Several times in recent weeks I enjoyed a (for me) new experience (but one that I know many other law-profs have had) -- former students (in these cases, students I taught during my first semester, in the Fall of 1999) were back on campus for on-campus interviews and meetings with current students. I felt, well, (a) old ("Good Lord, was I teaching law in the 90s?"), (b) humble ("I cannot believe they let me teach law to this guy -- I didn't have a clue what I was doing. Thank God it worked out for him!"), (c) proud ("Dang, this person seems happy in her vocation, and is thriving! If I had anything to do with that . . . cool!"), and (d) grateful (both to the former students from coming by and re-connecting and to all those who made it possible for me to be in the position of helping with the students' education and formation).
Thursday, August 29, 2013
When former students return as hiring-committee members
"If you send your kid to private school, you are a bad person"
This piece, by Allison Benedikt (who also served up this little gem a while back), is -- on the one hand -- offensive, stupid, and scary for its statism. On the other hand, she has a point (at least, I think one can extract this point from the piece): *If* you send your child to a private school because you are fortunate enough to have the means to do so and you believe that a private school is more conducive to your child's development, safety, and happiness, but you oppose policies aimed at making it financially possible for parents who are not so fortunate and who have the same belief . . . well, I am not saying you are "bad", but you might have some soul-searching to do.
The March and Faith
It was an electric day here in Washington. This 50th anniversary of the March on Washington filled the city with energy as the participants and onlookers both reflected on the past and looked toward the future. So much has been and will be written about the day, that this post is in no way an attempt to capture the entirety of the day. Many will no doubt offer numerous and moving accounts with each having its own insight.
I would like to highlight one aspect of the news coverage of day that struck me as particularly relevant to MOJ and its mission. As a law professor at a religiously affiliated institution, I often encounter (as I am sure many here do) the argument that religion and faith have no place in policy, laws, or debate. Indeed, some have argued persuasively that a bias exists against religion, and indeed faith of any kind, playing any role in policy development. Professor Garnett noted a thread of this just days ago when commenting on some secular forces hijacking such public events.
However, as the country celebrated this March and its significance in a social movement, the prominent role spirituality and faith played in this day flies in the face of the position minimizing the integral role faith and faith based institutions can play. The power of faith goes far beyond the inspiring Dr. King, whose spiritual leadership soared throughout his work and transformed America. But the entire fabric of that day - from the biblical quotations, to the active role of organized churches, to the spiritual hymns that provided the background music – was fused with faith as a conductor of social reform. Even 50 years later the day began with prayer, progressed to a President invoking God as the source of dignity for all people, and continued with bells ringing from churches throughout the world. What is remarkable is not just that faith played such an integral role, but that it explicitly and openly did so in a public and prideful way.
To be sure many forces fuel and influence important social movements. Some of these forces are individual and others collective. Yesterday is a reminder of a portion of those forces. In a world perhaps resistant to any interplay between faith and policy, yesterday underscores that faith and faith institutions can play integral roles in the liberation of the oppressed and protection of the vulnerable. Faith can inspire; faith can fuel; faith can sustain; faith can guide…good stuff to remember for those of us fortunate to teach a generation of future lawyers, activists, and policy makers.
The entirely predictable (and predicted) mainstreaming of polyamory
As anybody should have been able to see even as long as ten years ago, the project of mainstreaming polyamory is well underway. Since there can be no ground of principle for rejecting multiple sexual partner relationships once the historic idea of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife is jettisoned in favor of the idea of "marriage" as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership, it was "in the cards" (as social conservatives have been pointing out and candid social liberals have been acknowledging for at least a decade). Here's a sympathetic story about British polyamorists from the BBC (a reliable voice of the social liberalism in Britain).
Delahunty on Tocqueville on Pantheism in America
You should not miss Robert Delahunty's most recent post exploring Alexis de Tocqueville's view that the logic of American democratic egalitarianism would eventually lead for many toward a religion of pantheism. And his prediction rings true in Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism and in Walt Whitman's poetry (I had forgotten the praise that Whitman lavishes on the stench of his own armpits). Just a small fragment of the post (but it's a treat to read it in full):
What about those democratic men and women who yield to the democratic “predisposition” and abandon Christianity? Here Tocqueville suggests that the “prevailing taste democratic nations have for general ideas” will lead them, not to the unity that some will find in Catholicism, but instead to pantheism:
Man is obsessed with the idea of unity. He seeks it in every direction; when he believes he has found it, he willingly rests in its arms. Not content with discovering that there is but one creation and one Creator in the world, he is still irritated by this primary division of things and he seeks to expand and simplify his thought by enclosing God and the universe in a single entity. If there is a philosophic system according to which things material and immaterial, visible and invisible within the world are to be considered only as the separate parts of an immense being who alone remains eternal in the continuous shift and constant change of everything which is within it, I shall have no difficulty reaching the conclusion that a similar system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather because it destroys it, will have secret attractions for men who live in a democracy.
Democracy at 521.
Tocqueville recoils from pantheism, even while admitting that it is “one of the most likely [metaphysical systems] to entice the human mind in democratic ages.” He denounces it as an idea that “naturally attracts and arrests [the] imagination [of democratic men] and nourishes their arrogance, while cosseting their laziness.” And he calls on all who are “smitten with the nobility of man” to “join forces and fight against this idea.” Id.
....
What evidence is there, we might ask, that the America of the present is tending toward pantheism?
The evidence, I believe, is not hard to find. Consider, e.g., our changing attitudes toward the environment. By this I mean, not primarily our concerns with pollution or resource depletion, but rather the much more fundamental changes in the ways we have come to think about man’s place in nature.
Ever since the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess baptized it with a name in 1973, the “deep ecology” movement has exerted an influence on contemporary culture. See Arne Naess, The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary, 16 Inquiry 95 (1973). The (originally) seven points in which Naess summed up “deep ecology” included discernibly egalitarian and pantheistic elements. Naess advocated the abandonment of “the man-in-the-environment image” and its replacement by “the relational, total-field image,” in which living organisms would be seen as “knots in the biospherical net.” He also urged “biospherical egalitarianism,” rejecting “anthropocentrism” in favor of “the equal right to live and blossom” for every form of life....Others have seen intimations of deep ecology in the works of such major thinkers as Martin Heidegger and the seventeenth century pantheist Baruch Spinoza.
Of course one might dismiss the deep ecology movement as culturally marginal and uninfluential. But do we not also see the signs of a kind of “practical pantheism” everywhere about us? Consider, e.g., our changing dietary habits (the preference for organic foods) or travel interests (eco-tourism). Let me conclude this essay by using what seems to me a particularly telling example: our changing burial practices.
Burial practices are especially revealing, I submit, because they indicate how a society implicitly thinks of human life, of death, of collective memory and individual fame, of an after-life, and of the relationship of the human body to the earth.
In his beautiful and moving book Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West (2003), Ken Warpole describes the recent, but growing, desire for “natural burial” in Britain and northern Europe. Proponents of natural burial, Warpole writes, “seek to create cemeteries that meld into the uncultivated landscape as quickly as possible, returning to a ‘state of nature’ as if the human presence on earth had never been.” At 191. And this, he rightly says, is “a presumption of astonishing radicalism”:
For the past 2,000 years at least, one of the principal functions of burial and funerary ritual – from the inscriptions and epitaphs in the Roman catacombs through to the cult of the headstone in the era of the Enlightenment – has been to leave, where possible, a permanent record for posterity of each individual life lived. Natural burial denies this function, at least with regard to any kind of design or inscription at the place of interment, though other forms of commemoration or record may take place elsewhere. This suggests that the strong desire to ‘be at one with nature’ and to leave no sign of burial behind is an unexpected and late-modern phenomenon, at least within Western culture, part of a new and unique kind of ecological consciousness, rather than a trace element of pre-historic or pagan belief systems.
Id.
Natural burial is philosophical pantheism woven deeply into the fabric and habits of a society. It expresses that society’s view of the inconsequentiality of the individual human being, and of its unconcern with the perpetuation of its own collective memory and identity. It is the handiwork of a society that sees human existence as merely a momentary perturbation of the natural order, an irritation on the earth’s surface. Ironically, the attitude of “letting be” that this kind of society displays in relation to nature is merely the photographic negative of the technological rationality that the deep ecology movement condemns as exploitative. If Tocqueville is to be believed, this is the type of society towards which we are drifting. Little wonder that he calls on all who believe in the “nobility” of man to oppose it.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Cavadini on Augustine on eros and marriage
Here's another Augustine-related link. This one is to "The Sacramentality of Marriage in the Fathers," by Notre Dame's John Cavadini. A short excerpt:
To Augustine’s mind, there is something naïve about a view of marriage that treats sexual desire as a relatively uncomplicated eros which education and ascetic living can easily channel into the pleasures of home and family. For Augustine, sexual desire as we know it now is anything but uncomplicated. To people accustomed to thinking that sexual desire and the pleasure it seeks are obvious and uncomplicated goods that contribute, in a straightforwardly positive way to the bonding and happiness of a married couple, Augustine’s views will look pessimistic. Yet Augustine would probably insist that it is simply realistic. Sexual pleasure is not a fixed quantity, unambiguously and obviously good as we experience it in a fallen world.
Religious Persecution in Egypt, Syria, and Beyond
In an interview in Catholic World Report, I offer some reflections on religious persecution in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere.
CWR: What about the view that these Christian communities were better off under people like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and possibly Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and now Bashar al-Assad in Syria?
George: No one should express any sympathy at all for horrible dictators like Assad and Saddam Hussein. Often they were the protectors of Christians and other minorities not because they particularly liked Christians or other minorities but because it was politically expedient for them to do so. Their coalitions, their bases of support were patched together and in many cases included some Christians. It is no salute to Mubarak or certainly to Assad, who is far worse than Mubarak, or Saddam Hussein, who was probably even worse than Assad—it is no tribute to any of them to say that, if it’s true that the Christian communities were oppressed as was everyone in the reign of those dictators, they were to some extent protected, and their plight has gotten worse, and that’s a tragedy. We should not be longing for the return of people like Assad and Saddam Hussein. We should be hoping and praying and working for the establishment in these nations of decent regimes that will respect the basic human rights of all people, including the Christians. . . .
CWR: What do you hope to accomplish as chairman of the USCIRF?
George: I certainly want to build on the achievements of my predecessor as chairman, Katrina Lantos Swett, who served with enormous distinction, and I’m delighted that she remains a member of the commission and, indeed, is vice chairman of the commission. I’ll continue to work closely with her. She and I believe that the plight of Christians throughout the Middle East has got to be given greater priority. That’s one thing I hope will be a mark of my chairmanship.
We’re also very concerned about Jewish communities. There are some small Jewish communities left outside Israel in the Middle East. They’re under even greater pressure these days than they have been in the past in places like Yemen.
I’m very concerned about religious persecution in Europe. Of course, it does not involve the brutality that we find in the Middle East. But I still hate to see liberal democratic regimes engaging in illiberal practices on the religious freedom front. We see this in a variety of areas. One, of course, is the all-too evident revival of anti-Semitism in some European countries.
Some European countries, even those with traditions of respect for civil liberties, are imposing restrictions on religiously-oriented clothing, like the Muslim headscarf on girls in schools, [and] jewelry, such as wearing a Star of David or a cross on a necklace. This extreme laicism or secularism represents an effort to drive religion into the purely private sphere and out of the public square, and that’s incompatible with a robust and proper understanding of religious freedom as extending not merely to what one does in the mosque or church or synagogue or temple or in the home at mealtime or bedtime, but extending to one’s public life. The robust right of religious freedom must include the right of the believer to enter the public square and to express his faith, including by symbols, and also to act on his religiously-inspired moral convictions about justice and the common good, just as Martin Luther King did in our own country, just as the abolitionists and people of other great reform movements did in our own country and continue to do, for example, in the pro-life movement.
So I’m concerned about Europe. It has not been a focus of USCIRF’s concern in the past, but it is commented on at some length in our 2013 report, and we will be continue to monitor that. There was the recent ruling in Cologne, Germany, equating religious circumcision in male infants with child abuse and attempting to ban it. Fortunately, the German government is moving to undo that court decision, but it’s indicative and reflective of an attitude and an ideology that needs to be taken seriously and strongly resisted. I want to applaud the Catholic bishops in Germany for coming out strongly against that ruling, despite the fact that no specifically Catholic interest was engaged here. Catholics don’t require circumcision of male children, though they permit it. This was not the Catholic Church’s fight. The bishops distinguished themselves by speaking out on behalf of the Jewish community and certain Muslim communities, for whom circumcision is a religious requirement.
On that same note, to go back to the Middle East for a moment, I also think we need to applaud and salute those Muslims who have stood up and spoken and tried to protect the Coptic Christians and other Christian minorities in the Middle East. On several occasions, Muslims have protected churches against extremists and mobs, protected the businesses of Christians, and taken other steps. It’s a mistake to paint with too broad a brush and to assume that all Muslims in Egypt or other Middle Eastern countries are persecutors of Christians. There have been more than a few, to their very great credit, who have not only refused to participate in the persecution, but have tried their best to stop it.
Moving now to other nations and regions of the world, we are, of course, deeply concerned about religious persecution in China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and other states that are on our CPC list. CPC refers to “Countries of Particular Concern,” countries we are recommending to the State Department for listing so they will be subjected to sanctions unless the administration takes the affirmative step of granting them a waiver. And we believe that waivers, if they are granted, should be granted for short periods of time, for terms, and the administration needs to pressure these offending states—these are the grossest offenders, the worst offenders—needs to pressure them and make clear to them that these waivers are only temporary, and unless reforms are made those waivers will be removed and sanctions will be imposed.
The complete interview is available here:
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2529/what_the_us_can_do_to_help_christians_in_egypt_and_syria.aspx#.Uh6R177D9on
Hollingworth on Augustine and Civilization
As Rick noted, today is the Feast of Saint Augustine, an occasion for special celebration at Villanova, which is sponsored by the Augustinians. I've been dipping into Miles Hollingworth's splendid new intellectual biography of Augustine. Here's a bit, with profound relevance especially for teachers, parents, and those who reflect on our public life:
Clever university students of the right persuasion can affect a meticulous languor whose sole pleasure is noticing itself in grand poses of disinterest—what Evelyn Waugh called 'the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding'. But you can't cheat life like this; your character will continue to hound you. The emerging picture is of Augustine as a young man, with the blood really pounding in his ears. He will make every attempt to repose in the normal and acceptable life of his new city; yet he will feel unable to enjoy it with the same ease that he will observe in those around him. He will feel that he is being permitted to live only a fugitivam libertatem, a 'fugitive's freedom'. It is one of the particular consequences of individuality and the first-person perspective that you will always assume that you are the only one going through these things. And if God has been a part of your upbringing then this is the moment when God usually gets it in the neck—as the spiteful architect of it all. Why should we be obliged to call Him good and make up the shortfall in a disingenuous belief?
....
Augustine’s contribution to the psychology of adolescence seems to be to suggest that the stock intensities of this time arise within a complex about God; about parents (and particularly the father) as the earthly stand-ins for God; and about how the sensation of betrayal by these deities creates those hair-trigger responses to the world. 'For just as vinegar corrodes a vessel if it remains long in it, so anger corrodes the heart if it is cherished till the morrow.’ Those who newly enter the world as children are permitted a certain measure of goodwill about it all that the enemy of this has only to destroy by cultivating scenarios in which anger must be carried for long distances. For, by the laws of action and reaction, anger develops in complex and elongated ways into sets of rights—which are those negative assurances held so passionately against all-comers. And from the anger of children forced to compromise comes the adult triumph of the rights-based civilization of the Earthly City, holding its sharpest edge to the neck of God.
Miles Hollingworth, Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford UP, 2013), 112-13.
Call for Proposals: "Love and Law Conference"
The good folks at Pepperdine University School of Law are hosting (yet) another outstanding conference this February. The theme this time is "Love and Law":
In a provocative essay, philosopher Jeffrie Murphy asks: “What would law
be like if we organized it around the value of Christian love [agape]?” Analogous
questions arise within other theological and moral traditions. What would
be the implications for the substance and the practice of law? We invite
presentation and panel proposals for our upcoming conference.
The list of confirmed speakers is fantastic, and already includes (inter alia) MOJ-ers Patrick Brennan, Rob Vischer, Michael Scaperlanda, and Amy Uelmen. For more information on the conference, and on how to submit a proposal, go here. I hope that the MOJ-ers will share their thoughts and papers with us -- and also report back!
AP story on religious exemptions and SSM laws
The other day, this AP story by Rachel Zoll provided a pretty good overview of the ongoing debate about religious-freedom-related exemptions and SSM laws. As MOJ readers know, Tom Berg and I have participated in the effort, described in the piece, to get such exemptions included in SSM legislation. (Here is an example of the letters we have sent to legislators.) As the article discusses, the effort has been criticized not only by those who regard it as, in effect, special pleading for bigots, but also by those -- like Matthew Franck, of the Witherspoon Institute -- who contend that it constitutes a premature surrender, that it has not yielded any good results, and that it has made it easier for SSM legislation to pass in states where it otherwise would not have.
As I wrote in Commonweal a few weeks ago ("Worth Worrying About?", here):
In recent years, a group of law professors (including me) with differing views on the policy merits of changing the legal definition of marriage has presented to legislators in various states a detailed analysis of these and other live and potential conflicts, and urged them to include in any new legislation not merely superfluous affirmations of churches’ authority over their own sacraments but also “meaningful religious freedom protections,” for both individuals and institutions, in both the private sphere of worship and belief and the public square of civil society. The group’s letters, in other words, take seriously the acknowledgment by President Obama and other prominent same-sex-marriage supporters that there are fair-minded and decent people on both sides of the argument and remind lawmakers that both prudence and principle counsel protection and respect for the consciences of religious believers and the distinctiveness of religious institutions.
These interventions have had nontrivial but admittedly modest effect. They have been criticized by some same-sex marriage advocates for privileging the irrational and atavistic objections of some over the full equality of others and, at the same time, they have been given low marks by some proponents of traditional marriage for offering naïve and premature concessions to an aggressive and uncompromising political and cultural campaign. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that it is important and worthwhile for those who see and embrace the connection between human dignity and the human right to religious freedom to do what they can—even if it does not seem like very much—to protect that right in and through law. Such work is not inconsistent with, and need not be counter-productive to, equally important efforts to, charitably and prudently, align the positive law with the truth about the person and enlist it in the service of the common good - See more at: http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/worth-worrying-about#sthash.wIKhlR38.dpuf
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