Although I'm not a regular Mother Jones reader, I found my way today to this review of "Planet of Slums," a new book by Mike Davis. I've bloggedoftenover the pastfew years about urbanism ("new" and old), cities, suburbs, Jane Jacobs, and Philip Bess, and so I was intrigued by Davis's discussion (as related by the reviewer, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro) of "urbanization without growth," a phenomenon which "has baffled development economists for years—especially those working in sub-Saharan African, where mega-cities like Lagos, Kinshasa, and Dar Es Salaam go on attracting tens of thousands of new arrivals each year even as their formal economies stagnate or even contract."
Now, according to the review, the primary villain in Davis's book is the IMF and its neo-liberal economic policies. Maybe so. But this bit from the review caught my eye:
Without formal work, and without the entry into secular politics that such work has traditionally provided, how do the poorest of the urban poor organize their social and political life? What offers them a “communal structure”? To this critical question, Davis offers a one-word answer: religion. “If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution,” Davis writes, “he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world.”
Today, religious organizations—Islamist, Hindu, Evangelical—are the single most important source of social cohesion among citydwellers in the developing world. Beyond spiritual sustenance and community, religious organizations offer social services no longer provided by the state, laws for virtuous conduct in chaotic environs, and membership in a global polity that transcends the corrupt nation-state that has excluded them. Political Islam continues to spread in power and influence from Cairo to Jakarta; the ascendance of its political parties—and their grassroots appeal—has received nervous attention from the Western media. Hindu fundamentalism, if remarked upon less often, has had an analogous trajectory in the bustees of Delhi and Mumbai. Pentecostal sects attract new adherents at astonishing rates from Brasilia to Johannesburg, altering political and community life in ways as yet not understood.
It is, I think, an interesting question: Are today's "mega-cities" really "cities," in the way that "new urbanists" think of cities. Are they, for instance -- in Joel Kotkin's words -- "sacred, safe, and busy"? Could they be?
Here, thanks to Sandro Magister, is an excerpt from a speech delivered by the Pope on April 6 in Rome:
[W]e all know that reaching a goal in sports or business requires discipline and sacrifice, but then all of this is crowned by success, by reaching the desired aim. And so it is with life itself: becoming men according to the plan of Jesus requires sacrifice, but this is not something negative; on the contrary, it helps us to live as men with new hearts, to live a truly human and happy life. Because there is a consumerist culture that wants to block us from living according to the Creator’s plan, we must have the courage to create first islands and oases, and then great landscapes of Catholic culture in which life follows the design of the Creator. . . .
We all ask ourselves what the Lord expects from us. It seems to me that the great challenge of our time – as the bishops on their “ad limina” visits, for example those of Africa, also tell me – is secularism: a way of living and presenting the world “quasi Deus non daretur,” as if God did not exist. The intention is to reduce God to the private sphere, to a feeling, as if he were not an objective reality, so that everyone creates his own life plans [...] and at the end, everyone is in conflict with each other. It is clear that this situation is decidedly unlivable. We must make God present in our societies once again. This seems to me the first necessity: that God be present again in our lives, that we not live as though we were autonomous, with the authorization to make up what freedom and life are. We must realize that we are creatures, realize that there is a God who has created us and that remaining in his will is not dependence, but a gift of love that makes us live. [...]
But what God? There are, in fact, many false images of God, of a violent God, etc. The second question, therefore, is this: recognizing the God who showed us his face in Jesus, who suffered for us, who loved us to the point of dying and so overcame violence. We must make present, above all in our lives, the living God, the God who is not someone unknown, invented, or just a figment of the mind, but a God who has revealed himself, who has shown himself and his face. Only in this way does our life become real, authentically human, and so also the criteria of true humanism become present in society. Here it also holds true, as we said in the first reply, that we cannot remain alone in building this just and upright life, but we must walk in the company of just and upright friends, companions with whom we can share the experience that God exists and that it is wonderful to walk with God. And to walk in the great company of the Church, which brings to us throughout the centuries the presence of the God who speaks, acts, and accompanies us.
Professor Friedman reports on an interesting case out of California:
[A] California federal court held that even though the belief is sincerely held, veganism is not a "religion" for purposes of the First Amendment or RLUIPA. The issue arose in the context of a prisoner's request for a vegan diet. The court held: "Plaintiff's veganism ... does not address 'fundamental and ultimate questions;' it has no formal and external signs. Plaintiff does not allege the existence of any larger body of adherents to which he belongs. Instead, he describes his veganism as a 'right and appropriate way to live.' .... [Therefore] Plaintiff's dietary regimen is a purely secular lifestyle choice, not protected by the Free Exercise Clause."
What do we think of this definition of "religion"?
This time from California. Apparently, the California Supreme Court has ruled that two Riverside County girls may sue a Christian high school, under non-discrimination laws, that expelled them because the principal believed they were lesbians.
In Christianity Today, Alan Jacobs worries that the blog is the "friend of information but the enemy of thought." Here's a provocative snippet:
Blogs remain great for news: political, technological, artistic, whatever. And they provide a very rich environment in which news (or rather "news") can be tested and evaluated and revised, as we have seen repeatedly, from cnn's firing of Eason Jordan to the discrediting of Dan Rather's story on President Bush's National Guard service. But as vehicles for the development of ideas they are woefully deficient and will necessarily remain so unless they develop an architecture that is less bound by the demands of urgency—or unless more smart people refuse the dominant architecture. . . .
As I think about these architectural deficiencies, and the deficiencies of my own character, I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as "that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation." For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, "could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure." Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.
On a smaller scale, the same problems afflict the intellectual and moral environments of the blogs. There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies like rss), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely conversations. It is no insult to the recent, but already cherished, institution of the blogosphere to say that blogs cannot do everything well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.
Rob suggests that the proposed (and now, I gather, yet-again-defeated) flag-burning amendment was a political stunt and a waste of time. I agree, I think. (Not that such stunts and wastes of time are anything new in Congress!) At the same time, I wonder if my reaction owes too much to my (perhaps excessively) libertarian take on free-speech questions? Rob writes:
[S]ymbols are important, in large part, because they are accessible and interpretable in ways that transcend collective edicts. Using the law to express the non-negotiable sanctity of the physical embodiment of national identity strikes me as an understandable, but ultimately absurd, endeavor.
It's not clear to me, actually, that it is "absurd" to think that law's regulatory (and expressive) functions may, and even should, play a part in the construction and maintenance of some symbols, particular symbols of the political community for whom the law speaks. Any thoughts? (Again, I am against a flag-burning amendment, because I am against any restriction on plausibly political expression that I can imagine.)
Responding to my post, the other day, about Catholics, patriotism, and cosmopolitanism, a friend and MOJ reader reminds me of these statements by the Council:
1.Decree on the Church's Missionary Activity (1965) sec. 15: "The Christian faithful...should live for God and Christ by following the honourable customs of their own nation. As good citizens, they should practice true and effective patriotism [amorem Patriae], should avoid altogether racial prejudice [stirpis contemptum] and rancorous [exacerbatum]nationalism, and should foster a universal love of human beings."
sec. 21: "...the lay faithful fully belong at one and the same time both to the People of God and to civil society. They belong to the nation in which they were born. They have begun to share in its cultural treasures by means of their education. They are joined in its life by manifold social ties... They feel its problems as their very own... they must give expression to this [Christian] newness of life in the social and cultural framework of their own homeland [patriae], according to the traditions of their own nation, a culture which they should get to know, heal, preserve, develop in accordance with contemporary conditions, and finally perfect in Christ.
2.Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965) sec. 75: "Citizens should develop a generous and loyal devotion [pietatem] to their own country, without narrow-mindedness but rather in such a way that they always simultaneously look to the good of the whole human family which is tied together by manifold links between races [stirpes], peoples, and nations. May all Christians feel a special and personal vocation in political community..."
Dan Filler (of Concurring Opinions) has some thoughts about the Supreme Court's recent death-penalty decision, Kansas v. Marsh. Here is more, from Scotusblog. The specific question presented -- to which Justice Thomas's majority opinion confined itself -- had to do with the provision of Kansas law dealing with the balancing of aggravating and mitigating factors in capital-sentencing proceedings. However, the case became the occasion for a pointed, and interesting, exchange between Justices Souter and Scalia about the death penalty more generally, about the implications of DNA-based exonerations for the death penalty's legality and morality, about the relevance of other countries' practices and norms, and about role of judges. Check it out.
I received in the mail today my copy of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (order yours today, here!). It looks to be a rich and inspiring resource. The introduction describes nicely the foundation for the whole enterprise -- an "integral and solidary humanism," one oriented to the "full truth about man."
As much as the introduction, though, I really like the cover. It's the Allegory of Good Government, a fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, which is in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy. (There is also, in the same room, the Allegory of Bad Government.) Professor Nicole Garnett opened a recent paper of hers, "Ordering (and Order in) the City," with this:
The walls of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy, are graced with Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s striking frescos contrasting the effects of “good government” and “bad government” on fourteenth-century city life. In the city under good government, men work to repair stately buildings, women socialize in the streets, and merchants sell their wares in a busy marketplace. In the city under bad government, the buildings are crumbling, men stand idle (save one crafting weapons), bandits terrorize the innocent, and the bodies of murder victims lie in the streets.The goals of urban policy, it appears, have not changed in over six hundred years.
The frescoes' messages seem consonant with the renewed interest, particularly among Christians, in urbanism, and also with Joel Kotkin's dictum that cities were, and should be, "sacred, safe, and busy."
