Dahlia Lithwick, who writes about the Supreme Court and law, can turn a phrase, but her analysis sometimes descends into over-partisan fog. As my colleague, Gerry Bradley, shows (here), this is definitely true of her latest, at Slate, on the abortion-related legislation that some states are considering.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Bradley on Lithwick's deeply misleading and misguided latest
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Climate Change at the Court
The Supreme Court heard oral argument yesterday in one of the most anticipated cases of the term, American Electric Power Co., Inc. v. Connecticut, which involves a federal common law public nuisance claim by several states, New York City, and some land trust organizations against five major utility companies. The plaintiffs are seeking injunctive relief against the utilities for the emission of greenhouse gases that the plaintiffs allege have contributed to climate change.
The case poses a set of fascinating and complex issues, but there are at least two especially interesting arguments for MOJ readers to ponder.
Maybe we have the government we deserve . . .
Solve our fiscal mess! (Just don't cut my benefits or raise my taxes.)
"What Evangelicals Owe Catholics"
From Joe Carter, at First Things.
Dear Joe . . . you're welcome. =-)
Building Virtue
Raymond Hain, in the context of extolling the virtues of a new book of essays by Philip Bess, lays out several arguments for the "new urbanism." This caught my eye:
[This is the most] striking difference between the various communities in the walkable neighborhood and the various communities in the suburbs: the communities of the neighborhood typically overlap, whereas the communities of the suburb do not. Though suburbanites still live, work, play, worship, and shop, there will be very few people, if any, with whom they will have more than one activity in common. We live with people other than those with whom we work, and we pray with yet a third, different community.
The most important feature of contemporary suburban sprawl, then, has little to do with aesthetics and everything to do with its fragmenting character. Suburbia makes possible and promotes a division between the various individual activities that make up our lives. But while our activities seem fragmented, we must find a way to integrate the various activities in which we engage so that our lives are a harmonious and unified whole. The task of integration, of recognizing the various human goods and pursuing them as a single human agent in search of happiness, is the central task of human life. And it is in terms of an integrated pursuit of the final end that each of the moral and intellectual virtues finds its place.
I'm tempted, as a child of the suburbs who has spent his entire adult life living in cities, to validate my own choices and shout "hurrah!" While the walkable community does offer some advantages over the suburb in this regard, though, I think it's easy to overstate the difference. Integration is difficult in the modern subdivision, to be sure. The task of integration can also be extremely difficult in walkable communities, especially to the extent that urban life can be marked by lower levels of trust and a greater sense of anonymity. And it seems like building a walkable community that also has sufficient employment opportunities to keep everyone working within that community is a very difficult trick to pull off. Even if we get out of our fenced-in back yards and onto the front porch, that's a long way from working and worshipping together.
Hain is not very optimistic about the prospects for another reason, as he concludes:
It looks like all this [integration] is only possible if enough people agree on the end, the general shape of human happiness as a whole, and this agreement on what matters most shapes and makes possible all the other integrative activities of our community. But what if we no longer agree on this (and, frankly, this seems exactly the situation we face today)? Bess reminds us that suburbia represents a turning away from public life towards private life. Front porches have become back decks, and public squares have disappeared. Suppose we were to rebuild those public squares, and all of us spent our evenings on our front porches. We might discover, to our dismay, that we had almost nothing to talk about.
In any event, it's well worth reading.
"God's Partisans are Back"
Here is a short piece, in The Chronicle, by my friend and colleague Dan Philpott (Pol. Sci., Notre Dame) and others, about the failure of the "secularization" thesis to explain what's happening in the world around us.
But if American foreign-policy makers want to promote democracy and stability, they must come to realize that secularism is a poor analytical tool. The great surprise of the past generation has been the resurgence of religion's influence. Despite a powerful array of secularizing regimes, ideologies, and social trends, religion has not only outlasted its most ferocious 20th-century rivals, but in many cases, it also appears poised to supplant them.
Among other things, the piece suggests that religious freedom is a "critical [factor] when assessing whether religion is more likely, on balance, to yield peace or terrorism, democracy or authoritarianism, reconciliation or civil war."
The piece is based on the authors' excellent new book, God's Century.
Christianity and Human Rights, An Introduction
Here's a concise write-up of this book, edited by John Witte and Frank Alexander (wonderful scholars in their own right, as well as innovators and impresarios when it comes to all kinds of exceptional writing in law and religion). With contributions by, among others, Robert Bellah, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Kent Greenawalt, and Rick Garnett.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
McCabe on the Triduum
I have played a (very) small role in helping Brian Davies, OP at Fordham bring to posthumous light some writings of my late friend Herbert McCabe, OP (1926-2001). Spending an afternoon or evening with Herbert in an Oxford pub was one of life’s great intellectual delights. Herbert was an acknowledged influence on many, including Alasdair MacIntyre (who partly credits McCabe in the preface to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? with changing MacIntyre’s view about Thomism), Denys Turner, Anthony Kenny, Stanley Hauerwas, Seamus Heaney, and Terry Eagleton. Herbert died ten years ago this summer, and I still think about him every day.
One of the best things Herbert ever wrote was a set of three sermons for the Triduum, which is available in his volume God Matters, much of which is on Google Books or for purchase at a reasonable price. As he says in his sermon for Good Friday:
[M]y thesis is that Jesus died of being human. His very humanity meant that he put up no barriers, no defences against those he loved who hated him. He refused to evade the consequences of being human in our inhuman world. So the cross shows up our world for what it really is, what we have made it. It is a world in which it is dangerous, even fatal, to be human; a world structured by violence and fear. The cross shows that whatever else may be wrong with this or that society, whatever may be remedied by this or that political or economic change, there is a basic wrong, persistent through history and through all progress: the rejection of the love that casts out fear, the fear of the love that casts out fear, the fear that without the backing of terror, at least in the last resort, human society and thus human life cannot exist. The cross, then, unmasks or reveals the sin of the world. In this sense the crucifying of Jesus is the archetypal sin of mankind, the root and meaning of our original 'sin', which is the lack of grace and moral weakness we suffer from, not (first of all) by committing any sin, but just by belonging to, originating in, the human species, the animal that has not come to terms with its new kind of animality. This twist in the human condition is what St Thomas calls the materia, the psychological expression, of the sin of the world. What gives it its real significance (its forma) is the rejection of God's love that was most clearly demonstrated in the killing of Jesus. As we all know only too well, even when we have been liberated by faith and baptism from the sinfulness of original sin and become children of God in Christ, the psychological distortion in our human nature remains with us until we are fully restored at the resurrection. With the cross the alienation of humankind is recognized as sin, and for that very reason recognised as something that can be forgiven.
....
The cross and resurrection are the eternal dialogue of Father and Son as projected on to the screen of history, what it looks like in history. If you want to know that the Trinity looks like be filled with the Holy Spirit and look at the cross. The Trinity, when reflected in our history, like something reflected in rippling water, looks pretty strange, just as the human being in our history looks strange, being despised and crucified: Ecce homo.
"Encouragement is not establishment"
So suggests Rusty Reno at the First Things blog. Commenting on some recent court decisions, Reno writes:
In the past any governmentally sponsored expression of religion was held as suspect. Now a way of reasoning is emerging that distinguishes legitimate state encouragement of religion from an illegitimate use of state power to compel consciences. . . .
I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but in view of modern Catholic social teaching the Supreme Court’s decision strikes me as just right. As Vatican II recognized, religion is supremely fulfilling for the human person precisely because it engages us at the deepest level—and therefore must be approached with special care, not only to protect the integrity of religious institutions, but also to protect the integrity of our consciences. Our society should encourage religion—but we should do so with careful protections to ensure that our participation remains free and without coercion.
Here, Reno is echoing, I think, Dignitatis humanae (par. 6):
The protection and promotion of the inviolable rights of man ranks among the essential duties of government.(5) Therefore government is to assume the safeguard of the religious freedom of all its citizens, in an effective manner, by just laws and by other appropriate means.
Government is also to help create conditions favorable to the fostering of religious life, in order that the people may be truly enabled to exercise their religious rights and to fulfill their religious duties, and also in order that society itself may profit by the moral qualities of justice and peace which have their origin in men's faithfulness to God and to His holy will.
I wrote a short essay, which is consonant with Reno's piece, on religious freedom, the liberty of conscience, and "standing", which appeared in the Villanova Law Review a little while back. It's here.
"Catholics and the Practice of Law"
My former student, Matt Emerson, has another essay up at Patheos, called "Catholics and the Practice of Law." In it, he responds to a recent New York Times story which asks whether law school is a losing game. He concludes with this:
. . . I am not suggesting that Catholics should not be lawyers, nor am I suggesting that all lawyers are equally affected by the factors I've outlined above. However, a Catholic must be uncommonly mindful of what draws him or her to the practice of law. If one does attend law school and enter the practice, he or she must act intentionally, every day, to strengthen his or her relationship with God. Sunday Mass is not enough. The compulsion to bill hours and its effect on how an associate views life can turn faith into mere ritual or into an impersonal duty that involves no more than writing checks, temptations against which a faithful Catholic must vigilantly safeguard.
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