Further to Rob's and Greg's posts, these are the thoughts I posted on Creo en Dios! this morning:
Yesterday was the day some people thought the world might end.
It didn't. Instead, the big news of the day was the NRA suggesting that the response to the deaths of our children in Connecticut last week should be to have armed guards in all of our schools and create a national database of the mentally ill in the country.
The paranoia and demagoguery reflected in the NRA's comments are deeply upsetting. Because if one is convinced we need guns at schools, why not guns in every day care center, every hospital, every heavily trafficked street corner?
Why not churches? Then we can sit and pray to the Incarnate God who met violence with love, with guns in our laps ready to protect ourselves from anyone we perceive to be a threat.
Is that the society we believe we've become? Is that a society we want to be?
If that is our vision of our future - a vision without hope, the world might as well have ended yesterday.
I've watched the post Newtown commentary with deep (and growing) sadness, shaking my head as people say, "It's not about guns, it' about mental illness." Or "It's not about mental illness, it's about guns." Or "it's not about guns or mental illness, it is that we've locked God out of schools."
The problem with "it's not A, but B" analyses, is that they seek simple solutions to complicated issues, and that they tend to promote the simple solutions that happen to be consistent with the promoters' already-existing views. We do need some meaningful regulation of guns in this country. And we desperately need a sounder approach to mental illness. We also need to, as my friend Mark Osler wrote earlier this week, to be more effective evangelists. We need to do more to help those without one to develop a personal relationship with God.
And we need hope. Hope in God. Hope that we can do better. Hope that we can be better. And responding to gun violence by promoting more guns is not a reflection of hope.
I ended the last session of our Advent Retreat in Daily Living on Monday by reading Daniel Berrigan's Advent Credo. It is worth sharing again in this context.
It is not true that creation and the human family are
doomed to destruction and loss—
This is true: For God so loved the world that
He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him
shall not perish but have everlasting life;
It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination,
hunger and poverty, death and destruction—
This is true: I have come that they may have life, and that abundantly.
It is not true that violence and hatred should have the last word,
and that war and destruction rule forever—
This is true: Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given,
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
his name shall be called wonderful councilor, mighty God,
the Everlasting, the Prince of peace.
It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of evil
who seek to rule the world—
This is true: To me is given authority in heaven and on earth,
and lo I am with you, even until the end of the world.
It is not true that we have to wait for those who are specially gifted, who are the prophets
of the Church before we can be peacemakers—
This is true: I will pour out my spirit on all flesh and
your sons and daughters shall prophesy,
your young men shall see visions and your old men shall have dreams.
It is not true that our hopes for liberation of humankind, of justice,
of human dignity of peace are not meant for this earth and for this history—
This is true: The hour comes, and it is now, that the
true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and in truth.
So let us enter Advent in hope, even hope against hope.
Let us see visions of love and peace and justice.
Let us affirm with humility, with joy, with faith, with courage:
Jesus Christ—the life of the world.
I choose hope.
Our fellow blogger Robby George has a very interesting review of Akhil Amar's new book, "America's Unwritten Constitution," in the pages of this week's Times Book Review. Robby's review is, on the whole, positive. Here is a bit from the conclusion:
Almost everyone agrees that the Constitution includes whatever its text logically requires or more or less clearly implies. More provocative but also persuasive is Amar’s contention that it includes principles inferred from how the written Constitution was enacted. But can constitutional principles, even broadly construed, include some derived from George Washington’s presidency, or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, as Amar suggests?
Amar allows that parts of his unwritten constitution are “not on the same legal level” as the written one. But that raises the question: What in general does it mean to say that some principle is part of the unwritten constitution? Does it constrain government actors as stringently as principles of the written Constitution do, or less so? A more unified, detailed account of the unwritten constitution’s function might bolster Amar’s bolder claims — or qualify them. It would help us to see more clearly the boundaries of the constitutional landscape that Amar helpfully sketches, a landscape neither fully lighted by the text nor darkened by “penumbras, formed by emanations.”
Friday, December 21, 2012
Consider my colleague Greg Sisk's call for us to embrace -- with God's help -- the best in ourselves and our society:
"[A]ttention to moral character and cultural healing is imperative if we take seriously the calling to create the best environment for human thriving. And, at present, we have ample reason to doubt that American culture is bringing out the best in our people."
Then consider the NRA's call for an armed guard in every school, along with the stark rationale offered by Wayne LaPierre:
The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment? How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame . . . while provoking others to try to make their mark? A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill? And the fact is, that wouldn’t even begin to address the much larger and more lethal criminal class: Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members who have spread like cancer in every community in this country. . . .
I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.
Is LaPierre asking us to embrace the best in ourselves and our society? These remarks reflect the power of fear, but they do not reflect a Catholic understanding of engagement with the world. I have a hard time imagining John Paul II teaching us that the answer to gun violence is more guns because "our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters." I don't resent gun ownership, but I struggle to reconcile the rhetoric in which gun rights are sometimes embedded -- fear of the other, withdrawing behind the power of the gun, simplistic responses to evil -- with the call of solidarity and the exhortation to "be not afraid."
In conjunction with the annual meeting of the AALS in January, the 2013 Conference on Christian Legal Thought sponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago and the Law Professors' Christian Fellowship will take up the nature of law, based partly on a pending statement on the nature of law from a group of Evangelical and Catholic scholars. The schedule of speakers is below, and you can register
here--$30 gets you an afternoon of enlightening conversation and a lavish cocktail reception. I hope to see many MOJ readers there.
Saturday, January 5, 2013, 1 PM to 6:15 PM
Wyndham Riverfront New Orleans
701 Convention Center Boulevard
New Orleans, LA 70130
Conference Topic: The Statement on the Nature of Law from Evangelicals and Catholics
1:15 PM – 2:45 PM: Session One: Christian Perspectives on the Nature of Law
Chair: Michael Moreland (Villanova University School of Law)
William Brewbaker III (University of Alabama School of Law)
Nora O’Callaghan (Loyola University Chicago School of Law)
David Skeel (University of Pennsylvania Law School)
2:45 PM – 3:00 PM: Coffee Break
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM: Session Two: Non-Christian Perspectives on the Nature of Law
Chair: Zachary R. Calo (Valparaiso University Law School)
Bruce Ledewitz (Duquesne University School of Law)
Dan Markel (Florida State University College of Law)
Seval Yildirim (Whittier Law School)
4:45 PM – 5:15 PM: Vespers
5:15 PM: Reception
From the Holy Father's recent Christmas Address to the Roman Curia:
"The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man."
