Here's a nice profile of Cecelia Klingele, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin's law school and a future law clerk to Justice Stevens. She sounds like a first-rate, and fascinating, person. Good for the Justice.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Justice Stevens's law clerk
The Faith and the City
Thanks to Mark for his post about "CST and the City." What a rich subject! For starters, I cannot resist (yet) another plug for Philip Bess's book, "Til We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred." Also on my must-read list would be Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City" and John McGreevy's "Parish Boundaries."
I do think -- and I mean no offense to my pals in suburbia -- that there is something "urban" about "the Catholic thing." (Read the first chapter of Peter Ackroyd's "Life of Thomas More.") Someone said (something like) that the heart of urban life is the "being together of strangers." That line reminds me of the old-chestnut description of the Church: "Here Comes Everybody."
For more MOJ posts on "urbanism", "new" and otherwise, click here, here, here, here, and here.
Let's run with this. Ours is an incarnational, embodied faith. Physical place, and space, has to matter to us. (This is why, ahem, ugly churches are, well, bad.) Mark?
"Catholics Against Rudy"
The "Catholics Against Rudy" website is launched.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Another way to help New Orleans
A reader kindly passed on to me this link, about the Fr. Harry Tompson Center in New Orleans. It sounds like the Center does really good work with the poor and homeless in New Orleans. Check it out.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Defining "Torture"
We have talked often on this blog about torture, its immorality, and (the problem of) its definition. A reader, Geoffrey Turecek, passes on this online essay, "The Catholic View on Torture," which might be of interest. Here is the concluding paragraph:
Every human being, guilty or innocent, must be treated as someone who is made in the image and likeness of God, who loved us so much that He gave us free will. Torture is always an attempt to break down this God-given free will. Such violence is a direct attack on an integral part of human nature. As such, it is additionally a vicious attack against the Author of our nature. It is morally unacceptable for any Catholic to condone or approve any torture in any way, for any reason.
Earlier in the essay, he writes this:
Because God gave humans free will, it is an offense against the individual man and human nature itself to attempt to force what He has made free, for any reason, whether it be through means that are physically, psychologically, or morally violent in any degree.
I wonder, have the definitional difficulties simply been "pushed back", from "torture" to "force"? The right answer cannot be, it seems to me, that it is immoral -- i.e., that it is "torture" -- to engage, say, in tough plea-bargaining, in which -- for example -- a prosecutor . . . incentivizes a suspect to plead guilty to a particular charge by indicating her willingness to prosecute a more serious one. "Physically" violent means are (relatively) easy to identify; I'm not sure, though, that terms like "morally violent" move the ball all that much. What does a prohibition on "morally violent" means mean to an interrogator?
Saturday, June 30, 2007
"Justice Talking" event in Philadelphia
On July 10, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is hosting an event, "Highlights of the Supreme Court Term: How Has the New Conservative Majority Affected the Court?," at 5:00 p.m. Among other things, the event involves a discussion about the Term among Jan Crawford Greenburg, Prof. Geoff Stone, and me. For more information, click here.
I'm going to go out on a limb, and predict friendly-but-spirited disagreement about Carhart and Catholic Justices.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Standing, religion, and judicial power
Today, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Hein case, which presented a question involving "taxpayer standing" to challenge, on Establishment Clause grounds, certain features of the White House's faith-based initiative. Here is a link to the opinion. For my own part (and like Justice Scalia, who -- along with Justice Thomas -- concurred separately), I am inclined to think that the whole Flast enterprise of permitting taxpayer standing in Establishment Clause cases (but only in Establishment Clause cases) is misconceived. That said, I'm pleased that the majority did not extend Flast in today's decision. Yes, the state-of-the-law that results is (to put it mildly) conceptually muddled, but . . . that's life.
As I see it, today's decision is not so much about the place of religion in public life, or the relationship between the institutions of faith and those of government. Instead, it is about the limited role and power of the federal judiciary. As Justice Alito described, in his plurality opinion, the task of federal judges is to resolve certain controversies between parties with a concrete stake in the outcome; it is not to use lawsuits as a vehicle for reviewing or second-guessing policies with which some taxpayers disagree.
UPDATE: Here is a link to a conversation between Prof. Walter Dellinger and me about today's First Amendment cases, on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
Friday, June 22, 2007
St. Thomas !!!
Today (barely!) is the feat of St. Thomas More. (Thanks to MOJ-friend John Breen for the reminder.) Here is Pope John Paul II's motu proprio proclaiming St. Thomas to be the patron of politicians and statesmen.
And, I can't resist observing, tomorrow is the feast of St. Thomas Garnet (no, I'm not kidding), which also happens to be the birthday of one Thomas William Garnett, of South Bend, Indiana.
Distributism, corporations, and freedom
M.Z. Forrest has a post at Vox Nova discussing corporatism, distributism, and freedom. And, in the comments section, there are some suggested policy / legal reforms - including "abolishing LLCs" -- that, M.Z.F. believes, flow from the analysis. On the other hand, there's Steve Bainbridge's paper, "Catholic Social Thought and the Corporation."
How the West really lost God
In this essay in Policy Review, Mary Eberstadt explores a theory about "How the West Really Lost God":
[W]hat secularization theory assumes is that religious belief comes ontologically first for people and that it goes on to determine or shape other things they do -- including such elemental personal decisions as whether they marry and have children or not.10 Implied here is a striking, albeit widely assumed, view of how one social phenenomenon powers another: that religious believers are more likely to produce families because religious belief somehow comes first.
And therein lies a real defect with the conventional story line about how and why religion collapsed in Western Europe. For what has not been explained, but rather assumed throughout that chain of argument, is why the causal relationship between belief and practice should always run that way instead of the other, at least some of the time. It is as if recent intellectual history had lined up all the right puzzle pieces -- modernity, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking and absent families -- only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but leaves something critical out.
This essay is a preliminary attempt to supply that missing piece. It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over secularization -- and not as a theoretical exercise, but rather because compelling empirical evidence suggests an alternative account of what Nietzsche's madman really saw in the "tombs" (read, the churches and cathedrals) of Europe.
In brief, it is not only possible but highly plausible that many Western European Christians did not just stop having children and families because they became secular. At least some of the time, the record suggests, they also became secular because they stopped having children and families. If this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it.
UPDATE: On this matter, as on so many others, Lisa Schiltz was way ahead of me. Here's her June 9 post on the same essay. Thanks to Elizabeth Brown for the tip.
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