You know, although I find much to admire in and like about Sarah Palin (I grew up in Alaska), I agree with almost everything Rob says in his "Problem with Palin" post, except for (what I take to be) his premise that the "willing to engage the world, subordinate ideological formulae to actual experience, capable of revising views in light of facts, not prone to demonize those who disagree, yet clear-eyed about the importance of fundamental moral norms" criterion, when applied to the political choice facing us next month, cuts in favor of voting for an Obama administration rather than a McCain administration. As I see it (and, to be sure, there's probably no point in elaborating -- at this point, we all think what we all think), misplaced populism, uncritical sloganeering, hostility toward questions directed at factual predicates, and ugly hostility toward those who come to different judgments about policy vehicles are (at least) at present, bigger problems on the political left than on the political right (which is not to say that anyone is innocent). Oh well. St. Thomas More, pray for us.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Response to Rob
Monday, October 6, 2008
Perry to San Diego
Big news from the University of San Diego:
Michael Perry, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on international human rights law and theory, has been appointed to a three-year term at the University of San Diego as University Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law and Peace Studies. Perry is the first faculty member to have a joint appointment in the law and peace schools at USD.
It will be great to have our own Michael P. teaching at a Catholic law school. (HT: Leiter).
"Proportionate reason" debate at Notre Dame
This event might be of interest to South Bend-area readers:
Title: “Catholic Voters and the 2008 Presidential Election”
In particular, we have asked the participants to address the question: “For an otherwise pro-life voter, what constitutes a sufficient 'proportionate' reason to justify a vote for a pro-abortion candidate?”
Participants:
Gerard Bradley, Notre Dame Professor of Law & member of the Catholics for McCain National Steering Committee
Vincent Rougeau, Notre Dame Associate Professor of Law & member of the steering committee for Obama’s Catholic National Advisory Council
Moderator: John T. McGreevy, Dean of the College of Arts & Letters
Date: Wednesday, October 8th
Time: 6:30pm (reception to follow)
Place: McKenna Hall Auditorium
Sponsored by the Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture, and funded by the Notre Dame Fund to Protect Human Life.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
CST, regulation, and the two parties
Mark Stricherz's post, here, connects well with the various recent MOJ posts on the credit crisis, the economy generally, and CST.
News from the U.K.
Friday, October 3, 2008
A highbrow, Friday afternoon literary post
I really liked this ("Changes in the Land"), by Thomas Zebrowski, over at First Things. It's a great reflection on the work of Wallace Stegner (if you have not read Crossing to Safety, well, cancel your weekend plans and do it). A bit:
. . . Stegner was on a lifelong quest for tradition, rootedness, and a sense of community that had been denied him by his peripatetic childhood and the individualistic outlook that surrounded him.
His early years in Utah had taught him about the benefits, even the necessity, of community for survival in a harsh natural environment, and Stegner recognized that it was the Mormons’ faith in God and in the future that had enabled them alone to carve out a respectable civilization in the North American desert. Wally never embraced Mormonism or any religious faith, but Fradkin believes that in a sense Stegner shared the Eastward orientation of this biblical people. The Mormons of Salt Lake City bury their dead beneath headstones that look back towards Zion. And Fradkin places much symbolic value upon the fact that Stegner chose for his own ashes to be scattered on his summer property in Greensboro, Vermont instead of near the Palo Alto home he had occupied for more than forty years. In part, Stegner’s decision may have been a testament to the comparatively stable, if flawed, local community he had discovered there. In Fradkin’s interpretation, it was also about Stegner’s belief in the greater capacity of this more verdant land to renew its own natural resources and reverse some of the grosser effects of human spoliation.
The environmental and even social perils of the West, on Stegner’s view, have been specially conditioned by an all but pervasive aridity that, among other things, freezes the effects of human exploitation into the landscape. In the more humid Eastern and Southern climes, the vertiginous wilderness is always poised to reclaim the land at least partially from human development and control. The practically necessary power plants, dams, mines, and sprawling housing developments of the West, by contrast, scar and damage the land in ways that are irreversible within any human timeframe. A New Deal Democrat who believed in the prudent use of governmental power, Stegner supported robust federal protection of the pristine wilderness areas that still remained west of the Mississippi, going so far as to invest with spiritual significance the preservation of some Western lands in a state as much unaltered by human influence as possible. He believed there were intangible and ancient resources in those places that might somehow sustain us. . . .
"Person, State, Society"
As I mentioned a month or so ago, I'm teaching a seminar at Notre Dame Law School this semester called "Catholic Social Thought: Person, State & Society". And, I'm having a great time. (The students? Well, you'll have to ask them.) A recent meeting was dedicated to subsidiarity and pluralism, and we read: Quadragessimo anno; Thomas C. Kohler, In Praise of Little Platoons, in G. Weigel & R. Royal, eds., Building the Free Society (1993); Richard W. Garnett, Jaycees Reconsidered: Judge Richard S. Arnold and the Freedom of Association, 58 Ark. L. Rev. 587 (2005); John A. Coleman, S.J., A Limited State and a Vibrant Society: Christianity and Civil Society, in Post & Rosenblum, eds., Civil Society and Government (2002); and selections from the Compendium (¶¶ 406-27).
Next week, the topics are "human rights and human dignity", and we'll read (inter alia) Pacem in terris; Lorenzo Albacete, A Theological Anthropology, in Recovering Self-Evident Truths; Mary Ann Glendon, Foundations of Human Rights: The Unfinished Business, in Recovering Self-Evident Truths; & Jacques Maritain, Man and the State.
Is this a great job, or what? (The rest of the semester's readings can be found after the jump, if you are interested. Comments welcome!)
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Pulpit Freedom Day!
Others have the whole financial-crisis thing well in hand, it seems -- lucky for me, since all I have to offer is (a) I doubt Sarkozy's right; (b) I doubt Sen. McCain is more to blame than, say, Rep. Frank; and (c) I'm glad the Dow is up today -- and so I thought I'd register my regret that the intrusion of Serious Events overshadowed the news (or, maybe, "newslet") that I'd been anticipating for several weeks, i.e., "Pulpit Freedom Day" (link).
Anyway, the Washington Post reports, here, more than 30 ministers this past Sunday (intentionally) "[d]ef[ied] a federal law that prohibits U.S. clergy from endorsing political candidates from the pulpit." (Paul Caron has more, typically thorough, coverage here; I blogged about this general matter a few weeks ago, here; and my colleague, Lloyd Mayer, has a good paper on the religious-freedom issues here.)
But wait . . . there's more! Here's Martin Marty's "Sightings" column; here's Michael Sean Winters at America; here's pro-life activist Jill Stanek; and, for the usual overheated and underinformed rhetoric ("gambit to dash the pillar of church-state separation"), here's the New York Times editorial.
My views (for what they are worth): (1) It is impossible, and undesirable, to separate entirely "religion" and "politics". We should worry about a government that tries to separate them. (I explain this view, here.) (2) The question whether and to what extent churches should be exempt from taxation should be distinguished from the question whether and when contributions to churches should be tax-deductible. (3) I suspect there are few bright-lines available for us to deploy in order to put into practice the intuition that while we don't want the government supervising sermons and evangelization, we also don't want to subsidize purely partisan political enterprises.
The financial crisis: a reader's views
An MOJ reader sends in this, responding to Lisa's and Russ's posts on the financial crisis. (At the time of this writing, for what it's worth, the Dow is back up 300 points after yesterday's drop.)
Elizabeth Schlitz's discussion of "stewardship" [seems to reflect primarily] her subjective feelings about the difference between "stewardship" and "securitization". The point of both approaches, though, is to at least return the investor's money to him - and preferably with interest. That's why it's such a big deal when the money market funds "break the buck". I understand her argument about the FDIC, but I (my subjective belief) doubt that it provides much of a psychological check on banks.
Furthermore, her statement that "it's difficult to retain a sense of "stewardship" for funding that is coming from a source based on speculation and risk-taking" [seems to reflect] discomfort with the stock market in general. All investment is, by its nature, fraught with risk. When you invest in something, you're betting that it's going to make money. The question is whether you're making a prudent bet or an imprudent bet.
Russell Powell writes in "A Catholic Approach to the Financial Crisis?" that he is concerned that our policy choices in this crisis are likely to hurt the poor. That's very likely. However, the main reason we're in this mess in the first place is because banks and the GSEs made loans to people who were credit risks. Fannie and Freddie specifically exist to promote home ownership for people who can't get a loan from traditional banks. Congress urged banks generally to increase loans to minorities and low-income people who traditionally were unable to obtain mortgages. The reason that they weren't able to obtain mortgages before is because they don't make enough money to pay the mortgages. And then when they couldn't pay their mortgages - the whole thing came tumbling down. (For the record, there were also plenty of higher-income people who took mortgages larger than they could afford.) There's plenty of blame to go around - the GSEs are the worst combination of public and private, the banks shouldn't have made risky loans, etc. - but the poor were the beneficiaries of these risky policies along with the rest of us. Ignoring economic realities in the name of "progressivity" or "antidiscrimination" or even "social justice" eventually hurts everyone. Although it may seem unfair that some people will never own their own homes, it's much kinder than encouraging them to incur a debt they can't pay, and eventually losing something they've come to love. And blaming the credit instruments (i.e., credit swaps) for the crisis just ignores the fundamental unsoundness of the underlying mortgages.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: A question for Michael
I share Michael P's admiration for Prof. Doug Laycock, and so I take very seriously Doug's remark, to which Michael linked:
The nature of marriage is a question with profound religious significance and fundamentally disputed answers. The state has no more business imposing a single answer to that question than to any other religious question. Marriage is for the churches; government should confine itself to civil unions. And then we should try as best we can to create rules that enable Americans with fundamentally different views of marriage to live in peace and equality in the same society.
I'm going to bracket, for now, the possibility that, for public-policy purposes, the state might well have entirely non-"religious" reasons for believing (and legislating on the basis of the belief) that the public good would not be well served by a move to a civil-union regime (assuming, as I gather Michael does, that such a regime would not distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex couples).
What are the "rules" -- to which, I gather, Michael is offering his "Amen" and support -- that would "enable Americans with fundamentally different views of marriage to live in peace and equality in the same society"? They would need to reflect, it seems to me, a thorough-going commitment by the public authority to *genuine* respect for those persons and institutions who do not believe that same-sex unions and marriage are morally equivalent. What would be the approach, in such a regime, then, to (just to pick two examples) (a) tax-exempt status for organizations that "discriminate" against same-sex unions, and (b) the applicability of non-discrimination laws to such organizations' hiring-and-firing practices?
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
