I'll be participating in a conference next Thursday, September 13 -- "Catholic Perspectives on Religious Liberty" -- organized by Tom Farr and hosted by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University Law Center. The keynote speaker is Cardinal Donald Wuerl and the balance of the conference is organized in 3 fairly conversational panels, each of which is devoted to a separate topic. If you are able to come, please stop by and say hi. More details here.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Conference: Catholic Perspectives on Religious Liberty at Georgetown
Conference: "Telling the Story of Today's Christian Martyrs"
Notre Dame's Institute for Church Life is hosting what looks to be a wonderful conference in early November: "Seed of the Church: Telling the Story of Today's Christian Martyrs":
The conference intends to raise consciousness inside and outside the Church
regarding the widespread persecution of Christians around the world and to
explore how the Church has responded and might respond vigorously and
faithfully in the future.
It is striking how little attention the secular world pays to this injustice,
despite the fact that the persecution of Christians is one of the largest
classes of human rights violations in the world today. The Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community estimates that some 100 million Christians are victims of severe persecution. Yet governments, human rights organizations, the global media, and the western university pay little heed. For example, of three hundred reports that Human Rights Watch has produced since 2008, only one focuses on a case of Christian persecution. Similarly, despite the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act by the U.S. Congress in 1998,
neither U.S. foreign policy nor civil society has ever made the persecution of
Christians a high priority.
A central objective of this conference is to rectify this lack of acknowledgment
of this persecution by the secular media and Western academia, and to
communicate to the world the extent and character of the persecution. Yet the purpose of the conference goes beyond raising awareness. It is also to explore
how the Church can respond to the persecution of Christian believers
prayerfully and liturgically, out of the depths of the Church’s spiritual
theology. In the most profound sense, what does it mean to be in solidarity with brothers and sisters in Christ who suffer violence for their faith?
Religiously Affiliated Law Schools reception at the AALS hiring conference
For all those going to the "meat market" next month:
Touro Law Center will be hosting the annual reception of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools at the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference in Washington, DC. This year’s reception will be held on Thursday, October 11, 2012, from 7:30 to 9:00, in the Hoover Room of the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. All faculty candidates are invited to attend.
Thanks to Sam Levine (Touro) for the reminder!
Beards
The redoubtable Peter Berger has a winning column on them. A few years back I had one, but despite Berger's plausible claim that "the power of the beard as a profane symbol of adult masculinity should not be underestimated," my wife for some reason did not hold my beard in very high esteem.
Berger's post is prompted in part by the legal controversies involving the Amish beard cutting incident in Cleveland, now being tried as a federal "hate crime," and the trial of alleged murderer Major Nidal Hasan in Fort Hood, Texas, who was ordered to shave his beard for trial. Here is Berger's beards and religion angle (but you really should not miss the rest):
Needless to say, religion is a particularly rich field for the beard as sacramental symbol. There are significant differences between Latin and Greek Christianity. Bearded priests have become the norm in Eastern Orthodox churches; in the Roman Catholic Church, while there are some monastic orders whose monks wear beards, secular priests are normally clean-shaven. I don’t know whether there are “grooming regulations” in either case, nor do I know of any in Protestant churches. Mormons stand out: Young men going out on their two-year missionary stints must be clean-shaven, as must students at Brigham Young University. Beards have become the trademark of Orthodox Judaism, though the Torah does not command them directly (Leviticus only has rules for shaping the beard). I would imagine that there are different deductions from these rules in the Talmud. Jews in mourning, while “sitting shive”, don’t shave and let the stubbles sit during this period. Sikhs are very intent on their luxurious beards. Many Hindu ascetics have beards, but that is not so much a symbol as the result of their having no possessions, not even a razor (they do beg—is there no pious barber who can donate a free shave?). I have no knowledge of Buddhist attitudes to facial hair. But of course we are most aware of the role of beards in contemporary Islam. Beards are the male equivalents of female headgear. If young men in Turkey come out of the closet as Islamists and consequently drive their Kemalist parents crazy, their young sisters achieve the same result by covering their hair with the scarves that signify Islamic modesty. As far as I know, there is no commandment to wear beards in the Koran, though there is an authoritative tradition (hadith) according to which the Prophet Muhammad did issue such a commandment.
I promised that there would be no theoretical or practical conclusions. Let me just say this: There are very few “natural” symbols. (Though the lion may be a “natural symbol” of might, as against the mouse.) Beyond such clear cases, anything can symbolize anything. Symbols change over time. As to beards, often they symbolize nothing beyond themselves—as Freud did not say, but might have said: Sometimes a beard is just a beard. Beards have carried all sorts of symbolic freight. In the area of religion, it would be nice if beards symbolized moderation and tolerance.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Crime, Chicago, and Catholic Schools
This op-ed has a nice shout-out for recent and ongoing work, in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the U. of Chicago L. Rev., by Nicole Stelle Garnett and her co-author, Margaret Brinig, on the social-capital and neighborhood-health effects of Catholic schools (and Catholic-school closings). A bit from the op-ed:
A series of research articles by University of Notre Dame Professors Margaret Brinig and Nicole Garnet have laid out the case. In a paper summarizing their findings, "Catholic Schools, Urban Neighborhoods, and Education Reform" Brinig and Garnet used three decades of data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to evaluate the effect of a Catholic school closure on its neighborhood. They found -- even after controlling for other demographic variables that might predict decline -- that neighborhood social cohesion decreases and disorder increases in neighborhoods that have had a Catholic elementary school close. Last month an article about Brinig and Garnet's research, "Catholic Schools and Broken Windows," was published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. This research demonstrated that during a time of overall decline in crime, Catholic school closures slowed the rate of decline of crime as compared to beats without a Catholic school closure.
There remain many questions not answered by this research as to why inner-city Catholic schools might have this effect. However, the authors conclude that "...Catholic school closures are strongly linked with increased disorder, reduced neighborhood social cohesion, and eventually, serious crime." . . .
A class I wish I could take . . .
. . . at McGill (in Montreal), taught by Victor Muniz-Fraticelli, called "Church and State":
This course will trace the development of the idea of “church autonomy”—or, more properly, the autonomy of religious organizations—in Western political thought. It is divided into three parts. In the first part, we will explore the
emergence of the idea of libertas ecclesiae (freedom of the church) from the
waning days of the Roman Empire to its vigorous assertion in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, a period which culminates in the Concordat of Worms in the
Holy Roman Empire and the revocation of the Constitutions of Clarendon in Britain. In the second part we discuss the transformation of the idea of religious
freedom in the Early Modern Period, which saw the assertion of supremacy by the secular state over religious bodies and their reconception as
voluntary associations of individual citizens. Finally, in the third part, we
consider various current controversies where religious organizations
corporately assert rights to autonomy—including control of membership, property, and governance, exemption from generally applicable laws, and application of religious adjudicative norms—to determine whether the idea of libertas ecclesiae is descriptively useful or normatively desirable.
Sanctity of Human Life: Democratic and Republican Platforms
File this under “Some Things Speak for Themselves”:
Republican Party National Platform: The Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life
Faithful to the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage. We support the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life. We oppose the non-consensual withholding or withdrawal of care or treatment, including food and water, from people with disabilities, including newborns, as well as the elderly and infirm, just as we oppose active and passive euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Republican leadership has led the effort to prohibit the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion and permitted States to extend health care coverage to children before birth. We urge Congress to strengthen the Born Alive Infant Protection Act by enacting appropriate civil and criminal penalties on healthcare providers who fail to provide treatment and care to an infant who survives an abortion, including early induction delivery where the death of the infant is intended. We call for legislation to ban sex-selective abortions -– gender discrimination in its most lethal form -– and to protect from abortion unborn children who are capable of feeling pain; and we applaud U.S. House Republicans for leading the effort to protect the lives of pain-capable unborn children in the District of Columbia. We call for a ban on the use of body parts from aborted fetuses for research. We support and applaud adult stem cell research to develop lifesaving therapies, and we oppose the killing of embryos for their stem cells. We oppose federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
We also salute the many States that have passed laws for informed consent, mandatory waiting periods prior to an abortion, and health-protective clinic regulation. We seek to protect young girls from exploitation through a parental consent requirement; and we affirm our moral obligation to assist, rather than penalize, women challenged by an unplanned pregnancy. We salute those who provide them with counseling and adoption alternatives and empower them to choose life, and we take comfort in the tremendous increase in adoptions that has followed Republican legislative initiatives.
Democratic Party National Platform: Protecting A Woman’s Right to Choose.
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way. We also recognize that health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. We strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s decision to have a child by providing affordable health care and ensuring the availability of and access to programs that help women during pregnancy and after the birth of a child, including caring adoption programs.
Review of Judge Wilkinson's Book
I have a review of Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III's book, Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance, over at The New Republic. I have the rough sense that my take is generally more positive than what I've seen from other legal academics and commentators, but perhaps you will let me know.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
"Executive Overreach"
I have a short piece in the new issue of Commonweal, called "Executive Overreach." It was solicited as part of a "what's important to think about, as the election approaches" series that the magazine is running. Here's a bit:
. . . Constitutionalism is about more than our particular charter’s text, the Supreme Court’s various decisions, or pieties about shared values and fundamental rights. It is an attachment to the enterprise of protecting human freedom and promoting the common good by structuring, separating, and limiting power in entrenched and enforceable ways. It is a mechanism for conferring power and authorizing action, a vehicle for governing and getting things done, but it’s also an embrace of constraints, processes, and forms, and a willingness to accept delays, inefficiencies, and frustrations as unavoidable costs, perhaps even benefits. In constitutional
government, how and by whom things are done is at least as important as what is
done and when, or how quickly. And this is why it is troubling, rather than
inspiring, to hear the president keep saying, “We can’t wait.”
This is not a partisan concern. Both parties have been guilty of overreach . . . .
This is not a Tea Party point, even if the Tea Party sometimes makes it. It is certainly not an endorsement of the constitutional provisions that once entrenched slavery or a denial that some others are anachronistic. Nor is it a defense of the various congressionally created, non-constitutional rules that sometimes make a mockery of the idea of structured deliberation by setting up a maze of holdouts, vetoes, and hostage taking.
Electoral majorities will sometimes reward those whose proclaimed or perceived energy and vision are too big for the rules and who promise to ignore or abolish procedures that—especially during times of deep political divisions—seem to deliver only delay and dead ends. And yet, as Chief Justice Warren Burger observed almost thirty years ago, “With all the obvious flaws of delay, untidiness, and potential for abuse, we have not yet found a better way to preserve freedom than by making the exercise of power subject to the carefully crafted restraints spelled out in the Constitution.” Those who designed the Constitution understood that political liberties are best served through competition and cooperation among plural authorities and jurisdictions, and through mechanisms that check, diffuse, and divide power. . . .
Happy Birthday, Anton Bruckner
The great composer and renowned organist Anton Bruckner was born today in 1824. Bruckner's retiring
personality has led to relative obscurity (at least by comparison with his showier contemporaries Brahms and Wagner). But Bruckner's religious music -- especially his Masses -- is a delight. Here is his Ave Maria. And here's a recording of my favorite of his great big sprawling magnificent symphonies -- #4 in E flat, the "Romantic" (you've got to jack up the volume full blast to get the full effect of the highs and lows in Bruckner...Günter Wand conducting in his later years does a really nice job).
At right, the "Bruckner organ" at the Augustinian priory, St. Florian's, in Austria.
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
