John Allen has a thoughtful column today about religious freedom as the dominant issue for the future of Catholicism. He identifies three historical movements which have thrust religious liberty into the foreground: (1) the secularization of Western nations, and the concomitant sense in which Western states will become increasingly hostile to Catholicism and Christianity generally; (2) the reality that increasingly large numbers of Catholics come from the southern hemisphere, where they face dire threats to life and limb (and I take the point about the ministerial exemption that Allen makes); and (3) the shift from Judaism to Islam as Catholicism's primary interlocutor. Here's a bit from Allen's discussion of the last shift:
As Islam becomes the paradigmatic relationship, however, Catholic psychology has begun to shift. Today, Catholics are less inclined to assume that the problem lies on their side of any inter-faith dialogue; they've become more inclined to point to distortions and excesses on the other side as well. That's a prescription for a more balanced and substantive, but also more combustible, form of dialogue.
By far, the most common area where one sees this new Catholic willingness to push back is religious freedom, and not just in the relationship with Islam. It also surfaces, for instance, in the dialogue with Hinduism, given the alarming spread of Hindu nationalism and radicalism in some regions of India. The worry is that violent anti-Christian pogroms that broke out in the state of Orissa in 2008 may be a preview of coming attractions.
Russell Moore of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant and insightful theologians working in any Christian tradition today. He is an Evangelical Protestant brother from whom Catholics can, I believe, learn a lot. I would very much like his work to become better known in the Catholic community. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of conducting a public dialogue with him, during his visit to Princeton, where he also spoke at our campus interfaith Respect Life Sunday service. (Another speaker was the exceptionally gifted young Muslim writer Suzy Ismail.) The focus of our discussion was on Evangelicals in contemporary American culture and politics.
Here is a video: http://web.princeton.edu/sites/jmadison/calendar/flash/Moore_Discussion.html
Thursday, October 6, 2011
I liked this piece, by Timothy Williamson, from the New York Times, "On Ducking Challenges to Naturalism." Among other things, Williamson observes that:
. . . If it is true that all truths are discoverable by hard science, then it is discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science. But it is not discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science. “Are all truths discoverable by hard science?” is not a question of hard science. Therefore the extreme naturalist claim is not true.
. . . [W]e should not take for granted that reality contains only the kinds of things that science even in the broad sense recognizes. My caution comes not from any sympathy for mysterious kinds of cognition alien to science in the broad sense, but simply from the difficulty of establishing in any remotely scientific way that reality contains only the kinds of thing that we are capable of recognizing at all. . .
Here is information about an event commemorating the 500th (!!) anniversary of Antonio de Montesinos, the Dominican who famously denounced the enslavement and oppression of indigenous people in the New World and whose preaching influenced Bartolome de las Casas. Here's a bit from the conference web site:
While concerned with the history of human rights, the conference will have as its primary focus assessing current institutional and legal approaches to move forward in protection of human right. The 500th anniversary is the ‘rationale’ for the conference. Given many contemporary experiences with problems in the global human rights regime, a review of universal definitions and protections of human rights would be justified even without the 500th anniversary.
While we have created in the last century many formal human rights statements and enforcement institutions, from the ILO to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various courts built on the Nuremberg model, egregious violations of defined standards continue. For example, despite great progress in defining indigenous rights, there are many cases where specific native communities are being displaced or forced to adapt to norms imposed by outside dominant societies. The movement of millions of migrants as a companion to economic globalization has spawned numerous failures to protect labor and other human rights. Imbedded in this migration is the smaller but more appalling abuses arising from involuntary human trafficking. While many religious institutions and traditions provide models for justifying and defending human rights, of which Montesinos is a stellar example, movements linked to many religious traditions have been tempted to approve suppression of rights in the name of conformity.
