Monday, May 21, 2007
Leading evangelical Protestant theologian Richard Mouw gives the practice of praying to saints about two cheers (maybe one and a half?). Note the general comment that Christians "often talk past each other" in their approaches to any given issue, "with Protestants thinking about getting saved and Catholics thinking about experiencing the life of the church."
Tom
Friday, May 18, 2007
A response to Lisa's interesting comment: Eddie Brock in Spiderman 3, praying to God in church to kill Peter Parker, might even have quoted one of the many "imprecatory" psalms, where the psalmist indeed asks God "to smite a particular enemy of [his]." For example, Psalm 69:20-29:
These psalms, like the church scene, are "theologically troubling" with their curses on others, and whether and how to pray them have been recurring questions. One of the most common answers, I think, is that the psalmist is asking not for personal vengeance, but for vindication of God's justice. And Eddie's in a very weak position to claim such justice, since it was his own deceit for which Peter publicly humiliated him (I'll keep this vague to avoid spoilers). But, in an example of what I like about the movie's moral anthropology, it also clearly paints Peter as having satisfied a vengeance lust against Eddie, as having gone over the top, and as implicated in the original competitiveness that started the whole cycle. Eddie "looked for compassion [from Peter], but there was none." (By contrast, the triumph of good at the end requires characters to give up their vengefulness and exercise compassion for each other.) The wise, and Christian, emphases are that vengeance -- personal and social -- spirals out of control so easily, and that even those who are wronged -- as Peter is by Eddie -- often mix their claim for justice with a simple desire to satisfy vengefulness (cf. Mark's recent observations about some victims in sex-abuse cases) or ego.
And all the sticky, crawly black stuff is awesome.
Tom
Thanks to Greg for summing up our recent exchange. I agree with his main point that we all need to test our assertions about social/economic policies -- market or not -- with empirical evidence. Three quick comments. First and most important, as an empirical matter I have a much bigger affinity for Britain and Ireland than for France, because the former, unlike the French, take the game of golf seriously. Second, although avoiding demonization of a country like France was part of my point, I was also saying that we ought to recognize that some nations' stronger safety-net policies help them do better than the U.S. on certain measures relevant to Catholic social thought. That, I think, was a response to Greg's original post asserting only the failures of welfare programs and regulations, and was not a changing of the subject. Third, some of us manage to believe both in school choice (to say nothing of the imporance of education) and in the idea that government benefits and regulations can promote human capacities, not just retard them. Or to take another example, some of us believe both that government should ensure a substantial safety net of services and benefits and that many of those should be delivered through non-govermental providers. So in terms of the Left and Right interpretations of Catholic social thought that Greg describes, I suspect that a lot of us, even on the blog, have some combination of lefty and righty views.
Tom
Thursday, May 17, 2007
While we wish R.I.P. to Jerry Falwell, it's also legitimate to debate his legacy. I have at best mixed feelings about Falwell, who I personally think emphasized some important values but was highly selective among Christian teachings, and who made some truly despicable public statements (blaming gays for 9-11, peddling videos accusing Bill Clinton of drug-related murders). [MODIFICATION: I should not downplay Falwell's leadership against abortion, and I should say "very important values" and simply "mixed feelings."] However, this editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune makes criticisms of Falwell that would earn it an F from me in a college (maybe even a high-school) persuasive writing course:
One did not have to believe in the Rapture to see that, under Falwell's leadership, huge numbers of Christians disappeared from mainstream U.S. politics. . . .
Even now, almost two decades after the Moral Majority was disbanded, Christians are divided about their proper role in the public square. Instead of helping them see what they had in common -- as, for example, Billy Graham has done for many -- Falwell urged them to focus on the issues that drove them apart. It's hard to see what's moral about that.
The Rapture thing is cute, but I have no idea what the editors are talking about, since Falwell is known for bringing fundamentalist Protestants into the mainstream political process, from which they had separated themselves for decades. Indeed, the usual criticism is that they've inappropriately taken over one of the two major political parties, not that they've "disappeared" from major-party politics. As for the ensuing paragraph about divisiveness, I'm now awaiting the Star-Trib editorials saying it's immoral for Christian clergy to denounce the Iraq war as unjust, since that's an issue that "dr[ives] Christians apart." Or that it's immoral to denounce cuts in anti-poverty programs or in taxes on the rich, since Christians disagree about those matters too.
People in public debate find endless ways to try to avoid having to take on the merits of their opponents' religiously motivated positions, Of course, the editors would have avoided these mistakes if they'd simply read RIck's great "Religion and Division" piece.
Tom
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
I didn't see Spiderman 2, and I gather all of the movies in the series are about power, responsibility, and temptation, so maybe this is old news ... but I found Spiderman 3, which our family saw this weekend, chock full of moral lessons of Christian import for kids and adults. (It's also full of too many villains and plot lines to develop well, so it's not a perfect movie, but ...) Without writing any spoilers, I can say that our hero Peter's personality is taken over by a very unwholesome influence -- but the point is, the malignant agent simply magnifies the bad tendencies he's already shown. It was a nice metaphor of how original sin is revealed and compounded by worldly temptations and social forces. There's also a lesson about our always ultimately having the choice to do good that may underestimate the power sin can have over our wills, but when that's taken together with the depiction I just mentioned of how evil is latent in us -- and starts to feel more and more comfortable the more we continue in it -- the overall moral anthropology in the movie is quite Christian. Christianity Today liked it too:
[T]he themes are as straightforward as Sunday school lessons: the dangerous allure of vengeance, the power of forgiveness, the nature of true love. There's even a church standing at the center of the movie's widening gyre, where Peter wrestles with his sinful nature, that all but guarantees Spider-Man 3 a place on Christian film-critic top ten lists for 2007. An admirable act of sacrifice during the climactic battle is sure to inspire a Christian-market spinoff book: The Gospel According to Spider-Man.
Tom
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Speaking of "Morning’s Minion" at the Reasons and Opinions blog, he has followed the Sisk/Berg debate here about France and fills in statistics on some of the points we made. Many of his numbers support my claim that while France has significant problems, we shouldn't join Greg in simply dismissing it as a "social disaster," and in some areas, especially health care and child welfare, ways its social-democratic approach produces better results than our approach. On the other hand, Morning’s Minion notes that job protections for French workers come at the expense of the young, especially Muslims, who have high unemployment rates, which is obviously a sizzling kettle that has already boiled over a few times. These judgments seem quite reasonable. My point was never that France doesn't have significant problems – only that it shouldn't be dismissed as a "social disaster," especially when we have some pretty large bits of wood in our own eyes (in addition to the other points, think of how many of our young minority men are in prison, often for minor drug offenses, and not just unemployed). I thought I caught more than a whiff in Greg’s original post of simple contempt for the French, especially (as I noted) in his casual assertion that despite electing a president who promised economic liberalization, the French will never make adjustments (because, after all, they’re the French). There’s been plenty of demonization of France in the air recently, and it’s no better than the demonization of America by French and other European pundits (cataloged, e.g., in this book). But I accept Greg’s assurance to me that this was not his goal, and that he chose to write about France because of the recent election.
Greg's latest post connects reliance on government to the loss of faith in France. He doesn't explain the mechanism, but I'll grant the point: reliance on government services can reduce people's reliance on church-related schools or social services, and thus can (primarily in the former case) undercut the transmission and reproduction of the faith. That’s why I believe that religious schools and social services should be able to participate in government benefits programs, and why I’d like to see government ensure a level of assistance through taxes but rely on a variety of providers to deliver the services. Unfortunately for Greg's simple argument, though, the French, like Europeans in general, give much more state assistance to religious K-12 schools than we do, and their social-democratic attitudes have a lot to do with that: they believe that positive government action can promote freedom, in this case freedom among educational options. By contrast, our more negative attitude to taxing and spending explains in part why opposition to state aid to religious schools has been so strong in America: more of us think that state aid must be an imposition on taxpayers rather than a facilitation of families’ freedom. (The French state aid, however, does have the problem of coming with lots of strings that have harmed the distinctiveness and autonomy of French Catholic schools.)
Finally, although I agree that growth of government can reduce religious vigor, it seems to me we have to recognize that the loss of Christian faith in France, and Europe generally, has had a lot of other causes. One was that for many decades before and after the French Revolution, the Church became historically associated with only one part of society (most the aristocracy and rural citizens) and one part of the political spectrum. De Tocqueville had France especially in mind when he commended American Christianity for not getting too tied to one political party and thus losing the ability to reach half the population. A second major factor was that the terrible destruction of lives and land from two world wars – effects of a kind and size that we never suffered here – made doubt in a providential God much more severe and widespread among Europeans. Cf. Reinhold Niebuhr’s description in The Irony of American History of how Americans’ material good fortune – rich lands, the protection of two oceans – made it easier for us to believe in a providential God. It seems to me that the loss of religious faith is in significant part separate from reliance on government, or a cause of that reliance, and only in part a result of it.
Monday, May 14, 2007
From the anti-illegal-immigration commentator at CNN:
The separation of church and state in this country is narrowing. And it is the church, not the state that is encroaching. Our Constitution protects religion from the intrusion or coercion of the state. But we have precious little protection against the political adventurism of all manner of churches and religious organizations.
The leadership of the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches, as well as Jewish and even Muslim religious organizations, are driving that political adventurism as those leaders conflate religion and politics. And while there is a narrowing of the separation between church and state, there is a widening schism between the leadership of churches and religious organizations and their followers and members. . . .
This week the head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, Cardinal Roger Mahoney, basically threatened his faithful with denial of heaven if they don't support amnesty for illegal aliens. The good Cardinal said: "Anything that tears down one group of people or one person, anything that is a negative in our community, disqualifies us from being part of the eternal city."
The nation's religious leaders seem hell-bent on ignoring the separation of church and state when it comes to the politically charged issue of illegal immigration. A new coalition called Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform Wednesday will begin lobbying lawmakers with a new advertising and direct mail campaign on behalf of amnesty for illegal aliens.
Dobbs thus joins the long line of political debaters -- abortion-rights advocates, gay-rights advocates, segregationists during the 1960s -- who have tried to disqualify their opponents' religiously grounded values by invoking the separation of church and state.
Perhaps anticipating the familiar (unanswerable) argument that people's religious values can and do play a role in democratic political debate, Dobbs shifts to theology, quoting Romans 13 on the duty to submit to the governing authorities, who are ordained by God. This would make a prima facie theological case against Christians who join the illegal-alien-sanctuary movement or otherwise break or help break the immigration laws (although one would still have to deal with the claims for civil disobedience against fundamentally unjust laws). But it's not much of a case, is it, against those who petition the governing authorities to enact a law granting amnesty? That's working with the system, not rebelling against it. True, amnesty would be a law granting forgiveness from previous law violations (under certain conditions), but if the governing authorities could never take any such action we wouldn't have bankruptcy laws, truth and reconciliation commissions, executive pardons, and probably several other features of legal systems that don't come to my mind offhand. The advisability of granting amnesty in the context of immigration reform is a legitimate matter for debate, as is the question whether bishops and other clergy have accurately interpreted their traditions in pushing for it as a legislative priority. But Romans 13 and the separation of church and state are both beside the point.
Tom
Saturday, May 12, 2007
I noted that in Richard's cogently-put argument for a Catholic school refusing to have as commencement speaker a noted figure who is pro-abortion-rights, the only alternative Richard suggested to recognize such a person's contributions to the pursuit of truth was to pit them in a debate against someone else (Cuomo vs. Hyde, Singer vs. George, Sobrino vs. Pope). If this is the only alternative, schools would forego every such speaker who was unwilling or too costly to go into a debate format (a significant restriction, even if one argues it's worth bearing). RIchard also puts these people into debates over the very issue at which they're at odds with the official Church teachings (Singer on infanticide, Sobrino on liberation theology). He doesn't mention a situation like a conference keynote address or a stand-alone lecture on a non-abortion topic where the speaker is in sync with (even quite admirable to) the Church, and is not a general honoree (although the featuring itself involves a kind of honoring). E.g., Al Gore keynoting a conference or lecturing separately on global warming (see Zenit, May 12, 2007, for the Vatican's view on the moral seriousness of this problem, and stipulate for argument's sake that Gore's position on it is generally quite admirable). RIchard's not mentioning this situation as an alternative makes me wonder if he or others see it as no different than the commencement speaker or award recipient.
A related question, as 2008 approaches, is whether there is an objection to inviting a pro-abortion-rights officeholder or candidate in the relevant jurisdiction in his/her status as the officeholder/candidate (given appropriately equal visits by other candidates), not as an honoree.
I raise these questions because we've had discussions of them at St. Thomas.
Tom
Friday, May 11, 2007
My colleague Greg makes some good points about the economic and social problems of France and the unsustainability of a number of its current practices. But for me at least, the post loses a lot of credibility by painting things in such black and white terms, dismissing France overall as a "disaster" and suggesting that there is no middle point -- and no case for a middle point -- lying somewhere between where the U.S. and France are now, or learning something from each system.
(Let's set aside the loss of Christian faith, which we can all agree is very bad in spiritual terms.) The France that Greg condemns as a "social disaster" has the problems he identifies, but it also, as compared with the United States, has lower abortion rates, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality rates, and lower homicide rates. The relation of a generous social-welfare system to such figures is not 1 to 1, but it is there. Whatever one says about the costs of the social-welfare system, the benefits that it provides for child-raising -- both for women at home and women in the busainess workplace -- have contributed to a fertility rate that is higher than virtually everywhere else in Europe (and very close to the U.S., bucking the general European trend of low fertility). A lot of what we save in social welfare spending is eaten up in our much more expensive health-care system. And while productivity per worker is less in France than in the US, productivity per hour worked is comparable or slightly higher, fitting with the idea that the French accept lower economic performance overall in return for simply working less and having more leisure and family time. Again, I'm not saying the French approach is right and the US wrong -- and it's likely that their current point on the trade-off curve is not sustainable -- but Greg's post seems not to recognize any conflict of values or considerations here whatsoever.
I think that among the insights Catholic social thought should give us, stemming from the recognition of original sin, is an acknowedgment of the imperfections of all social and economic systems and the inevitable trade-offs between them. I don't see that in Greg's post; for him, the problems are entirely on one side. And his curt dismissal of the idea that France might ever make reasonable adjustments in its system toward more productivity and risk -- as e.g. the US, Britain, and some of the Scandinavian countries have done over the years -- strikes me as simple France-bashing.
Finally, Greg's slippery-slope arguments against welfare policies might be valid, but they might not. The nature of slippery-slope arguments, of course, is that they use the prospect of bad results down the line to prevent you from doing something now that is justified taken alone. For example, one might say, paralleling Greg's logic, that we should never invade a nation (say, Afghanistan) to respond to an attack on us (like 9-11), because if we do we'll get too sanguine about the idea of war and start, to paraphrase Greg, "careening toward the [moral] and [geo-political] disaster that is [the Iraq War]." (Gee, maybe that's one instance where the French turned out to have gotten something right.)
Tom
Sunday, May 6, 2007
The Christian Legal Society's estimable Center for Law and Religious Freedom (for which Rick and I serve on an advisory board) has a new blog devoted mostly to religious freedom issues.
Tom
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