Reposting from 2014:
We often remark here at Mirror of Justice that the central questions of Catholic legal theory are those of human anthropology and human nature. (Even if, like Elizabeth Anscombe, I'm not at all sure that [modern] reflection on "the self" is a meaningful or important philosophical question, see Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics at p. 67.) On what it means for said human nature to be redeemed, here is an excerpt from a homily by my late friend Herbert McCabe, OP on today's feast:
In Mary the redemption reaches down to the roots. In us it is not yet radical, but through our death in Christ and our resurrection in him it is to become so. So far we are only sacramentally redeemed, in the sacramental death and resurrection of baptism - this is something real, it is not merely play-acting, but it is only sacramental, it is not yet in our flesh. The redemption of Mary is pre-sacramental, she does not need baptism or Eucharist, she needs Christ only and has him in her existence in her very flesh. For this reason her redemption, which is pre-sacramental, is a sign and foretaste of the post-sacramental, the life of the risen body, the future kingdom. Her Assumption is the beginning of the resurrection of all who are taken up into Christ’s resurrection.
This, then, is how we are to cash the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. This is the difference in practice that the doctrine makes. We are not to look for this difference in the biography of Our Lady, in her character or in her behaviour. In this sense the doctrine is not about that. It is not, for instance, about the fact that she committed no sin. You could hold, as Thomas Aquinas did, that she was sinless and still deny, as he did, the Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception does not make that sort of difference to Mary; it did not make any noticeable difference to her - as I have suggested there is no reason to suppose that she knew about it. What it makes a difference to is our understanding of what it means for her to be redeemed and therefore what it will eventually mean for us to be redeemed. To assert this doctrine is to assert the mysterious fact that our holiness will not stop short of the roots of our being, that we too are to become radically holy.
And this is a strange doctrine. At the moment we are forgiven sinners; we are forgiven but we are people who have been sinners, we have been subject to the sin of the world, moreover we have at times opted for the sin of the world. Both things are true: we have contrition for our sins even as we celebrate our forgiveness. Being realistic and honest and therefore contrite about our sins is the sign and result of our being forgiven. (That is why confession is an important part of the sacrament of Penance.)
What we celebrate on the feast of the Immaculate Conception is that Christ’s love for us brings us further than this. What he wants for us is not just that we should be forgiven sinners but that we should be as though sin had never been. Redemption for us will involve a rebirth from an immaculate conception. Our redemption will not just be the successful end of a journey, the triumphant culmination of the history of man, but in some utterly mysterious way we will be freed from our history, or our history will be taken up into some totally new pattern in which even our sins become part of our holiness. We will somehow be able to accept them as God accepts them. There will be no more sorrow for sin, no more remorse over the past, no more contrition; we will be radically and totally free: ‘And all things shall be well and all manner of things shall be well ... when the fire and the rose are one’ (God Matters, pp. 213-14).
Monday, November 23, 2015
The annual fall conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture was this past weekend, and, as Rick and I previewed last week, featured a blockbuster lineup of presentations. Nowhere in the Catholic world, I’d submit, is there a more robust annual academic event of such intellectual breadth and depth, and the Center’s Director, Carter Snead, and his staff should be commended for their hard work that results in such success.
Particular highlights for me were the opening address by Remi Brague on freedom and creation, a paper by Alasdair MacIntyre on justifications for coercion, Jonathan Lear (long one of my intellectual heroes) on Aristotle and Freud, Elizabeth Lev and John Haldane on modern art, a debate between Father Martin Rhonheimer and Thomas Pink on the interpretation of Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, and a panel on vowed religious life and freedom with two good friends, Sister Maria Evangelista Fernandez, OSB and Brother Bryan Kerns, OSA. Rick, Father Thomas Joseph White, OP, and I participated in a panel on religious freedom—its natural law basis (White), the conditions for it in civil society (Garnett), and problems in defining what counts as a religious institution for purposes of legal exemptions (Moreland). Of course, there are also the joys of sharing meals and time together with hundreds of scholars and students from around the world.
And there is a larger point to be made about this moment at Notre Dame and in Catholic higher education generally. As I mentioned last week, I am spending this academic year on leave at Notre Dame as the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Ethics for Ethics and Culture (and my wife, Anna Bonta Moreland, is the Myser Fellow in the Center this year). The Center for Ethics and Culture is a model for Catholic intellectual engagement with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty at Notre Dame that other universities would be wise to explore and emulate. The Center’s Sorin Fellows program integrates undergraduates into the work of the Center and places them in contact with faculty (as an example, Anna and I hosted a dinner with four Sorin Fellows at our home last month). A Mission Hiring initiative identifies graduate fellows and faculty who can make vital contributions to Notre Dame’s Catholic identity.
There is a well-worn tendency to despair about the future of Catholic higher education, even at those schools such as Notre Dame where the commitment to Catholic identity seems to me exceptionally strong. Since I was an undergraduate at Notre Dame and then through graduate school at Boston College and in faculty and administrative roles at Villanova, I have seen more than 20 years of debate over curriculum, faculty hiring, and student life at Catholic universities. Those who would despair should light a candle rather than curse the darkness by creating and supporting initiatives such as the Center for Ethics and Culture—if such initiatives continue, then the future of Catholic universities in the United States is bright indeed.
Monday, November 16, 2015
I thought this "student-protesters-have-a-point" piece in the New York Times yesterday by Ross Douthat was especially insightful amid these fraught times on campuses. As Douthat puts it in his quick summary of the history of American higher education:
Over this period the university system became increasingly rich and powerful, a center of scientific progress and economic development. But it slowly lost the traditional sense of community, mission, and moral purpose. The ghost of an older humanism still haunted its libraries and classrooms, but students seeking wisdom and character could be forgiven for feeling like a distraction from the university’s real business.
Fast forward to the contemporary university, Douthat writes, and "the university’s deeper spirit remained technocratic, careerist and basically amoral."
But it seems to me there is an opportunity here for Catholic universities to respond to this challenge. Some of the most interesting passages (in Chapter Three, for example) of Laudato si' speak to the concern about technocracy run amok, and--at their best--Catholic universities maintain a commitment to the liberal arts and humanistic learning (even in professional schools of law and business!) that leavens the loss of moral purpose of the university. It may be that Catholic universities can help give the university back to itself. To do so would entail discerning those trends in the modern university that have been destructive of the aims of higher education (pick your favorites) and providing a witness to the possibility of something better--a stronger sense of community, moral and intellectual seriousness, and student formation for a life worth living.
I am fortunate to be spending this academic year on leave at Notre Dame as the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow in the Center for Ethics and Culture and teaching a seminar in the Law School. This weekend features the Center for Ethics and Culture's annual conference, and the theme for this year is freedom. Highlights include plenary talks by Remi Brague, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Pink, Father Martin Rhonheimer, and Father Julián Carrón. The undercard includes a panel on religious freedom with Father Thomas Joseph White, OP, Rick Garnett, and yours truly. Full details are here.
Monday, November 2, 2015
Great news out of Villanova today--thanks to a generous $2 million gift from Joseph and Eleanor McCullen, Villanova Law is launching a new Center for Law and Religion. The Villanova press release with details is here.
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
The Catholic corner of the Internet has been ablaze for the past day or so about a letter submitted to the New York Times by Catholic theologians upset over Ross Douthat columns about the Synod and, in particular, his use of the word “heresy” in a sub-tweet during a Twitter exchange. Setting aside the letter’s objection to Douthat’s lack of “professional qualifications” (which if enforced would leave the Times op-ed page with only Paul Krugman’s columns on economics and Tom Friedman’s on foreign policy), there is also an important and, to my mind, interesting issue here about the professional norms applicable to signing such statements.
I was once told by a doctoral student of John Rawls’s that Rawls, though an opponent of the Vietnam War, did not sign statements opposing the war because such statements were necessarily too imprecise and usually expressed mere opinion without argument. (Toward the end of his life, Rawls did, alas, sign the so-called “Philosopher’s Brief” in Glucksberg v. Washington, to which David Velleman and Paul Weithman responded powerfully here and here.) I’ve been thinking about the issue of when one should sign statements, amicus briefs, and such since attending an AALS panel last January (organized by my friend and Villanova colleague Michelle Madden Dempsey) on “The Role Morality of the Legal Scholar.” On the panel, Richard Fallon reprised arguments he made a few years ago here raising serious concerns about legal scholars signing amicus briefs, and Amanda Frost responded to Fallon’s arguments along these lines.
For myself, I’ve not been much for signing statements by academics, though I have signed onto amicus briefs in areas of my interest and expertise—including religious freedom and tort and contract law preemption—where I knew the counsel involved and was able to provide substantive feedback in the drafting of the brief. And while I don’t have especially strong or developed views about the role morality of academics when deciding whether to sign this or that statement, it does strike me as an under-explored topic in need of more thoughtful reflection than it usually gets. Notably, what criteria should govern when one does or does not sign a statement? What does one hope to accomplish through such a statement? And how should one navigate between the twin dangers of either self-righteous and ineffectual academic preening in choosing to sign a statement or cowardice in not doing so?
As someone who tries to resist the notion (at least in its cruder formulations) that common law is "made" by judges based on "policy" considerations, I found much to appreciate in John Finnis's wide-ranging lecture "Judicial Power: Past, Present and Future" delivered last week at Gray's Inn Hall. To wit:
To state (like Bacon and countless much longer-serving judges) that the common law is declared rather than made is no mere “fairy-tale” unless the statement is mistakenly asserted or heard as a description of the history of the common law. It is not a description or prediction, fictionalising that history by overlooking the many changes made by the courts, but a statement of judicial responsibility: to identify the rights of the contending parties now by identifying what were, in law, the rights and wrongs, or validity or invalidity, of their actions and transactions when entered upon and done. There are cases when a court, especially one that is hierarchically supreme and thus not bound to follow the rulings of higher courts, can judge it has the duty now to depart from an interpretation or view of the part of our law in dispute between the parties because, though that interpretation or view has been judicially approved and is what legal advisers would now and previously convey to their clients, it is nonetheless out of line with principles, policies and standards acknowledged (now, and when the dispute arose) in comparable parts of our law–so out of line that it ought now to be declared to have been a mistaken view, and set aside in favour of a rule that, though new in relation to the subject-matter and area of law directly in issue between the parties, is nevertheless not a novelty or act of legislation (taking our law as a whole), and can fairly be applied to the parties and dispute before the court.
Perhaps I just need to have a second cup of coffee this morning, but I thought this long essay by Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown on the "Age of Exhaustion” at the American Interest brilliantly captures much about our political and cultural moment—Liberalism (by which Mitchell means a good bit of modern American conservatism) and anti-Liberalism having run their course, we’re tired. Highly recommended with much to think about and contest throughout. A bit:
What Tocqueville understood over and above his contemporaries was that while the transition to democratic social conditions is always tumultuous, once they have settled in, a new sort of problem emerges: Citizens will lose faith in liberty and no longer labor to maintain and defend it. Instead, they will prefer a quiet, purportedly beneficent equality in servitude, a despotism that assures them that they have security and adolescent entertainment: Facebook, Twitter, never-ending video games, and the titillation of ever more mesmerizing gadgets. This delivers them from the specter of anxiety and the burden of freedom. The democratic age ends, neither with robust Liberals striving in a forever imperfect world, nor with defiant anti-Liberals striving to perfect the world, but rather with The Great Exhaustion. Striving, uncertainty, risk, labor, suffering, insult—these become too much for our fragile constitutions to bear. Above all, in the time of The Great Exhaustion, no one wants to “feel uncomfortable” and, so, we conspire to organize the world so that it is without duress or hardship. The 1 percent political and commercial classes are happy to oblige.
