March 23, 2007
/ Volume
CXXXIV, Number
6
EDITORIAL
Disarray
The Editors
Beleaguered is the polite word now most often
used to describe the Bush administration. Yet making sense of the
administration’s failures requires stronger language. As the events and
revelations of the last few weeks remind us, almost nothing this
administration does works and almost nothing it says adds up.
What is one to make of the deplorable
treatment of wounded and damaged Iraq war veterans at the Walter Reed
Army Medical Center? How could an administration that endlessly boasts
of its “support for the troops” allow those who have paid the highest
price for this unnecessary war to be neglected in this way? Evidently,
similar problems pervade the military health-care system. Veterans
Administration hospitals, which under the Clinton administration were
models of what good government stewardship could accomplish, are now
also in disarray. Like everything else associated with the Iraq
debacle, the military medical system was simply not equipped to deal
with the unintended consequences of the war, namely the tens of
thousands of severely traumatized soldiers who will require decades of
care. Some generals have been fired, and a bipartisan commission has
been established to investigate the scandal, but this should not
distract attention from the fact that the buck stops in the White
House.
A rare moment of accountability occurred in
the conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former
chief of staff, on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. Libby
lied to FBI agents and to a grand jury investigating the
administration’s efforts to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a
critic of the administration’s unfounded claims about Iraq’s weapons of
mass destruction. The legal issues of the case, which initially
involved an investigation into the “outing” of Wilson’s wife as a CIA
agent, were far from clear, and Wilson himself is no paragon of
truthfulness. What is undeniable, though, is that Libby lied about his
role in the administration’s feverish effort to smear an opponent of
the war.
More evidence of the administration’s
cavalier attitude toward the law came to light in the congressional
testimony of six U.S. attorneys fired by the Department of Justice. The
federal prosecutors complained of Republican political interference
with investigations, and of threats of retaliation if they went public
with their stories. Later in the same week it was revealed that the FBI
has carried out unauthorized surveillance on thousands of U.S. citizens
under predictably elastic applications of provisions of the Patriot
Act.
If things are going badly at home, not much
is going better in Baghdad, where the carnage continues virtually
unabated. Holding his first news conference after assuming control of
U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus said the “surge” strategy
will require more than the 21,500 troops already committed. It was then
learned that President Bush had already dispatched nearly five thousand
more troops. Petraeus also strongly hinted that the surge, which was
presented to Congress and the nation as a temporary escalation, will be
open-ended in duration. In other words, there will be no end to the war
in Iraq on Bush’s watch, and therefore no need to face up to any
ultimate failure.
Bush’s defenders complain that Democrats have
no alternative strategy. On the contrary, several plausible proposals
for gradual disengagement are being debated in Congress, all of which
recognize, as General Petraeus himself has said, that there must be a
political solution to the conflict. As columnist Jonathan Chait writes
of Bush’s apologists, “Trust the commander in chief, don’t undermine
the troops, withdrawal equals defeat, aren’t arguments to support
Bush’s strategy. They’re generic pro-war arguments.” And that is all
the administration has ever offered.
The heartwrenching stories from Walter Reed
remind us that a very small number of Americans are paying a very high
price for this open-ended war. Many soldiers are now being sent back to
Iraq for the third time, while others are having their deployments
extended. There has been remarkably little protest about this unjust
and ruinous policy. If joining the armed services is the job these men
and women chose, then they have to live with the consequences of that
choice, or so goes the common wisdom. But war is not a “job” in any
morally coherent sense. Even if service in the military is voluntary,
placing the burden of the nation’s decision to go to war only on those
who have chosen to serve is not right. Their choice does not absolve us
of our responsibilities to treat them fairly. What was shameful about
the abuse of the wounded at Walter Reed was easily understood. What is
shameful about sending the same young men and women to fight again and
again in Iraq should be too.
Here's an interesting post, from the "Crunch Con" blog, on the "separation of church and culture":
I heard a good talk last night by Ken Myers, the happy genius of the indispensable Mars Hill Audio Journal household. Our host was Dr. David Naugle, head of the philosophy department at Dallas Baptist University (N.B., for Dallas area readers, Ken's going to be speaking today at DBU at noon, on "Why There Really IS A War Between Science and Religion: C. S. Lewis's Vision of a 'Repentant Science'"; the lecture is free -- follow the link to Dr. Naugle's webpage for details). I've become a big fan of the Mars Hill interviews, and can't encourage thoughtful Christians interested in the intersection of faith and culture strongly enough to subscribe. So it was a treat to hear Ken speak in person. He talked last evening about how from the days of the founders, the American way of thinking about the role of religion in public life was not only to privatize it, but to individualize it. He explained how the inevitable result of this was to make Christian faith peripheral to the substantive questions in public life. Moreover, the principles behind this privatization of religion inevitably lead to the corruption of religion, because it becomes primarily a matter of expressing how individual men feel about God, rather than being an expression of how God feels about individual men, and what He calls us to do.
The upshot is that even among the most religiously enthusiastic Americans, the faith has become so inculturated that it has been turned inside out, and is no longer prophetic, but therapeutic. Ken talked about an interview he did in 2005 with sociologist Christian Smith, who had just written a book on the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. What he found was a consistent set of religious beliefs across denominations, and even traditions (i.e., Muslim teenagers told him the same thing). But it wasn't the beliefs of the particular traditions the kids came out of; rather, it was what Smith calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." It's principles, as Ken listed them, were startlingly familiar: God exists, but you really shouldn't get overly involved with Him unless you get into real trouble or something; the point of life is to be happy; it's important to be nice; good people go to heaven, and most everybody is good; et cetera. . . .
It's being reported over at the Volokh Conspiracy that Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen will be leaving the University of Minnesota and moving across town to the University of St. Thomas. This is, in my view, a fabulous hire, one that -- coupled with the news about our own Susan Stabile and Joel Nichols -- really brings home how successful the St. Thomas experiment has been. In terms of law-and-religion, it seems clear to me that St. Thomas is now home to one of the strongest groups of scholars in the country.
Many of us are interested in the enterprise of Catholic legal education, even if we teach at non-Catholic institutions. What lessons does the St. Thomas experience hold out for us, and for other Catholic law schools?
Monday, March 26, 2007
An interesting profile of Sen. Brownback, from a New Hampshire paper:
U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback introduced himself to state voters Monday as a "full-scale conservative" and made no apologies for his hardline stances against taxes, abortion and gay marriage.
The Kansas Republican, making his first trip to the earliest primary state since announcing his presidential ambitions, told conservative activists at a luncheon he's "pro-life, whole life," saying candidates can't fight for fetus' rights and then abandon them after they are born.
"I believe the child in the womb should be protected, and that we should also protect the person that's in poverty, and the child that's in Darfur, and working with prisoners so they don't have so much recidivism and always back in the system," Brownback said.
I am emerging from the swamp of the deanery long enough to post this Call for Papers to be presented at the Fifth (mirabile dictu!) Annual Conference on Catholic Social Thought and the Law here at Villanova Law in September 2007. Many MOJ-ers and friends-of-MOJ have presented at or attended these conferences. This year's topic will be one that has engaged several of us on this blog over the years -- what does CST tell us about the relationship of the market, the state and the law? Confirmed speakers include David Hollenbach, who will speak about "Economic Justice for All 20 Years Later," the economist/theologian Daniel Finn, who has recently published "The Moral Ecology of Markets" with Cambridge UP, our own Susan Stabile, and yours truly. But there is plenty of room for other papers and respondent. I hope my co-blogistas and our readers will be kind enough to circulate this call to their colleagues and other interested parties.
VILLANOVA
UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL
OF LAW
JOURNAL OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT
The Fifth Annual Conference on Catholic Social Thought and the Law
Catholic Social Teaching on the Market, the State and the Law
CALL FOR PAPERS
Villanova
University
Conference
Center
Friday, September 21, 2007
The nature and implications of Catholic social teaching on the significance of the market for human dignity, and on the role of the state in the regulation of the market, is one of the most controversial aspects of the social doctrine. Catholic social teaching on these issues can best be described as sui generis and non-assimilable to secular conceptions of âleftâ or âright,â but both the left and right have claimed that teaching for their own. This has led to fundamentally inconsistent characterizations of Catholic social teaching as either left-communitarian or as supportive of a strong form of economic liberalism. Can both characterizations be correct? Does disagreement over the proper role of the state prevent creation of a coherent theory of how the market contributes to the common good?
Even more troublesome is the argument that the teaching on the market and its relation to the state is so general and abstract, and so deferential to secular/technical knowledge, that virtually all specific questions of economic and regulatory policy should be regarded matters of prudence, and that the social doctrine gives no or little guidance to their resolution. If that is true, then the value of Catholic social teaching in this field is questionable, to say the least. Is such a wholesale deference to prudential judgment consistent with Catholic social teachingâs robust conception of the common good?
These contesting claims about Catholic social teaching have broad implications for Catholic legal theory. Can the social doctrine provide a framework for determining when and how the market should be freed or constrained by law? Can we derive from it a set of normative propositions about the nature and purpose of the corporation that would provide a foundation for the law of corporate governance and social responsibility? What implications does Catholic social teaching about the market have for the legal structuring of the employment relationship? These are just a few of the questions that will be considered at the Conference.
The Conference will bring together legal academics, economists, theologians and philosophers. Articles presented at the Conference will be considered for publication in the Journal of Catholic Social Thought, a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal. Please submit paper proposals or requests for more information to Dean Mark A. Sargent, [email protected] or Professor Michael Moreland, [email protected] at Villanova University School of Law.
Information for those wishing to attend the Conference will be published shortly.
Last week Michael P. posted an op-ed by Susan Jacoby arguing that religious believers too often mistake disagreement for discrimination. Jonathan Watson responds here. On the Washington Post's website, Jacoby has a post exploring a similar theme, but focused more particularly on the "phony issue" of anti-Catholicism. An excerpt:
The accusation of anti-Catholic discrimination, like the labeling of all critics of Israel as anti-Semitic, is a cover for what is essentially a dispute between conservatives and liberals (both within and outside the Catholic Church). I wouldn't vote for a Catholic like [Bill] Donohue, but then I wouldn't vote for an atheist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Protestant or (what was it?) a believer in "Tibetan Buddhist deities" who shared Donohue's views.
A Catholic wit, looking back on the certitudes of American Catholicism in the fifties, once remarked that "it was the only THE church." Not any more. And never, thankfully, in America. Catholicism, like every other religion, enjoys no immunity from secular criticism in our nation.
Shameless self-promotion time: In today's issue of USA Today, I have this op-ed, "China's lesson on religious freedom," which is about the Holy See's resistance to China's efforts to select Catholic bishops. Here's a bit:
Although its government likes to claim otherwise, and apparently hopes people won't notice, meaningful religious freedom does not exist in China. Quite the contrary: As the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in its report last year, "The Chinese government continues to engage in systematic and egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief."
And so, it was probably more disappointing than surprising when the government-controlled puppet church, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, late last year purported to ordain a new bishop for Roman Catholics in the Xuzhou Diocese, about 400 miles south of Beijing, over the objections of the Holy See.
Why should we care? True, we might sympathize with the millions of Chinese believers whose freedom of conscience is systematically violated, and we might harbor a general unease about China's increasing power, ambition and influence. But putting that aside, is there any reason, really, why Americans should worry much about which of these two bureaucratic adversaries — the Holy See or the People's Republic — picks Chinese bishops? . . .
The struggle for the church's freedom in China reminds us that what the separation of church and state calls for is not a public conversation or social landscape from which God is absent or banished. The point of separation is not to prevent religious believers from addressing political questions or to block laws that reflect moral commitments. Instead, "separation" refers to an institutional arrangement, and a constitutional order, in which religious institutions are free and self-governing — neither above and controlling, or beneath and subordinate to, the state. This freedom limits the state and so safeguards the freedom of all — believers and non-believers alike.
