Monday, February 20, 2006
Sightings 2/20/06
Hoping in Pope Benedict XVI
-- Martin E. Marty
You don't need Sightings to find
cartoons in Denmark or hunting accidents in Texas, so let's turn this week to a
subject too small to make the front pages, namely Roman Catholicism. It's
on my mind in part because a subscriber forwarded me a critique from a friend
to whom he had forwarded a recent Sightings.
The friend dismissed that column by saying, "Of course Marty would write
that way, because he's such a firm Roman Catholic," or something to that
effect. I pushed the "delete" button at once, concerned about
identity theft, and snuggled back under my firm Lutheran roof. But for a
moment, I dreamed ....
This dream: What if not too far into the new millennium a pope would come along
and issue something important about a positive theme? What if such a
piece were de-polarizing, meaning that it would appeal not just to one faction
or another? What if the face such a figure presented were not scowling,
and the voice going with it not crabby or scolding? What if what he wrote
aspired to present something of the Christian gospel, Good News? The
public image of Catholics, evangelicals, and plenty of others shows them to be
rather brutally seeking power or defensively holding on to it. Must it
always be so?
I pinched myself to read this headline in
the February 10th issue of the National Catholic
Reporter:
"Encyclical Finds Favor in Unexpected Quarters" -- the Reporter itself being an unexpected
favorer of the encyclical, the pastoral letter from Pope Benedict XVI. Deus Caritas Est, "God Is
Love," is the first encyclical from the former cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
who bore the tough image of an inquisitor. Most Catholics with whom the Reporter folks hang out (and non-firm
non-Catholics like M.E.M.) nursed grievances and bruises from the then-cardinal
in his earlier role. Of course, they have to keep their guards up.
"God Is Love" is only one document, one action, and there will be
many others, maybe of other kinds.
For the moment, though, John L. Allen, Jr., a reporter with a reputation for
fairness who was not "expected" to see the new pope in such a
friendly light, could cite critics like Paul Collins, an over-examined and
edged-out "victim" of Ratzinger; Andrew Sullivan, who criticizes
Catholic critics of gay priests; Hans Kueng, old
friend-turned-foe-turning-friend; and a half-dozen others marked as liberal who
are now applauding this first shot out of the encyclical cannon.
"Just what Catholicism needs, really" (Collins); "a beautifully
written document (Sullivan); "solid theological substance" (Kueng);
and from a spokesperson for a liberal Catholic group: this could be a
"human face for Christianity and for the Catholic church." Of
course, all these praisers saluted with fingers crossed. For the moment,
however, they simply enjoyed the fact that Benedict XVI chose to write about
and seek to exemplify Christianity's central but so often overlooked themes:
divine Love and the way it relates to human loves.
Deus Caritas Est takes off from and is critical of a
modern classic Lutheran treatment of Agape
and Eros, though the pope tries to bridge to other such
interpretations of the two loves. So there is homework to be done.
For the moment, however, most critics have parked their grudges at the door,
and they consider with hope that Benedict XVI has set a promising tone for what
will follow.
----------
Sightings comes
from the Martin Marty Center at
the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Get Religion has an intriguing post on consumer demand and the modern Christian worship experience. While it is written primarily from a Protestant perspective, much of its sentiment applies to the average Sunday mass, as reflected by a comment on one of Amy Welborn's related posts:
[I]n a world that possesses the C Minor Mass, the Icelandic Sagas, and Albrecht Durer, where does Dan Schutte, the poet of "Footprints" and Thomas Kinkade fit in? I know it's a stupid question to ask but did mediocrity exist in the Garden, or was it a consequence of the Fall of Man? Who takes the blame for Thomas Kinkade?
Rob
Click here to see a photo that may change your career ... if not your life: Church Sign.
_______________
mp
Duquesne law prof Alison Sulentic recommends the proceedings of the November 2005 session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, titled Conceptualization of the Human Person in Social Sciences. She also recommends Wojtyla, Person and Community: Selected Essays (Catholic Thought from Lublin), which "is very useful in understanding John Paul II's view of personhood, as well as his reading of Aquinas on this point."
Rob
In response to Rob's question about a bibliography for personhood, with a focus on Catholic Legal Theory, I believe the following texts would need to be on the list: the works of de Vitoria and Suarez (they are conveniently situated in the Oxford Classics of International Law edited by James Scott Brown); Bartolome de Las Casas's In Defense of the Indians; Dred Scot v. Sanford, particularly the dissents; John XXIII's Pacem In Terris, especially N. 9; John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae; and Psalm 139, verses 13-16. The Pontifical Academy for Life also has some important texts available online at the Vatican website: www.vatican.va . My list is incomplete, but these texts would help the investigator plot a course of research interested in CLT. RJA sj
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Larry Solum periodically provides an introduction to fundamental concepts in legal theory, geared primarily toward law students. Today's topic is personhood, and the introduction only gives a hint of the concept's depth. While it's impossible to do justice to the intellectual tradition underlying "personhood" in a blog format, we could at least provide a more robust reading list. So what sources would Catholic legal theorists add to Solum's bibliography?
Rob
In the New York Times, Leon Wieseltier has this typically sharp and hard-hitting review of Daniel Dennett's book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as Natural Phenomenon. Here is a bit:
THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. "Breaking the Spell" is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.
The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing. The excited materialism of American society — I refer not to the American creed of shopping, according to which a person's qualities may be known by a person's brands, but more ominously to the adoption by American culture of biological, economic and technological ways of describing the purposes of human existence — abounds in Dennett's usefully uninhibited pages. And Dennett's book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.
In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it. "By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse," he declares, "and yet I persist." Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts! He wonders whether religious people "will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through." If you disagree with what Dennett says, it is because you fear what he says. Any opposition to his scientistic deflation of religion he triumphantly dismisses as "protectionism." But people who share Dennett's view of the world he calls "brights." Brights are not only intellectually better, they are also ethically better. Did you know that "brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest"? Dennett's own "sacred values" are "democracy, justice, life, love and truth." This rigs things nicely. If you refuse his "impeccably hardheaded and rational ontology," then your sacred values must be tyranny, injustice, death, hatred and falsehood. Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name; and in a new era of American obscurantism, this is not helpful. . . .
BEFORE there were naturalist superstitions, there were supernaturalist superstitions. The crudities of religious myth are plentiful, and a sickening amount of savagery has been perpetrated in their name. Yet the excesses of naturalism cannot hide behind the excesses of supernaturalism. Or more to the point, the excesses of naturalism cannot live without the excesses of supernaturalism. Dennett actually prefers folk religion to intellectual religion, because it is nearer to the instinctual mire that enchants him. The move "away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts," or the increasing philosophical sophistication of religion over the centuries, he views only as "strategic belief-maintenance." He cannot conceive of a thoughtful believer. He writes often, and with great indignation, of religion's strictures against doubts and criticisms, when in fact the religious traditions are replete with doubts and criticisms. Dennett is unacquainted with the distinction between fideism and faith. Like many of the fundamentalists whom he despises, he is a literalist in matters of religion.
Check it out!
