Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Friday, May 9, 2008

Response to God and Myanmar

By Susan Stabile

MOJ-reader Jonathan Watson had this to say regarding my post on God and Myanmar:

"You ask, 'What is it that prompts people to regard disaster or disease as God's punishment for being bad?' My response is that I believe that humans have an innate desire to see good action rewarded (hence, many Christians now and in the past viewing wealth as a reward for living virtuously) and evil activity punished (see the comments on Myanmar).

"In the end, we are left with Fr. Araujo's statement, and a similar from First Things here, by David Hart, an Orthodox theologian, [which states in part]: 'I do not believe we Christians are obliged — or even allowed — to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God's goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.'"

God and Myanmar

By Rob Vischer

I share Susan's distress over comments attributing the Myanmar disaster to God's will.  But I don't find the comments especially puzzling -- in some cases, they are legitimate attempts to reconcile the world we see with God's sovereignty.  It's one thing to write off school shootings as products of free will, but it's much harder to do that with a natural world that seems hard-wired for human misery.  Explaining Myanmar as an exercise of God's sovereignty also makes a certain amount of logical sense after reading Scripture, particularly the Old Testament.  If God hardened Pharaoh's heart in order to keep him from freeing the Israelites, necessitating more plagues, why wouldn't it make sense that God would "clean up Myanmar" in this horrific manner?  One reason I have such a hard time reading the Old Testament is that it seems that God is continually breaking eggs in the course of making his proverbial omelet.  Modern sensibilities suggest that God's love for every single human person precludes Him from willing any amount of suffering for any single human person.  I hope that's the case.  The Bible does not exactly boost my confidence, though.

Evangelical Manifesto

By Rob Vischer

Two days ago, a group of 80 evangelical leaders (including Jim Wallis, Os Guinness, Richard Mouw, and Dallas Willard) released "An Evangelical Manifesto."  The document's two purposes are "first to address the confusions and corruptions that attend the term evangelical in the United States and much of the Western world today, and second to clarify where we stand on issues that have caused consternation over Evangelicals in public life."  It is well worth reading.  It is also noteworthy that more polarizing figures such as James Dobson and Richard Land are not among the signatories.  And a spokesperson for Concerned Women for America said the manifesto was "blurring the distinctions between liberal and conservative" and confusing Christian voters about the most important issues: abortion and gay marriage.  Under this approach, I suppose that even discussing any issues other than abortion and gay marriage as relevant considerations for Christian voters must be written off as "confusing."

God and Myanmar

By Susan Stabile

As we ponder Robert Araujo's question about the reponsibility to protect, I have another question.  I just read a blog post of a friend of mine recounting a comment from a coworker to the effect that the cyclone that hit Myanmar was God "cleaning things out over there."  What is it that prompts people to regard disaster or disease as God's punishment for being bad?  We heard some people say it about the tsunami.  We heard some people say it about 9/11.  And, if you remember back to the early days of the AIDs epedemic, there was no shortage of people proclaiming that AIDS was God's way of punishing homosexuals.  It all seems so inconsistent with my understanding of the God who loved us first and unconditionally (the subject of a blog post I coincidentally made earlier today) that I just don't get it.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

The Responsibility to Protect—and Catholic Legal Theory

By Robert John Araujo, SJ

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When His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI spoke at the United Nations on April 18, he addressed the duty and responsibility to protect peoples—not only from gross violations of human rights but also in situations of humanitarian crises, human or natural. It strikes me that the current situation in Myanmar/Burma may provide a situation in which a difficult and uncooperative government is augmenting the dreadful suffering of the Burmese people who are experiencing the many tragedies of Cyclone Nargis. I am in the process of trying to develop some thoughts about what does Catholic legal theory have to say about the responsibility to protect. I begin with these words of Pope Benedict delivered during his UN address:

Recognition of the unity of the human family, and attention to the innate dignity of every man and woman, today find renewed emphasis in the principle of the responsibility to protect.  This has only recently been defined, but it was already present implicitly at the origins of the United Nations, and is now increasingly characteristic of its activity.  Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made.  If States are unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations Charter and in other international instruments.  The action of the international community and its institutions, provided that it respects the principles undergirding the international order, should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation of sovereignty.

RJA sj

Introduction

By Russell Powell

I would like to thank Mark Sargent and Rick Garnett for inviting me to join the Mirror of Justice.  I have followed the blog for the past few years and appreciate the respectful engagement with often difficult issues.  As some of you know, I am particularly interested in how Catholic tradition informs questions related to poverty alleviation and interreligious dialogue.  I actually see one as a bridge to the other.  I believe that dialogue regarding policy and jurisprudential approaches to poverty (along with other social justice concerns) provides a tremendous opportunity for meaningful interaction with other communities. In my scholarship, I am most interested in dialogue with Islam.  My interest in Christian-Muslim dialogue was a pivotal factor in my choice to join the Jesuits many years ago.  Although my discernment in formation led me to conclude that I was not called to priesthood, I still feel called to a vocation in dialogue as a legal academic and am deeply grateful for my time in the Society of Jesus.  I look forward to many fruitful conversations on the Mirror of Justice.

Russell Powell

Seattle University School of Law

Models of Christian Legal Scholarship

By Thomas Berg

Bill Brewbaker (Alabama) posts what looks to be a very interesting paper, Theory, Identity, Vocation: Three Models of Christian Legal Scholarship.  From the abstract:

Recognizably Christian scholarship is becoming more commonplace in the American legal academy, yet little systematic attention has been given to fundamental questions of approach. This article highlights moments of continuity and discontinuity between Christian legal scholarship and its secular counterparts. Contrary to the expectations generated by contemporary political debate, the distinctive contribution of Christian legal scholarship is not primarily to provide ammunition for political programs of the right or the left, but to situate law and human legal practices within a larger story about the world.

The "vocation" model seems particularly interesting:

Finally, a vocation model emphasizes that legal scholarship is one of many human (and not merely Christian) callings, the point of which, as with other such callings, is the glory and enjoyment of God. In order to know what pleases God, the scholar will need to study the Scriptures and theology; he or she will need the church. But the scholar will also need to study God's creation, including not only the world God has made directly, but also those relevant human institutions that, in God's providence, inhabit it. On this view, there is no reason to prescribe a uniform methodology for Christian legal scholars, nor should we necessarily expect widespread agreement among Christians on contestible legal issues.

Tom

Frans de Waal Answers Your Primate Questions

By Michael Perry

Frans de Waal, as you may know, directs the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University (where I and many other primates teach).  If you follow this link, you'll find a host of fascinating comments about everything from nonprocreative sex (it works for our primate cousins, the bonobos) to income inequality (could be the downfall of us human primates).  Interesting stuff!

More on Obama and Judges

By Thomas Berg

In reaction to Rick and Rob on Obama, I think that we do not want judges (in constitutional and statutory cases) to carry out "their broader vision of what America should be," but that we do want judges who can understand (or try to understand) "what it's like to be gay, poor, or black" (as well as other characteristics; I do think there's a problem with overly selective sympathy).  Sympathy for the real-world conditions of people is a judicial virtue, not because the judge is suppose to enact that sympathy solely or in the face of the law, but because it is often essential to giving meaning to the directives of the law (constitutional or statutory).  Interpretation, even an under an originalist analysis, often requires making an analogy (or disanalogy) between the context of the enactment and the context today.  For example, could a justice have voted to strike down school segregation in Brown without making some judgment that segregation denied equality to people in an analogous way to the black codes of 1868, and that education had become so pervasive a factor in people's opportunities by 1954 that it was analogous to the rights (property, contracts, etc.) as to which the 1868 framers meant to guarantee equality?  Would a justice be able to reach those conclusions, or even address those questions, without trying to imagine "what it [was] like to be black" in segregated societies/schools"?

As another example, I've found that asserting the constitutional right to bring religion into the public square -- a well-grounded right historically, but one whose contours in current situations are not entirely clear -- won't succeed unless judges try to sympathize with the religious believer facing the state: the student who wants to do a religious paper topic in class over a teacher's objection, or the family that wants their religious choice included equally in a school choice program as against the state's teacher's lobby and Blaine Amendment history.  Without thinking "what it's like to be a serious religious believer," judges tend to say "I don't see that you're that burdened; you can still practice your religion at church and home."

Tom

Memory and Intelligence

By Eduardo Penalver

I know this is not really on topic, but I’ve always been interested in the connections between memory and intelligence, perhaps because I’m so absent-minded.  And I never like to miss an opportunity to plug a Borges short-story. (Borges is the Simpsons of literary reference, since virtually any topic of conversation can be connected in some way to one of his stories.)  This story in USA Today about a woman who can remember every day of her life since age 14 is terrifically interesting, particularly because of the trouble she has with abstract concepts.   It calls to mind the Borges story, Funes el memorioso (Funes, the Memorious), about Irineo Funes, a young man who, after a fall from a horse, remembers every detail of everything he experiences.  Borges talks about how Funes, who is bed-ridden after his fall, passed the time.  On several occasions, he recalled his memories of particular days in the past, a project that, each time, took an entire day.  On another occasion, using his powers of memory, he created a numbering system in which every number had a different name (names like “Luis Melian Lanifur” and “Agustin de Vedia”).  At the end of the story, Borges ventures some comments on the connections between memory and thought.  Describing Funes, he says:

He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin.  I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking.  To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract.  In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes, there was nothing but particulars — they were virtually immediate particulars.

The comment about about ignoring is interesting (and additional proof of Borges’s perceptiveness), because the USA Today story talks about another person with a prodigious memory who has no trouble with abstract concepts.  The difference between the man with perfect memory who can abstract and the woman who cannot seems to be the control the man has over his memories.  The woman describes them as crowding in on her even when she doesn’t want them, while the man talks about his ability to call them up at will.  So Borges is correct in suggesting that perfect memory may not be fatal to the ability to generalize and abstract if one has sufficient control over his thoughts to be able to ignore the memories when they’re not useful.  In any event, the possibility that a certain degree of forgetting is actually helpful for thinking has always given me some hope.

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