My friend and colleague, Dan Philpott (author of the outstanding God's Century) has a good piece up at the Berkeley Center's website, called "Citizens or Martyrs: The Uncertain Fate of Christians in the Arab Spring." A bit:
. . . Today, Egyptian Muslim office-seekers are divided among proponents of a strongly Islamic state and supporters of liberal rights, including religious freedom for Christians. The scenario of religious freedom, then, is plausible, too.
What can be done on behalf of Arab Christians to make this rosier scenario more likely? For its part, the U.S. government ought to use its power of economic aid and diplomatic recognition far more assertively to protect vulnerable Christians. To his credit, President Obama made religious freedom a tenet of his June 2009 speech in Cairo in which he sought to reorient U.S. relations with the Muslim world. But the response of his State Department to actual attacks on Christians has been tepid. The case for more vigorous U.S. support for Christians is in part one of human rights. But it runs wider. Protecting Christians is a matter of religious freedom, and religious freedom – for Christians as well as all minorities, including dissident Muslims – is an indispensable plank of stable, democratic regimes, a key goal of U.S. foreign policy in the region. In this highly religious part of the world, the attempts of secular dictators to suppress religion have bred violence and encouraged extremism, just as Islamist dictatorships would do were they to emerge. The middle possibility is the sort of democracy that invites the participation of religious communities and channels it in a civic direction. The protection of Christian minorities can be seen as a litmus test for such religious-friendly democracy.
For their part, Christians around the world could do far more to speak out on behalf of their beleaguered brethren. The lesson of Eastern Europe during the Cold War is that dissidents are emboldened and empowered by the support of outsiders. Christians, like the U.S. government, should realize that protection for fellow believers lies not merely in solidarity with the persecuted but in the kind of regime that protects religious freedom for all. . . .
By the way, the Berkeley Center (led by Tom Farr), is doing a lot of great religious-freedom work these days. This upcoming event -- a debate between Michael McConnell and Noah Feldman -- looks great.
A reader and attorney -- Dominique Ludvisgon -- who served for several years in the White House Office of. Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, sent me the following, with respect to the recent reports that the HHS had failed to renew a contract with the Bishops' Migration and Refugee Services office:
Based on the facts that have come out regarding Obama political appointees' interference in the grant-making process, one is left with two impressions: (1) the anti-sex trafficking program is being politicized and manipulated in service to the radical pro-choice agenda set forth by this Administration and its HHS Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius and (2) this latest development in the state's attempt to crowd out highly-qualified religious social service providers that actually adhere to the fundamental tenets of their faith reveals, among other troubling things, what little regard this Administration has for the religious liberties of individuals and religious organizations and what an utter farce the Administration's Neighborhood and Community Partnerships office is.
For years, Bush Faith-Based & Community Initiatives critics like Barry Lynn, FFRF, the ACLU and others sought to dredge up evidence of politics trumping fair grant processes and for years, those critics came up empty. When he campaigned for office and early in his Administration, President Obama (and other Admin. officials like Josh DuBois) would frequently recite the criticisms, routinely and wrongly suggesting that the Bush Administration rigged the federal grants process to "funnel" public dollars to politically favored religious groups. So in a cheap-shot attempt to differentiate this Administration's virtuous social service partnership efforts from the allegedly biased work of its predecessor, Obama EO 13559, "Fundamental Principles and Policymaking Criteria for Partnerships With Faith-Based and Other Neighborhood Organizations" contains the following provision (Section 2 (j)): "Decisions about awards of Federal financial assistance must be free from political interference or even the appearance of such interference and must be made on the basis of merit, not on the basis of the religious affiliation of a recipient organization or lack thereof."
When it rolled out its version of the FBCI, the Administration suggested that it was still open to partnering with qualified religious (as well as secular service providers), but it would do so in a fair manner. What it didn't emphasize was that, regardless of the equal treatment regulations still on the books, its version of "partnership" entailed a return to the pre-Bush FBCI era, where hostility towards committed religious providers and outmoded strains of Establishment Clause jurisprudence prevailed.
Given the fantastic performance of the USCCB in its coordination of anti-trafficking victims services in past grant years and the determination by career officials and an independent review board that it was significantly more highly qualified than at least two of the three subsequent grant awardees (who were actually deemed "unqualified"), HHS's denial of the grant to USCCB is highly suspect indeed. In fact, if one considers this case in light of the Administration's track record on religious liberties and conscience protections, it is difficult to conclude anything but that USCCB was discriminated against because of its adherence to the Catholic church's teachings regarding human dignity and sexuality. Accordingly, HHS's actions appear to be unlawfully discriminatory AND fly in the face of the Administration's own rules with respect to partnerships between faith-based organizations and government.
One success of the Bush FBCI's equal treatment efforts was to encourage agencies to revise provisions in federal grant solicitations that had no basis in law and/or were actually motivated by hostility and discrimination towards religious social service providers. Such provisions, even when neutral on their face, had very discriminatory effects in practice by stacking the deck against qualified religious organizations competing for federal grants. In this case, the Obama/Sebelius HHS directed or permitted political appointees to strategically inserting language in grant solicitations motivated by hostility toward committed religious organizations. It further directed or permitted them to skirt fair grant procedures by disregarding the considered assessment of both career officials and an independent review board as to which grant applicants would most suitably perform the services required under the grant. Such actions should provoke an outcry among those who routinely crowed about the alleged politicization of federal grant programs during the Bush Administration. Where are all those critical voices now?
Over at Distinctly Catholic, Michael Sean Winters is also, I think, critical of the decision, but is not convinced that the denial is part of a larger "anybody but Catholics" attitude at HHS. We'll see.
I should note that Winters has a number of posts, in recent days, reflecting on law, culture, and religious liberty . . . and the new evangelization. Check them out.
Here is an updated announcement about the Religiously Affiliated Law Schools conference, which is being held this year at Touro and organized by Prof. Sam Levine:
On May 2-4, 2012, Touro Law Center will host the biennial Conference of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools. The Conference will explore a variety of important issues related to the general theme of "The Place of Religion in the Law School, the University, and the Practice of Law." Specific topics of discussion will include, among others: the relationship between the religiously affiliated law school and the university; bringing religion into the classroom; law and religion programs and institutes; and the role of religion in the work of public interest lawyers.
Along with the formal Conference proceedings, there will be time for informal discussions among participants, on these and other issues of common interest.
“We are excited to host this conference at Touro Law, particularly since it is the first time the conference will be hosted at a law school with a Jewish affiliation,” said Samuel J. Levine, Professor of Law and Director of the Jewish Law Institute at Touro Law Center. “We look forward to a meaningful conference that will have a positive and lasting impact.”
Nicholas Kristof, in the New York Times, has a "solution to many of the global problems that confront us, from climate change to poverty to civil wars . . . It’s called family planning, and it has been a victim of America’s religious wars." As he puts it, "family planning became tarnished by overzealous and coercive programs in China and India, and contraception became entangled in America’s abortion wars."
Christopher White responds, here, with some different proposals for how to meet the needs of the world's poor, especially women and young girls.
In mid-October Egyptian media published news of an altercation between Muslim and Christian students over a classroom seat at a school in Mallawi, Minya province, reports Michael Ireland, Senior Correspondent, ASSIST News Service.
Egyptian journalist Mary Abdelmassih, writing for AINA -- Assyrian International News Agency -- www.aina.org, says the altercation lead to the murder of a Christian student.
AINA says the media portrayed the incident as non-sectarian. However, Copts Without Borders, a Coptic news website, refuted this version and was first to report that the Christian student was murdered because he was wearing a crucifix.
As Nina Shea put it, a few months ago, the so-called "Arab Spring" "has not been kind" to Egypt's Christian minority.
In a few days, some people (not me!) will be "celebrating" Guy Fawkes Day (or Bonfire Night). (Aside: This day was commemorated in my public school, when I was in first grade.) Reading this BBC piece about my (very distant) relative, Henry Garnet, S.J., would be a better use of time than firecrackers. Free the Gunpowder Plot One!
Anthony Esolen has a nice piece at Public Discourse on the necessity of authority for human flourishing. He contends, among other things, "no genuinely human reform of education is possible unless we are willing to cast aside an essentially inhuman egalitarianism." There's a lot more going on, so read the whole thing. I hope that Patrick Brennan, who edited an excellent volume on the subject of "authority," will weigh in!
Sometimes, when I am in conversations with people about the abortion issue generally, and the importance of protecting the conscience of health-care professionals more specifically, I am told that it is unrealistic or overblown to worry about doctors or nurses being "forced to do abortions." "That," I am assured, "would never happen. But they should have to refer patients to others, etc."
Now, it appears that a hospital in New Jersey has adopted a policy according to which nurses must either assist in elective abortions or be fired. This is outrageous, and it strikes me that it is probably also illegal. But, is it also a glimpse of things to come?
In "The Ethics of a World at 7 billion", available here, at the Washington Post, Prof. Charles Camosy notes that this latest population milestone is being used / exploited in a variety of ways and concludes:
[T]he lesson to learn from this milestone, especially for those who have a religious motivation to aid the poor and care for the earth, is not that we should impose a secular, Western understanding of reproductive control on poor people of color in the global south. This is a new kind of colonialism. Instead, we should take a hard look at the everyday choices we make and how they affect the earth. This benchmark offers us a chance to honestly examine our lifestyles and see if they can be offered to a God who demands good stewardship of the Earth and its resources.
So long as Camosy does not mean by this (but I fear he does!) that we should stop eating meat (says the guy with the Friday reservation at Ruth's Chris) . . . hear, hear! I would add, though: It is sometimes the policy proposals of people who claim to be acting in the interests of, and caring about, "the [e]arth", its ecosystems, the natural environment, etc., that make it more difficult to feed the world's poor and vulnerable. We should look critically at such proposals, and ask -- do they really serve the interests of the vulnerable, or do they serve instead to promote our aesthetics and sense of self-satisfaction?
UPDATE: Joel Kotkin observes, on the occasion of this milestone, that overpopulation is not, in fact, "the problem" . . . it's "too few babies." (Kotkin unfortunately tip-toes past the elephant when he refers to Deng Xiaoping’s "rightful concern about overpopulation at the end of the Mao era[.]") Commenting on declining birthrates, and the increasing number of women who report plans to have no children, he concludes:
If this trend gains momentum, we may yet witness one of the greatest demographic revolutions in human history. As larger portions of the population eschew marriage and children, today’s projections of old age dependency ratios may end up being wildly understated. More important, the very things that have driven human society from primitive time — such as family and primary concern for children — will be shoved ever more to the sidelines. Our planet may be less crowded and frenetic, but, as in many of our child-free environments, a little bit sad and lot less vibrant.
Our future may well prove very different from the Malthusian dystopia widely promoted in the 1960s and still widely accepted throughout the media. With fewer children and workers, and more old folks, the “population bomb” end up being more of an implosion than an explosion.
I worry that "shoved to the sidelines" might understate the matter.
Prof. Charles Camosy, who blogs at Catholic Moral Theology (link), has a piece in the latest Commonweal on the "evolution" of Peter Singer. He writes, "[C]an Christian ethicists talk with Peter Singer—and can he talk with them? Are they even intelligible to one another? The answer, it turns out, is yes." Later in the piece, Camosy adds:
Until recently, Singer’s theory would have forced him to describe persons as merely self-aware bundles of contingent preferences, but his recent shift [RG: described in the essay] creates new space for models of personhood that are compatible with Christian ethics. According to one such model, persons are kinds of things that persist over time, require objective goods to have a happy and meaningful life, and are defined in morally significant ways by their relationships with parents, friends, spouses, and children. If Singer could accept that definition of personhood, or even just part of it, much of his disagreement with Christian ethics would disappear.
In my experience, Charlie is admirably eager to see the good, and the potential for good, in others' views. I have to say, though, that I think the "if" in that last sentence is a big one. It sounds a *bit*, as one friend of mine put it, like "If Singer could accept Christian moral anthropology -- which he does not and cannot -- then his disagreement with Christian ethics would disappear." But I think Singer's account of "speciesism" (which Camosy describes) is not reconcilable with the definition of "personhood" on which Christian ethics is built.
Thoughts? Note: Peter Singer's views on many issues are, in my view, horrifying. There's no need to observe, in the comments, that he has very very wrong views on some important questions. Let's stipulate that he does, and ask, first, whether Prof. Camosy is right when he says that "[t]he recent shifts in Singer’s thinking suggest that he and Christians may soon have more fruitful ways to talk about their disagreements. Meanwhile, there is already enough practical agreement for Christians and Singer’s followers to work together on problems that cannot wait until every theoretical question is settled." Next, let's ask whether, actually, cooperation with "Singer's followers" actually does have to wait until that cooperation no longer requires Christians to put aside the non-trivial matter that Singer's followers believe that severely disabled neo-nates, whose care is expensive, may (should?) be killed. On the one hand, of course Christians can and should cooperate for shared ends with people who are not Christians. But, are there limits? I'm not sure . . .
