One sometimes hears the clanging of warning bells that the country is headed toward "theocracy." But even if one defines a "theocracy" in comparatively capacious terms -- say, as a society which is influenced strongly by religious arguments in its public decision-making -- it seems that American Catholics are overwhelmingly oblivious to and uninterested in documents prepared by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops dealing with Catholic teaching on political matters, documents which the USCCB prepares for every election cycle. My colleague Mark Movsesian has the details.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Obliviocracy
11th Circuit: Death Really Is Different
Following up on Rob's death penalty post, readers here may know that in Graham v. Florida, decided last year, the Court held that the Eighth Amendent prohibits the imposition of a sentence of life without the possibility of parole on a juvenile convicted of a non-homicide crime. This was a moment when Justice White's famous decision in Coker v. Georgia (as glossed in Kennedy v. LA) that the death penalty is a different sort of crime, requiring a categorical rule against its imposition in all cases but homicide, was seemingly rejected. The DP was no longer different; now LWOP, the second most serious punishment, was categorically different too for certain entire classes of criminal. The decision followed from the Court's seemingly expanding Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in, e.g., Roper v. Simmons, which held that it is cruel and unusual punishment to impose the death penalty on juveniles.
The obvious next move was to challenge LWOP for juveniles convicted of homicide offenses. But the 11th Circuit, in Loggins v. Thomas, released yesterday, rejected that argument. The procedural posture of this case is quite complex, but suffice it to say that on the facts, this looks like an exquisitely inauspicious case to make an argument for the extension of Graham. The defendant's conduct was barbaric -- atrocious in the extreme. You can find Judge Carnes's description of the events leading up to the victim's murder (and thereafter as well) at pp. 2-5.
The legal heart of the decision occurs at pp. 36 and following, and I want to note a couple of interesting features of the opinion.
Perry on the death penalty
Should we be concerned by this exchange about the death penalty from last night's debate? Should we be troubled that a GOP front-runner for President has never even struggled "at all" with the possibility that one of the 234 human beings whose executions he has presided over may have been innocent? More significantly, should we be troubled by a political climate in which the mere mention of those 234 executions draws cheers from the crowd?
Distinguishing religious liberty from multiculturalism
Victor Muniz-Fraticelli has posted an interesting new paper, The Distinctiveness of Religious Liberty. Here's the abstract:
The model of religious freedom in diverse liberal-democracies has been mistakenly incorporated into the multicultural paradigm. The wholesale incorporation of the religious liberty paradigm into the multicultural paradigm is an institutional, historical, and conceptual mistake, and it distorts our understanding of the institutions that enshrine religious liberty and underlie our justification of them. The Western paradigm of religious liberty is a complex product of diverse historical conflicts and political traditions, and only contingently overlaps the multicultural argument. The purpose of this essay is to differentiate religious liberty from multiculturalism as theoretical categories, and to at least identify some of the consequences of this differentiation.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
St. John's Religion and Bankruptcy Conference, September 16
The American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review, Center for Bankruptcy Studies and Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s University School of Law are hosting a joint conference, “Religion and Bankruptcy,” at the Law School’s Queens campus on Friday, September 16. The conference keynote will be given by Geoffrey Miller (NYU). If you are in town, I hope you will drop by.
The full schedule is here, and here is the description:
From the time of its creation and throughout its evolution, bankruptcy law has affected and been affected by religion. Important aspects of current bankruptcy law, such as the discharge of debt and the exemption of personal property, originated in religious traditions before making their way into secular law. At the same time, religious individuals and institutions are themselves often parties in bankruptcy cases, and a number of Bankruptcy Code provisions specifically address religious matters. This symposium will bring together leading bankruptcy experts and thinkers who will examine both sides of this relationship.
Notre Dame-Michigan and Catholic Education
Notre Dame will play Michigan this Saturday in Ann Arbor in the first-ever night game at Michigan Stadium, the largest football stadium in the world. Why is this pertinent to Catholic legal education? Because both schools were founded by Catholic priests—the University of Michigan by Father Gabriel Richard in 1817 and Notre Dame by Father Edward Sorin in 1842. Both were fascinating figures in their own right--Richard, for example, was the first priest to serve in Congress and published the first newspaper in Detroit. So although I will be cheering for the Fighting Irish (my undergraduate alma mater), I’d like to think that every Notre Dame-Michigan game is a celebration of the role of Catholics in the history of American higher education.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Constitution Day at Villanova with Philip Hamburger
Anyone in the Philadelphia area on Friday, September 16, will want to come to Villanova's Constitution Day Lecture, which will be delivered this year by Philip Hamburger, Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and author of the splendid books Separation of Church and State (Harvard UP, 2002) and Law and Judicial Duty (Harvard UP, 2008). Professor Hamburger will be speaking at 3:00pm that afternoon on "Censorship and Death," and Amy Wax, Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, will respond. Details here.
Robby George at GOP Debate in South Carolina
How many other law prof blogs have a blogger asking questions at a presidential debate? As noted in this story, our own Robby George will be part of the panel tonight at a Republican presidential debate in South Carolina:
How candidates respond to George’s queries, which will focus on the political and philosophical, could shake up a primary season that, so far, has been dominated by platitudes. The race for the GOP nomination, he says, is often cast as a scramble for the highly coveted but nebulous tea-party crown. But few voters, he laments, have a sense of how leading Republicans interpret the principles that inspire tea-party activists.
George aims to clarify the often blurry positions of Republican candidates on issues of political, moral, and philosophical importance. If they give him a stock or evasive response, he will follow up with sharper questions. It won’t be a fishing expedition for red-hot quotes, he emphasizes, but a quest for paragraph-length answers about America’s founding principles in an office-hours-type setting.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Family "Fragmentation," Economic Disparity, and Catholic Schools
In a column on the front-page of the Sunday editorial section of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Mitch Pearlstein of the Center of the American Experiment writes about the “fragmentation” of American families as “the explanation for economic disparity that we too readily sweep under the rug.”
The statistics for Hennepin County, which is Minneapolis and its suburbs, are deeply depressing: 18.3 percent of white children are born out of wedlock (which is hardly reassuring), while 84.3 percent of African-American children are born to a single parent. To be a black child in Minneapolis living with both parents is truly to be a minority. How ineffably sad! And the social science research confirms how powerful is the negative impact on economic progress, individual opportunity, educational gains, future marriage prospects for children, etc. As Pearlstein says:
Simply put, so long as fragmentation rates remain as huge as they are, enormous numbers of children will keep doing inadequately in school (and, as a result, in economic life) –- no matter how much money we spend, no matter how boldly politicians lead and no matter how passionately teachers teach.
What can we do? We of course need to address the decline of marriage, which is not helped by the ongoing depreciation of marriage into an expression of self-fulfillment for adults rather than as a stable home for a mother and father in which to raise children. The Catholic Church must maintain its moral stance on marriage, while somehow making that teaching more present and practically meaningful to a new generation living in a moral-cultural abyss. The outrageous statistics of family broken-ness may provide a starting place for the discussion. The current sad state of affairs is a testament to the dangers that follow radical changes in fundamental social structure, which began in the 1960s but continue today. The Catholic message is an answer to that crisis.
In the meantime, how do we help those who are trapped in the cycle of family fragmentation, that is, children who grow up without two parents and who too often are left without the educational benefits and discipline and healthy attitudes that adhere to children growing up in a stable and unbroken family? Spending more money on welfare programs or public schools or this or that social experiment hasn’t been working and certainly cannot do all of the work.
Pearlstein says the answer is educational choice. And I read him as focusing less on the academic quality of private schools than on the different culture and community that a private school can foster, supplying the very things that at-risk children need. The research confirms that private school options for children from single parent homes bears fruit by making progress and maturity into adulthood sustainable over the years:
I asked this principal of a Catholic elementary school in the Twin Cities what her institution's mission was. “To manifest God’s love in every child,” she said, or words close to that. As educational mission statements go, this was one of the briefest yet meatiest ever drafted.
We on the Mirror of Justice have posted regularly about the importance of our Catholic schools and why we as Catholics should support them. Creating opportunities and building a support system for those at risk by family fragmentation is one more reason to maintain and strengthen our Catholic schools.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Scruton on Icons, Brands, the Sacred, and the Profane
Roger Scruton is one of my favorite writers on aesthetics. In this piece, he discusses a new book on icons, "From Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon," by Martin Kemp. Perhaps channeling a little Mircea Eliade, Scruton writes that the difference between icons and brands is in the "sacredness" of the object. A bit from the essay below. (x-posted CLR Forum)
Things become sacred when sacrifices on behalf of the community have been distilled in them, as the sacrifices of generations of soldiers, sailors and airmen are distilled in the American flag. And sacred things are invitations to sacrifice, as is the flag in time of war. Sacred things create bridges across generations: they tell us that the dead and the unborn are present among us, and that their “real presence” lives in each of us, and each of us in it. The decline of religion has deprived us of sacred things. But it has not deprived us of the need for them. Nor has it deprived us of the acute sense of desecration we feel, when facetious images intrude at the places once occupied by these visitors from the transcendental.
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