My own mind tends to focus more on other tournaments during March but . . . the good folks at First Things are running their "Tournament of Novels" over at the First Thoughts blog. Head over and vote (early and often) for Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (and four others of your choice). My four, for what it's worth, were The Brothers Karamazov, The First Circle, Silence, and The Power and the Glory.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
The "Tournament of Novels" at First Things
Monday, March 7, 2011
Graduate seminar in Catholic Political Theory at the Lumen Christi Institute
This looks very interesting:
This summer, The Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago is sponsoring an intensive week long interdisciplinary graduate seminar that focuses on the fundamental philosophical concepts that undergird Catholic political and social theory. The seminar, entitled "Catholic Social Thought: A Critical Investigation" is devoted to an interdisciplinary analysis of Roman Catholic social teaching over the course of the past century, from the ground breaking publication of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum up to the recent publication of Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate.
The Catholic social tradition is drawn from both reason and faith. Accordingly, it has has evolved along two fronts. First in the effort to gain clarity and wisdom by philosophical reflection upon the fundamental principles of social life themselves, and second by way of application of these principles to the contingent historical tides of social institutions. This seminar seeks to explore this thought as it is found in magisterial documents, and to discern the evolution of teaching on such issues as: the relationship between the virtues of charity and justice; the different modes of justice; the plurality of social forms and their ontological grounding; the origin and limits of human authority; the relationship between the Church, the modern state, and civil society; and the role of natural law in public discourse and political debate.
Fifteen students will be selected to participate in a five-day seminar with two-hour sessions twice daily. We encourage graduate students from a variety of disciplines to apply, including: philosophy, theology, history, political science, law, economics, and sociology. Books, lodging, and airfare or regional travel will be included, and there is no cost or stipend for attendees. The seminar will take place at Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, RI from Monday, August 8th, 2011 to Sunday, August 14th, 2011.
Application Process:
Any graduate student in the fields listed above may apply for consideration. Applicants must submit one confidential letter of recommendation, a short writing sample (25 pages or less), and a statement of interest in the seminar. Completed applications must be received by April 15, 2011. Students will be notified of their application status by early May.
Seminar Leader:
Russell Hittinger is Professor of Philosophy, Research Professor of Law, and Warren Professor of Catholic Studies at University of Tulsa. He is author of The First Grace: Rediscovering Natural Law In A Post-Christian Age and A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory. He is a member of both the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
About Lumen Christi:
Founded by Catholic scholars at the University of Chicago in 1997, the Lumen Christi Institute aims at enriching the intellectual community of the University of Chicago by cultivating the Catholic intellectual tradition through on-campus lectures, non-credit courses and seminars, and conferences. Both Catholics and non-Catholics regularly participate and are encouraged to attend. Past lecturers and participants have included Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Tracy, Jean-Luc Marion, Louis Dupré, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Mark Murphy, and many others. More information can be found at www.lumenchristi.org. Past summer seminars have been led by Corey Barnes (Oberlin College) on “Thomas Aquinas’s Christology” and Paul Griffiths
(Duke University) on “The Later Augustine: De Trinitate and De Civitate Dei.”
Online information:
For more information, please visit the Lumen Christi website, where you can also download your applicaiton.
Lumen Christi: http://www.lumenchristi.org/
Summer Seminars (including application forms): http://www.lumenchristi.org/?p=471
"Debate" at the NYT
It would be sad if it weren't so funny (or, is it the other way around?) The Times has, as part of its "Room for Debate" series, a "debate" up called "Why Blame the Teachers?" So far as I could tell, the "debaters" consisted of seven people with pretty much the same view, and one somewhat milque-toast-y dissenter.
Sheesh. I mean, I'm a strong supporter of reforming education policy (which means, among other things, that I am deeply concerned about the excessive power and misguided positions of the teacher-unions), but I'm happy to agree that there is "room for debate" on the matter. Note to the good people at the Times: Debate, like diversity, requires differences.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Faith in "The Sunset Limited"
This piece is an interesting reflection on the faith-related themes in "The Sunset Limited", an HBO filmed-play, which I really enjoyed and which is based on a work by one of my favorite living writers, Cormac McCarthy.
"Jesuit Education and the Dubious Frontier"
A former student of mine, Matt Emerson, has published this essay at the Patheos website, about the position and nature of "Jesuit education in the modern world." The piece, which makes for sobering reading, might be usefull paired with some of what our colleague John Breen has written about Jesuit law schools.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
The "sweet mystery of life" passage and conscience protection
Prof. Mark Rienzi writes, at Public Discourse, and adapting (I think) a longer law-review piece, that the Court's Casey decision provides support for a constitutional conscience right of health-care providers to refuse to perform abortions. Worth reading.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
"God's Century"
My colleague, Dan Philpott, and his co-authors Tim Shah and Monica Toft, have a new, must-read book coming out, called "God's Century." Here's some bits from the press release:
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead.” Many have insisted on the accuracy of his observation, believing that religion would wilt in the modern world. On the contrary, religion has flourished globally, and over the past four decades its political influence has surged. Drawing on original analysis and dramatic case studies, scholars Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah address this thorny phenomenon in their new work, GOD’S CENTURY: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics [W. W. Norton & Company; March 14, 2011; $25.95 hardcover]. In the tenth anniversary year of the 9/11 attacks and just as religious groups around the world such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are poised for greater influence, GOD’S CENTURY shows why religion’s influence has soared, what it means for today’s politics, and what religion’s political place ought to be.
Despite claims that religion is exclusively irrational and violent, its political influence is in fact diverse, promoting democracy, reconciliation, and peace in some countries while fostering civil war and terrorism in others. Why is the politics of religion so varied? Among many factors, two stand out: religious actors’ political theology and their independence from the state.
For much of history, religious actors and political authorities formed integrated relationships―they were willingly interdependent, both institutionally and ideologically. However, beginning with the Protestant Reformation in 1517, new developments in Europe—including the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the French Revolution of 1789—caused political authorities to flex their power and increase their control over religious actors. But after the 1960s this relationship surprisingly and dramatically changed yet again as religious actors began to expand their independence, some through conflict and struggle and others through mutual consent and constitutional change. Religious actors increasingly abandoned political theologies of passive obedience in exchange for a more active mindset that often legitimates, if not demands, intense political engagement. What is more, religion has resurged with the help rather than the hostility of the very forces many imagined would weaken it: democratization, globalization, and modernization. . . .
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Heaven
For the next few days, I will be in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah -- at Alta -- where the skiing is better than it is anyplace else on the planet. If the goal of "Catholic" anything -- legal theory, etc. -- is, ultimately, to "be happy with Him in the next," I think that -- at 10,500 feet in the Utah sunshine -- I can consider this trip MOJ official business.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
"Catholic Schools do more with less"
Yes, they do. Have I mentioned before, here at MOJ -- I'm not sure -- that meaningful school choice (which includes financial support for children whose parents choose qualified religious schools) is a social-justice, civil-rights, and religious-freedom imperative? Just checking . . .
By the way, this essay, by my colleague Peg Brinig and (the lovely and talented) Nicole Garnett might be of interest:
More than 1,600 Catholic elementary and secondary schools have closed or been consolidated during the last two decades. The Archdiocese of Chicago alone (the subject of our study) has closed 148 schools since 1984. Primarily because urban Catholic schools have a strong track record of educating disadvantaged children who do not, generally, fare well in public schools, these school closures have prompted concern in education policy circles. While we are inclined to agree that Catholic school closures contribute to a broader educational crisis, this paper shies away from debates about educational outcomes. Rather than focusing on the work done inside the schools, we focus on what goes on outside them. Specifically, using three decades of data drawn from the census and from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (“PHDCN”), we seek to understand what a Catholic school means to an urban neighborhood. We do so primarily by measuring various effects of elementary school closures in the Chicago neighborhoods where they operated for decades. We find strong evidence that Catholic elementary schools are important generators of social capital in urban neighborhoods: Our study suggests that neighborhood social cohesion decreases and disorder increases following an elementary school closure, even after controlling for numerous demographic variables that would tend to predict neighborhood decline and disaggregating the school closure decision from those variable as well. This paper discusses these findings and situates them within important land-use and education-policy debates.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Tom Farr on international religious freedom
Tom Farr has an as-per-usual interesting piece up, at The Immanent Frame, on the international-religious-freedom policies of the United States. In particular, he considers the questions "whether religious freedom as it is conceptualized in the United States has any applicability elsewhere, and whether American foreign policy can legitimately seek to advance international religious liberty at all." Here's a particularly important paragraph, which is directed at those who regard American efforts to affirmatively spread and support religious freedom as somehow "imperialistic":
Religious freedom is not just for Christians, or minorities, or Americans, or any other single group. It is the birthright of every human being and the legal right of every religious community. To stand against religious persecution is a moral imperative, especially for the government of the United States.
Moreover, religious freedom has long been affirmed and protected by international law and is one of the cornerstone rights in the UN’s landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is, in other words, not a parochial, partisan, or sectarian claim, but a universal human right. The IRFA explicitly invokes Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, and international human rights covenants as the standard for U.S. policy.
Finally, religious freedom is a linchpin of ordered liberty and the very antithesis of religious extremism. By guaranteeing equality under the law for every person and community, religious liberty protects majorities as well as minorities. If the purpose of U.S. foreign policy is to engage the world in defense of American interests, it must become more effective than it has been in carrying out its statutory mandate to advance religious liberty abroad. . . .
Read the whole thing. This is important stuff.
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