Monday, October 29, 2012
"The Paul Ryan Controversy in Historical Context"
Matthew Shadle, at Catholic Moral Theology, has an interesting post up, which aims to provide some historical background and context for the "Paul Ryan controversy" and which notes, among other things, that Catholics have, in the past, had to think about how to deal and cooperate with (or not) "alien ideologies." Like Rep. Ryan's critics, and the authors of the On All Our Shoulders statement, I agree that Rand-style "objectivism", and also certain forms of "libertarianism", are in serious tension with the Christian proposal; I do not think, though, that the "Ryan is a Randian!" charge is accurate or helpful, or that Catholic Social Teaching is necessarily statist, or that there is not ample room in the CST tradition for correctly-understood (i.e., understood in Christian-anthropology terms, not in atomistic or Randian terms) individualism. Putting that all aside, though, I thought the post was thought-provoking.
Abortion and "extremism"
Recent comments by Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock have provided an occasion for some candidates and activists to recycle, for presidential-election purposes, the "anti-abortion extremism!" charge. I think it is worth remembering, though -- Charles Reid's recent argument notwithstanding -- which of the two major-party candidates' views and record on abortion actually are "extreme".
Friedman on being "pro-life"
Thomas Friedman took a break from extolling the virtues of Chinese-style authoritarianism to explain what it really means to be "pro-life," and why -- given what it really means -- he is. He goes beyond the (in my view, not persuasive) arguments of Charles Reid and others that a vote for Obama is, in fact, a "pro-life" vote because -- despite his opposition to providing legal protection or meaningful moral status to unborn children -- his policies are likely to result, on balance, in fewer abortions. (I think this prediction is quite flawed, but that's another matter.)
For Friedman, it turns out that being "pro-life" has not much to do with one's views on abortion, and instead means (my words) "supporting policies that will result, all things considered, in more total life-days -- that is, in more people living longer than they otherwise would." So, "being pro-life" involves, for example, supporting regulations of unhealthy sugar-rich sodas and dramatic policies aimed at reducing the predicted impacts of climate change.
Now, it is true, I think, that the reasons one has for opposing abortion are reasons that also should affect one's views on other issues. Abortion is wrong when and because it is the unjustified killing of an innocent, vulnerable human person; other unjustified killings of innocent, vulnerable human persons are also wrong. But (as Friedman is smart enough that he should know), the abortion "issue" is not one of mere vitalism; to say that reducing the speed limit and regulating abortion are "pro-life" in the same way because both result in fewer deaths is, well, obtuse. Kind of like celebrating Chinese-style authoritarianism.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
A great story about a great program
Read a wonderful piece about Notre Dame's outstanding, game-changing Alliance for Catholic Education (A.C.E.) program, in The New York Times (!!), here:
Devoting themselves to society’s overlooked and left-behind, voluntarily accepting a wage of $1,000 a month that is roughly at the federal poverty line, living in intentional Christian households, the 1,600 teachers produced by ACE in its 19-year history have formed the 21st-century equivalent of the sisters and brothers from Catholic religious orders whose sacrifices for decades sustained the American parochial school system.“Perhaps the ACErs were an anticipation of what the religious life would look like in the next generation,” the priest and author Andrew M. Greeley wrote in his novel “The Bishop at the Lake.”
The Rev. Nathan Wills, a former ACE teacher who recently visited with the Tucson cohort, looked backward for an analogy. “It’s a reflection of the disciples,” he said. “This is what the apostles did when Jesus sent them to teach. They set up communities in the midst of difficult circumstances.” . . .
Ryan on poverty and civil society
At Catholic Voices, Kim Daniels has this post, about Rep. Paul Ryan's speech on "the importance of civil society in the fight against poverty." Among other things, Daniels writes that "[w]hile admitting that Republicans don't always do a good job speaking to these issues, Ryan rejected as a straw man the idea that the GOP ticket believes 'everybody should just fend for themselves.' Instead he laid out a vision rooted in Catholic ideas about the importance of community, civil society, and the need to strike a balance between government and private action."
With respect to the same speech, Matt Boudway has this, at Commonweal; Donald McClarey discusses it here, at The American Catholic; and the NYT's least interesting columnist, Charles Blow, has this.
Esolen on Public and Religious Education
An excellent essay, at Public Discourse, by Anthony Esolen, "Public and Religious Education: L'Etat C'est Tout". From the conclusion:
It is a mistake to believe that a totalitarian State regulates all the actions of its individual members. The Communist Party, says [Whittaker] Chambers, encouraged promiscuity; and certainly the public schools of Providence do not discourage it with any effectiveness. Individuals may well be granted great leeway in habits that destroy the competitors to the State: the family, the community, and the churches. We drive “government” out of the bedroom, by which we mean that common people will have no say in the most determinative matter of their common life, in order the more firmly to entrench the State in the living room, the classroom, the town hall, and the sanctuary. For the State does not want to keep separate from the churches. It wants to absorb them.
Arkes, "Is Religious Freedom a 'Natural Right'?"
At Right Reason, Prof. Hadley Arkes considers whether religious freedom is a "natural right." A taste:
. . . How is there anything, in the mandates on contraception, that is aptly countered by a claim of "religious freedom" standing against the law? Bishop Lori and his brother bishops, accomplished men that they are, were not able to break out of this box. The heart of the problem, again, is that they have not been able to explain whether the freedom they are asserting is really grounded in reason, in an understanding of natural right, or whether they are claiming to be aggrieved distinctly as Catholics and theists by an assault on matters of "faith" that are not shared with everyone else in the population. What is missing is precisely the account offered by John Paul II on Catholicism constituted both by faith and reason: There was the revelation to the Jews, enlarged by the revelation of Christ and his mission, but fortified as John Paul II said, by the tradition of Greek philosophy. He remarked in Fides et Ratio that it fell to the "fathers of philosophy to bring to light the link between reason and religion." . . .
He concludes with this:
Without that underlying moral understanding and the doctrines of natural law, it would be impossible to explain a regime in which a system of law is built upon a body of first principles forming a fundamental law (or a "constitution"). Without that accompanying faith it would be hard to explain why we seem to think that human beings, wherever we find them, will have an equal claim to our sympathy and respect; that they are made in the image of something higher; that they are creatures of reason who deserve to be ruled with the rendering reasons for the laws imposed on them. Without all of that, it becomes harder to explain why we can accord to them the standing of "bearers of rights" flowing to them by nature. In short, then, without the moral understanding sustained now mainly by the religious, it would be hard to take seriously the notion that there are natural rights that command our respect because they are grounded in truths about "the human person." That is the case for religion as a natural right, and the measure of our desperation is that, in the current state of our public life, the bishops find the gravest test of their preparation and learning as they try to explain the matter to their own public in a post-literate age.
There's a lot more, so read the whole thing.
The wrongheaded wedge between "social issues" and social justice"
The National Catholic Reporter passes on the news that, according to a new study, "Catholics would prefer bishops to focus on social justice issues even if it means less emphasis on abortion. While that view is held strongly by Catholics who attend church only occasionally, 'the most striking finding, and one that may surprise many leaders in the church, is that Catholics who attend church once a week or more also express a strong preference for an emphasis on social justice over abortion,' the report states."
The study goes on to report some other findings about Catholics' political plans and preferences. It is, in my view, unfortunate that so many Catholics appear to have internalized a distinction -- one that might be politically useful for one "side" in American politics, but is not true to the Gospel or to Catholic Social Teaching -- between the Church's "social justice" teachings, including the preferential option for the poor, and the Church's clear (if less popular in some quarters) insistence on the equal dignity and inviolability of every person, no matter how small. A society that spends lots of money feeding the poor, while legally classifying some vulnerable people as less-than-people, and as unprotected from others' violence, is not a just society (just as a society that had a just abortion-law regime but ignored the real needs of the poor would be an unjust society).
Bishop Flores on religious freedom
One of the members of the bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty is Bishop Daniel Flores, from Texas. Here (HT: Distinctly Catholic) is an excellent lecture he gave, a week ago, on religious freedom, the problems with the HHS mandate, and also the problems with some illegal-immigration-related legislation. A bit:
The Church has a responsibility to defend the prerogatives of reason, and of opening up the perceptibility of the true and the good, and the beautiful. In some ways this theme dominates the writings of Pope Benedict 16. The Regensburg address was all about defending reason as capable of attaining to the truth. Western culture, though, has adopted a naked skepticism about the power of reason to read reality adequately well so as to inform political decisions based on a standard of justice.
The reason the popular good has replaced the common good as the focus of political discourse is that to discuss the common good you have to think reason can adjudicate reality fairly in most big issues. Justice relies on a judgment of reason. With the decline of confidence in reason, has come a collapse of political discourse about the good and the just into the single criterion of the popular will. Hence most all the effort and energy of the public discourse aims at shaping at least the perception of what the popular will might be.
The “public sphere” as Charles Taylor describes it, is the media and social matrix where the public appears to talk to itself.[4] It is currently dominated by efforts to define the good in terms of popular consensus, real or imagined. This, however, takes place in a public social context that ignores religion as a merely private concern, a context that is skeptical of reason, and is driven by the aims of molding popular perceptions of the good. This is what I mean by the shift in public secularity. . . .
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
John Paul II and the Law: A First Try
Here's a post I did, the day after Blessed Pope John Paul II's death, back in April of 2005:
I'm sure that many of us are reflecting on the effect that the Holy Father had on our faith and lives, and thanking God for the gift of his ministry and example. It also makes sense, here on MOJ, for us to consider what the Pope's work and thought might mean for law and legal theory. A few thoughts:
First, many of the Pope's writings focus on the importance of culture as the arena in which human persons live, thrive, and search for truth. His was not a reductionist Christianity -- one in which the choices and hopes of persons drop out of the analysis, and are replaced merely by one "dialectic" or another. Nor is Christianity merely a matter of a rightly ordered interior life. We are precious and particular, bearing the "weight of glory," but also social, relational, political -- and cultural. And, he recognized, law both shapes and is shaped by culture.
Second, the Pope returned again and again to the theme of freedom. Certainly, for lawyers -- and particularly for lawyers living and working in our constitutional democracy -- questions about the extent to which law can and should liberate (and, perhaps, liberate-by-restraining?) are appropriately on the front burner. It's fair to say that John Paul II proposed an understanding of freedom -- and of its connection with (T)ruth -- that contrasts instructively with the more libertarian, self-centered understanding that seems ascendant in our law (particularly our constitutional law) today.
Third, I imagine we will be working out for decades the implications of the Pope's proposal that the God-given dignity of the human person, and the norm of love, richly understood, should occupy center-stage in our conversations about morality -- rather than utilitarian calculations, historical movements, or supposed categorical imperatives. This proposal seems particularly powerful when it comes to the matter of religious freedom.
Finally, there is the (perhaps, at first) surprising fact that, at the end of the 20th Century, it was a mystical Pope who "stepped up" and reminded a world that had been distracted, or perhaps chastened, by reason's failures, and had embraced a excessively modest, post-modern skepticism, of the dignity and proper ends (without overlooking the limits) of reason.
There's a lot more to say, of course. I would, for what it's worth, encourage any MOJ readers who work with or advise law journals to consider commissioning essays, or even symposia, on John Paul II's jurisprudential legacy.
Rick
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