Monday, October 30, 2017
I will be at Yale Law this Thursday, speaking on "Revisiting 'Reliance Interests' in Planned Parenthood v Casey: Does 'Relying' on Abortion for Equality Actually Serve Women's Equality?" The talk is sponsored by the Yale Law chapter of the Federalist Society and will take place in Room 120 from 12:10-1:30pm.
I have the honor, at Notre Dame Law School, of holding the Paul J. Schierl / Fort Howard Corporation Chair. A few days ago, Mr. Schierl died at the age of 82. He lived a full, rewarding, and exemplarly life, in the law and in his community. Read about him, his work, and his family here. R.I.P.
Sir Roger Scruton will deliver the keynote address at the second meeting of The Tradition Project, convening this Thursday, 
November 2, at the New York Athletic Club, 180 Central Park South. Reception at 6:00, address at 7:00.
The title of his lecture is "Tradition, Culture, and Citizenship." Please refer to this notice for more details about the project, and please write either to me or to Mark Movsesian if you are interested in attending.
Sunday, October 29, 2017
Stanley Hauerwas has an (as one would expect) provocative and someone idiosyncratic reflection up at the Washington Post. (I'm assuming that, in keeping with the usual practice, Hauerwas didn't pick the particulars of the headline." A bit:
Five hundred years after its inception, we are witnessing the end of the Reformation. The very name “Protestant” suggests a protest movement aimed at the reform of a church that now bears the name of Roman Catholicism. But the reality is that the Reformation worked. Most of the reforms Protestants wanted Catholics to make have been made. (Indulgences are no longer sold, for instance.) A few Protestant denominations might still be anti-Catholic (consider evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress’s claim, recently publicized, that Catholicism has Satanic origins ), but the original idea that Catholics adhere to a legalistic perversion of Christianity that does not admit the free grace of God is seldom seen, these days, as the Protestant difference from Catholicism. Over time, historians have helped us see that there was no one thing the Reformation was about, but that if there was a single characteristic at its heart, it was the recovery of the centrality of Christ for making sense of why Christians are not at home in this world. That emphasis turned out to be the overriding insight that shaped the work of Vatican II, meaning Catholics have overcome the major thrust of the Reformation.
That the Reformation has been a success, however, has put Protestantism in a crisis. Winning is dangerous — what do you do next? Do you return to Mother Church? It seems not: Instead, Protestantism has become an end in itself, even though it’s hard to explain from a Protestant point of view why it should exist. The result is denominationalism in which each Protestant church tries to be just different enough from other Protestant churches to attract an increasingly diminishing market share. It’s a dismaying circumstance. . . .
My own sense is that it's difficult to reduce or distill the Protestant Reformation (Revolt?) down to one "single characteristic" and so it is also difficult to pronounce with confidence who "won" or to say what "winning" would even be. (A lot of early Protestants had a whole lot of practices and teachings in their sights - e.g., the veneration of Mary, the Sacraments, etc. - that still seem to be going strong.) Still . . . interesting.
Thursday, October 26, 2017
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
My friend and colleague, Prof. Paolo Carozza, shared with me the address he delivered a few years ago at Benedictine College. It is a very thoughtful reflection on the life and witness of St. Benedict and his relevance to our times. Among other things, he engages some of what Rod Dreher has been arguing, in his The Benedict Option and elsewhere.
I particularly liked this:
God has written into the world “an order and a dynamism that
human beings have no right to ignore,” [Pope Francis] tells us . . . . And thus the proper
attitude for us to strive for in the face of this fact must be one of “gratitude and
gratuitousness, a recognition that the world is God’s loving gift.” It is
quite countercultural today to insist that reality and the world of meaning are not
wholly constructed by us. And nevertheless it is true that the things that most
correspond to the destiny of our lives are not the ones we “make”, and still less the
ones we “possess” or that we “consume”. Instead we have to allow ourselves to be
made by, possessed by, and consumed by a passion for truth and beauty and
goodness.
Beginning again, the beginning of a new year institutionally, the beginning of
a new stage in life, the new beginning of hope in a world that has lost its way, begins
with our own hearts. If we allow ourselves to be made and possessed and consumed
there, we will witness the transformation of the very heart of the world.
Monday, October 23, 2017
This event, sponsored by the Religious Freedom Research Project at Georgetown's Berkley Center, looks to be really good. If you're in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 1 . . . check it out! (RSVP required.) Here's the blurb:
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses urging sweeping religious reforms and catalyzing the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation unleashed an intensified focus on freedom of conscience, with dramatic social and political consequences. It fostered new notions of religious liberty as well as new frameworks for civic life. At the same time, the Reformation built upon centuries of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologies of conscience, dignity, and freedom in ways that are not always understood.
This symposium will explore these dynamics, but also examine how Christianity per se has unleashed distinctive and powerful principles of conscience and freedom across its 2,000-year history, even in the face of what Pope Francis has called the “ecumenism of blood”—the severe religious persecution affecting numerous Christian and non-Christian communities around the world.
The line-up of speakers and presenters is really impressive, and the keynote address is by the great Robert Louis Wilken.
This essay, "The Church and the Republic", by Richard Reinsch, is definitely worth a read. Especially for those of us who've thought and written about "institutional" religious freedom and the "Freedom of the Church," it's a really helpful piece. Here's just a bit:
. . . Brownson, though, ultimately provided in this essay a teaching that goes beyond calculated adjustment to contemporary circumstances that existed between church and state. He grounded religious freedom in the nature of the human person because religion is the quintessential internal decision made by citizens and the state was “incompetent” to regulate this choice. Brownson observed that human beings possess equal rights to err before the state on religious identification. The state’s chief concern is with regulating external acts to prevent violence and fraud and to order citizens’s acts towards the common good. The mission of the Church, however, is “a spiritual not carnal one” and she directs persons through their conscience. To the extent the Church has an effect on the public order it is indirectly through the impact her teaching has on her members or those who have heard her proclaim the gospel and moral principles of the church and whose thinking and behavior changes accordingly. This is, Brownson contended, “the precise order which obtains in the United States.” It follows that “in all this she can address herself only to . . . moral nature, to . . . reason or understanding, his free will, his heart, and his conscience.”
The American Option
Brownson, though, did not merely restate America’s defense of religious freedom to the editors of La Civiltá Cattolica, but also stressed that American constitutionalism is really the form of government that most approximates a Christian anthropology and provides an example of how modern republics can realize the Christian idea of the integral development of the human person. On this point, Brownson observed that the First Amendment’s religion clauses were a specific limitation on the state’s power reminding it that it stood under a higher order of law. . . .
This weekend marked the second anniversary of the death of our friend and colleague, Fr. Robert Araujo. R.I.P.
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
