Monday, June 21, 2010
Smith on "marriage equality" and begging the question
My friend and former colleague Steve Smith has an interesting post up, at "Law, Religion, and Ethics" about the deployment in the same-sex-marriage debate of the term "marriage equality". His post reminds me of conversations we've had over the years here at MOJ about the use of the term "discrimination" in conversations about the rights of religious institutions to hire, fire, etc., "for mission."
Gedicks on Fundamentalism and Postmodernism
Fred Gedicks has posted a new paper that should be of interest to MoJers titled God of Our Fathers, Gods for Ourselves: Fundamentalism and Postmodern Belief. (HT: Solum) Here's the abstract:
Prepared for a symposium on “Families, Fundamentalism, and the First Amendment,” this essay uses the “death of God” as a frame for recent developments in law and religion in the United States. Western culture has been obsessed with the death of God at least since Nietzsche. During the 1900s, this obsession took the form of a prediction that modernization had so undercut belief that the latter would eventually disappear entirely. That prediction turned out to be spectacularly wrong in the United States; popular and academic literature is now filled with triumphant - and regretful - expositions of the contemporary vibrance and vitality of religion. God has cheated death (or, at least, Nietzsche).
Or has he? The God whose death was widely predicted and the God who today is alive and well are not the same God. The God who died is the God of Christendom, who bound together western society with a universal account of the world that did not survive the advent of postmodernism; this God, indeed, is dead. The vibrant God of today is the one adapted to postmodernism; the vitality of that God is on display in contemporary American religion, especially in the spirituality movement. The most pressing religious problem now confronting the world is posed by believers who refuse to recognize the demise of the first God and the rise of the second; these “fundamentalists” continue to press for government recognition and enforcement of absolute religious truths. All three of these phenomena - the death of God, his rebirth in postmodernity, and his remnants in fundamentalism - are manifest in recent Religion Clause decisions.
An Altar in the World
I am reading a wonderful book by Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith.
America magazine describes it as a
“delight to the eyes, mind and heart.” The title refers to the presence of God
in our living world in many natural altars, not merely within church buildings.
In a chapter on The Practice of Wearing Skin, she discusses the need for
reverence of the body. She observes that the central claim of the incarnation
is that “God trusted flesh and blood to bring divine love to earth.”
When Taylor hears about the decline of organized religion, she hears many things, but she thinks the intellectualization of faith is more important than inept clergy, bad faith, and “preoccupation with intellectual maintenance.” She wisely remarks: “In an age of information overload, when a vast variety of media delivers news faster than most of us can digest - - when many of us have at least two e-mail addresses, two telephone numbers, and one fax number – the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frightenly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God."
cross-posted at religiousleftlaw.com
Sunday, June 20, 2010
The Phoenix controversy
The complicated reasons behind an abortion at a Catholic hospital By Kevin O'Rourke
[This from AMERICA, June 21, 2010.]
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Common Ground?
NYT, 6/19/10
Campaigning for Common Ground in Abortion Debate
By SUSAN DOMINUS
A group in New York is seeking to make adoption a subject at abortion clinics. Here.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Bottum on the Gardner execution
Jody Bottum laments Utah's execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner:
There is, in fact, only a single reason that Ronnie Lee Gardner died last night—a single explanation that makes any sense at all. And it is that he deserved it. The murder he committed twenty-five years ago still cries to the heavens for justice.
And maybe it does. Certainly it does. But where, exactly, does the State of Utah get the authority to answer the calls on heaven? Where, exactly, does a modern nation, founded on no deliberate godly principle, derive its power to kill in the name of high justice? This is a nation, after all, that refused—with the infamous “mystery” passage in Casey v. Planned Parenthood—to protect the unborn, precisely because, the Supreme Court said, no such metaphysical foundation can be imposed by government. So where do these assertions of divinely based power for the death penalty come from?
It cannot be simply that the government is the one in power; there has surely been, sometime in the history of the world, such a thing as an illegitimate government. For that matter, there has surely been, at some point, an illegitimate claim of power by an otherwise legitimate government. The question of authority for a government’s action cannot be simply dismissed or ignored. Justice there must, and will be, for Ronnie Lee Gardner’s crimes—but political theory demands some account of why the prison system of Utah gets to enact and impose that justice.
Judging from the comments to the post, Bottum's condemnation of the death penalty is not popular among the First Things readership. It's an interesting conversation.
"Catholic Unity"
COMMONWEAL
June 18, 2010
Catholic
Unity
by The Editors
 |
What makes the USCCB and its legal and legislative staffs so confident that they alone are competent to understand the new health-care law? Is there a possibility that the USCCB might be wrong? More
Human Dignity and the Right to Life in German Law
Kai Moller has posted a fascinating new paper, The Right to Life Between Absolute and Proportional Protection. Of particular interest (to me, anyway) was the discussion of Germany's post-9/11 law authorizing the government to shoot down an airplane likely to be used as a terrorist weapon. The law was struck down in court as a violation of human dignity as guaranteed by Article 1(1) of the Basic Law. Moller explains:
In German legal terminology, there is a distinction between 'inviolable' and 'untouchable,' the former meaning that the state may sometimes interfere with the object of the right, provided that it comes up with a legitimate justification, and the latter meaning that any interference will automatically amount to a violation of the right. Human dignity, as the 'superior' value of the Basic law, is 'untouchable' . . . . The Court held that [the Aviation Security Act] violated both human dignity and the right to life in so far as it permitted the shooting down of aircrafts in situations where there were innocent persons on board.
The trick, of course, is defining "human dignity," and not surprisingly, given the implications, it has been defined narrowly (though still vaguely) in roughly Kantian terms. An interesting read.
Our Addiction to Foreign Oil
Jim Wallis in Sojourners wrote yesterday about the oil spill. He agrees with the President that: “For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. . . . For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades we have failed to act with a sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again the path forward has been blocked, not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor. The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight.”
Wallis observes that the last eight Presidents have called for an end and promised to end our dependence on foreign oil. He recognizes that our addiction to foreign oil produces a foreign policy “based on dependence on corrupt oil regimes, on sending our sons and daughters off to fight and die for their crude product, [and] on both fueling and paying for the violent terrorism that is eventually used against us.”
He says we should undertake a mission to end that dependence, and we should. When one looks at the changes that would have to be made to accomplish getting past our addiction, I find little grounds for optimism. When hundreds of billions of dollars of advertising press us to be a materialistic, hedonistic society and when campaign finance laws give soulless corporations enormous political power, it is hard for me to imagine how the political will and the willingness to sacrifice can be generated to cure our addiction. I suspect that a cure for our addiction will eventually be forced upon us, and it will not be pretty.
cross-posted at religiousleftlaw.com
Thursday, June 17, 2010
The Belushi Brothers and the Church's Responsibility to the Faithful
I applaud the Church's embrace of the Blues Brothers, but the Church needs to speak with unmistakable clarity in this area and underscore that this embrace extends only to the 1980 film. The unsuspecting Catholic might be misled by the Church's statement into renting Blues Brothers 2000, which could place the believer's very soul at risk. More broadly, the Church should specify that while John Belushi was an artistic genius, any project to which his brother Jim is attached should be avoided at all costs. These projects, under the soothing guise of a laugh track, suck the viewer's very notion of beauty right out of them. I'm not sure if these matters are within the CDF's jurisdiction, but an "Index of Forbidden Sitcoms" may not be such a bad idea, and my first nominee for the list would be According to Jim.
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
