Good Lord, set in thy Church strong and mightly pillars that may suffer and endure great labours, which also shall not fear persecution, neither death, but always suffer with a good will, slanders, shame and all kinds of torments, for the glory and praise of thy holy Name.
By this manner, good Lord, the truth of thy Gospel shall be preached throughout the world.
Therefor, merciful Lord, exercise thy mercy, show it indeed upon thy Church.
I very much enjoyed this essay, by Miroslav Volf (Yale), called "Life Worth Living: Christian Faith and the Crisis of the Universities." Among other things, it engages my friend and teacher Tony Kronman's important book, Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Here's just a bit:
What is lost when the exploration of life worth living gets squeezed out of the university? For one, the university's character changes. In terms of the main thrust of what universities are about, they become a combination of research institutes and vocational schools. As research institutes, universities seek to explain how the world and various swaths of it function and to apply the knowledge gained to mastery over the world. As vocational schools, universities prepare students for jobs, which are increasingly knowledge based.
As sites of research, application of knowledge, and training, universities are immensely important. But if this were all there was to them, they would be seriously deficient. In research and vocational training, the most basic question is "How?" - how things (from galaxies to subatomic particles, and everything in between) work, and how to make things work for our benefit. Reason is employed for explanatory and instrumental purposes. Answering "How?" as we seek to achieve our goals is important. So is answering "What?" as we stand in wonder before the world. But perhaps the most characteristic question for humans is neither "How?" nor "What?" but "To what end?" To what end do we seek to advance knowledge and invent new technologies? To what end do we work from dusk to dawn, whatever our jobs are?
Centred on research and vocational training, universities are about cognition and instrumental rationality only, not about moral norms and meanings. They teach students how to achieve whatever ends they themselves or others set for them, but not how to evaluate and chose wisely among possible ends. Experts in means, they then remain amateurs in ends. With cognitive and instrumental prowess, they blindly follow their "preferences" bereft of reflexive standards or norms with which to evaluate them; they seek to satisfy their desires without having explored what is genuinely desirable and why. . . .
. . . The Christian faith can help universities build robust humanities programs in which the question of life worth living figures prominently. This may in fact be the most important contribution that the Christian faith has to make to the flourishing of universities, just as participating vigorously in the public debate on life worth living might be the most important contribution to public life more broadly. . . .
The Becket Fund reports that "the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Europe’s final arbiter of human rights disputes, decided 9-8 today that the autonomy rights of religious institutions—here, the Catholic Church—trump the rights of religion teachers to mount a public attack on church teachings." What is amazing, and unsettling, to me, is that the decision was so close. Apparently, at least one judge wrote an . . . interesting dissent: "In a remarkable dissent from the Court’s decision today, the ECHR judge appointed by the government of Russia, Dmitry Dedov, directly attacked the Catholic Church and its practice of priestly celibacy, calling the practice “totalitarianism” and adding his opinion that “the celibacy rule contradicts the idea of fundamental human rights and freedoms.”"
My friend and colleague Dan Philpott has a nice, short piece up at the Open Democracy site, making the case that there are "no human rights without God." (MOJ readers will remember that Michael Perry has pressed this argument in several works (here, for example)).
This essay, by Roger Scruton (follow him on Twitter!), "The Good of Government: American Conservatives Need a Positive View of Government" seems an important intervention not only in the conversation about "radical" v. "liberal" "conservative" Catholics, but also in the one about Catholicism and "libertarianism." Check it out.
From David Bentley Hart, in May's issue of First Things, responding to Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker: "[W]e have reached a moment in Western history when, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief and unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do. . . .Principled unbelief was once a philosophical passion and moral adventure, with which it was worthwhile to contend. Now, perhaps, it is only so much bad intellectual journalism, which is to say, gossip, fashion, theatrics, trifling prejudice. Perhaps this really is the way the argument ends--not with a bang but a whimper."
. . . which reminds me of this essay, in a March issue of Commonweal, by Terry Eagleton: "An Unbelieving Age: Nietzsche's Challenge and the Christian Response."
A nice point, from the December 2013 issue of First Things, from Rusty Reno: "Where family limits from below, religion limits rom above. Faith makes a claim -- the claim -- on our loyalty. . . . Rousseau saw how the Christian faith divides our loyalties. We can be citizens, yes, but we must be disciples first. . . . He rejected this divided loyalty as a threat to genuine freedom, which to his way of thinking requires an integral and all-powerful government that can give full and unlimited expression to the general will of the people."
In the April issue of First Things, Rusty Reno writes -- in the course of a discussion about my colleague George Marsden's new book, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment - about the "paradox of modern democratic society: The more individualistic our culture, the more powerful and all-pervasive government becomes. We want a very strong and robust state to guarantee our freedoms . . .." (I am assuming, or perhaps just hoping, that making or endorsing this observation does not make one an un-Catholic "libertarian.")
Later, he writes that "the consensus of consensus liberalism is the consensus of the powerful, and so it's essential that liberalism should rule. That's why it so loudly announces itself as the arbiter and manager of pluralism without every allowing itself to be a constituent."
About a year ago, I announced that "The Lord of Heaven and Earth" -- a statement on law written and signed by two dozen Catholic and Evangelical law professors -- had been published in the Journal of Christian Legal Thought. Here's a bit more on the project:
Over the last eight years, many of us met at several meetings to get to know one another, learn about our histories, and draft this document. We had some amazing collaborators. We met for a weekend at Notre Dame with historians John McGreevy and George Marsden. They traced our communities’ history of conflict (mostly) and collaboration (more recently) on the subject of law. Then we met at Pepperdine with philosopher/theologians Bradley Lewis, Dallas Willard, Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, and Oliver O’Donovan. They helped us think through both our overlapping and conflicting ideas about law. Then we met for major drafting sessions at Villanova and New Orleans. The major drafting oars went to (volunteers) Patrick Brennan and Bill Brewbaker. The attached document is the product of their work, with input from the broad range of people who attended our meetings and commented on earlier drafts. And, at law year's Lumen Christi / Christian Law Professors Fellowship meeting at the AALS, we had a really productive panel at which scholars from a variety of faith traditions reacted to, and thoughtfully criticized, the statement.
Our plan was always to publish it also -- ideally, at the same time, but a year seems close enough! -- in Villanova's Journal of Catholic Social Thought. Well, it's out now in that journal, too, and you can download it here: Download ECT in JCST.
I suppose I am a little bit biased, but I agree entirely with Michael Sean Winters that Lost Classroom, Lost Community, by Profs. Nicole Stelle Garnett and Margaret Brinig is an outstanding book. Read his glowing review here, and then go buy the book here.
