We shouldn't let this occasion pass without notice on MoJ: Peter Steinfels wrote his last Beliefs column on Friday. I cannot help but wonder if this leaves a void that the Times will not feel any particular pressure to fill. Read comments from America here and Get Religion here.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Thanks to Peter Steinfels
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Congrats, and thanks, to Teresa Collett
I was delighted to receive, in my e-mail today, from Prof. Teresa Collett, the Annual Report of the Prolife Center at the University of St. Thomas School of Law. Congratulations, and thanks, to her, and to the School of Law, for this important effort. Here, at the very interesting blog, "Law Social Justice", is her reflection on the Center's first year:
I write this blog entry during Advent – a holy season observed by many Christians in remembering the Lord’s first coming as a baby born in Bethlehem, and in the “joyful hope” of His coming again. This season focuses our thoughts and prayers on the great gift of children and the generosity of those who undertake the duties of parenthood. Pope Benedict, during his Advent reflections in 2007, reminds us “Every child born is a sign of trust in God and man and a confirmation, at least implicit, of the hope in a future open to God’s eternity that is nourished by men and women.”
The Pope’s simple meditation explains the spiritual foundation of the Prolife Center at the University of St. Thomas School of Law – and of the school’s emphasis on social justice more generally. Each new life represents a unique creative act by God, or put more simply “a baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” The person that comes into being bears the indelible image of God and is precious in His sight. No matter how tarnished and obscure that image may become – sometimes due to the person’s sinful choices and sometimes due to our own blindness to the beauty within others – as believers we owe respect to the image of God which is reflected in every person. This is why there are no “throw away” people – not the criminal, the immigrant, the poor, the disabled, the elderly, or the unborn child. Each was willed into being by God, and it is not properly within our power to gainsay God’s decision.
Yet many in our society seek to do exactly that. Abortion is justified on the basis that the child will be born handicapped, or was conceived through an act of violence, or will be poor and must struggle for survival from the very beginning. Each of these reasons suggests that we are wiser than God, and that His decision to create this unique human being was wrong. We presume that we can know the future of the child, with a certainty superior to that of God’s. Thus the intentional taking of a human life becomes an act of mercy rather than injustice. Yet it is an odd mercy that kills the subject of its concern, and a strange faith that elevates the time-bound and particular judgments of man over the deliberate creative act of God.
The work of the Prolife Center at St. Thomas is grounded in this simple truth – God does not make mistakes in his creation of any person. It is my prayer that this simple truth increasingly guides each of us during this holy season of Advent when we reflect upon the Lord’s coming as a newborn babe.
Right on.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Mary, Table of Intellectual Faith
Happy New Year everyone!
Fr. Araujo rightly observes the tension between the types of rationality that dominate contemporary legal reasoning and the types of reasoning that Catholics see as harmonious with faith. His question for us points deeper into the nature and structure of legal reasoning and the values that it advances.
John Paul II was particularly aware of the tensions between scientific rationality and the faithful Catholic life. In Fides et Ratio, he wrote that Mary, the Seat of Wisdom, is the “sure haven for all who devote their lives to the pursuit of wisdom.” (108) The encyclical interprets her “unqualified yes to Gabriel’s message as a leap of faith that made possible the salvation of all persons.” It is this parable of Mary that illustrates the proper relation of faith and reason that Catholic philosophers should seek to emulate. Just as she put aside her worldly concerns so that “the Word might take on flesh and become one of us,” so too should the faithful Catholic philosopher offer natural reason in the service of the divine. The encyclical notes that the “ancients” saw Mary as the “table of intellectual faith. In her they saw a suitable image of true philosophy and realized that they must be philosophizing with Mary.” Taken in this light, Catholic thought is engaged in the pursuit of true wisdom when it thinks like Mary thought.
Imagine the full human range of reason and emotion that Mary would have experienced. The feelings of joy, fear, confidence, self-doubt, pride, humility, triumph, wonder, awe, and mystery. What were Mary’s self-understandings? Surely, her heart and mind were united in her affirmation of her role in God’s plan. Mary knew what the modern world has only recently begun to re-discover, that rationality and affectivity are inseparable (see for example, Antonio Damasio’s Descartes' Error).
The reduction of the fullness of human reason to the dispassionate discursive rationality of scientific inquiry is particularly troublesome for lawyers. In her interesting book, The Language of Law School, the linguistic anthropologist, Elizabeth Mertz, suggests that legal education, particularly in the first year, promotes objective, dispassionate modes of legal analyses, which denude the student of moral intuitions and empathetic emotion. What’s more, this sort of disengagement from moral feeling may be necessary for the professional formation of the contemporary America lawyer. Nonetheless, when legal education and legal reasoning obscure the fullness of human wisdom in favor of instrumentalism, consumerism, and fanciful conceptions of autonomy, we should rightly be aghast, because as St. Augustine taught, the emotional detachment of the Stoic is fundamentally incompatible with a faithful Christian life.
The Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
Over the past several days the Mirror of Justice has hosted a spirited debate on a variety of themes that have offered perspectives of colleagues and friends on matters that are important to the law and, therefore, Catholic Legal Theory.
One of themes addressed in recent postings has been the role of reason. Reason and how it is utilized has a definite bearing on the law and how the law addresses or should address issues including homosexuality, same-sex marriage, sexual/reproductive autonomy, and abortion.
As has been observed by other members of the Mirror of Justice family, reason is crucial to the law and, therefore, Catholic Legal Theory. Of course the natural law tradition, so much a part of the Catholic understanding of legal matters, places an emphasis on right reason in this endeavor. But as Time Magazine in its essay on John Courtney Murray rhetorically asked almost fifty years ago, whose reason is right? What makes reason right? What is vital to its method?
Let me offer a few suggestions in this regard.
The first would be this: I consider that most people have the ability to exercise right reason. They are born and equipped with the intellectual capacity to think about issues, events, happenings, etc. in such a way as to see more clearly what is at stake and what is involved. Of course, this task requires patience: patience with one’s self and patience with what is being considered and studied. The exercise of right reason does not require the distinctive and super-human acumen of Professor Ronald Dworkin’s Judge Hercules. It does require, however, fidelity to a thoughtful and objective process, and patience is a virtue needed to facilitate this process.
A second matter deals with how a person conducts one’s self in the intellectual enterprise of reasoning that brings together observation, consideration, and evaluation (both normative and moral). Initially, we all see and think about the universe that surrounds us from a personal perspective. Hence we begin our reasoning from a subjective point, but this does not mean that we should stay there throughout the entire process in which we exercise reason. Our subjective perspective must sooner or later be tempered by objectivity. I know some of my Mirror of Justice friends are likely to challenge me on this because they have done so in the past. Let me present the point once again: objectivity is that ingredient that enables the individual who exercises reason to transcend the familiar, the desirable and get closer to the truth.
Ah, yes, the truth. This is the third matter which I wish to raise today in what may well be but an installment in the project of our ongoing discussion and possible debate. Is there truth about anything? One may insist that he or she knows the truth, but in fact confuses the familiar that is comfortable to or desired by this person with what is beyond the known, the familiar, the desirable. For the Catholic, be he or she legal theorist or otherwise, there is one Truth, who is God. The closer we become to God, the closer we become to the truth that enables us to see what is right and what is wrong with the positions we hold and assert. As we acknowledge that some positions are right and some are wrong, our reasoning is more inclined to be associated with the modifier right. As one long-involved with the process called legal reasoning, I don’t often see the case made for including in it the Truth who is God. So be it. But if one professes or asserts that his or her legal reasoning is a part of the Catholic world, then God as Truth is indispensable to his or her participation in the process of legal reasoning.
Indeed, rigorous thought and exhaustive evidence gathering are a part of the process of legal reasoning, too. For many but not all, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness are also essential elements. But so is the ability to hone those skills necessary to distinguishing right from wrong, truth from falsehood.
I look forward to what my friends here at the Mirror of Justice might have to say about these thoughts.
In the meantime, a blessed New Year to you all! May God who is mercy and truth be with us, and may Mary, Seat of Wisdom and Mirror of Justice, pray for us. Amen.
RJA sj
May it not be so in 2010
Wendell Berry once wrote:
Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our ‘marginal land' because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.
Here is to healthy bodies, minds, and spirits in 2010.
Happy New Year!
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Disgust
I understand why Robert George and Michael Scaperlanda were
upset by Michael Perry’s Christmas Eve post. But once Michael P gave an
explanation as to his meaning, it is not clear to me why one of Michael’s
central points was not addressed. In response to Robert, Michael P said: “My point was and is that the “Yuk”—my shorthand
for an emotional disposition of disgust—is what animates, in many, the search
for and construction of a rational vindication of the disposition. The
“Yuk”—the disgust—is not the argument but an important factor animating the
search for and construction of the argument. Now, I know that this is not
true for everyone who is in the grip of the conviction that homosexual sexual
conduct is necessarily immoral, but it is certainly true for many. See
Martha Nussbaum, Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law: From Disgust to
Humanity (Oxford Univ.
Press, 2010); Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame,
and the Law (Princeton
Univ. Press, 2006). “
In looking
through the posts I see regrettable personal attacks on Michael P’s capacity
for toleration and integrity, on Cathy Kaveny’s comparative analytical rigor,
logical precision, and depth of insight, and a dismissal of Martha Nussbaum as
if her arguments are not to be taken seriously. But I do not see a substantive
response to Michael’s point.
Clearly the
traditional Catholic position opposes homosexual conduct with the same brush
that opposes unmarried heterosexual sex. Disgust does not seem relevant here.
Nonetheless, many (Catholics or not) seem particularly agitated by homosexual
conduct. Why? The disgust explanation is somewhat complicated. My recollection of the evidence
is that men generally are attracted to lesbian pornography and repulsed by same
sex male pornography. I have not read Nussbaum's work on this. I do not know if
she addresses this. The suggestion that disgust plays no role in the conservative
attitudes of many toward same sex relations is difficult to credit in my view.
But lesbian sex seems to me to complicate the picture. And, by the way, I do
not know what the evidence is with respect to women and pornography in terms of
gay and lesbian sex (though there is probably evidence on this in the Meese
Report).
Understand,
I think most heterosexual liberals who favor gay marriage are nonetheless
disgusted by some forms of homosexual conduct. The existence of disgust does
not show that one’s position on homosexuality is defective whether it be
liberal or conservative – unless disgust is the exclusive basis for opposition.
I have no clue how many persons fall into that category. I suspect that disgust
plays a strong motivational role with respect to many who are particularly
agitated by the issue.
Law and Anthropology
As we ring out the old year (and decade) and ring in the new, I went back and looked at our very early blogs from nearly six years ago. This one, from Rick, still expresses what for me is a core aspect of our project.
One of our shared goals for this blog is to ... "discover[] how our Catholic perspective can inform our understanding of the law." One line of inquiry that, in my view, is particularly promising -- and one that I know several of my colleagues have written and thought about -- involves working through the implications for legal questions of a Catholic "moral anthropology." By "moral anthropology," I mean an account of what it is about the human person that does the work in moral arguments about what we ought or ought not to do and about how we ought or ought not to be treated; I mean, in Pope John Paul II's words, the “moral truth about the human person."
The Psalmist asked, "Lord, what is man . . . that thou makest account of him?” (Ps. 143:3). This is not only a prayer, but a starting point for jurisprudential reflection. All moral problems are anthropological problems, because moral arguments are built, for the most part, on anthropological presuppositions. That is, as Professor Elshtain has put it, our attempts at moral judgment tend to reflect our “foundational assumptions about what it means to be human." Jean Bethke Elshtain, The Dignity of the Human Person and the Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries, 14 JOURNAL OF LAW AND RELIGION 53, 53 (1999-2000). As my colleague John Coughlin has written, the "anthropological question" is both "perennial" and profound: "What does it mean to be a human being?” Rev. John J. Coughlin, Law and Theology: Reflections on What it Means to Be Human, 74 ST. JOHN’S LAW REVIEW 609, 609 (2000).
Happy New Year!
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Nussbaum, religious liberty, libertas ecclesiae, and such
Martha Nussbaum delivered the keynote address at the third annual John F. Scarpa Conference on Law, Politics, and Culture, held at Villanova Law in February, 2009. It was a great occasion.
On the occason, other contributors included, as readers of this blog will remember, Kent Greenawalt, John McGreevy, Rick Hills, Jesse Choper, Geoff Stone, and (our very own) Rick Garnett, not to mention (the estimable) Richard Schenk OP.
Now, Prof. Nussbaum's reply, along with most of the other conference papers, can be found on the Villanova Law Review. Start at 54 Villanova Law Review 677.
Reflecting on Church, State, Politics, Trends, and Values at St. John Lateran
Today was the last of our ten days in Rome with our extended Sisk and Gilchrist families, which we concluded with a visit to the Basilica of St. John Lateran. We thereby completed our pilgrimage to all four of the major basilicas in Rome (the others being St. Peter's, St. Mary Major, and St. Paul Outside the Walls). I am grateful for being able to spend this time in Rome, attending the Christmas Eve Mass in St. Peter's with thousands of the faithful from all over the world, visiting the four major basilicas, and seeing again many of the other churches and holy places in Rome that I have cherished (such as Santa Maria Trastevere and Santa Maria Sopra Minerva).
And I have been reminded at nearly every holy place that the Catholic Church has always struggled with its proper place in worldly society while also seeking to transcend time and place and point the faithful to the higher things. Although I am very tired as we pack late in the evening for an early morning departure, and so I apologize if this post is poorly worded, I thought I would share these thoughts while they were fresh in my mind.
In each of the past twenty centuries, the Church has had the mission of being fully engaged with the particular society of a time and place by being a locus of coherent and integrated values, while always holding fast to the Deposit of Faith and passing on that tradition and revealed teaching through the Apostolic Succession. As sons and daughters of the Church, we on the Mirror of Justice also are confronted with the difficult task of upholding the continuing relevance of Catholic teaching for the peculiar problems arising in this particular time and place, while needing to remain sufficiently independent from political, cultural, and academic movements to be led by our faith rather than by our preferences or aspirations. Along with St. Paul, we seek “unity in faith and knowledge of the Son of God,” and want to avoid being “tossed one way and another, and carried hither and thither by every new gust of teaching (Eph 4:11-15).”
Of course, the Church has not always succeeded in every era in rising above temporal trends and temptations. From the Bronze Doors taken from the Roman Senate (Curia) in the Imperial Forum to symbolize the Church's political reign over Rome to the large statute of Constantine in the portico, the Basilica of St. John Lateran amply illustrates that the Church at times has been too willing to seek to exercise direct political power. We should learn from the Church's failures as well as its successes.
We have the opportunity on this jewel of a web site to find a way toward a uniquely Catholic common-ground in which we resist accommodation to academic or political trends of every nature and ideology and seek instead to find and apply those more transcendent values that have carried the Church through twenty centuries. Without becoming isolated from our communities and while being open to new insights into human nature and experience, we also need to remember – as one finds in the most moving and powerful of the icons and imagery and stories found in the holy places of Rome – that the Church typically is at its most effective as a counter-cultural witness for values.
As I sat today meditating in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, I found my eyes constantly returning to the statue of the basilica's namesake. As rendered in the statute, St. John the Evangelist holds his quill with a waiting hand away from the book as he looks above and listens for the voice of God. While I do not expect that any of our writing, either in academic venues or on the Mirror of Justice, will reflect the immediate revelation experienced by St. John, we too must remind ourselves to pause regularly and listen for the voice of God. We should never presume that what we say proceeds from the mouth of God, but neither should we ever write on matters of values and faith without opening our ears to that quiet and powerful voice.
Greg Sisk
Statue of St. John at Basilica of St. John Lateran (photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen)
My New Years Wish
All I want for New Years is for the endless Michael P., Robert George (and with yet a new intervention from Michael S.) thread to end. I know that it is too much to ask that we would have a comments section where this to and fro might have properly belonged.
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