Jerry Coyne writes, in this op-ed, that "[a]s atheists know, you can be good without God." What the piece is actually about, though, is not the not-very-interesting question, "Can an atheist be 'good'?" (Of course he or she can), but rather, "does morality come from God?" Coyne says:
But though both moral and immoral behaviors can be promoted by religions, morality itself — either in individual behavior or social codes — simply cannot come from the will or commands of a God. This has been recognized by philosophers since the time of Plato. . . .
Then, after citing examples from the Bible and other religious texts in which God appears to command or will bad things, Coyne writes:
When religious people pick and choose their morality from Scripture, they clearly do so based on extrareligious notions of what's moral. . ..
And then:
Secular morality is what pushes religion to improve its own dogma on issues such as slavery and the treatment of women. . .
And so on. The question that is not, it seems to me, really acknowledged or engaged is whether, if there were no God, "secular morality" would be true. As a number of learned people (Perry, Wolterstorff, etc.) have suggested, it is not at all obvious that, for example, the claims proposed in human-rights discourse have any foundation (though they certain sound nice and yield good results) if it is not the case that we are made and loved by God.
"China to defy Vatican," the Telegraph recently reported, "with seven new [state-picked] bishops." This little bit of the story caught my eye:
Asked if the new candidates were approved by the Holy See, [Liu Bainian, president of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, the government body which runs the Chinese Church] said: "There's no official channel for communications, but we cannot delay the election of our bishops because it is important to spread the gospel. We hope that the Vatican will respect the outcome of our elections."
Interesting that the president of a "government body" in China is emphasizing the importance of spreading the Gospel. One might not have thought this was a high priority for that nation's government.
Rocco Palmo has more on the story, here:
Even if secularism and challenges to religious expression in society rate as key concerns on the ecclesial radar in Europe and the Americas, the Chinese drama that's flared in fits and starts over recent years rises to a threat level practically all its own. Because, in a nutshell, while many Westerners have come to be alarmed over external hurdles perceived to limit the presence of faith and the rights of believers in the public square, in the world's largest country, the church is unable to merely exist according to its own determination, its internal governance carried out under the close supervision of the state -- and, often, contingent upon the latter's approval. . . .
I am late to this story but (thanks to the illumination of our incomparable librarian, Arundhati Satkalmi) there is a major controversy in southern India dealing with the discovery of huge sums of money inside a Hindu temple (totaling $22 billion), the product of individual donations to the temple over the course of history. A Reuters story is here, and this story also gives additional information. The government wants the money to serve India's population; many Hindus are agitated by the possibility that the government will simply seize it; and there seems to be some feature of this dispute which involves the property on which this and other Hindu temples are situated, but I am not certain. Does anyone have more information about this dispute?
Steve Bainbridge has a nice post on a paper by David Skeel dealing with the Dodd-Frank Act, in which Skeel "consider[s] the legislation from a distinctly Christian perspective." Professor Bainbridge concludes his post with these thoughts describing the varieties of law and religion scholarship:
- Studies of how the law impacts religion. This probably is the dominant form of law and religion scholarship, but it's really mostly Constitutional law dealing with the free exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment. Not really distinctively Christian.
- Critiques of policy recommendations made by religious figures. This is what I mostly do in the law and religion field. Where US Catholic Bishops have made legal and regulatory proposals grounded in Catholic social thought, for example, there is a space for distinctively Christian legal scholarship that engages those proposals not only from secular grounds like economics but also from theological perspectives.
- Christian critiques of laws like Dodd-Frank. This is the area where I think it is hardest to do something that is both rigorous and distinctively Christian. As far as I can tell, for example, there's very little in either the Bible or the Magisterium that would help me answer the question of whether executive compensation at TARP recipient firms should be capped.
I think these are useful categories, and, as Bainbridge rightly says, there is nothing distinctively Christian about category 1. The other two categories are part of a larger group of scholarship that approaches legal policy issues from a Christian perspective, and this is certainly a variety of law and religion scholarship (and there is nothing distinctively Christian about it -- the perspective might be Jewish, Islamic, and so on).
But it strikes me that Bainbridge's categories are all strongly normative (like so much of legal scholarship). I think that if we are examining the field of law and religion scholarship, there are many other fields that are emerging now or on the horizon which are more in the nature of descriptive, critical, or historical, rather than normative, scholarship: comparative work in law and religion, history of various ideas or concepts within religion and law (justice, for example), studies of what were perceived historically to be the interdependencies of religion and law (some of my own recent work touches on this), which features law and religion, as systems of social control and obligation, share, and many more. These kinds of scholarship may not be "Christian" (or anything else) in the sense that they are not making normative criticisms of law from a Christian point of view. But is it necessary to do normative policy criticism using Christian sources in order to engage in Christian legal scholarship? I do not think so, but I am curious about what others think. And check out Bainbridge's good post.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
I really enjoyed this piece, at First Things, by Fr. J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., called "Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Aquinas: An Imagined Encounter". A bit:
. . . Thomas Aquinas was equally committed to university life. To be sure, when Thomas taught at the University of Paris, universities were themselves something of a novelty. The University of Paris was more than 500 years old when Jefferson established this great university in Charlottesville. But, Thomas Aquinas, like Thomas Jefferson, was not content merely to gain knowledge, he wished to share it and dedicated himself to a life of teaching as well as learning.
The desire to share knowledge, and not just to acquire it, exhibits not only a conviction shared by our two Thomases, but a shared virtue. Each understood, albeit in very different ways, that his prodigious gifts were not solely at his own disposal but were intended by their very nature to be shared.
Aquinas would have located that desire to share his knowledge in human nature, which was, in turn, rooted in the very essence of the Trinitarian God he worshipped. Jefferson likewise would have recognized the desire to share his knowledge in human nature, and would have seen that nature as rooted in a less personal God, but in a God who created the universe nonetheless. . . .
Following up on Robby's post, from a few days ago, I wanted to call attention to this short essay, by Hadley Arkes, over at The Catholic Thing, on the same topic (i.e., Gov. Perry's recent remarks about the Tenth Amendment and abortion).
For what it's worth, I agree entirely with Robby that Gov. Perry's claim that the Tenth Amendment makes it the case that the regulation of abortion is a matter for the states (alone) presumes that Congress's power to enforce the substantive guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment does not include the power to regulate abortion. Whether or not Congress's enforcement power does include the power to regulate abortion is, in my (certainly revisable) view, a trickier question than Robby's post suggests, but let's put that aside.
Prof. Arkes' point, I think, is that even those of us who "believe" in the Tenth Amendment (Ed.: How could one not? It's like infant baptism . . . "I've seen it.") can also believe that (i) the Tenth Amendment itself does not answer the question, "does Congress have the power to do X?", and (ii) that Congress does, in fact, have more than a few at-present-not-fully-engaged powers to regulate, limit, and discourage abortion. And, it seems to me, he is clearly right about this.
UPDATE: A reader called my attention to the (not, to me, surprising) fact that Gov. Perry quickly made clear his support for a constitutional amendment regulating abortion. I should make clear that my post (above) was not intended to suggest any doubts on my part about whether or not Gov. Perry opposes abortion; that he is pro-life when it comes to abortion seemed before, as it does now, clear to me. I only meant to comment on the (to this Con Law geek) perennially interesting question of the Tenth Amendment's relationship to questions about the scope and content of Congress's enumerated powers.
