I will soon be beginning my annual Oscar movie orgy -- sitting in a movie theater with my teenaged-son for 2 Saturdays in a row, watching all 10 of the Best Picture nominees. (He's a senior in High School, so this might be our last time to do this together. What are the odds I'll make it through Toy Story 3 without needing about a box of kleenex?)
Before I submerge myself in the box office winners, I want to bring your attention to a movie that was not so successful, but was still one of my favorites from the past year: The Way Back. It tells the story of a band of men who escape from a Siberian gulag in 1940, and trek all the way through Siberia, Mongolia, across the Gobi dessert, to freedom in India. It has all the elements that go into some of my favorite movies -- Polish, Russian & German characters speaking in combinations of accented English & subtitles (including Colin Farrell fantastic as always as a Russian criminal with Lenin & Stalin's faces tatooed on his chest); incredible scenery; people struggling with inconceivable adversity -- from the bitter cold of the Siberian winter to the torture of thirst in the desert.
But I recommend it here on MOJ because it's also just bursting with Christian imagery and symbolism -- crowns of thorns, crosses, images of Mary, etc. The main psychological thread of the movie involves questions of redemption and forgiveness. Most fascinating to me, though, is the role played by the only significant female role in the movie, a young Polish refuge who joins this band of men halfway through the movie. I don't want to spoil anything, but I challenge you to think about the role she plays in the survival of this band -- including in a surprising way towards the end of the movie. It struck me as an interesting example of how the relative strengths of men and women can play off each other in different circumstances.
Here is (I think) a really good interview with my friend and former colleague, John Garvey, who is now the new President of the Catholic University of America. It's all worth reading, but this part struck me in a particular way:
In Catholic higher education, there’s much talk about Catholic identity. It seems that it means different things to different people. What does Catholic identity, on a practical level, mean here?
There are two kinds of things you want to look at. In the first instance, Catholic identity is carried by, and most importantly consists in, hiring faithful Catholics to teach on the faculty, and so that a majority of the faculty should be people faithful to the witness of the faith. Also, I think it’s important to represent people of other faiths who are committed to the mission of the university and who add intellectual dimensions or depth to the discussion, but within the context of this. It’s not something that people can be indifferent about. That is the most important thing, and it carries over into classes in history, classics, sociology, economics and business. That’s essential. The bishops, in the norms that they promulgated in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, had it exactly right.
I have said to the faculty that it’s important for all of us to keep in mind the norms that the bishops have promulgated, that a majority of the faculty should be committed to the witness of the faith. I’ve spoken to the deans and department chairs about how that’s something we need to make part of our hiring process — and not just keeping count after the fact, but rather at the beginning of the process, to make sure that our search operates in the way that good affirmative-action searches operate: You proactively go out and seek out people who want to work at a university like this and include them in the mix of people that we interview. We make part of the interview process a discussion about the nature of our Catholic mission and ask prospective faculty members what they would contribute to that. So, it’s very much part of our public discussions and search processes.
A second dimension is the student-life dimension. This is something I’m a little bit newer to, in one way, but in one way I’m not. Unlike many of my predecessors, I have been a consumer of Catholic education. Jeanne and I have educated five children in 95 years of Catholic education, all told. All of them have been to Catholic colleges and universities. It’s really important to us, in following our children through college, not only what they study in the classroom, but also because they are living at the universities: What are their lives like in the residence halls? What are their opportunities for the sacraments in their everyday life? What are their friends’ attitudes towards the Church, towards Mass and the sacraments, and towards the beatitudes? Because much of the work of raising your children, once they reach a certain age, is who they are living with. Having the right student life at the university is a really important part of what kind of adult Catholics they grow up to be. For us, it was really important that they be at a place where they could meet young Catholics, because they’re going to fall in love with somebody, and that is a consideration. . . .
I just got back from Loyola University Chicago, where I had the pleasure of being invited by the Sister Ann Ida Gannon Center for Women and Leadership to contribute to a panel of women engaging in what was billed as "A conversation at the intersection of professional life, the practice of faith, and working toward the common good", Women Shaping the Church. The other panelists were Simone Campbell, SSS, JD, Executive Director of NETWORK, telling the story of how she came to draft the letter in support of the Senate Healthcare bill that was signed by about 60 women's religious orders; Mary Ann Zollmann, BVM, President of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, explaining how her order dealt with the recent Apostolic visitation; and Judge Sheila O'Brien, Justice of the Illinois Appellate Court, who recently wrote an op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune that's gotten a lot of attention: Excommunicate Me, Please. We were moderated by Lisa Sowle Cahill, who was recently spotlighted in Commonweal.
It was an extraordinarily stimulating, positive, energizing conversation about women's role in the Church. We all expressed varying degrees of frustration at various aspects of this issue, but the overall tone of the conversation stressed our common love for the Church, and our desire to participate in finding the right space for the application of the particular feminine genius to the issues most dear to each of us.
I was struck by how significantly Loyola's undergraduate campus is marked by the presence of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The organizer of the event, Janet Sisler, is the relatively-new Director of the Gannon Center for Women in Leadership. If the charisma, energy, tact and love for the Church that she demonstrated in orchestrating this event are any indication of where Loyola is heading, I expect great things from the next generation of women leaders in the Church coming out of Chicago!
Years ago, David Luban wrote an article about Martin Luther King, the legal system, and King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. (87 Mich. L. Rev. 2152) This part really grabbed my attention:
[T]here is an important sense in which Socrates, like Paul and Amos and Shadrach and Luther and Bunyan, does not belong in the same political narrative as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The defining relationship of Socrates's public stance, like the figures in the biblical narratives, was a relationship with a divine voice. This relationship, to be sure, manifested itself in a politically significant action, but in the case of Socrates that was happenstance. . . . [U]nless we take Paul and Luther to be lying at the core of their being, their political acumen accrued to them (to speak scholastically) per accidens . . . [T]he theological narratives contained in King's Letter may actually suppress or displace an explicitly political self-understanding of political action by substituting relationships with the divinity for political relationships.
Luban here is expanding on Hannah Arendt's point that "conscience is unpolitical." Thoughts?
A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood explains (in the NYT) what his group seeks for Egypt:
As our nation heads toward liberty . . . we disagree with the claims that the only options in Egypt are a purely secular, liberal democracy or an authoritarian theocracy. Secular liberal democracy of the American and European variety, with its firm rejection of religion in public life, is not the exclusive model for a legitimate democracy.
In Egypt, religion continues to be an important part of our culture and heritage. Moving forward, we envision the establishment of a democratic, civil state that draws on universal measures of freedom and justice, which are central Islamic values. We embrace democracy not as a foreign concept that must be reconciled with tradition, but as a set of principles and objectives that are inherently compatible with and reinforce Islamic tenets.
Sounds fairly catholic, in a Catholic sort of way, no?
UPDATE: I hadn't read this WaPo op-ed from another member of the Brotherhood, which is a little less reassuring:
Because we are an Islamic movement and the vast majority of Egypt is Muslim, some will raise the issue of sharia law. While this is not on anyone's immediate agenda, it is instructive to note that the concept of governance based on sharia is not a theocracy for Sunnis since we have no centralized clergy in Islam. For us, Islam is a way of life adhered to by one-fifth of the world's population. Sharia is a means whereby justice is implemented, life is nurtured, the common welfare is provided for, and liberty and property are safeguarded. In any event, any transition to a sharia-based system will have to garner a consensus in Egyptian society.
Sometimes people say that a simple theory is an elegant theory. Or one might hear that a theory is beautiful in its simplicity. That might mean that a simple theory is an effective theory, and that in turn could have two other meanings: (1) the theory's simplicity will allow more people to understand it in the first place; and/or (2) the theory's simplicity will mean that people who understand it and find it appealing are most likely to apply it correctly (or as intended). Both of these meanings really have to do with the theory's influence, or its expediency, or the capacity of the theory to reach desirable results: if you want your theory to be influential, to be useable, to be applied as you intend and to reach the consequences for which you intend it, it's wise to make your theory as simple as possible.
But I take the prejudice in favor of simplicity sometimes to mean something more than an argument from effectiveness. The equation of simplicity with elegance seems to be an aesthetic claim as well -- that simple theories are beautiful, elegant, artful, and that theories become uglier or progressively inelegant as they become more complex and ornamented. In legal theory, in the fields with which I am familiar, simplicity is often seen as an intrinsic virtue, and its virtue seems somehow fundamentally connected to an aesthetic sensibility. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, please, not Bernini.
I may be quite wrong about the impressions above, but having these thoughts suggests another set of questions that I'm hopeful the learned readership here will know something about. First, has there been any scholarship on the relationship between legal theory and aesthetics -- how and why it is that we find one kind or genre of legal theoretical account more appealing, from an aesthetic point of view, than another? Second, and more generally, what does the scholarly landscape of law and aesthetics look like? Has anyone thought about, for example, Roger Scruton's work in aesthetics in the context of legal scholarship? Are there any connections between aesthetics and IP law (I could have selected other fields, but this one seems like it might offer something particularly interesting)? I suppose the law and literature movement may have explored the aesthetics of opinion-writing, and perhaps there are other connections that have been probed there as well. And finally, is there any serious study of the connections between CST or Christian legal thought and aesthetics?
As one who teaches a fall seminar to law and graduate philosophy students entitled Natural Law & Natural Rights, I am in debt to our friend and colleague Robby George and his collaborators who have initiated a new on-line resource available at the Witherspoon Institute entitled: Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism. Having looked over the site and its contributions, I know I shall find this project an important and rich resource for my work and that of my students. In the words of one of other other good friends and colleagues, Rick Garnett, check it out!
Villanova Law has been in the news of late, alas, but far more interesting (and nourishing) than any of that will be the Scarpa Conference this Friday. I link here to the details, which I've mentioned on MOJ twice before. You can't beat this line-up. Bill Eskridge (Yale) and John Ferejohn (NYU) will co-keynote a discussion dedicated to exploring their monumental book A Republic of Statutes (Yale, 2010). The other speakers will be Henry Paul Monaghan (Columbia), Martin Shapiro (Berkeley), Jane Schacter (Stanford), David Stras (Minnesota Supreme Court), Ted Ruger (Penn), Kristin Hickman (Minnesota), and Tom Merrill (Columbia). Talk about a *range* of super-smart perspectives on some of the most imporant terrestrial topics!!
