I want to second Rob's comments about this past weekend's conference at Notre Dame on secularism. The keynotes I attended by Alasdair MacIntyre, Christian Smith, and Lucy Beckett were extraordinary, and, of course, it was great to be on a panel and to present a paper alongside Rob and my friend and colleague Patrick Brennan. On top of all that, the chance to bask in the generous hospitality of Rick Garnett and his colleagues at Notre Dame is always one of the highlights of the gathering, and Carter Snead's appointment as the new director of the Center for Ethics and Culture portends even better things to come.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Conference
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Archbishop Chaput on Human Dignity
Here is an address delivered last night at the University of Pennsylvania by Philadelphia's (still relatively new) Archbishop Charles Chaput on human dignity. Drawing on, among others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Hans Jonas, and the American Founders, Archbishop Chaput makes the argument that there is nothing distinctly (properly understood) Catholic about the respect for human dignity.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
William Ian Miller on "Losing It"
One of the rites of passage of a Michigan Law School education is taking a course with William Ian Miller, the leading scholar in the world of the medieval Icelandic sagas and author of a series of books--The Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard, 1998), The Mystery of Courage (Harvard, 2000), Faking It (Cambridge, 2005), and Eye for an Eye (Cambridge, 2007)--about, well, the whole range of virtues and vices. I don't know if I learned much *law* (of the kind you need to know on the bar exam) from Bill, but I did learn a lot about everything else, which maybe all comes back to law and life in the end. He has a delightful (and typically Miller-esque) essay (based on a new book) in the current Chronicle of Higher Education about passing 65:
I am 65, and I think my brain just hopped a bullet train heading south, leaving a shadow of itself behind, just enough to let me worry whether it is time to close up shop, before the people in gray close it up for me. Will I know when I am an embarrassment? Do my younger colleagues, sometimes very much younger, already know? Am I missing the hints that they are sending my way? Will anyone show up for my retirement dinner? Will I? Will my memory still be good enough to recall everyone who did not show up, so that I can even up the score? And just how would I, feeble and without the wit, manage that? Will I be able to come up with their names, should I manage to recall their faces? And why am I consumed with fears about that dinner some five years before it will take place in exactly the same way I would lie awake at nights worrying about botching my bar mitzvah three years before I had to go on stage and man up in the Jewish way? But then once you, yes you, stop worrying about ridiculous things like this, you'll have not only lost touch with the world, but with yourself.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Law Students and Lost Idealism
As the law school semester turns to its final lap and the anxiety of our students--especially 1Ls--begins to take on dire proportions, I take a page from my 1L contracts teacher, Philip Soper, and give my students this passage about lost idealism from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi:
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.
I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark.
No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883), Chapter IX
Shadow Work
Following on last week's kerfuffle over the Note on Financial Reform from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, I thought this piece by Craig Lambert from Sunday's New York Times points toward a way of thinking about the economy in the spirit of Rerum Novarum and the other major social encyclicals:
To be sure, shadow work has its benefits. Bagging one’s own groceries or pumping one’s own gas can save time. Shadow work can increase autonomy and enlarge our repertoire of skills and knowledge. Research on the “Ikea effect,” named for the Swedish furniture manufacturer whose products often require home assembly, indicates that customers value a product more highly when they play a role in constructing it.
Still, doctors routinely observe that one of the most common complaints today is fatigue; a 2007 study pegged its prevalence in the American work force at 38 percent. This should not be surprising. Much of this fatigue may result from the steady, surreptitious accumulation of shadow work in modern life. People are simply doing a huge number of tasks that were once done for them by others.
Doing things for one another is, in fact, an essential characteristic of a human community. Various mundane jobs were once spread around among us, and performing such small services for one another was even an aspect of civility. Those days are over. The robots are in charge now, pushing a thousand routine tasks onto each of our backs.
Perhaps the Church's contribution to debates over the economy shouldn't be so much to give conventional answers and provide authoritative arguments for politicians from the right or left but instead to urge a fundamental rethinking about the hollowing out of our economic life. The concern about the demands and fatigue of shadow work seems promising in that regard, and not surprisingly so--Lambert borrows the concept of "shadow work" from Ivan Illich, the wildly eccentric former Catholic priest and quasi-hero of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Quote of the Day on the Ministerial Exception
The invaluable SCOTUSblog site has been running a series of discussions on the cases pending before the Supreme Court this term, including the (much discussed here at MOJ) ministerial exception case, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC. Read the whole exchange (including the contributions from our own Tom Berg), but I thought this brief comment by Kevin Baine of Williams & Connolly--one of the best lawyers I've ever had the privilege of working with--was a powerful and pointed summary of the issues:
The fundamental question in this case is whether those who seek to serve a church in a religious capacity may invoke the power of the state in support of their desire to serve—or whether the church has the right to choose those who perform religious functions without regard to secular standards and without interference by the state. I think the Religion Clauses answer that question. If the notion of separation of church and state means anything, it means that there is a zone of church affairs that the state is powerless to regulate, and I think that zone has to include the right of a church to select its ministers. The state should no more be able to set the criteria for church office than the church should be able to set the criteria for state office.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
America's Greatest Catholic Intellectuals
The Gregorian Institute at Benedictine College in Kansas conducted a survey to identify the ten greatest intellectuals in American Catholicism for their Catholic Hall of Fame, and the list of those from "the world of ideas and academic scholarship" includes an MOJ blogger:
- Orestes Brownson (1803–1876)
- John Courtney Murray (1904-1967)
- John Senior (1923-1999)
- Avery Dulles (1918-2008)
- James Schall (1928-)
- Ralph McInerny (1929-2010)
- Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009)
- Mary Ann Glendon (1938-)
- George Weigel (1951-)
- Robert P. George (1955-)
They note that future categories will include fiction authors (Flannery O'Connor, e.g.) and bishops, but my offhand additions (heavy on philosophy) would be Alasdair MacIntyre (not an American by birth--neither was Neuhaus--but he has spent the last 40 years or so in posts in US universities), John Tracy Ellis, Nicholas Rescher, John Zahm, and Bas van Fraassen.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Pope Benedict XVI on Technology and Silence
Last week was the Feast of Saint Bruno, founder of the Carthusians, and the Pope visited the Carthusian Charterhouse at Serra San Bruno yesterday (h/t Rocco):
Technical progress, markedly in the area of transport and communications, has made human life more comfortable but also more keyed up, at times even frantic. Cities are almost always noisy, silence is rarely to be found in them because there is always a lingering background noise, in some areas even at night. In the recent decades, moreover, the development of the media has spread and extended a phenomenon that had already been outlined in the 1960s: virtuality that risks getting the upper hand over reality. Unbeknown to them, people are increasingly becoming immersed in a virtual dimension because of the audiovisual messages that accompany their life from morning to night.
The youngest, who were already born into this condition, seem to want to fill every empty moment with music and images, as for fear of feeling this very emptiness. This is a trend that has always existed, especially among the young and in the more developed urban contexts but today it has reached a level such as to give rise to talk about anthropological mutation. Some people are no longer capable of remaining for long periods in silence and solitude.
By the way, if you haven't seen the documentary film "Into Great Silence" about the Carthusians, do so.
Branch Rickey
For those of us interested in law, religion, and sports, Books & Culture has an interesting review of a new biography of Branch Rickey by Jimmy Breslin. Rickey, of course, was the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers who desegregated Major League Baseball in 1945 by signing Jackie Robinson, an act of courage that played a considerable role in launching the Civil Rights Era. Rickey was also, as it happens, a devout Christian (from a long line of pious Ohio Methodists) and a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School (my former teacher Evan Caminker--now the dean of Michigan Law--is the inaugural holder of a chair at Michigan endowed in Branch Rickey's honor).
Monday, October 3, 2011
What Should Be in a Course on Moral and Political Theory for Law Students?
When Villanova reformed its 1L curriculum a few years ago, we introduced a series of 1L electives that includes international law, statutory interpretation, the regulatory state, and criminal procedure. Patrick Brennan and I designed (and co-taught the first time it was offered) a course entitled "Justice and Rights" that we hoped would serve as an introduction to some major themes in moral and political philosophy tailored for law students (and not duplicate what they might get in an upper-level elective in jurisprudence).
In its initial incarnation, we read, in order, chunks of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, John Locke's Second Treatise, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, along with a series of Supreme Court cases that pose, however imperfectly, a set of issues about, well, justice and rights (Heller v. DC, Grutter v. Bollinger, Lawrence v. Texas, Plyler v. Doe, San Antonio v. Rodriguez, and Kelo v. New London). I know that law students won't need to know, say, the difference between Hobbes's and Locke's social contract theories in order to pass the bar exam, but I do think that reading these texts, thinking about them, and writing a series of papers on the issues they raise is a distinctive way for a Catholic law school to provide a humanistic legal education that can improve students' reading and writing skills while also providing the opportunity to reflect on some larger questions. And, so far, many students have responded with enthusiasm.
I'm wondering what MOJ readers think a good course of this kind would look like. I've thought about reading more Rawls, not so much because I'm a committed Rawlsian but because A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism have such a significant bearing on the way that justice and rights are understood in contemporary law. Or I know there are rich texts in the tradition that we neglect entirely--Plato's Republic, Augustine's City of God, selections from Aquinas, Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation, Kant's Doctrine of Right, etc., along with a whole host of potential contemporary authors. I'd be grateful for any suggestions.
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