This is the 10,000th blog post at Mirror of Justice. Here is the first (authored by our friend Mark Sargent), from Feb. 3, 2004 -- almost seven years, and more than 2.5 million site-visits, ago:
Welcome to Mirror of Justice, a group blog created by a group of Catholic law professors interested in discovering how our Catholic perspective can inform our understanding of the law. Indeed, we ask whether the great wealth of the Catholic intellectual and moral tradition offers a basis for creating a distinctive Catholic legal theory- one distinct from both secular and other religious legal theories. Can Catholic moral theology, Catholic Social Thought and the Catholic natural law tradition offer insights that are both critical and constructive, and which can contribute to the dialogue within both the legal academy and the broader polity? In particular, we ask whether the profoundly counter-cultural elements in Catholicism offer a basis for rethinking the nature of law in our society. The phrase "Mirror of Justice" is one of the traditional appellations of Our Lady, and thus a fitting inspiration for this effort.
A few things about this blog and us:
1. The members of this blog group represent a broad spectrum of Catholic opinion, ranging from the "conservative" to the "liberal", to the extent that those terms make sense in the Catholic context. Some are politically conservative or libertarian, others are on the left politically. Some are highly orthodox on religious matters, some are in a more questioning relationship with the Magisterium on some issues, and with a broad view of the legitimate range of dissent within the Church. Some of us are "Commonweal Catholics"; others read and publish in First Things or Crisis. We are likely to disagree with each other as often as we agree. For more info about us, see the bios linked in the sidebar.
2. We all believe that faith-based discourse is entirely legitimate in the academy and in the public square, and that religious values need not be bracketed in academic or public conversation. We may differ on how such values should be expressed or considered in those conversations or in public decisionmaking.
3. This blog will not focus primarily on the classic constitutional questions of Church and State, although some of our members are interested in those questions and may post on them from time to time. We are more interested in tackiling the larger jurisprudential questions and in discussing how Catholic thought and belief should influence the way we think about corporate law, products liability or capital punishment or any other problem in or area of the law.
4, We are resolutely ecumenical about this blog. We do not want to converse only among ourselves or with other Catholics. We are eager to hear from those of other faith traditions or with no religious beliefs at all. We will post responses (at our editorial discretion, of course.) See "Contact Us" in the sidebar.
5. While this blog will be highly focused on our main topic, we may occasionally blog on other legal/theoretical matters, or on non-legal developments in Catholicism (or on baseball, the other church to which I belong.)
6. We will be linking to relevant papers by the bloggers in the sidebar. Comments welcome!
Monday, January 17, 2011
God bless the many Muslims of Egypt who, true to their word, made themselves "human shields" to protect their Coptic Christian fellow citizens during their celebration of Christmas. After the recent horrible murders of Christians in their nation, a large number of Egyptian Muslims vowed to protect the Copts from further violence. They did this by guarding Christian churches and even attending the Christmas services themselves. I hope that those of us who are Christians would do the same for our Muslim fellow citizens if the shoe were on the other foot. I sometimes hear people ask: Where are the moderate Muslims who should be taking the lead in opposing violent jihadists? The truth is that there are Muslims here in the United States as well as abroad who have boldly spoken out against violence and extremism; but their courageous witness has received little attention. I hope that the American and international media will recognize the heroism of those Egyption Muslims who, at considerable risk to themselves, protected the Coptic minority.
This site, courtesy of the Witherspoon Institute, looks to be a useful and interesting resource.
Welcome to the first phase of The Witherspoon Institute’s online center for Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism. The project to create an online archive containing the seminal documents of these traditions with educational resources is made possible through the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and with direction from scholars associated with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
This project has been designated a "We the People" project by the National Endowment for the Humanities and is being supported in part by funds the agency has set aside for this special initiative. The goal of the "We the People" initiative is to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture through the support of projects that explore significant events and themes in our nation's history and culture and that advance knowledge of the principles that define America. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this website do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This tribute, by Prof. Chris Kaczor (Philosophy, Loyola-LA), to my former colleague, Ralph McInerny, is well worth reading. What a wonderful life.
. . . His academic achievements are well known — eight honorary doctorates, presidential and pontifical appointments, Gifford Lectures and teaching stints from Argentina to Oxford. His man was, of course, Saint Thomas Aquinas, but not only Thomas. The New York Times obituary noted that Ralph “wrote on the sixth century philosopher Boethius, the 12th-century Spanish Arabic scholar Averroes and later thinkers and theologians, including Cardinal Newman, Kierkegaard, Pascal and Descartes.”
The Los Angeles Times obituary focused on him as “the prolific author of approximately 100 novels. Beginning with Her Death of Cold in 1977, he wrote more than two dozen mysteries featuring Father Dowling, which led to the 1989–91 Father Dowling Mysteries TV series starring Tom Bosley.”
Indeed, The Times of London was not the first place to note Ralph’s extraordinary productivity. “George Orwell, who famously, and wrongly, concluded that the Billy Bunter oeuvre was too vast to have been written by one man (Frank Richards), would have had a similar problem with the output of Ralph McInerny, the American Catholic scholar and writer of detective fiction.” But Ralph was much more than a prolific author. . . .
The Campbell Law Review presents its annual 2011 symposium:
Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Christianity: Perspectives on the Influence of Christianity on Classical Liberal Legal Thought.
The conference will consider the relationship between liberalism and Christianity and their influence on American constitutionalism. The conference will investigate the extent to which classical liberalism and Christianity influenced the formulation of the Constitution and the thought of the Founding era. It will focus on the importance of foundational Christian commitments to characteristic notions of religious toleration and freedom of association as they are borne out in the thought of the Founders and the founding era.
The conference will be hosted on May 18, 2011, at Campbell University School of Law, located in Raleigh, North Carolina. The following presenters will be featured:
Professor Robert F. Cochran, Director of the Herbert and Elinor Nootbaar Institute of Law, Religion, and Ethics and the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law,
Professor John M. Breen, Loyola University Chicago School of Law;
Professor Bruce P. Frohnen, Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law;
Professor Michael Scaperlanda, University of Oklahoma College of Law;
Professor Barry Shain, Colgate University;
Professor John Inazu, Visiting Professor, Duke University School of Law;
Professor Anthony Baker, Visiting Professor, John Marshall Law School; Professor C. Scott Pryor, Visiting Professor, Campbell University School of Law;
Dean Donald R. McConnell, Trinity Law School.
All are invited. Attendees may find more details and register online at:
http://law.campbell.edu/pubs/lawrev.cfm?volume=32&number=2
Here's my friend and former colleague, John Garvey (now President of the Catholic University of America), writing in First Things, on the "Idea of a Catholic University." I like the conclusion especially:
At Catholic universities we strive to provide students with the full intellectual harmony Cardinal Newman referred to – to teach them that knowing, loving, and serving God are part of the same enterprise. They represent not just one option in a universe of equally good ideas, but our fulfillment. As Saint Augustine ultimately discovered, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
I received in the mail today my own copy of MOJ-friend Paul Horwitz's new (OUP) book, "The Agnostic Age: Law, Religion, and the Constitution." Order yours today! As I wrote in my back-cover blurb:
"The confident predictions of religion's decline and disappearance have proved badly misguided. It is true today, as it always has been, that religious faith, commitments, authority, and activism matter to people, to communities, and therefore to the law. In this thoughtful, engaging book, Prof. Horwitz proposes that our law and politics should appreciate religion's importance and distinctiveness and take its truth-claims seriously. As he explains, a secular government that is appropriately agnostic toward these claims nevertheless may and should cherish and protect religious freedom."
Congrats to Paul!
As part of my current research, I've been reading a lot of books by and about Martin Luther King Jr. Many of these works are familiar to MoJ readers, but one that might have escaped your radar screens, but is well worth checking out, is Martin Luther King Jr. and the Image of God by Richard Wayne Wills Sr (Oxford UP 2009). Rather than focus on the more particular (and often analyzed) elements of King's theology (e.g., agape, personalism, realism), Wills traces the extent to which King's ministry was shaped by his belief that we are created in God's image. He writes that "the image of God provided the question of civil rights with an ontological reason for reinforcing the meaning and experience of just political and judicial affairs," and that "a conversation concerning rights and the political documents that prescribed them necessarily backed into a conversation about that which preceded sociopolitical reality." In this regard, the Declaration of Independence was enormously valuable to King's work because, by "underscoring this theological fact [the Imago Dei] as a fundamental truth," it was an expression "of sacred design" with significant sociopolitical implications.
