RR Reno ("Rusty") of First Things just spoke on the modern papal diplomacy of "bold words and striking gestures," which both JPII and now Francis have displayed in great measure (up and against the more inward-facing papacy of Pope Leo and his predecessors). Though Reno only gave passing mention of Laudato Si, he spoke more as an academic than a commentator (as here). Arguing the encyclical is a "diplomatic intervention into a fraught and difficult geopolitical issue," which strikes him as designed to "arrest our attention," he wonders: 1) if the "rich world" diverts much of its GDP to the radical political/economic restructuring of itself (as it would need to in order to achieve the necessary reduction in fossil fuel use, etc.), what will become of our moral responsibility (and current capacity) to help developing countries mature economically?
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Reno on the encyclical
Douthat on the Pope's critics
I’m at Providence Abbey in RI today for this delightful conference, "Understanding the Francis Papacy." The conference organizers are to be commended for bringing together a diverse swath of intelligent, engaging and, thus far, quite humorous and compelling Catholic speakers. Attendees include many from the Catholic Worker Movement including Tom Cornell, students, academics, members of the broader community with an affection for the Holy Father, and of course, the Benedictine monks and priests. Here is a list of speakers and topics.
Ross Douthat spoke yesterday evening on “The New Catholic Civil War,” drawing extensively from this recent—provocative--blog post. (Elizabeth Stokes Bruenig is here too, by the way...) Here he lays out his “taxonomy” of Francis' critics: the three groups of Catholics who he judges are most worried about or threatened by Pope Francis, in varying degrees. In general, the recent Pew poll tells us that Francis enjoys enormous support among Catholics. But traditionalist (associated with the Tridentine Mass), capitalist (a particularly American phenomenon), and conservative Catholics (focused on marriage/family issues) are wary for different reasons. Again, the blog post here.
Most interesting though (and not in the post) was Douthat’s ruminations on the distinctions between Francis and his predecessors as to how to deal with argument within the Church (i.e., dissent). Francis definitely thinks he’s letting arguments air--that it’s healthy for the Church to have arguments. Of course there has long been argument in the Church regarding doctrinal matters, but during the last two pontificates, among bishops and priests, doctrinal unity was the "watchword.” Now, bishops are invited to “express themselves.” And they have. And some, as among the German bishops, have revealed a certain style of 1970s Catholic liberalism that was far more resilient than doctrinal conservatives (like Douthat) had thought. We now have a far clearer picture of the state, scope and scale of the divisions in the Church.
Perhaps the pope believes that out of this argument will come “new ideas and new synthesis.” But perhaps there will simply be more public division, whatever happens at the Synod in the fall. Such division, Douthat suggests, would call out for the pope, though probably not this pope, to seek resolution in a conciliar form…
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Responses to the Hook-up Culture at WMF
I will be speaking on the topic "Responses to the 'Hook-up' Culture: In Search of Sexual Integrity" at the World Meeting of Families in September. Here is a summary of my slated talk:
These days it seems as though coarseness has replaced courtship, but there are signs that a new springtime of sexual integrity is dawning. Drawing on personal experience, current data, and the inspiring work of many, Bachiochi tells the curious story of casual sex today. The reality is that fewer people hook up than is perceived; fewer, still, enjoy it. But the hook-up culture remains pervasive and has created a relationship vacuum. Participate in this multimedia presentation to learn more about how young men and women can find long-lasting, fulfilling love.
In terms of a "new springtime," I intend to highlight the courageous work of those associated with the Love & Fidelity Network (and the many college-based groups that have emerged following the Anscombe Society at Princeton), as well as David and Amber Lapp's work, and the new I Believe in Love website, among others.
Should MOJ readers know of other organizations, churches, or individuals that are showing signs of success in helping women and men find both reasons and strength to resist the temptations of the "hook-up" culture, do let me know: [email protected].
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Understanding the Francis Papacy
Portsmouth Abbey, a monastery and boarding school on the coast of scenic Rhode Island, is hosting the conference, "Like a Shepherd He Will Tend His Flock: Understanding the Francis Papacy," on June 19-21st.
The all-star line up of presenters include:
Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley
Ross Douthat
R.R. Reno
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Fr. Dwight Longenecker
Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig
Fr. Roger Landry
John Carr
Christoper White
Anna Bonta Moreland
Kenneth Colston
The conference organizes say they seek to "foster an authentic understanding of Pope Francis and will explore the major themes of his papacy." Here are the guiding questions:
–Who is Pope Francis? How does his background — as an Argentinian, a Jesuit, a pastor — motivate his own faith and mission?
–How should the Holy Father’s teachings on economics and the “throwaway culture” influence American social and economic policy?
–What are the main challenges confronting the Church at this point in history, and how is Pope Francis confronting them?
–How does Pope Francis encourage us to live out the fundamental doctrines of the Church?
–How should we understand Pope Francis’s reformational zeal within the context of Church history?
More here.
Friday, June 5, 2015
The Threat of (and to) Catholic parenting
The Pontifical Council of the Laity recently published Archbishop Chaput's remarks to his brother priests at their annual convocation in Philadelphia. The speech is worth reading in its entirety, of course, but this paragraph quoting Gerard Bradley was especially poignant...and frightening:
Professor Gerard Bradley of the University of Notre Dame School of Law is a constitutional scholar and a longtime friend of mine. Recently he shared with me his belief that “the most perilous [developing challenge that U.S. Catholics face] has to do with the establishment of ‘sexual health,’ ‘gender identity’ and ‘sexual self-determination’ as paramount goods even for children and minors — such that their parents and the Church become serious threats to these minors’ alleged well-being. In other words, Catholic parenting is in jeopardy of being branded, in relatively short order, as a kind of child abuse, a calumny against which our diminishing religious liberty protections will be thin shields.”
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Gender Trouble
I suspect most MOJ readers are not reading Judith Butler, the influential gender theorist who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. Since I have actually waded through much--but not all--of her fame-making Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, I thought I'd share some of it below, to shed some light on the intellectual underpinnings of the American gender/transgender movement. Butler's writing is almost impossible to decode, but the following passages are noteworthy for their unusual clarity. They also provide a decent summary of the rest of the book (or what I've been able to get through anyway).
One note: Butler's radicalism is rightly criticized by some gender feminists for rendering "woman" obsolete, such that there is no subject left for feminists to rally behind. As you will read below, for Butler, not only is (culturally constructed) "gender" a construct, but (bodily) "sex" is too...
Catholics, and especially those like myself who are seeking to give life to a robust articulation of a dynamic "new feminism," have a special responsibility, it seems to me, to defend human embodiedness, and the asymmetry, vulnerability and dependency that follows. Here's are two recent attempts of mine, which focus on asymmetry, one in Christian Bioethics (Oxford), the other a chapter in Mary Hasson's new book, Promise and Challenge. I recently presented a paper on embodiedness, vulnerability and dependency (that relies heavily on the great Alasdair MacIntrye and feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay), both at Steubenville and at a conference on women and the Church in DC this spring; publication is (one hopes) forthcoming.
From Judith Butler's Gender Trouble:
Although the unproblematic unity of “women” is often invoked to construct a solidarity of identity, a split is introduced in the feminist subject by the distinction between sex and gender. Originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation, the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex. The unity of the subject is thus already potentially contested by the distinction that permits of gender as a multiple interpretation of sex.
If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between the sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of "men" will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that "women" will interpret only femal bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will be become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.
This radical splitting of the gendered subject poses yet another set of problems. Can we refer to a "given" sex or a "given" gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is “sex” anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such “facts” for us?9 Does sex have a history?10 Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This construction of “sex” as the radically unconstructed will concern us again in the discus- sion of Lévi-Strauss and structuralism in chapter 2. At this juncture it is already clear that one way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain. This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender. How, then, does gender need to be reformulated to encompass the power relations that produce the effect of a prediscursive sex and so conceal that very operation of discursive production? [Pages 8-10]
...
In this sense, gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free- floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative— that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed. The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.” In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results. [Page 34]
Read more of Butler's book here.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Katha Pollitt's Intuition
Claremont Review of Books recently invited me to review Katha Pollitt’s new book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, alongside two other books on abortion, for their upcoming summer issue. I’ll post when the review is out, but for now, I wanted to cut through much of what has been written contra Pollitt’s book—and there is good reason for pro-lifers to express frustration on almost every page with a real misapprehension of the substantive arguments within the abortion debate—to point out an intuition of Pollitt’s that resurfaces throughout, the response to which needs to be integrated more fully into pro-life argument.
Even though Pollitt concedes the science, she, like so many of her friends in academia, is stuck in the philosophically untenable (and historically embarrassing) distinction between “human beings” and “human persons.” But here’s the intuition that Pollitt enunciates, following Ronald Dworkin, as a reductio ad absurdum in the pro-life movement: killing an embryo cannot be morally equated with killing a five year old, an infant, or even a late term fetus, but the pro-life position necessitates this moral equivalency in its support of fetal personhood. Pollitt maintains that pro-lifers don’t really even believe in this moral equivalency (after all, we don’t see pro-lifers picketing at IVF clinics where spare embryos are routinely discarded).
Perhaps if people who claim zygotes are persons had to spend a week arguing with Ronald Dworkin, they would collapse in exhaustion and admit that a fertilized egg is not the same as a five-year-old. Perhaps they would admit that they, too, would be more upset by a fire that killed four hundred workers in a factory or young people in a club…than at a fire in a fertility clinic that destroyed four hundred frozen embryos.
And so, Pollitt reasons, pro-lifers must believe what any reasonable person believes: human worth grows as the human being grows, thus not all human beings are worthy of equal legal protection (especially in a contest with a pregnant woman).
But here’s where I think Pollitt is right: most pro-lifers don’t really believe that killing an embryo is the same as killing a five year old. But, I think, many pro-lifers think they should believe that—to be fully pro-life. They aren’t comfortable making the distinction, for fear of falling into philosophical gradualism. And here’s where masterful pro-life philosopher Christopher Kaczor comes in: in a 2011 First Things article that is short enough to be required reading for everyone reading this post and articulated whenever Pollitt/Dworkin’s argument is raised, Kaczor shows that pro-lifers need not believe that all killings are equally egregious to resist the gradualism at the heart of much academic pro-choice thinking. All human individuals have equal moral worth. This is the pro-life position. But it is more egregious to kill a five year old or even a late term fetus than it is to kill an embryo, andyet each of these killings is still morally wrong. Taking Kaczor’s argument a step further, it is more devastating to lose four hundred workers in a factory than four hundred embryos, even if, tragically, four hundred human lives have been lost in both. The sorts of philosophical distinctions Kaczor makes are necessary to grasping the real consistency within pro-life argumentation—distinctions Americans are less and less capable of making (and understanding) in political debate today.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
By way of introduction...
It is a real honor to have been invited to 'blog' here at Mirror of Justice. I have long admired the keen observations about all things Catholic and legal on this blog, and am so grateful it exists. I do not know how well I'll take to blogging, but if there is a blog for me, this is the one. Thank you Rick and Lisa for taking a chance on me.
It is particularly edifying to have been invited to join a 'law professor' blog without, well, being a law professor. It gives some credence to the view that my scholarly work is actually important to someone out there; it's not just something I do to keep myself intellectually engaged when I am not otherwise active with six young children or with the classical Catholic school I just helped to found outside of Boston: www.stbenedictelementary.com.
My work involves the development of a thoroughgoing Catholic feminist theory as well as a Catholic feminist legal theory, especially as questions about gender intersect with questions of sexual and social ethics. (I'm also quite interested and adept in discussing theories of both education/educational policy and religious liberty, but will also readily admit to expertise in neither.)
I entered the feminist conversation 20 yrs ago, as a secular feminist activist and Women’s Studies student during my early years at Middlebury College in Vermont. Since my conversion (or ‘reversion’) to Catholicism in my final year at Middlebury in 1996 (a drama that involves the intellectual intervention of a leading Staussian atheist Jew), I’ve been keenly aware that, to be taken seriously in the modern world, the Church has to be in serious conversation with secular feminists. And though I tend to like a debate, and am strident in my arguments, I do mean conversation. Our political discourse—what with recent War on Women rhetoric on the left and a real demonization of feminism on the right—hasn’t served us well on this score. While adhominems fly, opportunity for real conversation among those of who see ourselves working for women’s progress remains barren. (NB: I applaud the work of Lisa Schiltz and Susan Stabile, especially in their most recent book in search of common ground with Georgetown law professor Robin West, about which I hope to write in a future post.)
So what I’ve tried to do in my work as legal scholar and women’s advocate is something not many faithful Catholic intellectuals would really ever care to do, but is something that is increasingly necessary if we are to truly engage secular feminism on its own terms: as a good student of Strauss, I seek to read the leading feminist philosophical and legal literature with a sympathetic eye; having been on board once upon a time, I find such sympathy easy to come by (and often still agree with and enjoy much of what I read).
As I write in Mary Rice Hasson's new book, Promise and Challenge (mentioned by Lisa in an earlier post):
In order to advance successfully a new feminist worldview in public life or in scholarship, we have to take the time to listen to our feminist-minded interlocutors, read them, and get to know them. If we are convinced, with St. Thomas, that human beings seek the good and the truth, we can turn to feminist theory and argument, and make an effort to identify the good intentions, insights, and authentic advances. In order to love them, we must take them seriously and sympathize with their position the best we can. We must have the confidence to ask humbly what we can learn from our interlocutors. What is it that makes their viewpoint, their writings, so compelling to others? Listening to them can teach us much—about their presuppositions first and foremost, and about potential areas of agreement. In general, though of course there are myriad exceptions, feminist-minded scholars and lay persons tend to care deeply about the sorts of things Catholic women care about: women and children, relationships, and the vulnerable. We just have starkly different ways of addressing these shared concerns.
I believe that the Church offers a richly pro-woman alternative to secular feminism, but that alternative is deeply inaccessible to the many many people who look out at the world through a secular feminist prism. As I write in Promise and Challenge:
Part of our current trouble making inroads into the culture with the Church’s extraordinarily liberating pro-woman message is our inability to translate it adequately for the modern world. (And Pope Francis does seem to think the trouble lay primarily with us, Christ’s disciples, and not with the lost sheep who no longer heed the Christian message.)...To the “JPII Catholic,” guided by the light of faith and strengthened by sacramental grace, the Church’s sexual teachings seem so right and life-saving, and so good for marriage, children, men and women—that there could be no other way. As a result, a vast gulf exists between the well-formed Catholic and the world’s sojourner, a sojourner who has been deeply formed, on the other hand, by the secular feminist worldview, whether or not she knows it or would even describe herself as a feminist. Key phrases used by John Paul II, such as “sexual complementarity,” “feminine, or nurturing, nature,” or “the nuptial meaning of the body” may mean gift and purpose to the well-formed Catholic but represent oppression and confinement to the feminist-minded. Just as in the days of the early Church, members of the same family speak as though foreigners, lacking not only a common moral framework, but also a common language. If we do not find a new translation, a mediating bridge that better articulates Church teaching in a world shaped by feminist views, we will remain forever a booming gong and clashing cymbal, a self-referential church, the Pope says, that thinks itself better than the world, but meanwhile shrivels in its pride, in its inability to love the other enough to go out and find her.
The rest of that chapter as well as the whole of Women, Sex & the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching tries to make some progress in articulating Church teachings anew, not for utilitarian purposes as though to spin her unpopular teachings in a more attractive way, but alas, because they are true. The sexual revolution has not been the boon to women secular feminists seem to think.
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