Jesus. In Schillebeeckx's, view Christ's death on the cross was the product of human sin, not divine will. Hilkert's article is well worth reading.
In this connection, I am reminded of Hans Kung's discussion of the problem of evil in his wonderful new book, What I Believe. Kung concludes that the problem of evil really has not been solved by any convincing argument and calls for faith. Recall that Kung also believes that the arguments for the existence for God are reasonable, but inconclusive. He believes that given a choice between living a life in a meaningless universe or in universe created by a loving God where we are called to be disciples, we should choose to believe in the latter. He suggests that even if he turns out to be wrong about the presence of a loving God, he will still have made the right choice about what he should have believed and how he should have led his life.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
An Argument One Does Not Often See
...can be found in this new paper by Paula Abrams, in which the endorsement test's reasonable observer standard is criticized on the grounds that it is insufficiently attentive to the Establishment Clause value of "inclusiveness." I've certainly seen critiques of the endorsement test, but only once in a while on the grounds that the reasonable observer standard needs really to be broadened to account for purely subjective experiences because it is in the nature of religious belief and non-belief that it "alters an individual's conception of the world," and so there is no single reasonable perspective on the subject of "inclusion." The bottom line for Professor Abrams is that any religious display by the government ought to be presumptively unconstitutional (1555) and that we ought to return to the purpose and effect test inquiry of Lemon, but somehow subjectivized as to the latter in order to account for the impossibility of attaining any sort of standard of reason at all, given the subject matter.
For what it's worth, my guess is that there is a fairly good chance that the endorsement test is on its way out, and that the Court will pick a case soon enough to reject it, though perhaps not for Professor Abrams's reasons (though these things are difficult to predict). But I'm not certain what I think about some of Professor Abrams' views about the reasons for the reasonable observer test's emergence. For example, she says, at 1554, that the endorsement test gained ascendance just as the court was shifting from a separationist model to "[t]he prevailing theory," one which "emphasizes government accommodation of religion." Lee v. Weisman is cited as evidence for the Court's new theory, and then the author says that "[t]he endorsement test embodies this metamorphosis." A few things strike me as not quite right about this set of statements: (1) the government lost in Lee; (2) the endorsement test was not used in Justice Kennedy's majority opinion in Lee; (3) Justice O'Connor, the mother of endorsement and committed endorsement-ite to the end, joined the majority in Lee; (4) if anything, the endorsement test, as conceived and applied, has been deemed (I think?) more restrictive than many competing approaches, including that used by Justice Kennedy in Lee; and (5) perhaps most crucially, I'm not sure I can agree that the Court's present "theory" is one which "emphasizes government accommodation of religion," whether in the Free Exercise or Establishment contexts.
For those interested in these issues, and with the time to read the paper, I'd be curious if you think I am misreading the claims.
Conscience rights at Vanderbilt
What is Vanderbilt University thinking? Either the nursing program is trying to scare away potential applicants who oppose abortion, or else the program desperately needs to hire someone new to draft its informational materials.
Brennan & Brewbaker on Christian Legal Thought
Last Saturday was the Annual Conference on Christian Legal Thought, cosponsored by Lumen Christi and the Law Professors' Christian Fellowship. I was only able to attend a portion of the day's events, but a real highlight was hearing about a forthcoming project by Patrick Brennan and William Brewbaker, Christian Legal Thought: Materials and Cases. What is so promising about this book is that it aims to place Christian legal thought on par with other "law and ___" disciplines in terms of intellectual rigor and organizational coherence. Though we've seen some great volumes published in the past few years exploring the connections between Christianity and the law, they do not lend themselves easily to a traditional 3-credit law school course outside the seminar room. Judging from Brennan's overview of the contents, the scope of the book's topics will make it difficult to marginalize on political or ideological terms: it should excite Republicans, Democrats, Catholics, Protestants, secularists, etc. It will be interesting to see whether there is much untapped interest among law school profs and students for a course on Christianity and law, and whether the difficulty in organizing materials for the course has been the primary obstacle for many profs. This should remove that obstacle once and for all.
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