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.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

CST and the City

By Elizabeth Schiltz

Mark -- It might be interesting to include a (long range) historical perspective in your CST and the City conference, too.  Maybe my perspective's warped a bit right now, because I'm still immersed in the Europe of late antiquity & the Middle Ages, but this came up in some class reading I'm doing this morning, from Christopher Dawson's Religion and the Rise of Western Culture:

The late Ernst Troeltsch, following Max Weber, went so far as to maintain that it was the medieval city which first provided the favourable conditions for a thorough-going Christianization of social life such as had existed neither in the city culutre of the ancient world, which was based on slavery, nor in the feudal agrarian society which had been built up so largely by the strong at the expense of the weak.

Dawson goes on to quote Troeltsch (from Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen):

The very condition of existence of the city as an essentially economic association is peace, the freedom and the common interest of all the citizens, together with freedom to work and the basing of property on personal effort and industry.

In all these respects the city corresponded to a great extent with the demands of Christian ethics.  As a non-military peaceful community of work, using the military element only for its defence and still devoid of capitalistic urban features, the medieval city was a pattern of Christian society as we find it in Thomist theory.

It also seems to me that this would be a conference where an international perspective might be particularly interesting and important.  The vast differences between what we as American Catholics experience as city life and what the inhabitants of cities such as Mexico City, Beijing, and Mumbai experience must have implications for CST.

Lisa

Vermeule on Legal Instrumentalism

By Rob Vischer

On MoJ we've had some good discussion about (and with) Brian Tamanaha and his work highlighting the dangers of legal instrumentalism (see, e.g., here, here, and here).  In the new Harvard Law Review, Harvard law prof Adrian Vermeule reviews Tamanaha's book, Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law.  An excerpt:

My basic suggestion, in Part I, is that there is no such thing as “instrumentalism." There is only a variety of instrumentalisms, offered in different theoretical contexts for different purposes. The merits of these different instrumentalisms must be evaluated locally rather than globally. Furthermore — this is a separate point, but a complementary one — there are several antonyms for legal instrumentalism that are materially different. It is no more coherent to praise all of them, just because they are not instrumentalism, than it would be to praise all of anarchism, fascism, and communism because they are alternatives to liberal democracy.

Subsequently, in Part II, I ask what prescriptions for the legal system follow from a critique of legal instrumentalism. I suggest that in a legal culture pervaded by instrumentalism (in all of its possible senses), there are powerful discursive pressures to justify an antiinstrumental view by reference to the beneficial effects that holding such a view will produce — by reference, that is, to the instrumental benefits of anti-instrumentalism. When combined with the claim that anti-instrumentalism requires certain beliefs, not merely certain actions, this is an intrinsically paradoxical stance; it leads, perhaps unavoidably, to a type of esoteric legalism, under which the theorist is quite willing to promote a false belief in the truth of antiinstrumentalism in order to secure the benefits of that belief. Unfortunately, however, there are well-known paradoxes of esotericism that make views of this sort self-defeating.

Monday, July 9, 2007

Richard Cohen on the Democrats and Education

By Rick Garnett

Worth a read:

When it comes to education, Democrats are uneducable.

One candidate after another lambasted George Bush, the Republican Party and, of course, the evil justices of the Supreme Court. But not a one of them even whispered a mild word of outrage about a public school system that spends $13,000 per child -- third highest among big-city school systems -- and produces pupils who score among the lowest in just about any category you can name. The only area in which the Washington school system is No. 1 is in money spent on administration. Chests should not swell with pride.

The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Not a single candidate offered anything remotely close to a call for real reform. Instead, a member of the audience could reasonably conclude that if only more money was allocated to these woe-is-me school systems, things would right themselves overnight.

Vouchers, baby.  Vouchers.

"The Case Against Perfection"

By Rick Garnett

Here is Will Saletan's review of Michael Sandel's "The Case Against Perfection."  Here's the end:

In a world without givens, a world controlled by bioengineering, we would dictate our nature as well as our practices and norms. We would gain unprecedented power to redefine the good. In so doing, we would strip perfection of its independence. Its meaning would evolve as our nature and our ideals evolved. The more successfully we engineered I.Q. and muscle-to-fat ratio, the more central these measures would become to our idea of perfection. We already see this phenomenon in our shift of educational emphasis from character to academic testing. We might create a world of perfect SATs, E.R.A.’s and C.E.O.’s. But it would never be a perfect world, because the point of perfection is that its definition doesn’t bend to our will.

This is the real problem with self-engineering. It seizes control of humanity so radically that humanity can no longer judge it. We can’t be certain it’s diminishing us. But we can’t be certain it’s perfecting us, either.

The Pope's letter re: China

By Rick Garnett

Here, thanks to Amy Welborn, is Pope Benedict XVI's letter to the Catholics in China.  I have not seen as much coverage as I would have expected, but maybe I've been looking in the wrong places.

This is a matter in which I am very interested.  (Needless to say, the Pope's tone is more pastoral and charitable than the tone I employed in my op-ed.  I probably would have preferred -- though, of course, I have to admit that the actualization of my preferences would be sub-optimal, pastoral-wise -- a bit more confrontational stance with respect to the Chinese government.)  I'm looking forward to hearing from my betters what, exactly, this letter means for the so-called "underground" Church in China -- and for the so-called Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.  This seems telling:

Considering "Jesus' original plan", it is clear that the claim of some entities, desired by the State and extraneous to the structure of the Church, to place themselves above the Bishops and to guide the life of the ecclesial community, does not correspond to Catholic doctrine, according to which the Church is "apostolic", as the Second Vatican Council underlined. . . .

Likewise, the declared purpose of the afore-mentioned entities to implement "the principles of independence and autonomy, self-management and democratic administration of the Church" [36] is incompatible with Catholic doctrine, which from the time of the ancient Creeds professes the Church to be "one, holy, catholic and apostolic". . .

Given this difficult situation, not a few members of the Catholic community are asking whether recognition from the civil authorities – necessary in order to function publicly – somehow compromises communion with the universal Church. I am fully aware that this problem causes painful disquiet in the hearts of Pastors and faithful. In this regard I maintain, in the first place, that the requisite and courageous safeguarding of the deposit of faith and of sacramental and hierarchical communion is not of itself opposed to dialogue with the authorities concerning those aspects of the life of the ecclesial community that fall within the civil sphere. There would not be any particular difficulties with acceptance of the recognition granted by civil authorities on condition that this does not entail the denial of unrenounceable principles of faith and of ecclesiastical communion. In not a few particular instances, however, indeed almost always, in the process of recognition the intervention of certain bodies obliges the people involved to adopt attitudes, make gestures and undertake commitments that are contrary to the dictates of their conscience as Catholics. . .

There's a lot more.  Any thoughts?

Justice Stevens's law clerk

By Rick Garnett

Here's a nice profile of Cecelia Klingele, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin's law school and a future law clerk to Justice Stevens.  She sounds like a first-rate, and fascinating, person.  Good for the Justice.

The Faith and the City

By Rick Garnett

Thanks to Mark for his post about "CST and the City."  What a rich subject!  For starters, I cannot resist (yet) another plug for Philip Bess's book, "Til We Have Built Jerusalem:  Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred."  Also on my must-read list would be Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City" and John McGreevy's "Parish Boundaries." 

I do think -- and I mean no offense to my pals in suburbia -- that there is something "urban" about "the Catholic thing."  (Read the first chapter of Peter Ackroyd's "Life of Thomas More.")  Someone said (something like) that the heart of urban life is the "being together of strangers."  That line reminds me of the old-chestnut description of the Church:  "Here Comes Everybody."

For more MOJ posts on "urbanism", "new" and otherwise, click here, here, here, here, and here.

Let's run with this.  Ours is an incarnational, embodied faith.  Physical place, and space, has to matter to us.  (This is why, ahem, ugly churches are, well, bad.)  Mark?

The Latest on the Muslim Episcopal Priest

By Thomas Berg

While the Rev. Anne Redding's embrace of Islam was accepted by Seattle's Episcopal bishop,

it turns out that Redding is actually a priest under the Diocese of Rhode Island. Bishop Geralyn Wolf doesn't find the interfaith possibilities so exciting, and announced Thursday that Redding is undergoing church discipline. . . .

In the meantime, Redding will continue "teaching theology at Seattle University, a Jesuit school."

(HT: Christianity Today weblog)

Tom

"Catholics Against Rudy"

By Rick Garnett

The "Catholics Against Rudy" website is launched. 

Recovering Self-Evident Truths

By Rob Vischer

The long-awaited volume Recovering Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law has now been published and is available for purchase.  Edited by MoJ-er Michael Scaperlanda and my colleague Teresa Collett, the collection includes essays from me and fellow MoJ-ers Rick Garnett, Amy Uelmen, and Robert Araujo, along with Catholic luminaries such as Francis Cardinal George, Mary Ann Glendon, Avery Cardinal Dulles, James Gordley, and Robert George.

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