Friday, January 22, 2010
Joseph Cao on human rights and the dignity of the unborn
Wow. Watch this video, of Joseph Cao (R-La.), speaking on the House floor, about abortion and human rights. Cao has many fans among liberals for being the only Republican to support the House Democrats' health-care-insurance proposal. He is anti-death penalty, an activist for refugees, and a former Jesuit novice. He quotes Pope Benedict XVI and talks about "moral anthopology."
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Unconditional Forgiveness -- for Christians and perhaps others
Patrick,
I agree with your claim that unconditional forgiveness is a Christian norm deeply rooted in our texts and tradition. My recent essay on forgiveness in Islam concludes that there is a similar moral basis for unconditional forgiveness in Islam (though perhaps not as clear in the Quran as in the Sunnah and later jurisprudence). I did note in my research that there are Rabbinic traditions that require affirmative steps on the part of the offender in order for forgiveness to be appropriate. It is not clear to me that this position is universally accepted within Judaism, however.
Russ Powell
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
unconditional forgiveness -- not for Christians?
Last year, I wrote and posted a paper on the forgiveness that we humans are capable of and called to. I argued that we are called to forgive one another *unconditionally.* Further, I take *unconditional* forgiveness to be the Christian norm. But some Christians seem to hold the view that those who have been wronged are entitled -- or maybe even required -- to condition their granting forgiveness on the offender's apology and contrition. I understand that view, but I don't see a basis for it in the Christian revelation. If there is one, I'd like help finding it. Please note that forgiveness is distinguished from reconciliation; prudence may counsel against the latter (as in cases of abuse by a spouse, for example), but prudence cannot (I argue) justify placing conditions on the act of forgiveness. Am I wrong about the Christian understanding of forgiveness?
John Allen's trends, cont'd
Thanks to Amy for starting off our conversation about John Allen's The Future Church. (Note, please, that the comments box is open. Check out her post, and share your thoughts.) Amy's description of Allen's claims and observations with respect to "A World Church" are both thorough and succinct; I have nothing to add to it.
A quick thought, though, about the observation that a “tight identification between the West and Christianity” has “disintegrated” and Catholicism has been turned “upside-down." In some senses (many, perhaps) this observation is clearly correct: Christianity is growing in the "South", and this growth would seem certain to result in (as Allen describes) "increasing attention to matters of pastoral concern in the South" and continued emphasis (I probably wouldn't use Allen's term, "turbocharging orthodoxy") on the moral dimensions of human sexuality.
I wonder, though, if Christianity is not more closely, and deeply, tied to "the West" than Allen's diagnosis and predictions suggest? I'm not talking so much about geography and am (to be clear) certainly not talking about race or ethnicity. But, what if there are certain ideas, associated with "the West" but comparatively underdeveloped in "the East" or "the South", that are not just accidentally, but essentially, connected with Christianity? Can Christianity "go South" without these ideas? Are there substitutes for them?
Amy talked about "the profound cultural differences between the European and North-American mind-frames: e.g., the European tendency to articulate highly abstract principles, and only eventually work its way down to a more concrete discussion, in tension with the more pragmatic problem-solving leanings of North-American culture", and suggests that Christianity's Southern turn could well create new "tensions" related to cultural differences. But I'm thinking -- not very well, at present, I admit -- not only about cultural differences (Christianity has wrestled with the challenge of inculturation for a long time, right?) but about the possibility that some really important (for Christianity) ideas (which, like culture, mediate our experience of the world) might not be present in those areas where Christianity is growing. What are these ideas? I'm not sure. Perhaps some who have thought about this more than I have will say, "actually, the chance for Christianity to slough off the constraining baggage of the kind of ideas you are talking about -- what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens or Rome? -- should be welcome, and will result in a clearer, more authentic and "original" Christianity." Perhaps.
Russello on Conscience Clauses
Here is a thoughtful reflection by MOJ friend Gerald Russello re Martha Coakley's statements about conscience clauses.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Praise the Lord and Pass the Precision Aiming Solution
MoJ readers might find this ABC News story -- http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-military-weapons-inscribed-secret-jesus-bible-codes/story?id=9575794&page=1 -- which comes to my attention by way of the Leiter philosophy blog, to be of some interest.
I don't know which is more telling of our times: (a) the fact that a company that sells rifle sights to the military refers to the devices as 'precision aiming solutions'; (b) the fact that the same company inscribes Gospel cites on the sights, which in turn turn up on rifles being used by US military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan; or (c) the fact that some military officials who know of the sights are alleged to refer to guns equipped with them as 'spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.'
I daresay that Thomas Pynchon could not outdo this in even the most imaginatively rich of his dystopian futuristic fictions.
Agreeing (twice) with Steve Shiffrin
Steve is quite right, in his recent home-schooling post, to make it clear that, in rejecting the sweeping, statist proposals of those who would outlaw home-schooling, we who believe in ordered-liberty-in-education do not and need not assert absolute immunity from reasonable regulation. He is also right, I think -- in his recent post regarding Dean Garvey's op-ed -- a broad claim that "it always unjustifiably burdens taxpayers' consciences to require them to pay taxes into a general fund out of which some activities to which those taxpayers are opposed are funded."
Now, unlike Steve perhaps, I think the "Madisonian claim" is unsustainable with respect to religion. That is, it does not (necessarily) violate religious liberty, in my view, for the public authority to "support" religion or its exercise with public funds. (To say this is to say nothing about whether and when such support is wise.)
In my view, the point of the Hyde Amendment is not so much to protect taxpayers' consciences (though I would think that the Amendment does make many of us feel better about paying our taxes). The point is to (a) avoid increasing the number of abortions through subsidization, and (b) to "teach", or "bear witness to the fact", that abortion is an act that it is reasonable to oppose as immoral and unworthy of the political community's financial support.
A "conservative anti-death-penalty movement?
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Roy Brown seems like a rarity - a conservative who's against the death penalty.
But to Brown, a state senator and the 2008 Republican nominee for governor of Montana, the philosophy aligns perfectly with conservative ideology. He's one of the more high-profile figures reaching out to other social and fiscal conservatives, hoping to create a bipartisan movement against capital punishment.
The effort has been backed by Richard Viguerie, a fundraiser and activist considered the father of the modern conservative movement. Viguerie, in a July 2009 essay in Sojourners magazine, wrote that executions are supposed to take the life of the guilty - but noted there are enough flaws in the system to fear an innocent person has been put to death.
Viguerie noted that death row inmates have been exonerated by DNA evidence, raising the prospect that prosecutors and juries made mistakes in cases without scientific evidence and in cases that predate the science.
"To conservatives, that should be deemed as immoral as abortion," Viguerie wrote.
(HT: Opinionated Catholic)
A qualified defense of Pat Robertson
Thanks to an MoJ reader for passing along this post from a doctoral candidate in Caribbean history providing background on the Pat Robertson "pact with the devil" quote. (For earlier MoJ posts on the matter, see here, here, or here.)
Monday, January 18, 2010
Mies van der Rohe and Home Schooling
Hello All,
A quick hear-hear to Steve's and Rick's recent posts on home schooling. It happens that all of the relatively few home-schooled folk whom I know are at least as high-performing on standard educational metrics as the most high-performing of the many more I know who were not home-schooled (like me for the most part). In addition to that, the relatively few home-schooled folk I know tend to be more 'individual' and 'out of the ordinary,' in good wonderful ways, than most (though not all) I know who were not home-schooled. And finally, none of these comparatively few home-schooled folk whom I know are in any way 'maladjusted' or 'intolerant,' so far as I'm able to tell. But none of this in any way implies that there are not home-schooled folk, maybe lots of them, who don't do as well as those whom I know, or who would find themselves in real trouble getting on in adulthood in the absence of some state-enforced basic standards. Which leads me to think that the real question where home schooling is concerned is precisely what those standards should be, and whether all parents are equally well situated to comport with or exceed them. Seems to me Steve must be right that there's much variation here, and that Professors Fineman and West might accordingly be painting with too broad a brush. (I emphasize 'might,' as I've not read their pieces here recently cited.)
In this light, it strikes me that two slogans commonly associated with the architect Mies van der Rohe have a place here, to one of which we might say, 'Nope,' and to the other of which we might say, 'Amen, brother.' The first such slogan, which might indeed articulate the attitudes of some (though I doubt many) home schoolers, is 'less is more.' To that one I think we might wish to say 'nope.' The second such slogan, which I think is in keeping with Steve's observation, is 'God is in the details.' And to that one I think we might wish to say, 'Amen.'
All best,
Bob
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