Monday, July 2, 2007
... in Missouri (from Christianity Today):
Church planters who receive money from the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) must now teach alcohol abstinence. The policy change was sparked by the Journey, a growing interdenominational church that borrowed $200,000 from the MBC to renovate a church two years ago. One of the Journey's outreach groups meets in a St. Louis microbrewery.
This post is to say amen, in general, to Fred Hiatt's lament today in the Washington Post:
As the Bush presidency implodes, some of its worst policies mercifully will go, too -- including, we can hope, the torture and unregulated detention of alleged enemy fighters that have so discredited the country throughout the world.
But valuable strands of policy also may end up strewn in the wreckage, victims (in varying combinations) of President Bush's ineptitude, inconstancy and unpopularity. Among these are what Bush called compassionate conservatism, now moribund; American promotion of democracy abroad, now flailing; and accountability in elementary and high school education, losing ground as it approaches a major test in Congress.
As Hiatt points out, compassionate conservatism in the sense of facilitating religious and other private organizations' work with the needy -- the faith-based and community organizations initiative -- is moribund in large part because the administration denied it any real funding from the start ("kneecapped it," as one congressional supporter put it).
As cycles of poverty and hopelessness remain a national scandal, I'd still argue that government policy should aim to mobilize and encourage the efforts of the widest range of community social-service providers, including faith-based providers. This approach can still encompass a wide range of values and thus, I hope, still be attractive to many Americans. If the conditions on the government's assistance are marked by a flexibility that respects the different ways that different organizations provide the services, then this approach can embody the Catholic twin principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. At its best, the Bush initiative acknowledged that personal transformation often plays a crucial role, along with material assistance, in changing the circumstances of those in need -- an emphasis that appeals to many evangelicals. And liberals in the vein of Sojourners' Jim Wallis likewise have recognized that giving substantial weight to private, community organizations and individual transformation can make the provision of assistance more effective and thus can bolster the case for putting more effort and resources into the whole project.
On educational accountability, Hiatt calls for fixing the problems with No Child Left Behind rather than scrapping it altogether. He doesn't mention continuing experiments with school voucher programs, but he should (they generally run up against the reluctance of middle-class voters and the determination of the teachers' unions, but they can get enacted for cases of real educational meltdown).
I'm not holding my breath that any 2008 candidates will pick up on this whole package of themes (especially not the Democrats on vouchers, or the Republicans on significant spending). But I still think there are opening for candidates to appeal across ideological lines, to embrace some of these themes and keep them from being buried with Bush.
Tom
Thursday, June 28, 2007
With just a little more than three weeks until Book Seven ... Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College offers his speculations on how it will all end. I tend to agree with the author of this enjoyable book, John Granger, that the Harry Potter books are "the most charming and challenging Christian fiction for children since Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia." The themes of the power of sacrificial love, the dangers of pride, the imperative of justice for the downtrodden, etc., are unmistakable though never heavy-handed. Then there's this catalog of J.K. Rowling's own statements hinting at her Christian sensibility in the books.
Tom
The latest testimony in the scandal concerning the firings of U.S. attorneys:
Paul K. Charlton, one of nine U.S. attorneys fired last year, told members of Congress yesterday that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has been overzealous in ordering federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty, including in an Arizona murder case in which no body had been recovered. . . .
Charlton testified that he asked Justice officials to reconsider [their directive, against his recommendation, to seek the death penalty in the case] and had what he called a "memorable" conversation with Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty. Michael J. Elston, then McNulty's chief of staff, called Charlton to relay that the deputy had spent "a significant amount of time on this issue with the attorney general, perhaps as much as five to 10 minutes," and that Gonzales had not changed his mind. Charlton said he then asked to speak directly with Gonzales and was denied.
Last August, D. Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales's chief of staff, sent Elston a dismissive e-mail about the episode that said: "In the 'you won't believe this category,' Paul Charlton would like a few minutes of the AG's time." The next month, Charlton's name appeared on a list of prosecutors who should be fired, which Sampson sent to the White House.
Tom
Monday, June 25, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
From today's op-ed by journalist Melinda Henneberger:
Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because “security moms” saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion. . . .
Many of them, Catholic women in particular, are liberal, deep-in-their-heart Democrats who support social spending, who opposed the war from the start and who cross their arms over their chests reflexively when they say the word “Republican.” Some could fairly be described as desperate to find a way home. And if the party they’d prefer doesn’t send a car for them, with a really polite driver, it will have only itself to blame.
The title that the editors chose overstates what the op-ed actually claims, which is only that the Democrats should respect pro-lifers and should give some on things like partial-birth abortion bans (and maybe some other regulations? -- it's unclear) because of the widespread public support for them. But what the author found about the importance of abortion as an issue for the women to whom she talked looks interesting. The book based on these interviews is available here.
Tom
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
In response to Michael's post: we've discussed income inequality before, here and here for example. My brief reaction is that Catholic thought regards absolute deprivation of the poor as the most serious problem, followed by a lack of economic mobility, and income inequality in itself as only third in the list of problems. But large or increasing income inequality is a matter of some concern in itself for a few reasons that I tried to argue in the first link above: (1) it can strain the bonds of solidarity (as people of wildly different incomes lead lives incomprehensible to each other); (2) it prima facie makes economic mobility more difficult (as the spread from one level to the next higher becomes greater); (3) and it can hurt the poor through what economist Robert Frank has called "expenditure cascades" (in which high expenditures by the wealthy raise the bar for what modest-income people must pay -- and not through mere envy, but because those expenditures become part of society's expectations).
It's hard to respond to RIck's post because the WSJ article is only available to paying subscribers.
Tom
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Every five years or so the Supreme Court has to grant certiorari in a case in order to force a recalcitrant government entity and lower court to allow private speakers to engage in religious expression on public property on the same terms as speakers with nonreligious viewpoints. This petition, Faith Center v. Glover, filed Friday by the Alliance Defense Fund, has many features that make it very suitable for the Court's next intervention. It involves equal access for religious worship services, a right many of us thought was settled by Good News Club v. Milford School, 533 U.S. 98 (2001). In the current case, a county library opened its meeting rooms to numerous community groups for "educational, cultural, and community-related programs and activities," but denied access for "religious services" -- in the case a "prayer, praise and worship" meeting by an evangelistic group -- while maintaining that it would allow access for "religious speech" such as a workshop on how to pray. A Ninth Circuit panel held, 2-1, that the exclusion of the worship service from the library's forum of meeting rooms was permissible because the service fell outside the forum’s subject matter, rather than presenting a viewpoint on issues within the subject matter. 462 F.3d 1194. The en banc CA9 denied rehearing, with seven judges dissenting. 480 F.3d 891.
It takes a while to list the host of reasons why the CA9 decision is wrong and the case cert-worthy. The "educational, cultural, or community-related" subject-matter of the library's forum is so broad that to exclude religious services from it is both implausible on its face and hostile to religion –- as if a worship service is not among the many activities that could contribute to a community’s life and culture. (The library had previously allowed the county Democrats, the Sierra Club, and numerous other groups to meet.) The panel opinion says that officials can deny access, or pull the plug, if a religious meeting constitutes "worship" rather than simply “speech” –- perhaps, that is, if the speaker invites the audience to participate a little too much, or they get too inspired and enthusiastic? Because of the hopeless and improper line-drawing this requires, the Supreme Court long ago in Widmar v. Vincent (1981) explicitly rejected the religious speech/worship distinction –- a rejection that the panel majority dismisses as “dicta” (!). Church services are at the core of religious expression, not the periphery; and when the service occurs in a public building only because of a general community-access policy benefiting many groups, this doesn't entangle the state with worship in any substantial sense (rather, the more entangling course is to try to distinguish worship or services from religious speech).
As to cert-worthiness, the CA9 decision conflicts not only with SCT cases but with with several other court of appeals decisions, most directly Bronx Household of Faith v. Bd. of Ed. of City of New York, 331 F.3d 342 (2d Cir. 2003), which held that a church service could not be excluded from school rooms opened for general community purposes. And it's a recurring question, as churches around the country use or seek to use schools and other public buildings for services because of restrictive zoning laws and high real-estate costs in residential areas. (These are almost all evangelical churches, but I can imagine some situations in which Catholic services could be affected by this issue as well.)
Finally, there's almost a "perfect storm" of circumstances why the Court realistically would be inclined to take the case (this is what interested me most in blogging about it). It's from the Ninth Circuit, for starters; the Justice Department has supported Faith Center's position in the lower courts; there was a panel dissent and a seven-judge en banc dissent; and one of the two judges in the panel majority clearly doesn’t believe in the equal rights of religious speakers in the first place (writing in a concurrence that allowing a religious group to use generally available school rooms impermissibly “subsidize[s]” religion and thus that every one of the Supreme Court’s “equal access” rulings for the last 25 years is wrong).
The fly in the ointment may be that the issue can be seen as interlocutory: it involves appeal from a partial reversal of a preliminary injunction, and the appellate panel expressed some hope that on remand the trial court could fashion an injunction that would exclude religious services without entangling the library impermissibly in defining concepts like worship. On the other hand: as I understand the rules, the interlocutory nature of a petition is not a bar to granting cert but merely a factor to consider; the issue seems a straight legal question not likely to be affected by any fuller record; and the idea that the library could avoid future entanglement seems more of a hope than a likelihood.
Tom
Thanks to Michael for blogging about last week's SCT decision, Uttecht v. Brown, on the death penalty and jurors. If prosecutors and trial judges run with this decision as a means of excluding jurors, it will make absolutely stark the incompatibility between official Catholic teaching and participation in the death penalty system. The prospective juror in the case, when first asked about the death penalty, said he thought it would be appropriate for cases when the convicted murderer would kill again if released -- a position that is close to the official teaching that execution is appropriate only in the "very rare, ... practically non-existent" cases where "this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor." Catechism 2267. (There's no indication whether the juror was Catholic.) And when the juror learned that the alternative sentence was always life without parole, he said he'd "have to give it some thought" whether he'd be willing to impose death given that alternative sentence. However, eventually the juror said that he "could consider" imposing death even in cases where the defendant would otherwise be locked up for life, "if I was convinced that was the appropriate measure."
I would have thought that even the juror's initial suggestion that death would be inappropriate when life without parole was an available sentence was within the range of permissible positions for a juror to take under the Washington death-penalty law, which says that a juror "may consider" (among other mitgating factors) "whether there is a likelihood that the defendant will pose a danger to others in the future," and that the jury should reject a death sentence unless it's "convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that there are not sufficient mitigating circumstances to merit leniency." Wash. St. 10.95.070, 10.95.060. The permissiveness of the Washington language ("may consider") would seem to leave room for the position of the juror who closely follows Catholic magisterial teaching. But now we are told by the SCT that this juror was "substantially impaired" in his ability to follow the law and therefore excludable for cause. And what's more, we are told that this was so even though the juror pretty quickly stated that he would be able to consider a death sentence over life without parole -- and who clearly, like most jurors, was just beginning to think about these things in detail rather than having a rigidly formed opinion.
If this decision is taken seriously, it appears to state that making even a nod in the direction of the magisterial Catholic position on the death penalty is ground for disqualification from the jury -- even if the juror ultimately emphasizes his willingness to follow the law. There are factors in the case that could lead it to be read narrowly: a degree of deference to the trial court's decision to exclude, the asserted lack of an objection by defense counsel (although interestingly for justices who generally claim to follow state procedural policy, Washington law doesn't require such an objection). But if the decision is read to provide a blueprint for juror exclusions in future cases, it would indeed be sadly ironic that a ruling justifying the exclusion of anyone making even a nod in the direction of the magisterial position was a ruling issued by five Catholic justices. (To say nothing about how, as Michael's post notes, such an expansion of the idea of a "death qualified" jury expands juries' willingness to convict in the first place.)
Tom
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Here are two pieces about last Monday night's CNN forum among Clinton-Edwards-Obama on "Faith, Values, and Poverty." The Christian Science Monitor piece evaluates the "religious left" more generally. The Christianity Today post accurately notes that the candidates at the forum were long on personal stories and short on specifics about policy regarding poverty (but see this book of varying proposals by Jack Kemp, Elizabeth Warren, etc., published by Edwards's anti-poverty research center at UNC Law School). But CT also rightly remarks that having such a forum, with one planned for the GOP candidates in September, is a good development.
Tom
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