Monday, April 11, 2005
What I find most striking about Stanford's warning to students regarding religion is that this may be one of the last remaining areas in which universities feel comfortable acting in loco parentis. In other areas (sex and substance abuse, in particular), the college student is presumed to be a fully formed, independent actor, needing no boundaries or guidance. (For some insight, read Mary Ann Glendon's review of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons or this Christianity Today column.)
Rob
According to this account, "a law school student group that requires members to pledge to adhere to Christian beliefs, including a prohibition against homosexuality, has sued Southern Illinois University for refusing to recognize the organization. . . . The revocation means the group can no longer use the university's facilities or name and is no longer eligible for school funding, according to the lawsuit. A university official said, however, the group can still use campus facilities."
Here is more:
"In revoking the group's status, Southern Illinois University cited violations of school policy that official student organizations must adhere to all federal and state nondiscrimination laws, the lawsuit says. A statement of faith that society members must vow to follow includes, among other prohibitions, "the Bible's prohibition of sexual conduct between persons of the same sex," the lawsuit says.
We have talked about this issue -- in the context of a dispute at Arizona State -- before. I'm not an expert on non-discrimination law, but it is not obvious to me that the CLS policy -- i.e., of requiring members to "follow" a "statement of faith" which includes a prohibition on "sexual conduct between persons of the same sex" -- would necessarily violate a law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Presumably, the CLS would admit someone who was homosexual but who was willing to assent to the CLS "statement of faith"? Perhaps an MOJ reader who is more familiar with the CLS policy can clarify this for me?
Rick
In the course of looking into something having nothing to do with law-and-religion, I came across a web page, provided by Stanford University's Office for Religious Life, entitled "A Word of Warning." Here is the text:
A Word of Warning
Maintaining and nurturing your spiritual life during college and graduate school is one of the best ways to keep perspective on your studies and to avoid the isolation that is too often a part of scholarly pursuits. The Deans for Religious Life and members of SAR are committed to providing opportunities for spiritual growth, rewarding friendships and intellectual inquiry into matters of faith in a supportive environment.
Unfortunately, not every religious group has your best interests at heart. Groups to avoid have some or all of the following characteristics.
If you feel you are being pursued aggressively or manipulated by a group or leader, contact any of the Deans for Religious Life or call 723-1762.
Now, it strikes me as reasonable and appropriate for a private university to provide (perhaps) paternalistic guidance to students on all sorts of matters involving their "personal" lives, including involvement with religious groups and activities. (I would hope that a University's willingness to provide "warning[s]" to students about the dangers posed by some religions to "critical, independent thinking" would indicate a willingness to warn about similar dangers posed by, say, political or identity-related groups). I imagine that reasonable people will disagree about what, exactly, "counts" as "claim[ing] to possess the truth exclusively", or "[dis]courag[ing] critical, independent thinking," or a "totalitarian worldview", but put all that aside.
I wonder, would (or should) the First Amendment constrain the issuance by a state-run university of a "warning" like Stanford's? Or, approaching the matter from a broader, "religion and liberal democracy" perspective, or from a "Catholic legal theory" perspective, what should we think about this "warning"?
Rick
For those of us missing the thrill of picking the NCAA basketball tourney winners, here's a slightly different sort of pool. (Sense of humor required.)
Rob
Sunday, April 10, 2005
American victims of priest sexual abuse are planning to protest Cardinal Law's celebration of a mass honoring John Paul II. If I were in Rome, I think I'd be inclined to join them, as I have not been made aware of any persuasive explanation for the prominent role given to Law. I've heard talk of protocol, but if the Vatican could do away with the three hammer strikes to the forehead as the means by which to confirm a pope's death, couldn't the standard operating procedures have been altered just a bit in this context as well?
Rob
UPDATE: Over at The Seventh Age, Jason Adkins responds to my question:
[M]aybe allowing (and even compelling) Bernard Law to preach at one of these Masses may be of tremendous service to a Church that could learn from the mistakes of its past. Perhaps putting someone like Law in front of the cardinals could be a powerful lesson about what can happen when they are careless in the exercise of their authority, as well as the spiritual consequences that may ensue. It gives him the opportunity to share his prayerful reflections over the past couple of years since his exile in Rome with the rest of the College of Cardinals. Perhaps he has something powerful to teach and preach to his colleagues. I'm willling to give him the benefit of the doubt and think that the other cardinals may feel the same way. He has certainly been shamed and chastened and has had to think alot about his mistakes. This could be a real positive for the Church.
The reason I think this is a possibility is because by all accounts, Bernard Law is a very good man with an amazing record of pastoral accomplishment, commitment to justice, and personal humility who happened to both make some gross errors in judgment as well as be in the wrong place at the wrong time. To impart to him sheer evil, malfeasance and bad faith is just plain calumny and fails to deal with the complexity of the sex abuse crisis. No doubt that he feels miserable and truly sorry for everything that happened. But perhaps he was mired in a Church culture that relied on "experts" and other specialists who believed with a little treatment or a change of scenery, these problem priests would be cured. Acting in the context of the post-conciliar era and its stupid deference to "science" and experts in all fields from liturgy to psychology and pastoral care, and relying on the fads and trends of the time out of a supposed duty to empower the laity and the wisdom of the new scientist/psychologist priests of the modern world, the Church mired itself in a huge crisis. But to have gone against the grain and resisted this at the time would have been nothing short of heresy. Most of the same activists that are championing reform in the wake of the abuse crisis, are the same that sought and built a church culture that relied on the wisdom of the age rather than ageless wisdom.
So my point is, let's all step back, take a deep breath, and maybe consider that this might be a positive moment for the Church. The way I look at it is this has to be a profoundly penitential moment for Law. Having the responsibility of preaching to all of the cardinals after screwing up and dragging the Church through as much mud as it was because of his mistakes can be nothing but chastening. I suspect he will approach this opportunity with much humility, and serve as a very important cautionary tale as the cardinal electors ponder the successor of John Paul the Great.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of Jason's response (although I don't see how resisting the mindset that led to the sex abuse crisis would have been "nothing short of heresy"), and I hope, like Jason, that Cardinal Law uses the opportunity to impart his hard-earned lessons to his colleagues. But is this the most appropriate vehicle for those lessons to be imparted? Whether it's accurate or not, the general perception is that it is a huge honor to celebrate any of the nine masses. Coupled with the widespread belief that the Vatican did not treat the abuse crisis as seriously as it should have, the pedagogical value of Law's role is not the lasting impression to emerge from this episode. This is not to suggest that Law is evil, but simply that he showed a profound lack of judgment -- a lack of judgment that facilitated unspeakable crimes. Placing him in this role so soon after the scandal seems misguided. By way of clumsy analogy, Ken Lay may have learned a lot from the demise of Enron, and his industry colleagues may stand to gain much from his newfound wisdom and humility. But if Lay has something to teach executives, it should be as a straightforward lecture stripped of pretense and the trappings of honor, not as the keynote address at a Chamber of Commerce awards banquet.
Rob
Saturday, April 9, 2005
I've just learned that one of my favorite Christian writers, Mark Noll, has a new book coming out this summer that may be of interest to MoJ readers. Titled Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism, the book is "a clarion call for a new appreciation among evangelicals of the current character of the Catholic Church." Timothy George endorses the book with the provocative suggestion that "[t]he Reformation is over only in the sense that to some extent it has succeeded."
Rob
Friday, April 8, 2005
Over at the new law-related blog, PrawfsBlawg, Dan Markel has a post about a proposal in Florida to eliminate the "duty to retreat" before one may use deadly force in self defense. According to reports, the proposed bill says that a person has "the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so, to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another."
Markel makes an interesting point: "[The proposal] seems this is another example of the challenges of expressive politics: how law both constitutes and reflects our competing values and senses of social responsibility." He also quotes Brooks Holland's observation that, although the proposal is being characterized in most quarters as "conservative", the "duty to retreat" requirement actually reflects a deep commitment to the value and dignity of life, by limiting the self-defense doctrine to cases of necessity.
Rick
My former teacher, Yale law professor James Whitman, has a fascinating new paper out, called "The Origins of 'Reasonable Doubt.'" Here is the abstract:
The "reasonable doubt" rule is notoriously difficult to define, and many judges and scholars have deplored the confusion it creates in the minds of jurors. Yet "reasonable doubt" is regarded as a fundamental part of our law. How can a rule of such fundamental importance be so difficult to define and understand? The answer, this paper tries to show, lies in history. The "reasonable doubt" rule was not originally designed to serve the purpose it is asked to serve today: It was not originally designed to protect the accused. Instead, it was designed to protect the souls of the jurors against damnation. Convicting an innocent defendant was regarded, in the older Christian tradition, as a potential mortal sin. The purpose of the "reasonable doubt" instruction was to address this frightening possibility, reassuring jurors that they could convict the defendant without risking their own salvation, as long as their doubts about guilt were not "reasonable." In its original form, the rule thus had nothing to do with maintaining the rule of law in the sense that we use the phrase, and nothing like the relationship we imagine to the values of liberty. This helps explain why our law is in a state of such disquieting confusion today. We are asking the "reasonable doubt" standard to serve a function that it was not originally designed to serve, and it does its work predictably badly.
The paper offers a detailed account of the Christian moral theology of doubt, and a reinterpretation of the development of jury trial in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It also includes a discussion of an important jurisprudential distinction: the distinction between proof procedures and what the paper calls "moral comfort" procedures. Without a proper comprehension of this distinction, we cannot understand the original significance of "reasonable doubt," or more broadly the structure of pre-modern law.
Whitman's arguments are powerful and provocative. It is worth asking, where else in the law of our secular, liberal democracy do we employ and deploy terms and concepts whose origins and foundations are rooted more in Christian theology than in liberal political theory? If I remember, Alasdair MacIntyre opened "After Virtue" with the suggestion that many of our most prized moral notions, in their current form, are precarious precisely because their Christian foundations have been lost or abandoned.
Rick
Thanks to John O'Callaghan who blogs at the Ethics and Culture Forum for passing along this moving account of a young Karol Wojtyla.
Thursday, April 7, 2005
The New Republic provides a number of essays, collected under the title "After Pope John Paul II." E.J. Dionne writes, in "Papal Paradox," that:
"A sign of contradiction" was a favorite John Paul phrase, and it might be said to define his papacy. In his effect on Roman Catholicism's relationship to the world, his achievement will be judged as liberal. But his impact on the Church he leads has to be seen as conservative. These terms are vexed, and John Paul himself would probably reject them--he'd insist on his own consistency in opposing both the Marxist and capitalist forms of materialism, in arguing that the spiritual is always primary, and in asserting that the Church's central obligation is to doctrinal clarity. But the Pope's version of consistency does not necessarily match that of the world that is judging him. That's the paradox at the heart of his papacy.
He adds:
Centesimus has to rank as one of the most successful papal documents in history. Rather than present a single line that Catholics should pursue in the area of politics and economics, it set the terms of debate among people of goodwill. John Paul ruled out dictatorships and highly centralized command economies. He also opposed capitalism without social safety nets and safeguards. But he left open a broad area for debate and experimentation. The Pope's approach was principled but not ideological. He was certainly egalitarian, but he did not demand absolute equality. He was open to the advantages of markets and to the positive uses of government. You could be on the right, as long as you acknowledged the imperative of lifting up the poor. You could be on the left, as long as you acknowledged the limits of the state and the right of individuals to personal initiative.
Michael Sean Winters writes, in "History Test":
Th[e] core theological belief that philosophic anthropology must be based on the person of Christ has appeared in all of John Paul's public writings. His tireless insistence on the dignity of every human person is rooted here, in the belief that, because Christ became a man, every man must be loved like Christ.
It is difficult to overstate the theological importance of the grace-versus-nature debate--an argument akin to that between the Federalists and the anti-Federalists on the creation of a powerful central government. That is to say, depending on how you resolve this one issue, every other theological issue is affected, altered, colored, changed. . . .
In a society debating how best to shirk governmental commitments made to the elderly while movie executives are paid upward of $100 million in severance, surely John Paul's humanism gets high marks for simple consistency.
That humanism, which once underpinned and shaped the Enlightenment values of Western societies, seems so utterly absent from the spread-eagle capitalism of the West today, in which the market is the sole vehicle for assigning worth and resources. If the good of concrete human persons is not the criterion for social, political, and economic life; if the value of subjective freedom is so predominant as to trump all other values; if the moral life of the human person is consistently evaluated in utilitarian terms, is humanism still even possible? John Paul's consistent solidarity with the poor could not stand in sharper contrast to the predominant cultural ethos of the West.
Andrew Sullivan understands John Paul II primarily as an "actor," and laments:
I'm a Catholic now withdrawn from Communion whose entire adult life has been in Wojtyla's shadow. And, as a homosexual, I watched as the Church refused to grapple with even basic questions and ran, terrified, from its own deep psychosexual dysfunction. "Be not afraid," this Pope counseled us. But he was deeply afraid of the complicated truth about human sexuality and the dark truth about his own Church's crimes. This was a Pope who, above all, knew how to look away. How else do you warmly embrace Yasir Arafat and Tariq Aziz without moral judgment? But people--faithful people--noticed where he couldn't look. And they grieved, even as, in the aftermath of this brittle, showboating papacy, they now hope.
"Brittle, showboating papacy." Whatever. Noam Scheiber also misses the boat, I think. He contends that the Pope was "an intellectual who was hostile to intellectual debate."
Finally, in "Central America," my friend and colleague John (not "James") McGreevy suggest that:
The next Pope and the next generation of American Catholic leaders will be to manage the transition from a Catholic culture to a Catholic creed. Until the 1960s, the faith inherited by American Catholics came from an extraordinarily dense network of Catholic families, schools, parishes, and Catholic associations. This Catholic faith was not an assent to an abstract set of propositions. Instead, it was the result of a shared culture--one that allowed Catholics to recognize that they had been speaking "Catholic" all their lives.
McGreevy states that, for the Church in America to succeed in its evangelizing goals, it will have to "reconcile itself to certain aspects of American culture."
Managing two problems that prevent this sort of reconciliation is crucial. The first is the intertwined knot of gender and ministry. Few women within the institutional Church structure hold decision-making power, and women working in parishes--increasingly important figures in a Church with a rapidly declining number of priests--struggle to obtain the opportunity to perform even basic ministerial tasks. This situation runs against one of the most powerful currents in modern history: the expansion of vocational opportunities for women. The real question is not the high-profile issue of women's ordination, but whether the next Pope will have the courage, unlike John Paul II, to sever some of the links between an ordained male clergy and ecclesiastical power. . . .
The stakes in all this are considerable. Given the moral dilemmas posed by contemporary bioethics, social welfare policy, and military strategy, Catholics might offer a distinctive alternative to the values of the market, an alternative that should be present in the public life of the world's only superpower.
Rick
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