Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

"An Epidemic of Loneliness": Community ties, Catholicism, and Suicide

By Rick Garnett

This is very interesting.   In the Oct. 5 issue of National Review, Kevin Hassett has a piece called "An Epidemic of Loneliness."  Here's a taste:

For more than a hundred years, economists and sociologists have studied an empirical regularity: When the population share of Protestants relative to Catholics rises, suicides increase markedly. Two major theories emerged to explain the pattern. The first rests on theological differences, and holds that Catholics but not Protestants are dissuaded from suicide by the fear that it will lead to eternal damnation. The second is that Protestants are more likely to have weaker ties to the community, and it is this separation from the support of a community that leads to despair and suicide.

While the early literature focused on these two competing forms of Christianity, researchers have begun to explore religion and the role of community more generally. As time has gone on, the community-based rather than theological explanation seems to have become more widely accepted in the literature. For instance, research has found that while Protestants commit suicide more than Catholics, atheists are even more likely to take their own lives than Protestants, an observation that would favor the community-based rather than theological channel. . . .

. . . As Protestantism spread and Catholicism declined in Europe, individuals found themselves increasingly separated from the community support mechanisms that could help sustain them in difficult times. Suicides surged. Today’s coarsening world is having a similar effect on far too many. Suicide has become an urgent public-health crisis with astronomical economic costs.

Yet another reason to regret the recent enactment in California of assisted-suicide legalization.

Fleming Rutledge on the Crucifixion

By Thomas Berg

Fleming Rutledge is one of the great preachers of our time. Check out her "Generous Orthodoxy" website here--and get a hold of any (or all) of her sermon collections on Paul, or Romans, or the Old Testament, or Easter, or The Bible and the New York Times. She confounds both conservatives and liberals by preaching universal themes--original sin, amazing grace, and their social and cultural implications--that undercut all our more partial political perspectives. She was also one of the first dozen or so women ordained in the Episcopal Church.

Now she's released The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, her "magnum opus" as The Christian Century's reviewer calls it. A bit of the review:

Don’t conservative and evangelical churches regularly preach the cross and the crucifixion? Yes, they do. But they often reduce these themes to formulaic, even mechanistic interpretations of their meaning, related only to individuals and their fate after death. Moreover, as Rutledge argues persuasively, such proclamations are often theologically incoherent, doing violence to the trinitarian nature of God and rendering the God now separated from Jesus Christ into a monster.

Perhaps partly in reaction to the predominance of such reductive and misleading interpretations of the crucifixion by conservatives and evangelicals, other parts of the church—mainline, liberal, and progressive congregations and their preachers—have had less and less that is substantive to say about the crucifixion. Pelagianism, ever knocking at the mainline door, sidesteps the cross to emphasize Jesus’ good works and his role as a moral exemplar and spiritual guide. Then proclamation tends to become telling stories about Jesus rather than preaching Christ crucified. In some mainline church settings, the crucified One is portrayed as just another innocent victim of the empire, not as the One whose death constituted God’s redemptive disruption of the world.

Protestantism has had a particular problem handling this problem of sin and redemption, reducing it either to "fire insurance" for the afterlife or confident prescriptions about social reform today. But as I see it, Catholic thinkers have to deal with the same issues. 

I'm running to the store (well, to Amazon) to get Rutledge's book.

Monday, October 5, 2015

At least we had Glucksberg ...

By Kevin C. Walsh

Rick beat me to posting about California's new assisted-suicide law.

It's kind of sad when the solace one takes in reading of such an unfortunate development is that the LA Times at least chose not to use the political language of "aid-in-dying" law that the newspaper had previously used. (Headline: "Governor sends aid-in-dying bill to Gov. Brown")  

Another form of solace in the category of "at least there's that" comes from the fact that this unfortunate change at least came through the appropriate political branches.

The judicial sensibility that brought us Washington v. Glucksberg was sound. When there's no law on a matter, the lawful decision is to decline to pretend there is. This may mean that the Court is unable to save us from ourselves, and we are stuck with laws we'd rather not have. But a Court that won't save us from ourselves when it can't do so lawfully is to be preferred to a Court anointed to save us even if that requires making up the law.

With the ascendancy of the Obergefell identity, we may not much longer enjoy the sting of an honest loss.

Gov. Brown signs assisted-suicide law

By Rick Garnett

Bad news out of California.  

Caught between conflicting moral arguments, Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminary student, on Monday signed a measure allowing physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who want to hasten their deaths.

Approving the bill, whose opponents included the Catholic Church, appeared to be a gut-wrenching decision for the 77-year-old governor, who as a young man studied to enter the priesthood.

“In the end, I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death,” Brown added. “I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn’t deny that right to others."

Saturday, October 3, 2015

"Getting to Purple: Religious Freedom Arguments to Reach the Persuadable Middle" -- at CLS in NOLA

By Thomas Berg

Today I gave a presentation at the Christian Legal Society's national conference in New Orleans. The presentation is called "Getting to Purple: Religious Freedom Arguments to Reach the Persuadable Middle" (here are the power point slides). It continues with the three kinds of arguments--civil libertarian, civic republican, and pragmatic--that I've laid out earlier in an article called "Progressive Arguments for Religious Organizational Freedom." The continued goal is to try to bridge what appear to be the hardening lines between conservatives and liberals over the value of religious institutional freedom.

I conclude the presentation with some lessons to draw from Pope Francis, who is a great model for both Catholics and others seeking to defend the freedom of religious institutions to serve others in a joyful and sacrificial spirit. I'll blog about that separately.

And for a lagniappe (Creole for "bonus or extra gift"), here is a picture from New Orleans with church-state associations. It's a jazz band at a wedding that had just finished in the church at the old Ursuline convent. You might remember that when the Ursulines nuns feared that their school for orphan girls would become subject to disruptive American regulation after the Louisiana Purchase, they wrote President Jefferson, who responded that 

the principles of the Constitution [a]re a sure guaranty to you that [your property] will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your Institution will be permitted to govern itself according to its own voluntary rules without interference from the civil authority.

(Rick, Carl Esbeck, Kim Colby, and I discuss Jefferson's letter to the Ursulines in our overview of historical sources of church autonomy, here, at p. 182.)

 

Ursulines Wedding 2

Friday, October 2, 2015

Ah, "tolerance"

By Rick Garnett

Here's the abstract for a new book by a senior lecturer at Keele University:

This book aims to examine and critically analyse the role that religion has and should have in the public and legal sphere. The main purpose of the book is to explain why religion, on the whole, should not be tolerated in a tolerant-liberal democracy and to describe exactly how it should not be tolerated - mainly by addressing legal issues. The main arguments of the book are, first, that as a general rule illiberal intolerance should not be tolerated; secondly, that there are meaningful, unique links between religion and intolerance, and between holding religious beliefs and holding intolerant views (and ultimately acting upon these views); and thirdly, that the religiosity of a legal claim is normally a reason, although not necessarily a prevailing one, not to accept that claim.

Yossi Nehushtan, "Intolerant Religion in a Tolerant-Liberal Democracy" (Hart 2015).

Wow.

Steven Smith on "Constitution Day"

By Rick Garnett

My friend Steve Smith's Constitution Day lecture -- "The Image of Liberty" -- is thoughtful, provocative, bracing, and sobering.  Check it out:

This Constitution Day talk compares the state of constitutional governance today to that of the Roman Empire, as famously discussed by the historian Edward Gibbon, and discusses alternative strategies that might be contemplated by those who believe that current American governance does not conform to the requirements of the historical Constitution.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Letter to Synod Fathers from Catholic Women

By Erika Bachiochi

RELEASED TODAY - October 1, 2015

Dear Synod Fathers in Christ,

In anticipation of the Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family (October 2015), we the undersigned Catholic women—scholars, professors, attorneys, physicians, writers, businesswomen, philanthropists, leaders of apostolate, members of religious orders, and others—wish to express our love for Pope Francis, our fidelity to and gratitude for the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and our confidence in the Synod of Bishops as it strives to strengthen the Church’s evangelizing mission.

Pope Francis has highlighted the need for women to be an “incisive presence” in the Church, and an “effective presence” in the culture, the workplace, and wherever “the most important decisions are taken,” in harmony with women’s “preferential attention” for the family. And Pope St. John Paul II observed that women “have the task of assuring the moral dimension of culture … a culture worthy of the person.” With these ideas in mind, we wish the Synod Fathers to know that:

  • We see the teachings of the Church as truth—a source of authentic freedom, equality, and happiness for women.
  • We give witness that the Church’s teachings—on the dignity of the human person and the value of human life from conception to natural death; on the meaning of human sexuality, the significance of sexual difference and the complementarity of men and women; on openness to life and the gift of motherhood; and on marriage and family founded on the indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman—provide a sure guide to the Christian life, promote women’s flourishing, and serve to protect the poor and most vulnerable among us.
  • We stand in solidarity with our sisters in the developing world against what Pope Francis has described as “forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family” and which exalt the pursuit of “success, riches, and power at all costs.” We urge a profound attentiveness to the poor and a relentless search for just solutions that address the deeper causes of poverty while simultaneously safeguarding the vulnerable, strengthening the family, and upholding the common good.
  • We believe that pastoral challenges can be met, in part, by communicating Church teachings more clearly, confidently, and compassionately, in language, tone, and generous personal encounters that welcome the “why?” of a searching heart. We believe that women should be prominent messengers of the truths contained in the Church’s teachings.
  • We enthusiastically commit our distinctive insights and gifts, and our fervent prayers, in service to the Church’s evangelizing mission.

And we pledge to accompany you, the Synod Fathers, and Pope Francis with our deepest prayers and gratitude, as you work for the good of families and the Church.

In Christ,

See the 200 signatories -- and add your own name here! 

New Blog: "The New Reform Club"

By Rick Garnett

Here's a new-ish group blog, that I'm liking a lot.  It's called "The New Reform Club:  God & Man in the 21st Century."  Check out, just for samples, this post by Gonazaga's Mark DeForrest on "Russell Kirk on the Conservatism of Continuity" and this one, by Seth Tillman, called "Why Punish Wrongdoing"?  A blog that identifies Chesterton and Belloc as two of its "patron saints" will likely be of interest to MOJ readers!  

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

John Allen on Francis and the Religious Freedom Signals

By Thomas Berg

Here. It doesn't mean he necessarily supports Kim Davis in all her assertions, or even the Little Sisters of the Poor, but it is at least a symbolic statement in favor of a broad right of conscience, and perhaps meant to reassure conservatives more specifically on these issues.

To put the point in crudely political terms, Francis is a figure who utterly defies the usual left/right divides, equally capable of meeting Kim Davis and embracing poor immigrant children at a Harlem school – seeing both as part of a continuum of concern for human dignity.

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