My friend and Notre Dame colleague, Carter Snead, has a new book out with Harvard University Press, called "What It Means to Be Human" (here). I'd read it in draft, and think it's wonderful -- a fitting tribute to, among others, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, whose influences are clear in the work, and that it captures well some of the key, heartland proposals and commitments that launched for 16 years (so far) sustained the "Mirror of Justice" blog. Need a Christmas gift? You couldn't do better.
Snead has also authored this essay, "the Anthopology of Expressive Individualism", which distills the book's claims nicely. Here's a bit:
[E]xpressive individualism fails because it is, to borrow a phrase from Alasdair MacIntyre, “forgetful of the body.” Its vision of the human person does not reflect and thus cannot make sense of the full lived reality of human embodiment, with all that it entails. After all, human beings experience themselves and one another as living bodies, not disembodied wills.
Because human beings live and negotiate the world as bodies, they are necessarily subject to vulnerability, dependence, and finitude common to all living embodied beings, with all of the attendant challenges and gifts that follow. Thus, the anthropology of the atomized, unencumbered, inward-directed self of expressive individualism falls short because it cannot render intelligible either the core human realities of embodiment or recognize the unchosen debts that accrue to all human beings throughout their life spans.
An inexorable reality of embodied human life is dependence. Most obviously, given the way human beings come into the world, from the very beginning they depend on the beneficence and support of others for their very lives. Among mammals, human beings in their infancy and youth have an unusually long period of dependence for basic survival—infants and babies require help with nutrition, hygiene, and general protection. Obviously, this dependence on others for basic needs is not merely a transient feature limited to the beginnings of human life. There are, of course, those who spend their entire lives in conditions of radical dependency. But because all human beings exist as corruptible bodies, periods of serious illness, injury, and senescence create cycles of often-profound dependency throughout the life span for everyone. Consider, due to the very nature of living as bodies, in MacIntyre’s words, all human beings exist on a “scale of disability.”
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
The life of the mind has been an important part of my faith journey, and it grieves me to see how many Christians are susceptible to the wild conspiracy theories that are contributing to our growing inability to engage in rational debate. My response to Eric Metaxas and other purveyors of the latest tall tales is here. An excerpt:
Our minds are a gift from God. Like all good gifts, we are called to steward them wisely. As conspiracy theories infiltrate the church and compromise its witness, we can’t just roll our eyes as though we’re accommodating an embarrassing uncle who drops by for holiday dinners. The gospel speaks to the heart and the mind. If wild conspiracy theories find fertile ground among Christians, we shouldn’t just be scandalized; we should be motivated to reclaim the intellectual rigor of our faith.
