"Murray's Mistake" is the title of this essay, by my friend and former colleague, Mike Baxter, who now teaches in Catholic Studies department at DePaul. A former Hauerwas student, and a longtime critic of liberalism generally and the "Murray project" specifically, argues that:
[A] schism has arisen within the Catholic community in the United States over the proper attitude toward the established polity. The schism is between those Catholics in the United States who identify with liberal politics and those who identify with conservative politics in the secular sphere. The division is pervasive and deep, and it is tearing the U.S. Catholic community apart.
The division between these groups of Catholics is a consequence of Catholics’ performing the role Father Murray assigned to them. . . .
[These divisions] are generated by the national policy agenda that he urged Catholics to pursue. The problem is that in setting out to transform politics in the United States, Catholics have been transformed by it. . . .
The lesson to be learned is this: those who set out to manage the modern state get managed by the modern state. In heeding this lesson, Father Murray’s story of Catholicism and America will have to be revised. . . .
As it happens, Mike also discusses in the paper Murray's "dualistic political theory" and his use of Pope Gelasius's "Two There Are" formulation, both of which have had a great deal of influence on my own thinking. In fact, my paper on "The Freedom of the Church" was first presented at a Villanova conference, on Murray, at which Mike Baxter also presented. Time flies . . .
Anyway . . . read the whole thing for Baxter's concluding suggestions (spoiler: MacIntyre and Aquinas are key). For my own part, I think almost everything Baxter says is correct, and cannot avoid the force of what I take to be his implicit challenge to folks (like me) who think that Murray's "dualistic" theory regarding religious and political authority still has a lot to offer. That said, and agreeing entirely with Baxter (and MacIntyre) that the hard work of building authentic human communities has to focus on non-state and / or local and / or pre-political associations, spaces, and activities, I do not see it as a plausible alternative for Catholics to simply walk away from engagement with the modern state (even if Murray was overly optimistic about our place in the "consensus" about how that state should operate).
This essay, "Crimes Against Humanities", is long, but well worth reading -- especially, I think, if one is a high-level administrator of, or generous benefactor of, an institution of higher education.
That's the (ponderous, I admit) title of this essay of mine, over at Public Discourse, on the work of Jean Bethke Elshtain. A bit:
Law is “of, by, and for” the people—for real human persons. The project of promoting persons’ flourishing—their real goods—will, necessarily, proceed on the basis of some “anthropological” assumptions about what it means to be human, about who and what people are, and about what they are made for. The project can only succeed if these assumptions are true. . . .
In this essay, "The End of American Protestantism," Stanley Hauerwas has some characteristically provocative things to say about America, Americans, liberalism, and Christianity. Here's a taste:
. . . Protestantism came to the land we now call American to make America Protestant. It was assumed that what it meant to be American and Protestant was equivalent to a faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic. But in the process the church in America became American - or, as Noll puts it, "because the churches had done so much to make America, they could not escape living with what they had made."
As a result Americans continue to maintain a stubborn belief in a god, but the god they believe in turns out to be the American god. To know or worship that god does not require that a church exist because that god is known through the providential establishment of a free people. This is a presumption shared by the religious right as well as the religious left in America. Both assume that America is the church.
Noll ends his account of these developments with the end of the Civil War, but the fundamental habits he identifies as decisive in the formation of the American religious and political consciousness continues to shape the way Christians - in particular, Protestant Christians - understand their place in America.
Yet I think we are beginning to see the loss of confidence by Protestants in their ability to sustain themselves in America, just to the extent that the inevitable conflict between the church, republicanism, and common sense morality has now worked its way out. America is the great experiment in Protestant social thought but the world Protestants created now threatens to make Protestantism unintelligible to itself. That is an obscure remark I must now try to make clear. . . .
I'll be speaking at a Constitution Day event in Springfield, Illinois on "Law, Religion, and Politics in the American Constitution and Tradition" on Tuesday, Sept. 17, at 7:00 p.m. More information is available here. If you are there or nearby, please come by and say "hello"!
Well, it's been a long time coming -- about 8 years, I think, when Bob Cochran and I met in New York with Fr. Richard Neuhaus -- but "Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Law: The Lord of Heaven and Earth" is now out. You can get it, thanks to the Journal of Christian Legal Thought, here. (It will also be published in Villanova's Journal of Catholic Social Thought). The document is called “Evangelicals and Catholics Together
on Law”, and it is signed by a dozen or so legal scholars from both faith groups.
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.
Please consider reading the statement and sharing it. Future issues of the Journal will be publishing some responses to it.
An interesting piece by Andrew Haines over at Ethika Politika on (among other things) the use of the term "traditional" in our ongoing debate about the law of marriage. Alasdair MacIntyre is (as one would hope!) discussed. I have a sense that Haines might be giving short-shrift to Burkean-type arguments about tradition, innovations, revolutions, etc., but . . . it's just a sense. Take a look.
This New York Times editorial ("Curbing Rape Behind Bars") is worth a read, and worth thinking about. My wife served on the National Commission that was established by the Prison Rape Elimination Act, discussed in the piece. The problem is serious and our (generally speaking) indifference to it -- indeed, the extent to which we joke about it in movies, and even in 7-Up Commercials! -- is shameful. It is, in my view, immoral to impose on those convicted of even the most serious crimes more or worse punishment than is legally authorized by their offense, conviction, and sentence . . . and no one is sentenced to be raped in prison. If we lock someone up, we assume a moral responsibility for his or her safety (to the extent possible). However, it is clear that, in many institutions, rape is overlooked and tolerated by "corrections" officers who see it as (among other things) a useful way to maintain discipline. (To be sure, that maintaining discipline in our prisons is such a challenge, even for well-meaning, dedicated, and humane officers, is at least in part a result of severe overcrowding, which is at least in part a result of a misguided approach to the criminalization of drugs . . . .)
