Many MOJ readers will be familiar with the work of Notre Dame's Center for Ethics & Culture, and with the wonderful Fall Conferences that the Center's founding director, David Solomon, has hosted for the past decade. I am pleased to pass on the news that Dean John McGreevy has announced the appointment of my friend and colleague, Carter Snead, to succeed Prof. Solomon. Congratulations to Carter, and all good wishes to the Center for continued success, growth, and scholarly contributions!
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Great news from Notre Dame: Snead appointed to direct Center for Ethics & Culture
"Defending Our First Freedom"
Over at First Things, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Jose Gomez, has a nice essay up on the importance of religious liberty, our "first freedom." He concludes with this:
In our history, religious freedom has always included the rights of churches and religious institutions to establish hospitals, schools, charities, media outlets, and other agencies—and to staff these ministries and run them, free from government intrusion.
And religious freedom has always included the churches’ rights to engage in the public square to help shape our nation’s moral and social fabric. We see this throughout our history—from the abolitionist movement, to the civil rights movement, to the pro-life movement.
America’s founders understood that our democracy depends on Americans being moral and virtuous. They knew the best guarantee for this is a civil society in which individuals and religious institutions were free to live, act, and vote according to their values and principles. We need to help our leaders today rediscover the wisdom of America’s founding. And we need to help believers once more understand the vital importance of this “first freedom.” At stake are not just our liberties but also the future character of our democracy.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace's Note on Financial Reform
This is a powerfully expressed statement by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace on the current financial maladies facing the world and the need for top-down reform. All of the recommendations warrant sustained thought, and most are well beyond my capacity to assess.
One thing that I did not remember is the call of Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris for a "true world political authority" to emerge to serve the common good of humanity. This vision is taken up by the Council, which talks about the need for "a supranational Authority" to take charge of these matters in light of what is seen as a movement toward greater globalization. The Council's recommendations are cautious in this respect, but they are striking nevertheless. It also seemed to me, especially after reading Mark Movsesian's post here, that thoughts about a truly transnational, global authority reflect a perhaps distinctively Catholic way to envision the problem of human authority, to be contrasted with the more Protestant view of state sovereignty described and championed by Vattel and others. These perennial differences never really are resolved.
UPDATE: Sorry, I see Rob is a step ahead of me below.
"Ze" and "hir" at college
I would hope that there is a middle ground between defining ourselves based on gender and dismissing gender as utterly irrelevant to identity. Grinnell's policy stands in stark contrast with President Garvey's move at Catholic. The more fundamental shift, though, is expressed by Grinnell's director of residence life:
“A couple decades ago, colleges were expected to behave as parents,” Conner said. “Today we are treating students like adults and letting them make their own decisions.”
As both a parent and as a former 18 year-old, I would vote for a little more willingness on the part of college administrators to play the parental card from time to time.
Michael Paulsen on Gender Selection Abortions
My colleague, Mike Paulsen, has posted a piece on the Public Discourse site, titled "It's a Girl." Check out the full article here. Herewith a couple of excerpts:
Millions of women obtain abortions because they do not want baby girls.
It’s shocking, but incontrovertible. * * * In a recently published book, Unnatural Selection, journalist Mara Hvistendahl convincingly demonstrates that the overwhelming reason for the increasingly large demographic disparity in the male-female birth ratio is sex-selection abortion. Hvistendahl estimates the number of missing or dead now to be 160 million and counting. Women have abortions because (among other reasons) they are able to learn the sex of their unborn baby and kill her if she’s a girl.
* * *
Being confronted with a harsh reality can change the minds of persons who have thought about a question only in abstract, arid terms. It is possible, then, that even a pro-abortion Court, confronted with a law banning sex-selection abortion, might recognize and retreat from the consequences of its own prior decisions. Enacting sex-selection bans, even if contrary to Roe and Casey, just might lead the Court to begin charting a path away from Roe.
* * *
Not just pro-choice justices, but also pro-choice politicians need to be confronted with, and called to account for, the lethal logic and terrible consequences of their support of Roe. President Obama, and pro-choice members of Congress and state legislatures, should be put to a straightforward test: Do you support or oppose a right to abortion for reasons of sex-selection? Should a woman have a constitutional right to abortion because “it’s a girl”? There is no better litmus test issue over life, and there is no better time for pressing such a challenge than during an election year.
Fragoso on conscience, health care, and takings
My student, Michael Fragoso, has just published a student note that will be of interest to many MOJ readers. It's called "Taking Conscience Seriously or Seriously Taking Conscience? Obstetricians, Specialty Boards, and the Takings Clause." Check it out.
Vatican favors a global financial authority
Today the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace called for the establishment of a global financial authority. An excerpt:
[A] long road still needs to be travelled before arriving at the creation of a public Authority with universal jurisdiction. It would seem logical for the reform process to proceed with the United Nations as its reference because of the worldwide scope of its responsibilities, its ability to bring together the nations of the world, and the diversity of its tasks and those of its specialized Agencies. The fruit of such reforms ought to be a greater ability to adopt policies and choices that are binding because they are aimed at achieving the common good on the local, regional and world levels. Among the policies, those regarding global social justice seem most urgent: financial and monetary policies that will not damage the weakest countries; and policies aimed at achieving free and stable markets and a fair distribution of world wealth, which may also derive from unprecedented forms of global fiscal solidarity, which will be dealt with later.On the way to creating a world political Authority, questions of governance (that is, a system of merely horizontal coordination without an authority super partes cannot be separated from those of a shared government (that is, a system which in addition to horizontal coordination establishes an authority super partes) which is functional and proportionate to the gradual development of a global political society.
Is this sound and timely advice, or an example of the Vatican's moral reach exceeding its technical grasp?
Friday, October 21, 2011
The new Journal of Catholic Legal Studies
The new issue of the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies is available online, and it includes papers from two symposia that might be of interest to MoJ readers.
The first focuses on the question, Whom Should a Catholic Law School Honor?, and features contributions from Amy Uelmen, Rick Garnett, Michael Baur, Karen Stohr, and me.
The second is a collection of reviews of my recent book, Conscience and the Common Good. Contributors include Patrick Brennan, Michael Moreland, Nora O'Callaghan, and Gerald Russello.
Bishop Kevin Rhoades's Red Mass homily on religious freedom
My bishop, Kevin Rhoades, gave at the local Red Mass an excellent homily on the importance of, and some of the threats to, religious freedom. A bit:
. . . As Americans, we enjoy the guarantee of freedom of religion, enshrined as the first Amendment to our nation’s Constitution. Religious freedom is something we Americans cherish. It is something that we as Catholics hold to be a fundamental human right, a right rooted in the very dignity of the human person. It is rooted in human nature, part of the natural law. The right to religious freedom, like the right to life, is an essential element of human dignity.
In his address to the United Nations in 2008, Pope Benedict spoke about religious freedom and about the need for recognition of the religious and the social dimensions of the human person. He said: “it is inconceivable that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves – their faith – in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights.”
I am speaking about these things at this Red Mass this evening because of the current situation the Catholic Church is facing here in the United States. There is a subtle, and increasingly not so subtle, effort by some in our society to restrict our religious liberty. And they are enjoying some success. . . .
The Retributivist Tradition and Its Future -- November 4 at St. John's Law School
If you are in or about New York City on November 4, please consider attending The Retributivist
Tradition And Its Future at St. John's University School of Law. The conference will take up many of the chapters in Retributivism: Essays on Theory and Policy (Mark D. White, ed., 2011). My own small contribution to the conference, which I'm still chewing over, might be titled something like, "The Retributivst Tradition As Its Future."
The conference description follows and the program is after the jump. Hope you can make it.
Retributivism as a justification of punishment is a very old idea, with sources in ancient codes of religious law and morality. After a period of dormancy in the 20th century, retributivism is now ascendant again as a theory of punishment, as scholars have reinterpreted the commitment to just desert in novel and provocative ways.
This conference, The Retributivist Tradition and Its Future, brings together leading thinkers in punishment theory to reflect on retributivism's past and present, with an eye toward what retributivism and punishment theory generally might become. Many of the speakers are also contributors to the recently published volume, Retributivism: Essays on Theory and Policy (Mark D. White, ed., OUP 2011), which will also be considered at the conference.
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