Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Why should the Church care?
In a comment on a recent post reporting Archbishop Piero Marini's personal opinion on the desirability of civil unions for homosexuals, my colleague Ellen Wertheimer asks the following question: "Why should the Church care" if homosexuals marry? Prof. Wertheimer answers her own question, probably inadvertently. The answer: because the Church *cares* -- the Church CARES about the salvation of souls. The issue of civil encouragement of homosexual union "affect[s] the Church" (to quote Prof. Wertheimer) because such union endangers souls inasmuch as it encourages and ratifies behavior that violates the moral order. Believe me, I *understand* that Prof. Wertheimer (along with many others) rejects the proposition that such conduct violates the moral order. That contingent rejection, however, should not obscure the fact that when the Church encourages some social forms and denies the legitimacy of others, the work is always the same: to teach the truth about the moral order so that all can be saved (I Tim. 2:4). If Prof. Wertheimer (and others) were to *approve* of terrorism or torture or unjust economic structures, for example, obviously that approval would not properly operate as a reason for the Church to cease to *care* to condemn such conduct or conditions. The Church seeks to correct and transform the culture for the sake of salvation; the Church is not on the side of the grand coalition in favor of the status quo and of a world that increasingly denies Gospel truths. Like any good parent, the Church does indeed *care*. The Church is not a libertarian parent. The Church cares about all of humanity, not just those who have already heard the Gospel and believed and been forgiven (over and over and over). The Church cares because Christ cares about all of humanity.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
"Another Vatican voice backs civil unions for same-sex couples"
By John Allen
Another veteran Vatican figure has signaled openness to civil recognition of same-sex unions in the wake of similar comments in early February from the Vatican's top official on the family. It's a position also once reportedly seen with favor by the future pope while he was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The latest expression of support for civil recognition as an alternative to gay marriage comes from Archbishop Piero Marini, who served for 18 years as Pope John Paul II's liturgical master of ceremonies.
"There are many couples that suffer because their civil rights aren't recognized," Marini said.
Marini, now 71, is currently the president of the Pontifical Committee for International Eucharistic Congresses. He spoke in an interview with the newspaper La Nación in Costa Rica, where the local church wrapped up a Eucharistic congress Sunday.
[Read the rest here.]
"The Blogger as Public Intellectual": A fun conversation with Paul Horwitz
Re-posting this:
Notre Dame's Institute for Advanced Study is hosting this week an interesting conference on "public intellectuals" and, this morning, the featured paper was from MOJ-friend Paul Horwitz, whose topic was "The Blogger as Public Intellectual." (For one blogospheric reaction to his presentation, go here.) Paul was, as per usual, interesting and thoughtful.
I was the "commenter" (or "commentator"?) who followed Paul and I spent most of my time talking about and reflecting on the "Mirror of Justice" project / experience. And, here's a bit of what I said:
What “stand outs” in my mind, about the “Mirror of Justice” effort – in addition to its relatively distinctive focus on Catholicism and law – is that it is both a “group” blog and one whose contributors disagree strongly about a lot of pretty important things. There are, of course, lots of “group blogs” (pretty much every magazine has one), but I do think the range of views (and, again, of disagreement) about non-trivial matters is unusual. As I see it, dealing with this disagreement has been for me the main challenge, but also the main reward, of the blog.
Our hope, when we started – and when we very deliberately assembled Catholic law professors from a variety of disciplines and from across the political spectrum – was the same one that University admissions officials cite when they do their work, namely, that the diversity would enrich the conversations that took place. It did, and it has . . . but we’ve also fought a lot (and not only at election time). Our arguments are, almost always, fairly regarded as “fights among friends”, but they happen “in front of” strangers, which is a bit unsettling (at least for me). They flare up and are resolved “in public” – the sharp elbows are thrown, and the sincere apologies extended, “in public.”
And so, over the years, I’ve come to think of our role less in terms of “providing for the world a coherent Catholic legal theory”, and also less in terms of contributing to (or imposing on) the world various pieces of “public intellectualism.” Instead, and precisely because the group is a relatively diverse one that is still united – tenuously, sometimes, but still united – by a sincere desire to live in friendship with Jesus and in communion with the Church – I’ve tended to think about what we do more in terms of “modelling.”
It seems to me that what we provide, or offer (or fail to provide or offer) to readers is not so much the discrete work product of a dozen “public intellectuals” as a conversation – an illustration or example – that is, depending on the day, more or less edifying and productive. When I’m blogging now (and this was not always true), I’m thinking not so much of “my own” readership, the way I might if I were a regular columnist for the Washington Post, as I am of my students, and my fellow bloggers’ students, who might be thinking hard about what it means to have a vocation in the law and to aspire to integrate that vocation with one’s religious faith and traditions.
Whether we on the blog are talking or arguing about the election, or immigration reform, or the philosophical anthropology underlying and animating the law of torts, I find myself these days thinking less about the importance of persuading as about the “way the conversation is going.” Don’t get me wrong: My fellow bloggers and I have views (often strong views) and we all want, I am sure, for those who disagree with us to yield to our superior arguments. (We’re lawyers, after all.) Still, and without being too polly-annish or precious, I have found myself in recent years more focused on the community-building and community-maintenance dimension of my blogging than on its evangelical or propagandizing aspects.
Former Texas Chief Justice, Jack Pope, turned 100 recently
After law school, I had the pleasure of clerking for Chief Justice Jack Pope, a man of profound integrity and intellect. A great mentor, he recently turned 100. Happy birthday!
"Pope served on the Supreme Court from 1964-85, with his final two years as chief justice, and at 100 is the longest-lived state chief justice in U.S. history and appears to be the first to reach the century mark, said Osler McCarthy, staff attorney for the Supreme Court."
McConnell, "A Defense of Citizens United"
A very interesting piece defending what Michael McConnell says is "one of the most reviled decisions of the Supreme Court in recent years." The piece is not a defense of the reasoning in Citizens United; moreover, it criticizes "the majority's sunny dismissal of the corrupting influence of independent expenditures" as "wholly unpersuasive."
Instead, McConnell defends the outcome on the basis of the First Amendment freedom of the press:
There is no serious doubt that some corporations – media corporations – have a constitutional right under the Press Clause to editorialize about candidates while the voters are making up their minds . . . . So the dispositive question becomes whether the protections of the Press Clause are confined to a certain set of actors, namely the institutional press (however defined), or whether it protects an activity: publishing information and opinions to the general public. Only if the former, narrower, interpretation is valid can Citizens United be wrongly decided. Although the narrow interpretation has received some support in recent years, and Justice Stevens appears to embrace it in one sentence and a footnote in his Citizens United dissent, it is in conflict with the great weight of precedent, departs from the unequivocal historical meaning of the Clause both before and for more than 100 years after its enactment, and – perhaps most decisively – requires a legally enforceable line between “press” and others, which is inherently unworkable and probably would not even produce a different result in Citizens United itself.
He then explores the implications of this disposition, one of the most important of which is that while the right of groups to publish views and opinions about candidates and campaigns would be protected, campaign contributions would not be:
The right to publish belongs to everyone – to natural persons like Thomas Paine, to business corporations like the New York Times Co., and to non-media corporations like Citizens United – but contributing to candidates is not an exercise of the freedom of the press. This is not to claim that there is no constitutional right to contribute to campaigns – just that the Court could have decided Citizens United while leaving the jurisprudence of contributions untouched. From the point of view of judicial minimalism, that would have been a virtue.
Monday, April 22, 2013
"What Is a Person?"
On Friday, at Notre Dame Law School, I had the pleasure of participating in a really interesting interdisciplinary roundtable-conference, which was generously organized by Prof. David Opderbeck of Seton Hall (and, this semester, of Notre Dame). One of the presentations was by (and several of the discussion-sessions were about) Christian Smith, who presented the basic argument of his fascinating book, What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago 2010). How cool, to write -- and to pull off! -- a book with that title.
Not to give too much away, but . . . a person is "a conscious, reflexive, embodied, self-transcending center of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication who -- as the efficient cause of his or her own responsible actions and interactions -- exercises complex capacities for agency and intersubjectivity in order to sustain his or her own incommunicable self in loving relationships with other personal selves and with the nonpersonal world." It's critical realism, personalist theory, antinaturalistic phenomenological epistemology, and Charles Taylor about social structures, human dignity, and the good. Wow!
Chris Eisgruber and Lawyer-University Presidents
Congratulations to Chris Eisgruber--a fellow member of the law and religion guild--upon his election as the 20th President of Princeton University. Eisgruber's book (co-authored with Larry Sager) Religious Freedom and the Constitution (Harvard, 2010) has been a formidable contribution to the field (especially for those of us who disagree with aspects of it), and Chris has been a generous conversation partner at many law and religion gatherings.
This also continues an interesting story about lawyers being tapped for university presidencies. With some notable exceptions (Robert Maynard Hutchins and Kingman Brewster come to mind), it seems to me there was a longtime bias against JDs (or LLBs in a bygone era) serving as presidents of elite institutions, but there is a trend over the past few decades in the other direction--Lee Bollinger, James Freedman, and Derek Bok are just a few examples. Why? My guess is that it's a significant marker of the acceptance of legal scholarship as a research field in the wider academy and the skills that lawyers often bring to such administrative positions--and, of course, the talents of the individual candidates.
Vischer on the Religious Liberty of For-Profits
You should make the time to read Rob Vischer's new piece, Do For-Profit Businesses Have Free Exercise Rights? One interesting feature of the paper is Rob's engagement with the First Amendment institutionalism literature. He makes the case for some line drawing, in his usual careful and thoughtful way. Here is the abstract:
Americans are understandably troubled by the prospect of Wal-Mart and the First Presbyterian Church as conceptually identical free exercise claimants. As an expanding array of for-profit businesses sue to block enforcement of the HHS contraception mandate, there is a danger that our failure to distinguish them will weaken the protections for all institutional free exercise claimants. Except for some still largely uncontroversial questions of internal church governance, the “moral bedrock” of religious liberty is increasingly contested when invoked by institutions. Absent some categorical distinctions, we risk what Fred Schauer and others have called “institutional compression” through a process “of leveling down rather than leveling up.” Nevertheless, in the wake of Citizens United, courts may decide not to embrace potential paths of distinction. If the identity of the speaker doesn’t matter for purposes of free speech, it is tempting to say that the identity of the actor doesn’t matter for purposes of free exercise.
Foreclosing a for-profit business’s standing to raise free exercise claims entirely is not justified. However, in light of the differences between corporate political speech and corporate religious exercise, and in light of the enormous market power wielded by for-profit businesses in the provision of essential goods and services, including the paths by which to earn a livelihood, a court would be justified in interpreting free exercise doctrine to reflect institutional distinctions.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Douthat on "Gosnel and the Politics of Abortion"
Just a bit, from what I thought was a good piece by Ross Douthat, commenting on the argument one is hearing in some quarters that the Gosnell case confirms the merits of the pro-abortion-rights side's arguments:
The only things missing from this clean, airtight, entirely consistent argument are, well, all the dead babies in the Gosnell clinic — or the dead “precipitated fetuses,” to employ the language Gosnell and his associates used to euphemize their practice of delivering and then “snipping” rather than aborting in utero. Their absence is not necessarily a problem if you’re willing to argue that those babies were non-persons before delivery and became persons immediately after (in which case Gosnell is guilty of infanticide but a more competent late-term abortion facility wouldn’t be), or if you’re willing to argue, with Peter Singer and some others, that personhood is something that emerges gradually at some indeterminate time after birth (in which case Gosnell’s “snipping” wasn’t murder at all). The former, I think, is the more common form of pro-choice absolutism, and the latter belongs to the more philosophically-inclined fringe (although the debate over “born-alive” bills has moved the official consensus fringeward). But if you’re already committed to absolute support for abortion rights, either argument will suffice to justify treating Gosnell’s conduct as irrelevant to the broader abortion controversy.
What neither argument seems likely to do, however, is do much to persuade the many, many “pro-choice but …” people who aren’t already so committed, and whose support for abortion rights tends to waver most when they’re confronted with the reality of what abortion actually does to fetal life — in clean, well-funded facilities as well as filthy ones, and in the womb as much as on Gosnell’s operating tables. This is, of course, the central reason why the pro-life side assumes that mainstream reporters didn’t particularly want to cover the trial: Because the mainstream press leans pro-choice, because mainstream journalism is pitched to readers in the mushy middle on abortion, and because the practice of “after-birth abortion” makes fetal humanity manifest in ways that almost inevitably push that middle in a more pro-life direction. . . .
Scorcese to produce "Silence"
One of my favorite filmmakers has apparently secured the funding to make the movie based on one of my favorite books, "Silence" by Shusaku Endo. Yay! Story here.
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
