There's little that makes me prouder (professionally, at least) than watching one of my faculty colleauges do a great job with a presentation-- except maybe watching one of my former students do a great job with a presentation. I had the pleasure of experiencing both yesterday, as MOJ-er Greg Sisk and former UST law student Katharine Tinucci (now press secretary to Minnesota's Governor Mark Dayton) gave their contrasting perspectives on how Catholic social teachings inform discussions on the budget, as part of the Murphy Institute's "Hot Topics: Cool Talk" series. Katharine focused on the state budget, urged us to view our responsibility for intergenerational solidarity from the perspective of our duty to fund the education of the next generation, and quoted our Archbishop. Greg focused on the federal budget, urged us to view our responsibility for intergenerational solidarity from the perspective of our duty to reduce the national debt burden, and quoted our Pope and his predecessor. What fun! You can watch their talk (and see their accompanying slide shows -- Greg's characteristically thorough and informative) on line here.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Hot Topics: Cool Talk -- Balancing the Budget with Sisk and Tinucci
Call for papers: Religious Traditions and Business Behavior
Here's an interesting call for papers:
The Center for Financial Policy at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business announces a Call for Papers and Proposals for the Henry Kaufman Conference on Religious Traditions and Business Behavior.
This conference explores two central questions in the relationship between the world’s major religious traditions and the business behavior of adherents to those traditions:
First, what do the world’s major organized religious traditions – Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism – proscribe about business and financial ethics and behavior?
Second, how and why have business and financial actors seriously compromised the leading religious traditions of their cultures?
By interrogating these two core questions, the conference will yield insights valuable to contemporary business and religious leaders about abiding questions such as: Do the scriptures and doctrines of these religions appear to have had a marked effect on financial behavior? Does religion appear to be a more potent or less potent influence than business ethics courses in fostering sound, ethical, and socially responsible financial behavior? How can religion best be promulgated to make financial behavior more sound, ethical, and socially responsible?
The conference will be in Spring 2013, with two preliminary meetings of speakers before then. Proposals are due Feb. 1, 2012.
Friday, December 9, 2011
on Christian Legal Thought
I am pleased to announce that the 2012 Conference on Christian Legal Thought, co-sponsored by the Law Professors Christian Fellowship and the Lumen Christi Institute will take place on Saturday, January 7, 2012, at the University Club in Washington, D.C.
This year the conference panels will address a variety topics including the role of public unions and the state of organized labor, legal pedagogy, free speech and moral discourse, and the vocation of Christian lawyers and law teachers. Speakers for the event include David Gregory (St. John’s), Thomas Kohler (Boston College), Susan Stabile (Univ. St. Thomas), Deanell Reece Tacha (Pepperdine), Eric Claeys (George Mason), Mary Leary (Catholic U.), Michael McConnell (Stanford), Paul Salamanca (Kentucky), and Kent Syverud (Wash. U.).
As in the past, this event promises to be a wonderful occasion for both scholarly engagement and fellowship. Academics and legal professionals interested in exploring the connection between the law and the Christian intellectual tradition are welcome to attend. You can register for the conference online here.
The First Amendment and Crisis Pregnancy Centers
Crisis pregnancy centers across the country offer birth counseling and sometimes services, but not abortion counseling or services. Unfortunately, pregnant women are drawn to these centers on the misleading assumption that abortion counseling is available. Various jurisdictions in the United States have fashioned laws designed to combat the deception perpetrated by these centers.
Baltimore, for example, (see here) requires that such centers put signs in their waiting rooms revealing that they do not offer abortion counseling or services. Incredibly, a federal district court has declared the law to violate free speech. The court thinks that the speech of the clinic is not commercial advertising and that it is more like political speech. To be sure, government cannot dictate the content of political speech. But it has long been the case that government has regulated counseling. Indeed, many counselors are properly subject to the prior restraint of licensing. In the area of health advice, there is no First Amendment right to deceive.
San Francisco (see here) is taking a different approach from Baltimore. It forbids crisis pregnancy centers from engaging in false advertising, specifically from making the false and misleading claim that they provide abortion counseling when they do not. The First Amendment challenge to this approach is that it is underinclusive. The argument is that crisis pregnancy centers are being singled out for special treatment. Instead, it would be better to outlaw deceptive advertising by anyone. This argument has some appeal, but it is ultimately unavailing. Speaking for a Court majority in RAV v. St. Paul, Justice Scalia said that government may outlaw commercial speech in one context, but not another because the risk of deception in its view is greater there. That seems to be exactly what San Francisco has done.
The courts deciding these cases have focused on the free speech clause, but the plaintiffs have put forward a freedom of religion argument that I think is embarrassing. In some of the cases where clinics are forced by law to reveal the true content of their services, the plaintiffs complain that the compulsion violates their freedom of religion. I understand that the plaintiffs are opposed to providing abortion services on religious grounds, and I believe they have a First Amendment right not to do so. I find it hard to believe that they are really religiously opposed to publicly announcing their religious views about abortion in their waiting rooms, let alone being religiously opposed to revealing what their services are. Perhaps, however, their claim is that they have a religious right to deceive women (could they kidnap them, if necessary?), so that they not have abortions. I think this is dubious theology, but I know it is a preposterous legal claim. I doubt we will hear much about the religious argument in these cases, but the free speech arguments will be wrestled with in many of the appellate courts.
cross-posted at religiousleftlaw.com
Paulsen on "The Most Important Religious Liberty Case of the Past Thirty Years
My friend Mike Paulsen makes a powerful case, here, at Public Discourse, for the high-importance of the Court's 1981 Widmar decision. As he points out, Widmar formed the basis for the Court's repeated rejection -- between 1981 and the Court's Zelman decision -- of the claim that the Establishment Clause generally requires discrimination against private religious speakers, speech, and activity:
Widmar thus broke the Establishment Clause logjam that had become a barrier to true religious freedom. The former skewed thinking--that separation required discrimination--began to give way. Much as Brown v. Board of Education had broken the back of separate-but-equal state racial segregation a generation earlier, Widmar broke the back of separate-and-unequal official religious discrimination. . . .
. . . Despite exceptions and odd departures, Widmar states the bedrock rules: The Free Speech Clause forbids government from excluding or discriminating against private parties' religious expression because of its religious content. The Establishment Clause does not authorize or justify such discrimination, ever. Where government has provided a program or a benefit on a general basis, it may not exclude religious persons or groups on the basis of their religious expression or identity. It is hard to think of a better, more succinct statement of the essentials of religious freedom.
Koritansky ed., "The Philosophy of Punishment and the History of Political Thought"
Thanks to Michael White, I am pleased to post about another superb-looking book about the intellectual
history of punishment edited by Peter Karl Koritansky and with contributions by Professor White, among others. The book is The Philosophy of Punishment and the History of Political Thought (U. Missouri Press 2011). Professor Koritansky's fine volume on Aquinas's thought about punishment is noted here. Here is the description of the edited volume.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
The Rapprochement of Religion and Technology
Pope Benedict XVI turning on a Christmas tree of lights with his Sony Tablet.
John Henry Newman and Mormons (again)
Once again, a Mormon law professor is making me think about John Henry Newman. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm” blog has an exchange between one of their bloggers, Michael Ruse, director of the program in history and philosophy of science at Florida State University, and Nate Oman, law professor at William & Mary Law School. Oman, a Mormon, is responding to an earlier post by Michael Ruse, in which he explains why he would have a hard time voting for a Mormon. This is how Oman characterizatizes Ruse’s argument; it strikes me as pretty fair:
“While I can tolerate the religious beliefs of others and in some cases may even be able to sympathize with them, I find Mormon beliefs and Mormon history so strange that I believe the mere fact of belief on the part of a Latter-day Saint reveals some basic character flaw or intellectual disability, a failing that legitimately would count as a reason for voting against someone for public office.”
Oman's response is fascinating. It reminds me of the final chapter of Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, in which Newman responds to the general accusation against the Catholic faith current in England of the time – that it is not a rational belief system, but rather a set of superstitious beliefs imposed upon people of weak will and intellect by a clergy with no respect for truth. A person who accepts claim that she cannot question certain teachings by the Church is susceptible to being misled on any matter about which the Church chooses to profess an opinion. Such a person has forfeited the right to be considered a rational person who thinks for himself. The last chapter of the Apologia consists of Newman's attempt to demonstrate why it is rational for a person to accept the authority of the Church on certain matters.
Oman’s post is just the same sort of endeavor. Some teasers:
. . . . if you are using belief in Mormonism as a proxy for a lack of critical or analytic abilities, fanatical mendacity, or the like, then you do not have to rely on the proxy. You can simply try to observe the primary phenomenon that you are interested in. What you will find is that there are many Latter-day Saints who in fact engage with the world critically and are not pursuing brutal or illiberal theocratic political agendas. To be sure, you will find some Mormons who are stupid, dogmatic, ignorant, and politically reactionary. You may even find that the distribution between the two groups in the Mormon population is different than the population as a whole, but so long as the primary phenomenon is itself observable, there is no need to rely on the proxy of belief in Mormonism to determine whether any particular Latter-day Saint suffers from critical or moral deficits.
This doesn’t imply, of course, that one cannot regard Mormonism as false and Mormon believers as mistaken. On the other hand, the mere fact of holding false beliefs is generally not taken as evidence of intellectual or moral failure. Lots of smart, thoughtful, critical, and morally decent people hold mistaken beliefs. Indeed, I suspect that they all do. The question then remains as to whether the mistaken belief represented by Mormonism is somehow different. It could be different in one of two ways. First, it might be that the mistake represented by Mormonism is qualitatively different in some way such that it really does provide some important piece of information about a person’s critical and moral apparatus. Second, it may be that given that one can identify believing Mormons who nevertheless display critical and moral competence, the persistence of their belief in Mormonism is itself sufficiently surprising—considering the “weirdness” of Mormon beliefs—to be a phenomenon demanding an explanation.
The post is really worth reading in its entirety.
Catholicism and the Risorgimento
From the "Vatican Insider" page of La Stampa, a Torinese daily, is this piece about a conference at the
Pontifical Lateran University about the Christian roots of Italy as nation-state (for another Church funding controversy reported in La Stampa and of possible interest to readers, see this). The aim of the conference was to study "the contribution of Christianity to the formation of Italian identity through the work of the Church[.]" It may be slightly revisionist to claim that the Roman Catholic Church was truly in support of Italian unification. Pope Pius IX was in fact rather hostile to the idea, and not without understandable political reasons given the fortunes of the Papal State after 1861. (At right, the Count of Cavour)
Be that as it may, I found the following paraphrased statement by historian Msgr. Cosimo Semeraro (as reported in the story) to be a nuanced and sensible characterization:
Undoubtedly unity took place in the wake of a bitter dispute between Savoy and the Papal State, and was achieved against the interests of the Church itself, Msgr. Semeraro acknowledged Nevertheless (Piedmontese prime minister) Cavour “also began to become aware of the universal value of Rome and the papacy”. Therefore, “The insistence of Cavour for the proclamation of Rome as the capital in 1861 reflects his awareness that the future of the new state had to necessarily pass through a reconciliation with the Holy See”.
To sum it up all, he is convinced that the contribution of Catholics was actually crucial, both in terms of “social and political initiatives of Italian Catholicism to address economic imbalances and social inequalities” and in historical circumstances like World War I, when “large masses, especially peasants” were made more familiar with “a state still suffering from the markedly elitist dimension of its beginnings”.
"Keeping Faith": Paul Cuff
Here is the fifth interview in my six-part series entitled "Keeping Faith" for the Daily Princetonian. This one is with Princeton electrical engineering professor and information theorist Paul Cuff, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/12/08/29603/
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