As Rick already noted, Philadelphia welcomed its new archbishop this past week. Here's a great photo of our own Robby George with Cardinal Rigali and Archbishop Chaput at the press conference announcing the appointment.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Archbishop Chaput
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Eamon Duffy on Norwich's Papacy
Following on Marc's post below about John Julius Norwich's new book about the history of the papacy, I recently came across a review of Norwich's book by Eamon Duffy in the Times Literary Supplement. One might have already been suspicious upon learning that Norwich devotes an entire chapter to the anti-papal satirical legend of Pope Joan, which Bill Keller highlighted in his NY Times review--it's as if a history of the American presidency included an earnest and lengthy examination of the fable of George Washington's refusal to tell a lie when he cut down his father's cherry tree. Duffy--who actually knows something about the history of the papacy and upon whose book Saints and Sinners (Yale UP, 1997) Norwich extensively relies--is not impressed (and calls to mind the scene in "A Fish Called Wanda" when Wanda has to tell Otto that "Aristotle was not Belgian" and "the principle of Buddhism is not 'every man for himself'"):
[Norwich] is not, by his own account, greatly interested in religion, and defines his book as “essentially political, cultural and, up to a point, social”. Occasionally, he warns us, “basic matters of doctrine cannot be avoided”, but as far as possible “I have tried to steer well clear of theology”. This is probably just as well, to judge by the declaration in his opening paragraph that “Roman Catholicism began with Christianity itself; all other Christian religions – and there are more than 22,000 of them – are offshoots or deviations from it”, a claim liable to trigger apoplexy in Constantinople and Cairo, Geneva and Canterbury, and which might elicit a raised eyebrow even in the Vatican. And on theological matters at any rate, errors abound: St Luke was not the author of the earliest gospel, St Peter did not write the epistles which go under his name, Athanasius was never an archbishop, Greek was not the dominant language of the Roman liturgy in the fourth century, St Peter’s Basilica was a cemetery church and never a cathedral, St Jerome was not an Italian, Constantine was not baptized by Eusebius of Caesarea, we do not know the purpose of Gregory VII’s Dictatus papae, and they were certainly never “published”.
....
The Popes is an entertaining book which tells some good stories and embraces a large historical sweep. But its overall effect is curiously trivializing. The papacy depicted here is in the end unintelligible, its power to inspire and its centrality over two millennia of Christian development reduced to a handful of vivid personalities and the to and fro of power politics. Anyone seeking to understand more of the inwardness of the world’s most enduring religious institution will have to look elsewhere.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Gaus on Public Reason
Matthew Lister--soon to join us at Villanova as a VAP--has a review at the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews of Gerald Gaus's new book, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World. As David Brooks once said of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man, it looks like it covers a lot of ground:
Gerald Gaus's book, The Order of Public Reason, is long, rich, and highly ambitious. It is also an important work, one that attempts both to give a rigorous account of the idea of public reason, developed out of an account of "social morality", and to show how, when the idea is properly understood, Classical Liberalism is the best way to structure a society where all are treated as free and equal. The Classical Liberalism that Gaus defends is an interesting and distinctive view, differing in important ways from both the "High Liberalism" of Rawls and those working in his wake, and from Libertarianism of the sort defended by Nozick, Rothbard, and others. While there are conservative elements to Gaus's approach, his is not a social conservative view, either. Classical Liberalism is not a new view, but Gaus has provided perhaps the most philosophically sophisticated justification for it.
This barely begins to touch on the many topics covered by Gaus along the way, including the relationship between reason and emotion in ethics, the role of instrumental reasoning in morality, the rationality and development of moral rules, the proper way to understand punishment and blame, and the place of history in morality, among others.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Hadley Arkes Responds
Hadley Arkes has written the following response to my post from earlier this week:
I would like to thank Michael Moreland for his comment on my piece in the Public Discourse on the so-called “video games” case and the opinion written by Justice Scalia. For over 20 years Justice Scalia has been the one on the Court who has come the closest to speaking for me on the legal issues of the day. But this is one of those places where friends diverge. And it becomes even more interesting because the difference is bound up with the differences we have in taking seriously a perspective on natural law, as a perspective that gives us a practical hold on the cases coming before us. Mike’s comment brings us to that ground, and I would talk his commentary as an occasion to get clearer on that ground for our friends.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Our Jurisdictional (Not Relativistic) First Amendment
You know we live in interesting times when Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan are lined up against Justices Thomas and Breyer, Archbishop Charles Chaput, Cathy Kaveny, and MOJ’s own Steve Shiffrin. To that mix, add Hadley Arkes today at Public Discourse writing on Brown v. EMA (the California violent video games case, though I still prefer the earlier caption, Schwarzenegger v. EMA) and charging Justice Scalia with “add[ing] yet another step to the acceptance over the years, of the law on speech that has been built on the premises of Justice Harlan’s relativism: ‘One man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.’”
With all due respect to Hadley, I think I see things a little differently. The First Amendment is not a sanction for moral relativism but is instead a judicially enforceable limitation on the power of the government to prescribe orthodoxy in the expression of ideas (a "jurisdictional" interpretation of sorts). Now, there are interesting disagreements that consume my friends who work on the First Amendment over what counts as protected “speech” and the appropriate level of scrutiny of government restrictions on various types of speech. But outside of a narrowly circumscribed set of cases, the government is powerless (“shall make no law”) to limit speech. That’s why I regard the recent spate of controversial First Amendment cases as, for the most part, correctly decided and, in some instances, obviously so—U.S. v. Stevens (animal cruelty videos), Snyder v. Phelps (tort liability for funeral protest), Citizens United v. FEC (limits on independent campaign expenditures by corporations and unions), Davis v. FEC (“Millionaire’s Amendment” to Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act), and, most recently, Brown v. EMA (violent video games), Sorrell v. IMS Health, Inc. (prescription drug "data mining"), and Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett (public finance matching funds scheme).
A minor doctrinal disagreement I have with Arkes’s characterization of R.A.V. v. St. Paul in an earlier piece at the First Things web site (where Arkes took Justice Alito’s side in Snyder v. Phelps) and again today is, I think, illustrative of the larger point. Arkes wrote back in March at First Things that Justice Scalia’s opinion in R.A.V. v. St. Paul was based on the “presumption that any attempt to judge the content of speech was on its face invalid,” and today he writes:
Scalia would insist yet again that it is arbitrary to cast moral judgments on the “content” of speech. The same doctrine that led him to accept, as free expression, the burning of crosses…now leads him to withdraw any ground of judgment, or moral restraint, on a class of “entertainments” that occasioned no particular strain in the past as they were brought under a regimen of legal restraint.
But this misinterprets Justice Scalia’s opinion for the Court in R.A.V. (joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Kennedy, Souter, and Thomas) as a bald claim of moral relativism about whether the burning of crosses is a good thing or a bad thing. Instead, R.A.V.stands for a much narrower (but, from the standpoint of First Amendment precedent, very important) principle that, even within a class of otherwise constitutionally proscribable speech (fighting words or assault), the government cannot make a content-based discrimination and carve out some forms of such speech for especially punitive treatment:
The content based discrimination reflected in the St. Paul ordinance comes within neither any of the specific exceptions to the First Amendment prohibition we discussed earlier, nor within a more general exception for content discrimination that does not threaten censorship of ideas. It assuredly does not fall within the exception for content discrimination based on the very reasons why the particular class of speech at issue (here, fighting words) is proscribable. As explained earlier, the reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey. St. Paul has not singled out an especially offensive mode of expression—it has not, for example, selected for prohibition only those fighting words that communicate ideas in a threatening (as opposed to a merely obnoxious) manner. Rather, it has proscribed fighting words of whatever manner that communicate messages of racial, gender, or religious intolerance. Selectivity of this sort creates the possibility that the city is seeking to handicap the expression of particular ideas. That possibility would alone be enough to render the ordinance presumptively invalid, but St. Paul’s comments and concessions in this case elevate the possibility to a certainty. 505 U.S. 377, 393-94 (1992).
So where Arkes sees moral relativism, I see an appropriate limitation on the authority of the state to censor the expression of ideas. This isn’t (I hope) because I’m in the grips of moral relativism but because that’s what the text and interpretive history of the First Amendment require.
Jaffa on Aristotle and Aquinas
Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review contained a review by Harry Jaffa of a new translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and I have some reservations about a couple things Jaffa says about Aquinas (and Aquinas’ appropriation of Aristotle) in the review.
First, Jaffa writes in the review that “Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, believed that in the ‘Ethics’ Aristotle had said everything needful for happiness in this life. Thus Aquinas did not write his own book on ethics, but instead wrote a commentary on Aristotle.” I’m not sure whether Jaffa means to say here that Aquinas didn’t think that the New Testament and Augustine, for example, said something “needful for happiness in this life,” but I’d submit that Aquinas most certainly did think so and thought that Aristotle’s account of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics required the addition (replacement, perfection) of an account of supernatural beatitude, grace, and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. See Denis J.M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (CUA Press, 1997), 395-401. Some (especially some Straussians) might say that such an insistent Christian theological element is all the worse for Aquinas, but it’s at least a plausible (indeed likely) view that what Aquinas meant by (perfect) beatitudo isn’t just Aristotelian eudaimonia with some random theological speculation thrown on top of it. Also, I'm not sure what to make of the claim that Aquinas didn’t write “his own book on ethics,” for surely the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologiae might count as a “book on ethics.” Of course, Jaffa’s earlier book on Thomism argued idiosyncratically for the importance of Aquinas’s Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics over and against the Summa Theologiae, so I understand (but don’t agree with) the marginalization here of the Summa and its much more theologically rich account of ethics and politics.
Second, Jaffa writes that “Aristotle’s greatness of soul (magnanimity) may seem to resemble pride, the greatest of sins described in the biblical canon. But Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of the ‘Ethics’ offers proof against theological negativism.” Again, I think Jaffa significantly understates here the difference between Aristotle’s virtue of magnanimity (which wouldn’t seem to describe, say, Jesus Christ) and Aquinas’s theologically subversive account of it. See ST II-II, 129 a.3, ad.4 and Mary Keys, Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good (Cambridge UP, 2006), 143-172. Indeed, it was precisely by engaging in a clever misinterpretation of Aristotelian magnanimity that Albert the Great and Aquinas were able to reconcile Aristotelian magnanimity and Christian humility. See Tobias Hoffmann, “Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas on Magnanimity,” Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 1200-1500 (Brill, 2008), 101-29. Jaffa wrote a book on Aquinas and Aristotle almost 60 (!) years ago in which he argued that Aquinas’s theological commitments undermined Aquinas’s “scientific and secular” bona fides, so I suppose this is just the latest installment in a long-running debate between those of us who think Aquinas achieved a genuine synthesis of Aristotelianism and Augustinian Christianity (preeminently in the Summa Theologiae) and those who think all the smart things Aquinas had to say (mostly in his commentaries on Aristotle) were already said earlier and more clearly by Aristotle himself.
Friday, July 1, 2011
First Things on Violent Video Games
First Things' daily "On the Square" has a set of interesting pieces by Archbishop Charles Chaput, Gregory Laughlin, and Robert Miller on Brown v. EMA, the California violent video games case that Steve Shiffrin has posted about here recently.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Augustine and The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick's masterpiece The Tree of Life is a stunningly beautiful film, but be forewarned that it doesn't have a straightforward plot insofar as it's about...well, everything from the origin of the universe through the evolution of life on Earth to the end of matter, with a lingering pause on a Catholic family in 1950s Waco, Texas. The otherwise gushing reviews from critics have largely missed the film's Augustinian themes: nature and grace ("The nuns taught us there were two ways through life, the way of nature and the way of grace."), interiority and the second-person dialogue with God that echoes Augustine's Confessions ("I didn't know how to name You then. But I see it was You. Always You were calling me."), love (“The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.”), and the surd of human sinfulness in a "Pear Tree"-like incident. Terrence Malick is an eccentric genius, but he's made the most overtly theological major American motion picture since Bruce Beresford's Tender Mercies in 1983.
Monday, June 27, 2011
The Pluralism of Law and Religion
I want to echo the comments from others about the interesting Law and Religion Roundtable at Northwestern. Thanks again to Rick Garnett, Paul Horwitz, and Nelson Tebbe for organizing the roundtable and to Andy Koppelman for his generous hospitality. I was struck by the number of important books in law and religion that are in the pipeline and were presented by Brian Leiter, Andy Koppelman, John Inazu, Kathleen Brady, and our own Marc DeGirolami, all of whom are tackling issues--such as toleration, secularism, and tragedy--in law and religion beyond mere constitutional doctrine. Adam Samaha from Chicago also presented a superb set of readings he's assembled for a course in law and religion.
Following on Marc's point about the remarkable pluralism (that's the sanguine term, as Marc says) of views in the field, an offhand thought is that in law and religion, perhaps more than in most fields, the tradition-dependent character (to use Alasdair MacIntyre's term) of one's commitments is squarely on display, whether one is an egalitarian liberal, a Thomist Catholic, an evangelical Protestant, or whatever. So maybe we can set aside our fundamental disagreements when we're talking about the UCC, but that's virtually impossible when we're talking about God, religion, conscience, and toleration--when the quest for a view from nowhere is an idle project. As MacIntyre puts it in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (p. 346):
The fact that liberalism does not provide a neutral tradition-independent ground from which a verdict may be passed upon the rival claims of conflicting traditions in respect of practical rationality and justice, but turns itself to be just one more such tradition...provides the strongest reason that we can actually have for asserting that there is no such neutral ground, that there is no place for appeals to a practical-rationality-as-such or a justice-as-such to which all rational persons would by their very rationality be compelled to give their allegiance. There is instead only the practical-rationality-of-this-or-that-tradition and the justice-of-this-or-that tradition.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Cesar Chavez's California
To steal a line from Stanley Hauerwas, I don't really believe in California. But even I will admit that California in the decades following World War II was about as ideal a time and place as American life can offer. Caitlin Flanagan has a nice essay in the current Atlantic about the California of her childhood and one of its sainted heroes, the devoutly Catholic Cesar Chavez. Flanagan winsomely recalls the labor activism of her Berkeley English prof father ("In the history of human enterprise, there can have been no more benevolent employer than the University of California in the 1960s and ’70s, yet to hear my father and his English-department pals talk about the place, you would have thought they were working at the Triangle shirtwaist factory."), but she's especially perceptive about Chavez:
To understand Chavez, you have to understand that he was grafting together two life philosophies that were, at best, an idiosyncratic pairing. One was grounded in union-organizing techniques that go back to the Wobblies; the other emanated directly from the mystical Roman Catholicism that flourishes in Mexico and Central America and that Chavez ardently followed. He didn’t conduct “hunger strikes”; he fasted penitentially. He didn’t lead “protest marches”; he organized peregrinations in which his followers—some crawling on their knees—arrayed themselves behind the crucifix and effigies of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His desire was not to lift workers into the middle class, but to bind them to one another in the decency of sacrificial poverty. He envisioned the little patch of dirt in Delano—the “Forty Acres” that the UFW had acquired in 1966 and that is now a National Historic Landmark—as a place where workers could build shrines, pray, and rest in the shade of the saplings they had tended together while singing.
For much of the twentieth century, California was a parable for America, including American Catholicism. But the story doesn't end on a happy note:
Growing up here when I did meant believing your state was the most blessed place in the world. We were certain—both those who lived in the Republican, Beach Boys paradises of Southern California and those who lived in the liberal enclaves of Berkeley and Santa Monica—that our state would always be able to take care of its citizens. The working class would be transformed (by dint of the aerospace industry and the sunny climate) into the most comfortable middle class in the world, with backyard swimming pools and self-starting barbecue grills for everyone. The poor would be taken care of, too, whether that meant boycotting grapes, or opening libraries until every rough neighborhood had books (and Reading Lady volunteers) for everyone.
But all of that is gone now.
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