Today's New York Times has an interesting story about the extremely influential philosopher of religion (and a former teacher of mine) Alvin Plantinga and his new book on religion and science. Setting aside reservations about this or that aspect of Reformed epistemology and Plantinga's work in philosophy of religion, the article captures Plantinga's importance to the project of Christian scholarship, the compatibility of religious belief and science, and the role of properly basic beliefs in defense of the rationality of theism. It's pertinent here because, even in a remote field such as law, it seems to me that one of the persistent challenges facing Catholic higher education is allaying the worry that there is somehow a tension between science and religion. But if you have a Thomist doctrine of creation and divine causality and a tradition-constituted interpretation of the Bible, biological evolution need not and should not pose any difficulty at all. Indeed, at Villanova we can take special delight that the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, was an Augustinian friar.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Plantinga on Religion and Science in the New York Times
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Goldman on the Death of Civilizations
The most recent column by "Spengler" (David Goldman) at the Asia Times is the preface to Goldman's new book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). A taste:
Our political science is uniquely ill-equipped to make sense of a global crisis whose ultimate cause is spiritual. But was not always so. From the advent of Christianity to the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, the West saw politics through the lens of faith. St Augustine's fifth-century treatise The City of God looked through the state to the underlying civil society, and understood that civil society as a congregation - a body bound together by common loves, as opposed to Cicero's state founded only on common interests.
....
In the absence of religious faith, if our culture dies, our hope of transcending mere physical existence dies with it. Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence, and war. A dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may make war on the perceived source of their humiliation.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Great Britain's Stand for Subsidiarity
I've noted before that many of the founders of the European Union were steeped in Catholic social thought (even borrowing the concept of subsidiarity from CST and making it into a constitutional norm in the EU), and the Vatican has long been an advocate of European integration. But the lack of an intelligible and enforceable principle of subsidiarity in the EU has resulted in ever-increasing bureaucratic centralization in Brussels and Strasbourg over the past several years, a trend that Britain has now called into question with Prime Minister David Cameron's veto of a proposed EU treaty. While Cameron probably hasn't discovered a newfound enthusiasm for Pius XI and was acting to protect British economic interests, Niall Ferguson argues here that Cameron made the right decision:
So it is not that British policy has dramatically changed. The real historical turn is the one now being taken by the 17 euro zone members and the six non-euro states that have chosen to follow them. For there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that what they have just agreed to do is to create a federal fiscal union. Moreover, it is a fundamentally flawed one. The only surprising thing is that so few other non-euro countries—Sweden, maybe the Czechs and Hungarians—have joined Britain in expressing reservations. I quite see why countries with the euro are prepared to give up their fiscal independence to avert a currency collapse. But what on earth is in this for the others?
....
“Eurozone Deal Leaves Britain Isolated” trumpets the Financial Times, for many years an ardent proponent of monetary union. But if David Cameron can succeed in isolating Britain from the disaster that is unfolding on the continent, he deserves only our praise. For once the old joke—“Fog in the Channel: Continent Cut Off”—seems applicable. There is now a Depression on the other side of the channel, and it is indeed the continent that is cutting itself off—from sane economic policies.
Karl Barth, the Constantinian Illusion, and Christian Hope
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Kalscheur on Catholic Higher Education
MOJ-friend Greg Kalscheur, SJ (Boston College Law) has an insightful piece at Inside Higher Ed about the challenges facing Catholic universities:
For Christians, the dialogue between faith and culture is as old as their earliest efforts to articulate what it means to be a distinctive faith community. As the Christian way moved beyond its original Jewish communities, attracted Gentile converts, and spread across the Roman world and beyond, a Christian intellectual tradition developed, which was the product of a continuous dialogue between faith and cultures.
This dialogue reflected two essential characteristics of the Christian, and especially the Catholic, understanding of human experience: that faith necessarily seeks understanding, and that all intellectual inquiry leads eventually to questions of ultimacy that invite faith responses. As a result, reason has been intrinsic to the life of the Catholic Church, which sees the search for truth as a manifestation of the Creator. For the Catholic, thinking is part of believing, and the Catholic view sees no conflict among faith, knowledge, and reason; it looks to how they illuminate one another. The most probing questions in every discipline are never deemed to be in opposition to faith, but are welcomed into the conversation on the conviction that ongoing discovery of the intelligibility of the universe will reveal more of the truth about God.
Ten years after Ex Corde was formally adopted by U.S. Catholic bishops, Catholic colleges and universities today must meet the challenge to reaffirm and revitalize their engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Saint Ambrose, Doctor of the Church (and Lawyer)
Thomas More is, to my knowledge, the only common lawyer ever canonized by the Catholic Church, but a number of civil and canon lawyers have been. Today is the Feast of Saint Ambrose, one of the four great doctors of the early Church (along with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great), who was trained in the law and an imperial governor under Valentinian before he was elected bishop of Milan by acclamation in 374 (Ambrose was a catechist at the time, so he was baptized and ordained bishop in the course of just a few days). In addition to his important contributions to Christian theology (particularly the refutation of Arianism) and music, he was also instrumental in the conversion of Augustine, who wrote that Ambrose "was one of those who speak the truth, and speak it well, judiciously, pointedly, and with beauty and power of expression" (On Christian Doctrine, IV.21).
Friday, November 18, 2011
Matthew Rose on Karl Barth on Secular Politics
Following on the discussion below about the limits of the state, my friend and Villanova colleague Matthew Rose writes the following in his splendid book Ethics with Barth: God, Metaphysics, and Morals (Ashgate, 2010), which provides a Catholic reading of the great twentieth century Swiss theologian Karl Barth and here makes a powerful case for the place of secular politics in an adequate political theology:
[O]ne might suggest there is an implicit deference paid to the kingship of Christ wherever a politics views itself critically and at a distance. The state announces its penultimacy, in Bonhoeffer’s useful term, when it boasts of no ambition to achieve absolute consensus or perfect harmony among citizens. By putting itself on endless trial, by conceding it must be limited in its claims and open-ended in its decisions, by seeking peace over perfection, and by refusing to be a site of ultimate loyalty, a secular politics affirms its own servanthood and bears implicit witness to God.
For Barth, then, it is precisely in and through its secularity—its incapacity to take responsibility for word and sacrament; its inability to define a full account of human flourishing; its repudiation of any salvific powers—that a politics discloses “not I, but one greater than I.” It is precisely in the recognition of its own impermanence and imperfect justice that the political discloses itself as a way station in a journey toward the end of human history. A secular state that respectfully shrinks from questions of theological truth does not therefore indicate theological insouciance or, worse yet, dissemble its own thinly-veiled totalitarianism. In its confession that it cannot bestow ultimate meaning or provide final consolation, secular politics instead (tacitly) acknowledges that there can be no easy correlation between the broken middle of the saeculum and the new Jerusalem. On Barth’s view, the secular state indicates (if unwittingly) that after Christ there is no other all-decisive political event for which the world must await with fear or an optative sigh. It discloses (if unknowingly) that no government can be seen as God’s chosen instrument for the salvation of humankind or as indispensable for the unfolding of his providential plan. Secular politics pay silent homage to God by its professed incapacity to embody the promise of the kingdom proclaimed and inaugurated in Christ. Human governments, an influential political theologian [Oliver O'Donovan] recently wrote, are instead “marked for displacement for when the rule of God in Christ is finally disclosed. They are Christ’s conquered enemies; yet they have an indirect testimony to give. . . . Like the surface of a planet pocked with craters by the bombardment it receives from space, the governments of the passing age show the impact of Christ’s dawning glory" (pp. 166-67).
Thursday, November 17, 2011
The Social Kingship of Christ: Metaphysical, not Political*
I'm not sure if this makes me a neo-con or a classical liberal or something else, but my friend and colleague Patrick Brennan already knows that I do not think that the doctrine of the Kingship of Christ--which we will celebrate this weekend--has the political implications with respect to the competence of the state that Patrick implies it does in his post. What Patrick regards as a "contingently incompetent" constitutional arrangement in our American regime seems to me an essentially sound basis for limiting the jurisidiction of the state with regard to religious doctrine and was affirmed by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in Dignitatis Humanae that it is "completely in accord with the nature of faith that in matters religious every manner of coercion on the part of men should be excluded" (Para. 10). The state must, of course, foster religious freedom, and the coercive power of the state does extend to public order (including public morality). But (only) the temporal common good is the end of political society, a Catholic via media between the alternatives of secularism and theocracy.
* A play on John Rawls's claim that his theory of "justice as fairness" was "political, not metaphysical."
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Albert the Great
Today is the Feast of Albert the Great (c. 1206-1280), the German Dominican, Doctor of the Church, and teacher of Thomas Aquinas. Albert is most famous for his contributions to the natural sciences and his role in bringing Aristotle into medieval philosophy and theology. But Albert also made important contributions to the medieval development of natural law, as ably argued most recently by Jean Porter in her books Natural and Divine Law (1999) and Nature as Reason (2005), so all of us who work in Catholic legal education have reason to celebrate the feast of this remarkable figure from our tradition.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Penn State and Evil
It's hard to add anything meaningful to the commentary about the profound evil involving Penn State's former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky and the conduct of those who turned a blind eye to the problem of child sex abuse in their midst. Ross Douthat's Sunday column in the New York Times is one of the most incisive statements I've come across. One person who seems to have displayed courage throughout in launching the investigation when he was Attorney General and then (in his ex officio capacity as a member of the Penn State Board of Trustees) seeing that justice was done to those who failed in their duties is Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, as recounted in this story from last week. As it happens (and was announced many weeks ago), Governor Corbett will receive the annual Saint Thomas More Award from the Saint Thomas More Society of Philadelphia this coming Wednesday evening following the 60th annual Red Mass in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
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