Thursday, October 25, 2012
MOJ's New Law School Dean
UST Law is pleased to announce "Habemus Deanam...." -- and it's none other than prolific MOJ'er and scholar, Rob Visher. See the full announcement here, and join me in congratulating Rob!
Ryan on poverty and civil society
At Catholic Voices, Kim Daniels has this post, about Rep. Paul Ryan's speech on "the importance of civil society in the fight against poverty." Among other things, Daniels writes that "[w]hile admitting that Republicans don't always do a good job speaking to these issues, Ryan rejected as a straw man the idea that the GOP ticket believes 'everybody should just fend for themselves.' Instead he laid out a vision rooted in Catholic ideas about the importance of community, civil society, and the need to strike a balance between government and private action."
With respect to the same speech, Matt Boudway has this, at Commonweal; Donald McClarey discusses it here, at The American Catholic; and the NYT's least interesting columnist, Charles Blow, has this.
Esolen on Public and Religious Education
An excellent essay, at Public Discourse, by Anthony Esolen, "Public and Religious Education: L'Etat C'est Tout". From the conclusion:
It is a mistake to believe that a totalitarian State regulates all the actions of its individual members. The Communist Party, says [Whittaker] Chambers, encouraged promiscuity; and certainly the public schools of Providence do not discourage it with any effectiveness. Individuals may well be granted great leeway in habits that destroy the competitors to the State: the family, the community, and the churches. We drive “government” out of the bedroom, by which we mean that common people will have no say in the most determinative matter of their common life, in order the more firmly to entrench the State in the living room, the classroom, the town hall, and the sanctuary. For the State does not want to keep separate from the churches. It wants to absorb them.
Arkes, "Is Religious Freedom a 'Natural Right'?"
At Right Reason, Prof. Hadley Arkes considers whether religious freedom is a "natural right." A taste:
. . . How is there anything, in the mandates on contraception, that is aptly countered by a claim of "religious freedom" standing against the law? Bishop Lori and his brother bishops, accomplished men that they are, were not able to break out of this box. The heart of the problem, again, is that they have not been able to explain whether the freedom they are asserting is really grounded in reason, in an understanding of natural right, or whether they are claiming to be aggrieved distinctly as Catholics and theists by an assault on matters of "faith" that are not shared with everyone else in the population. What is missing is precisely the account offered by John Paul II on Catholicism constituted both by faith and reason: There was the revelation to the Jews, enlarged by the revelation of Christ and his mission, but fortified as John Paul II said, by the tradition of Greek philosophy. He remarked in Fides et Ratio that it fell to the "fathers of philosophy to bring to light the link between reason and religion." . . .
He concludes with this:
Without that underlying moral understanding and the doctrines of natural law, it would be impossible to explain a regime in which a system of law is built upon a body of first principles forming a fundamental law (or a "constitution"). Without that accompanying faith it would be hard to explain why we seem to think that human beings, wherever we find them, will have an equal claim to our sympathy and respect; that they are made in the image of something higher; that they are creatures of reason who deserve to be ruled with the rendering reasons for the laws imposed on them. Without all of that, it becomes harder to explain why we can accord to them the standing of "bearers of rights" flowing to them by nature. In short, then, without the moral understanding sustained now mainly by the religious, it would be hard to take seriously the notion that there are natural rights that command our respect because they are grounded in truths about "the human person." That is the case for religion as a natural right, and the measure of our desperation is that, in the current state of our public life, the bishops find the gravest test of their preparation and learning as they try to explain the matter to their own public in a post-literate age.
There's a lot more, so read the whole thing.
"How about neither?"
In response to my recent observation about the false dilemmas that pile up when Christians try to do politics without sufficient benefit of the Good News, I received the following from one of my favorite former students:
Thanks for pointing out some of the false dilemmas regarding American politics in Mr. Weigel’s article. As someone who served, and knows others who serve and are getting worn down by the non-stop deployments, this false dilemma struck me most:
“Do you want to live in an America that is respected throughout the world for being just as well as strong, an America that supports others’ quest for freedom? Or are you resigned to living in a world where jihadists murder American diplomats, tear down the U.S. flag, and raise the flag of radical Islam over U.S. embassies with impunity?”
How about neither? As you suggested, the Gospel is instructive, particularly the Beatitude:
“Blessed are the meek; for they shall possess the land.”
Or put another way in Chesterton’s critique of Kipling:
“He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English. . . In a very interesting poem, he says that—‘If England was what England seems’ --that is, weak and inefficient; if England were not what (as he believes) she is--that is, powerful and practical-- ‘How quick we'd chuck 'er! But she ain't!’”
Villanova PMR Conference
Villanova hosts an excellent conference each fall in patristic, medieval, and renaissance studies, and this year's theme is "After Constantine: Religion, Politics, Culture, and Counterculture." This Sunday, October 28, marks the 1700th anniversary of Constantine's victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, establishing Constantine as the sole emperor of the Roman Empire and beginning his conversion to Christianity. The keynote speakers are Robert Wilkin of Virginia and William Klingshirn of CUA (program here). I will be presenting a paper on "Robert Bellarmine and the Freedom of the Church" on a panel alongside my Villanova colleague Matthew Rose and Stefania Tutino of UC-Santa Barbara, author of two splendid books: Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570-1625 (Ashgate, 2007) and Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010).
The wrongheaded wedge between "social issues" and social justice"
The National Catholic Reporter passes on the news that, according to a new study, "Catholics would prefer bishops to focus on social justice issues even if it means less emphasis on abortion. While that view is held strongly by Catholics who attend church only occasionally, 'the most striking finding, and one that may surprise many leaders in the church, is that Catholics who attend church once a week or more also express a strong preference for an emphasis on social justice over abortion,' the report states."
The study goes on to report some other findings about Catholics' political plans and preferences. It is, in my view, unfortunate that so many Catholics appear to have internalized a distinction -- one that might be politically useful for one "side" in American politics, but is not true to the Gospel or to Catholic Social Teaching -- between the Church's "social justice" teachings, including the preferential option for the poor, and the Church's clear (if less popular in some quarters) insistence on the equal dignity and inviolability of every person, no matter how small. A society that spends lots of money feeding the poor, while legally classifying some vulnerable people as less-than-people, and as unprotected from others' violence, is not a just society (just as a society that had a just abortion-law regime but ignored the real needs of the poor would be an unjust society).
Bishop Flores on religious freedom
One of the members of the bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty is Bishop Daniel Flores, from Texas. Here (HT: Distinctly Catholic) is an excellent lecture he gave, a week ago, on religious freedom, the problems with the HHS mandate, and also the problems with some illegal-immigration-related legislation. A bit:
The Church has a responsibility to defend the prerogatives of reason, and of opening up the perceptibility of the true and the good, and the beautiful. In some ways this theme dominates the writings of Pope Benedict 16. The Regensburg address was all about defending reason as capable of attaining to the truth. Western culture, though, has adopted a naked skepticism about the power of reason to read reality adequately well so as to inform political decisions based on a standard of justice.
The reason the popular good has replaced the common good as the focus of political discourse is that to discuss the common good you have to think reason can adjudicate reality fairly in most big issues. Justice relies on a judgment of reason. With the decline of confidence in reason, has come a collapse of political discourse about the good and the just into the single criterion of the popular will. Hence most all the effort and energy of the public discourse aims at shaping at least the perception of what the popular will might be.
The “public sphere” as Charles Taylor describes it, is the media and social matrix where the public appears to talk to itself.[4] It is currently dominated by efforts to define the good in terms of popular consensus, real or imagined. This, however, takes place in a public social context that ignores religion as a merely private concern, a context that is skeptical of reason, and is driven by the aims of molding popular perceptions of the good. This is what I mean by the shift in public secularity. . . .
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Be careful what you ask for
Over at First Things, George Weigel asks "What Kind of Country Do You Want?" A "fair question," as they say. Weigel's answer, however, strikes me as a series of false dilemmas. We would do better, I think, to "dream up" or, mirabile dictu, even reappropriate some basic Catholic principles that are not so cramped as the ones to which American Catholics, both "liberal" and "conservative," too often confine themselves. We needn't blunder on preferring our political system and its possible permutations to Christ and his beautiful demands. Is there going to be any true peace before the reign of Christ? The separation-of-powers and all the rest of the modern "solution" just aren't up to the stated task of neutralizing the public effects of original and personal sin. The only true solution is a complete embrace of all the ways by which government is legitimated and vindicated through its *serving* all. Christ is the servant of all, and service is the mark of good government. That's the sort of "country" I "want" -- one that serves all! It's the one I believe the Gospel demands. Weigel and I agree about many of the results to be desired and sought in the political realm, but I resist the claim, whether by Weigel or others, that we can realize the promises of the Gospel without tethering politics to the same Gospel.
If you don't know John Mikhail's work, you should.
For folks interested questions about natural law and natural rights, you really need to be reading John Mikhail. This paper is a nice entry into his work:
A striking feature of contemporary human rights scholarship is the extent to which it has turned its back on the idea that human rights can grounded in a theory of human nature. Philosophers, social scientists, and political and legal theorists thus frequently assert that the classical Enlightenment project of supplying a naturalistic foundation for human rights is dead. The main purpose of this contribution to a new book of essays on human rights is to rebut this pervasive skepticism. Drawing on recent work in the cognitive science of moral judgment, I defend one of the critical premises of ancient philosophy, Enlightenment Rationalism and the modern human rights movement alike: that human beings are moral and political animals, who are endowed with a moral faculty or sense of justice. The chapter thereby seeks to offer a new perspective on an old and venerable argument about the naturalistic foundation of human rights. . . .
The central aim of the chapter is to [describe] how researchers from a variety of disciplines (including experimental philosophy, developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, primatology, anthropology, comparative criminal law, and other fields) have begun to converge on a scientific theory of human moral cognition that, at least in its broad contours, bears a striking resemblance to the classical accounts of moral philosophy, natural jurisprudence, and the law of nations that reverberate throughout the ages. These classical accounts typically rest on the claim that an innate moral faculty and with it principles of justice, fairness, empathy, and solidarity are written into the very frame of human nature. These themes were particularly influential during the Enlightenment, when the modern human rights movement first emerged. It is precisely this set of ideas that modern cognitive science, liberated from the crippling methodological restrictions of positivism, behaviorism, historicism, and other discredited theoretical frameworks, has recently begun to explicate and to a substantial extent verify. This new trend in the science of human nature, I suggest, has potentially profound implications for the theory and practice of universal human rights.
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