I enjoyed this piece, "Friendship in a Time of Cyberattack," by my theorist-and-theologian friend (and fellow Duke Blue Devils fan!), Mike Baxter. Pope Francis, Guardini, Pieper, Berry, Simon, and MacIntyre all make appearances in Mike's discussion of friendship, time, technology, the university, and the polis. Here's just a little bit:
What the cyberattack did for us at Regis is open up the possibility of recognizing how our life and work together is so deeply dependent on digital technology and to consider the ways it could be enhanced by making ourselves less dependent on it. . . .
The cyberattack also created commonality between faculty and students, for we were in the same boat, with emails failing, assignments not posting, tests and exams running late. More importantly, there was a more personal touch to the interactions between students and faculty. Papers were graded by hand, in the penmanship of the grader. With no email, more students came by during office hours to ask about something. And there was a deeper sense that class was going to occur in the classroom, with everyone together, rather than dispersed through list-servers, online bulletin boards, and such. Finally, most importantly, it created common ground among faculty, for the simple fact that there was more time, what with fewer meetings, no department and college wide assessments to do, and so on; and with more time comes more conversations about what we are teaching and working on. An added factor here was that with on-line resources down, intellectual conversation is more likely to occur locally, which can be surprisingly fruitful. In other words, with our on-line capacities down, we were less able to have conversations with colleagues across the country and found ourselves drawn more into talking with colleagues down the hall or in the building across the quad.
In these (and other) ways we found ourselves gifted with the time and space for cultivating or renewing friendships in all the varieties and permutations discussed by Aristotle: utility, pleasure, among equals, among those older and younger, and, most importantly, true friendship, based on a common pursuit of the good. . . .
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Here is a short chapter I wrote -- a bit outside of my usual writing-area -- for a forthcoming volume called Christianity and the Criminal Law, on "Attempts, Complicity, Virtue, and the Limits of Law." The abstract:
The law and doctrines of criminal attempts and complicity illustrate the longstanding and fundamental tenet of Anglo-American criminal law that the blame and condemnation of the political community, which gives criminal punishment its distinctive character, attaches primarily to actors’ states of mind rather than to the harms they cause or results they bring about. This focus on blameworthy states of mind both reflects and has been shaped by the similar emphasis in Christian scripture, tradition, and moral teaching. And so, an examination of criminal attempts and complicity is an opportunity to explore Christianity’s influence on the theory, content, and operation of the criminal law. It also reminds us of a central Christian concern that is and has been located, for the most, outside the scope of the criminal law: Christian moral teaching not only enjoins the avoidance of wrongful acts, but also the cultivation and practice of virtue. A Christian life of discipleship, it has been said, “is not simply about performing certain types of actions. It is a vocation, a transformation of one’s very self.” However, this aretaic dimension of Christian morality and moral theology, unlike the nexus between culpability and choice, is difficult to find in the criminal law, which is inclined more toward proscribing acts than prescribing character, more toward forbidding bad conduct than facilitating good character, more toward deterring decisions than transforming selves. It is worth asking why.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
This Wall Street Journal piece -- which is, I gather, a condensed version of a forthcoming book -- "Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite", by Michael Lind, is worth a read and might well be of interest to MOJ readers and people interested in Catholic approaches to "the social question." A lot of it echoes things that (many) others have been saying lately -- Chris Arnade, Rusty Reno, Tim Carney, J.D. Vance, Robert Putnam, etc., etc. Two things that struck me (in a good way) were (1) Lind's recognition that, even in the context of this debate, it makes sense to distinguish between public-employee unions and private labor unions, given that the former tend increasingly to reflect and advance the interests of those Lind calls "the managerial elite" at the expense of less mobile and credentialed people and (2) his implicit (I wish it were explicit!) acknowledgement that getting past some of our current polarization and pathologies will require policies that make it possible for traditional religious believers to have meaningful access to alternatives to "public school monopolies" for the education of their children.
Friday, January 10, 2020
My friend and colleague Gerard Bradley has a Public Discourse essay up, which is worth a read, called "Learning from Integralism." A bit:
[T]he First Amendment stipulates that the truth or falsity of putatively revealed propositions is beyond the scope of authoritative resolution by those with care of our political society. The First Amendment does not say, or suppose, or even suggest that all such propositions are in reality somehow equally true (or false), or that they have at most the “truth” of poetry, or that all such alleged revelations are fantastical or mere human projections. Not at all: the First Amendment was ratified by a population that took the tenets of natural and revealed religion most seriously. It has been supported by countless Americans—notably including America’s Catholics—since. By recognizing and affirming the truths of natural religion—including the truth that a divine entity created what there is and sustains it in being out of providential care for humanity—America’s political leaders implicitly endorsed the entailment that such a divine entity would communicate somehow with humankind. They endorsed, in other words, the proposition that genuine revelation is not only possible, but likely.
Monday, January 6, 2020
Here is an interesting opinion piece, by Thomas Hibbs, which discusses (among other things) the work of my Notre Dame colleagues at the Lab for Economic Opportunities. A bit:
We all understand poverty is a problem, one that can seem intractable and inevitable. But what if the way we have approached poverty has been wrong for years, for generations even?
There’s evidence it might be.
The traditional model of the American social service industry has long been a one-size-fits-all approach that treats the symptoms of poverty — transportation, child care, food insecurity — but does nothing to address the cause. The result traps the poor in a never-ending cycle of dependency and stigma, creating repeat customers.
That scathing indictment comes not from a critic of the war on poverty but from one of its most passionate advocates.
