Laudato Si' was published on June 18, 2015. For a wonderfully informative account of what has followed, in the past year, read this account. An excerpt:
For those long engaged in environmental issues, the encyclical proved a valuable rallying tool, one that opened doors, spurred mobilization and generated not-seen-before excitement within Catholic circles.
"I cannot wish for anything better," said Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Peace and Justice, which oversaw the first draft of the encyclical. Since its publication last June 18, Turkson has served as its chief promoter, traveling across the globe to delivercountlesstalks on Laudato Si'.
"I think it has proven to be really transformative," said Tomás Insua, co-founder of the Global Catholic Climate Movement. "But there's definitely a long way to go to really get this encyclical to really sync in our Catholic identity and really drive transformational change." ...
As far as the long-term impact, Turkson placed Laudato Si' into the larger compendium of social encyclicals, describing them together "like a big river," with new tributaries forming as it flows forward. Like past encyclicals, such as Rerum Novarum, it too will stimulate future teachings and ideas, he said.
"But it is forever going to inspire the church's teaching on ecology and integral ecology."
What has gone wrong? A clue is perhaps to be found in Fromm's ambiguous treatment of transcendence. If there is any one feature which all existentialists agree upon as an inveterate trait of human existence, it is transcendence. . . . In Friedrich Nietzsche's words, man is he who must transcend himself. . . . [E]ven the atheistic existentialists would be candid enough to admit man's incurable God-directedness[.]
God is absent, said Johann Christian Holderlin; God is dead, said Nietzsche. This means one of two things. Either we have outgrown monotheism, and good riddance; or modern man is estranged from being, from his own being, from the being of other creatures in the world, from transcendent being. he has lost something--what, he does not know; he knows only that he is sick unto death with the loss of it.
Christendom began to crumble, perhaps most noticeably under the onslaught of a Christian, Soren Kierkegaard, in the last century. Again I am not telling you anything new when I suggest that the Christian notion of man as a wayfarer in search of his salvation no longer informs Western culture. In its place, what most of us seem to be seeking are such familiar goals as maturity, creativity, autonomy, rewarding interpersonal relations, and so forth.
It's all anthropology . . . Or, as Percy says in "Rediscovering 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'" (1971):
[T]he mystery has to do with conflicting anthropologies, that is, views of man, the way man is. Everyone has an anthropology. There is no not having one. If a man says that he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into question. . . . One still hears, and no one makes much objection to it, that "man is made in the image of God." Even more often, one hears such expressions as "the freedom and sacredness of the individual." This anthropology is familiar enough. It is in fact the standard intellectual baggage of most of us. Most of the time it doesn't matter that this anthropology is a mishmash, disjecta membra. . . .
There's nothing like a hand-down day at the end of June to amplify a particular kind of anxiety in those who worry, with Justice Alito, about "the deep and perhaps irremediable corruption of our legal culture’s conception of constitutional interpretation."
One way of getting at the problem is to think of decision-day "analysis" as constitutional law in the cave. Are we not like the prisoners who "assign prestige and credit to one another, in the sense, that they rewarded speed at recognizing the shadows as they passed, and the ability to remember which ones normally come earlier and later and at the same time as which other ones, and expertise at using this as basis for guessing which ones would arrive next"? (The Republic, 516c-d.)
For those interested in more developed thoughts along these lines, check out Steven Smith's trenchant assessment of our constitutional law, The Constitution in the Cave (available in both a McGeorge Law Review version and a First Things version).
In updating some slides for a Rotary Club presentation, I didn't see any 5-4 opinions for the Court this entire Term. For obvious reasons, the Term will end that way as well.
(Note: My source is the Supreme Court's "slip opinions" page. I just went through and scanned quickly for the vote spread in the slip opinions released before Justice Scalia's death on February 13. If I missed anything that should count as a 5-4 opinion for the Court, please let me know. The closest I saw was Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez, which was 6-3 on the judgment, but Justice Thomas concurred only in the judgment. Also, is anyone aware what 5-4 action there has been this term on the "shadow docket"?)
The 4-4 and 5-3 cases are the most obvious candidates for cases that took shape originally as 5-4 cases. But you can't estimate just from the resulting vote split, as it is most likely that the 8-0 decision in Zubik v. Burwell took shape before oral argument as a 5-4 case. We may see other examples of this going forward, as well.
Among the many delightful people associated with Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture that I got to spend time with in Rome over the past week is Ken Hallenius, Communications Specialist. Ken has created a very cool index linking to all of Pope Benedict XVI's general audience reflections. He has organized them by topic, such as "Prayer", "Faith", "Holy Women", "Doctors of the Church".
Ken also brought to my attention this excellent essay by Amy Wellborn, very critical of the Vatican's framing (but not the act) of the recent elevation of Mary Magdalenes’ July 22 memorial to a feast. Wellborn discusses the book she wrote about Mary Magdalene a few years ago (now out of print, but perhaps to be made available in digital form soon).
If the first great discovery of my life was the beauty of the scientific method, surely the second was the discovery of the singular predicament of man in the very world which has been transformed by this science. An extraordinary paradox became clear: that the more science progressed, and even as it benefited man, the less it said about what it was like to be a man living in the world. . . . After twelve years of scientific education, I felt somewhat like the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard when he finished reading Hegel. Hegel, said Kierkegaard, explained everything under the sun, except one small detail: what it means to be a man living in the world who must die.
From "How To Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic" (1984):
The Christian ethos sustains the narrative enterprise in ways so familiar to us that they can be overlooked. It underwrites those very properties of the novel without which there is no novel: I am speaking of the mystery of human life, its sense of predicament, of something having gone wrong, of life as a wayfaring and a pilgrimage, of the density and linearity of time and the sacramental reality of things. The intervention of God in history through the Incarnation bestows a weight and value to the individual human narrative which is like money in the bank to the novelist.
Our dear friend and MOJ colleague, Fr. Araujo, left behind -- among other things! -- a really nice interview, with Fr. Paul Kenney, S.J., which has been preserved thanks to the New England Jesuits Oral History Program. You can get it here (and you should!). Among (many) other things, Fr. Araujo reflects in the interview on his participation in the Mirror of Justice project over the years. Check it out.
What does it mean to be an intellectual? The word comes from the Latin word for understanding, intellego. Lego has dense, multifaceted meanings: to choose, select, collect, and gather. It also means to read. When inter gets added, which means “between,” we get a compound meaning, something like “to read between the lines.” Intellego translates the Greek wordkatanoesis, which can be translated as “knowing across.” If we put these clues together, we come up with a basic working definition of an intellectual. He is someone who can see the differences between things (choosing) and the connections between them (collecting). He attends to reality as it presents itself, but penetrates deeper as well. An intellectual can read not just words and books, but reality and the world. He knows the stories things tell or the ideas they express. In the case of the Christian intellectual, he knows how reality directs us towards the logos, which is the person of Christ.
The goal of the intellectual life, therefore, is to see things as they are, in themselves and together. The fullest kind of knowing knows across as well as about, among as well as in. The same applies to reading, the lectio in the word “intellectual.” We are always reading across words; we read individual words in relation to the others. Discerning an argument or message requires synthesis, a “knowing across.” . . .
