Of what moral significance are the results of Terri Schiavo's autopsy, if any, especially the conclusion "that she had irreversible brain damage and was blind "?
Thursday, June 16, 2005
A question for the group
Bonhoeffer and Just War
Here's a wonderful essay by Ragan Sutterfield on the use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's legacy in today's just war debates. An excerpt:
Bonhoeffer's life is wrapped in the dilemma of faithfulness. And we who come after him are left with that dilemma no more clearly resolved. Are we to follow Bonhoeffer in his calls toward peacemaking, or are we to go his way of drastic action for the sake of justice? Some would-be followers deny that there is any ambiguity in his example. They make him a pacifist and only a pacifist, or a model just warrior who rejected his earlier idealism. To step out of line with either position is a step that demands correction.
When John Buchanan, editor of The Christian Century, wrote that Bonhoeffer "move[d] to the Niebuhrian conclusion that the evil of Nazism should be opposed on Christian ethical grounds," he was upbraided by a reader who responded that "there is no hint that Bonhoeffer ever justified this choice on the grounds of Niebuhrian 'Christian realism' or denied that pacifism was the most faithful Christian commitment." In the same vein, Walter Wink wrote a short piece in Sojourners reminding readers that "American thinkers who have used Bonhoeffer as a way of justifying the just war theory overlook his clear statement that he does not regard this as a justifiable action—that it's a sin—and that he throws himself on the mercy of God."
The essay also details the conflicting applications of Bonhoeffer's work by Jean Bethke Elshtain and Stanley Hauerwas, concluding with a point of agreement:
While Bonhoeffer sees the state as an ordained "restrainer" that establishes and maintains order, it is the Church that must remind the state of its obligations. It is the Church's existence as a truth-telling community that gives it this role. "The failure of the church to oppose Hitler," Hauerwas writes, "was but the outcome of the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world." And it was in the context of this failure that Bonhoeffer took action at the risk of incurring guilt through violence.
On the imperative of truth-telling Elshtain and Hauerwas agree, and it is here that they are closest to Bonhoeffer. But how can we begin to speak truthfully? Elshtain calls us to the task of describing things as they are. The attacks of September 11 were clearly murder, an act of evil that we must respond to. But Hauerwas is more cautious; with Bonhoeffer, he reminds us that telling the truth sometimes requires more silence than the world would like. "No good at all can come from acting before the world and one's self as though we knew the truth, when in reality we do not," Bonhoeffer once said. "Qualified silence might perhaps be more appropriate for the church today than talk which is very unqualified."
Rob
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Slacken the Reins of the CDF
So says The Tablet in an editorial in the issue dated June 11, 2005. Read on:
The new head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith said in his first major statement concerning his new job that he saw it as “helping the Church see how beautiful and wonderful God’s love is”. If that becomes the tone with which the CDF approaches its work in future then Pope Benedict XVI’s appointment of Archbishop William J. Levada, who is standing down as Archbishop of San Francisco, will look truly inspired. The Pope himself, whom Archbishop Levada succeeds in this position, used to emphasise the CDF’s disciplinary rather than its evangelistic role, though he would not deny that one served the other. It is possible that any new Prefect’s best intentions do not long survive contact with the reality of the CDF’s brief, which inevitably includes the distasteful business of disciplining clergy who have gone astray.
The Pope has chosen someone with a background interestingly different from his own, chief pastor of one of the world’s most free-thinking (and free-living and -loving) cities. As an American, furthermore, he should have an instinctive feel for natural justice and due process, and no doubt an awareness that one of the major criticisms of the CDF is its perceived deficiency in that area. Theologians regularly emerge from contact with it both enraged and hurt by the way they were treated, with a profound sense of unfairness. In the literal sense, that causes scandal, for it weakens the value of the Church’s witness to justice elsewhere. The CDF’s mistake has been to understand itself as dealing only with a theologian’s opinions and hence not with the theologian as a person with rights. But for opinions read convictions, and to put someone’s convictions on trial comes very close to putting the individual on trial. That is certainly how it feels to the accused.
The CDF would silence many of its critics if it learnt to slacken the reins, and not to regard every new or unusual theological idea as automatically suspect – or “relativistic”, to use the term becoming fashionable under the new pontificate. Dialogue with the modern world cannot be conducted without risk, but the Holy Spirit is at work among the faithful and does not need a bodyguard. Catholic orthodoxy has a robust buoyancy of its own. Unconventional opinions are rarely as dangerous as those in authority seem to fear, and today’s new thinking frequently becomes tomorrow’s orthodoxy.
The challenge facing the CDF is to foster a climate in which the freedom of theological debate is respected and valued and those who put forward bad arguments are contradicted by good ones, not ordered to retract on pain of penalties. That means building up the vocation of theologian, and regarding theological speculation as a worthwhile exercise for the good of the Church, even when it asks searching questions of the Magisterium.
Every
time a theologian is investigated by the CDF that climate of free
exchange is diminished, and even those not accused or suspected are
bound to feel the chill. The head of the CDF ought to be regarded as
the theological community’s best friend in high places; and friendship
does not preclude a frank word of caution where it is deserved.
_______________
Michael P.
Back to Christendom
In Commonweal, William D. Wood criticizes recent comments by Cardinal Francis George that suggested the Cardinal's embrace of a rejuvenated Christendom:
Like Pope Benedict XVI, George believes that contemporary democratic societies are awash in relativism. Indeed, George seems to believe that secularism is the same thing as relativism, and that all secular, relativist societies will inevitably meet the same end as the totalitarian societies of the Soviet bloc. For example, he likened the present pope’s coming fight against secularism to the previous pope’s fight against communism. The lesson of both, said George, is that “you can’t deliver a stable society if, in order to protect personal freedom, you sacrifice objective truth and, particularly, moral truth. It’s a fault line, and it will destabilize our societies and bring them down...as certainly as the fault line in communism effected its demise.” This is an unfortunate confusion. Secularism isn’t the same thing as relativism, and neither is tantamount to state-enforced atheism. Convenient though it may be to think so, it simply is not the case that critics of the church are committed to the denial of all objective truth. Nor are they committed to the proposition that all is permitted and nothing is immoral. The conflation of secularism with relativism is an unfortunate mistake because it misrepresents the real pastoral context in which the church finds itself. The church must find a way to engage secular and religious people who embrace alternative moral codes and values that are genuinely compelling, though they are not the codes and values of the church. This is rather harder than thundering against imaginary relativists. As Alasdair Mac- Intyre said at the beginning of the conference: “In the entire universe, there are absolutely no relativists who are not American undergraduates!” The church hierarchy would do well to take those words to heart.
More to the point, I doubt that it makes much sense, either rhetorically or substantively, to deploy “Christendom” as the category with which the church opposes secularization. As Charles Taylor emphasized in his presentation, the church, at its best, has always realized that it must express itself in different ways to different cultures and civilizations in order to be heard. I can hardly imagine a worse way to evangelize Europe than by appealing to the virtues of a politically reconstituted Christendom.
Even if treating secularism as a political problem were rhetorically effective, it is a bad idea. To address the spiritual problem of secularism, the church must deploy spiritual tools: it must present the gospel as surpassingly beautiful and worthy of love. Sometimes, I think, the church even needs to get out of the way, and let the gospel present itself as surpassingly beautiful and worthy of love. But the church never needs to promote the gospel with the tools of the state. The tools of the state are gross and coercive. The love they elicit is, by definition, disordered. It is indeed wrong-as a certain kind of Catholic is fond of pointing out-to suppose that the authority of the church flows from the political order, but it is equally wrong to suppose that challenges to that authority are best countered with the tools of the political order.
Rob
IVF = Cloning?
The Evangelical Outpost rebukes President Bush for framing the public policy debate over embryos as a government-funding issue rather than an issue of the state's moral obligation to protect embryonic human life. The post concludes that:
Creating embryos that will never be implanted is as immoral as cloning human life for research. Whether the intention is to relieve the suffering of infertility or to pursue research in hopes of finding miracle cures, embryonic human life must not be treated as a means to an end. Innocent human beings, however they are created, deserve our protection.
You can read the whole thing here.
Rob
Do Virginity Pledges Work?
The New York Times reports on conflicting studies regarding the long-term efficacy of teenagers' promises to remain virgins until marriage.
Rob
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Lawrence and Sexual Autonomy
Eugene Volokh has an interesting post on the implications of Lawrence v. Texas for obscenity laws, not under free speech theory, but under the Court's emergent sexual rights theory.
Rob
Income Disparity as an Anti-Poverty Tool
Continuing our conversation on income disparity, reader Owen Heslin ties his defense of growing income disparity with his perspective on the historical record:
If, in the course of human events, the only sustained decrease in poverty has been accompanied by a sustained increase in income disparity, it is quite possible that the latter may be a precondition for the former. If one could show me a period of human history where income disparity decreased, and poverty decreased, I would be more than willing to revise my opinion. But fighting poverty in our communities located in the real world must be guided by results, and not theory.
It hardly seems right to decry income disparity when history suggests it may in fact be necessary to lift people out of poverty. I know it's not right to adhere to theories that don't work, resigning the poor to sink into deeper poverty, while we pride ourselves on the Biblical rationale for doing so.
I find it difficult to believe that poverty and income disparity have never simultaneously decreased over the entire course of human history. The French Revolution? The New Deal? If Heslin is correct, then shouldn't the Dorothy Day types among us be picketing for higher CEO pay and a reduced minimum wage?
And Matt Festa clarifies that the problem:
that is being reflected by growing income disparity is the lessening of mobility up and down. We live in a very demanding world that asks a lot ut of us. The people who tend to succeed in this world are highly motived and educated people. The data suggests that families tend to transmit these values better than others. Middle class and upper class families tend to provide better education for their children. How do we go about inculcating these values to those who are not exposed to them? How do we provide a better education for those that have them but do not have the means of providing them?
But isn't a mobility-focused concern regarding access to education wrapped up with some of the same economic policies that have facilitated the growing income disparity -- e.g., lower taxes making it more difficult to fully fund Head Start programs? (For purposes of this discussion, I'm assuming that growing income disparity is a reality, then asking how Catholic legal theory should respond; the folks at Powerline have called into question Paul Krugman's initial column.)
It seems consensus may be beyond reach on this issue, so let me recast the question from the opposite premise: does anyone believe that growing income disparity, standing alone, is a problem from the perspective of Catholic legal theory?
Rob
UPDATE: Jonathan Watson offers this helpful pointer:I
I think it may help to recast the question of income disparity not as a problem in and of itself from the prespective of Catholic Legal Theory, but rather a symptom of some other problems which are definitely a concern of Catholic Legal Theory (CT). I think it would be a good idea to begin with the realistic principal that there will always be income disparity in society, no matter which form of economic system is used in a country (capitalist, communist, socialist, etc.). Catholic Legal Theory would agree, I think, with this principal, but would endeavor to insure that in spite of this disparity, those on the lower rungs of the income scale were not being unjustly deprived of those things necessary to life and spirit. The task then is to define what comprises the class of base goods; the natural goods (as I have read somewhere). I suppose the question is really not whether an income disparity, but why an income disparity. If there is a trend whereby wealthy grow continually more so (whether or not at the expense of the poorer or middle class), why?
And PPK Blog offers a series of insightful, more narrowly framed questions.
Monday, June 13, 2005
University Faculty for Life conference
Readers might be interested in the University Faculty for Life conference that was recently hosted by Ave Maria School of Law. A press release about the conference is available on the Ave Maria website here. Highlights of the conference included two plenary talks--one by John Keown of Georgetown on "Euthanasia in Europe" and the other by Richard Wilkins of BYU on "International Law: A Threat to the Right to Life?" The conference also featured a panel discussion on the Terri Schiavo case. The conference papers will be published in University Faculty for life's annual volume.
I'd also like to encourage folks to consider joining University Faculty for Life (UFL). UFL is an interdisciplinary group of scholars that has encouraged the scholarly work of pro-life academics for 15 years. Our next annual meeting in June of 2006 will be at Villanova. I'd be happy to talk with anyone who has questions about the organization.
Richard
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