To add to the list of 'questions your kids ask that you're embarrassed not to be able to answer" . . .
My son, who is studying German in college, asked me the following, and I couldn't answer. I don't think it has anything to do with the informality of Twitter, because I think he's right about the informal 'du' being used in religious conversation. I suspect some MOJ readers know the answer. Please comment if you do!
I
was looking at Pope Benedict's new Twitter account, and out of curiosity, I
checked the German one too: https://twitter.com/Pontifex_de. Is it typical to religious
authorities like him to refer to people with the informal "you?" Or
is that some kind of special "pope" tense? I know that Germans refer to God with "du," so it could
be related to that. Or could it have something to do with the Pope being the
"father" of the rest of the Church--he uses "du" because
he's talking to his "children?"
Needless to say, I welcome The Economist's recent recognition that traditionalist Catholics are the avant-garde of our age. As one would expect, that recognition is generating some exciting discussion, including by Anna Williams at First Things. Ms Williams concludes by considering the worry that traditionalists wish to withdraw from the world. The actual direction pursued by traditionalists is the opposite, however, and that's what the real fuss is about. Traditionalists do not wish to separate from the culture; they are emphatically not separatists. Traditionalists wish to correct and transform culture in the image of the incarnate Christ. Traditionalists are not willing to give up on the culture, because its transformation contributes to the salvation of souls. It is this intransigent insistence about tranfsorming the world that the enemy resists with all its might and theory. As I argued in a recent paper, "the Church is not a bomb shelter" into which the faithful are to retreat. The Church is the society that fortifies the faithful to go forth and get the job done: the Church militant. I returned to the theme of the moral exigence of the Church's and the lay-faithful's being intransigent about creating Catholic culture here. When one understands the Church as Christ-continued in the world, her transformative capacity becomes unmistakable -- and a cause of hope. There is no other reason to hope.
"We cannot affect the outcome because we have consented to move within that cosmion according to a social mode of Christianity that, as Louis Veuillot so vividly put it, is 'sufficiently nothing to live in peace with the rest of the world.'" [Ferrrara, Liberty, the God that Failed 642 (2012)].
If you think Vatican II and its various false fruits were a surprise, and even if you celebrate Vatican II -- read Veuillot! As Veuillot (1813-83) already saw, any "Church" that sought to be so much of a nothing as to live in peace with the rest of the world would be denied even that false consolation. See now the impending proceedings regarding the contraceptive mandate as they concern the Church.
Parents in the US have had very little success in seeking opt-outs from the public school curriculum. I haven't read the court's opinion, which I think is only available in French. Perhaps the case is complicated by Canada's system of providing public funding for private education, although that seems unlikely since the ERC apparently also applies to homeschoolers.
I suspect that the case would be decided the same way in the US, at least as a matter of US constitutional law.
Want a 10-minute advent time-out during this sometimes frantic shopping, decorating, exam-taking & grading season? My brother sent me this clip about the powerful effect of music on residents of some nursing homes, narrated by the famed author & neurologist, Oliver Sachs. Just watch the last resident, "Henry", offering one of the most beautiful renditions of "I'll be Home for Christmas" that I've heard this season (and I spend a lot of time shuttling around kids who insist on listening to the 24-hour Christmas music station these days). What really got me, though, was Henry's reminder of the truth that should give us all comfort, at all times, but maybe especially in the days leading to Christmas: "The Lord came to me. Made me holy. I'm a holy man."
Anabaptists have--not surprisingly--been plaintiffs in some prominent free exercise cases. See Wisconsin v. Yoder and U.S. v. Lee. Right here in Pennsylvania, a Mennonite-owned cabinetmaking company has filed suit against the HHS contraceptive mandate (Philadelphia Inquirer story here).
Rick recently mentioned "Three Books". I don't recall that anyone here has mentioned this book, which in my judgment is one of the best recent books on religious (and moral) freedom. One of the book's authors, Charles Taylor, who is Catholic, is one of the most esteemed philosophers of our time.
Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Consicence (Harvard, 2011), available here.
I've been really gratified -- and quite surprised -- by the hundreds of downloads of my new (and admittedly not-sexy) chapter on subsidiarity in the tradition of Catholic social doctrine. Who knew that subsidiarity would attract more readership than, say, the individual mandate and contraception? God only knows.
One important point to make about subsidiarity in Catholic social doctrine is that it is not a consequentialist position. I was reminded of this recently when I read fn. 5 on p. 163 of Nick Wolterstorff's The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology (CUP 2012). Wolterstorff accurately observes that many Catholics defend subsidiarity on consequentialist grounds. To reduce the social order to the counting of consequences is, however, to make the very mistake the Church was resisting and condemning when she authoritatively formulated the ontological principle of subsidiary function. Subsidiarity is not checks-and-balances by another name. It is a statement about the natural right of naturally social persons and their upright associations. We can recall that the American revolution was defined "more than anything else by its rejection of the fundamental metaphysical and methodological assumptions of the medieval Scholastic tradition" (Feser, Locke [2007], 9). True subsidiarity, including its acknowledgment of hierarchy among societies, is hard for Locke's heirs to understand. Maritain's rendering of subsidiarity as "the pluralist principle" hides the layeredness of society that subsidiarity affirms.
Prof. Wilfred McCay has what I think is a really helpful and important essay, at Christianity Today, in which he elaborates on five reasons why -- contra, e.g., Micah Schwartzman and Rich Shragger -- religion is "special" and "should be granted . . . deferential attention" in the public square. He concludes the essay by addressing "an even deeper question. Can our freedom itself, and more generally the rights-based liberalism we have come to embrace in the modern West, survive without the Judeo-Christian religious assumptions that have hitherto accompanied and upheld it?"
Though himself an atheist, the Italian writer Marcello Pera has argued that it cannot—that it is impossible to uproot such ideas as human dignity from the Christian intellectual soil in which, historically, they were nourished. It's a dangerous illusion, he says, to imagine that modern liberal values can be sustained apart from religious presuppositions about the nature and destiny of man. Ironically, the very possibility of a "secular" realm of politics—which we embrace in the West as both inherently good and a necessary precondition of religious freedom—may depend upon the presence of certain distinctively Christian beliefs, embodied in culture as much as in doctrine.
