Friday, September 18, 2009
Here is the University of Chicago Press pre-publication blurb about a book that readers of MOJ should rush to pre-order:
GOD’S ECONOMY
Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State
Lew Daly
With a foreword by E. J. Dionne Jr.
University
of
Chicago
Press
(published in December 2009)
Though President Obama has signaled a sharp break from many Bush administration policies, he remains committed to federal support for religious social service providers. Like George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, though, Obama’s version of the policy has generated loud criticism—from both sides of the aisle—even as the communities that stand to benefit continue to struggle with economic hardship. God’s Economy reveals that virtually all of the critics, as well as many supporters, have long misunderstood both the true implications of faith-based partnerships and their unique potential for advancing social justice.
Unearthing the intellectual history of the faith-based initiative, Lew Daly locates its roots in the pluralist tradition of
Europe
’s Christian democracies, in which the state shares sovereignty with social institutions. He argues that Catholic and Dutch Calvinist ideas played a crucial role in the evolution of this tradition as churches across nineteenth-century
Europe
developed philosophical and legal defenses to protect their education and social programs against ascendant governments. Tracing the influence of this heritage on the past three decades of American social policy and church-state law, Daly finally untangles the radical beginnings of the faith-based initiative. In the process, he frees it from the narrow culture-war framework that has limited debate on the subject since Bush opened the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001.
A major contribution from an important new voice at the intersection of religion and politics, God’s Economy points the way to a new kind policymaking shaped by public faith, an approach combining strong social assistance from the state with a sharp moral focus on protecting families and communities in the liberal market order.
Lew Daly is a senior fellow and director of the fellows program at Dēmos, a nonpartisan public policy center in
New York City
. He is the coauthor, with Gar Alperovitz, of Unjust Deserts.
Advance Praise for God’s Economy
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have all supported expanding poverty-fighting partnerships between religious nonprofit organizations and government agencies. Lew Daly has taken the complicated history and often divisive discourse concerning such faith-based initiatives to a better intellectual and civic place. With wide-ranging sophistication and candor, God’s Economy sheds new light on Catholic and Calvinist ideas about church-state relations, referees ongoing debates about religion in the public square, and weighs in on policy controversies like those surrounding religious hiring rights. Agree or not with all of Daly’s conclusions, this is an engaging, balanced, and timely book. President Obama’s faith-based policy advisors and all other interested citizens should take note.”
John J. Dilulio Jr., Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society, University of Pennsylvania, and first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
Bold yet balanced, God’s Economy will confound liberals and conservatives alike. By harnessing neglected insights from Catholic, Calvinist, and other overlapping traditions of reflection on authentic social pluralism, Daly’s book offers to put both the market and the state back where they belong—in the service of the plural communities in which people learn to love, serve, and even worship. Incisive, informed, and inspiring, this is public philosophy that packs a practical punch. Much needed in places high and low, God’s Economy takes the vital discussion of mediating institutions and faith-based initiatives three long steps forward. Daly is an exemplary guide.”
Patrick McKinley Brennan, John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies,
Villanova
University
God’s Economy is a remarkable effort to rethink the nature of state power, markets, and social life. Daly makes long-neglected conceptions of plural sovereignty relevant to a wide range of contemporary debates. The result is a bold, unique contribution to social thought.
William A. Galston, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution
“Balanced, thoughtful, and loaded with practical policy implications, Daly’s God’s Economy lifts the debates surrounding charitable choice and Bush’s—and now Obama’s—faith-based initiatives above the cultural wars of the left and the right by documenting their roots in Catholic and Calvinist social pluralist thinking. It thereby makes a powerful case for protecting communities—especially families and religious communities—from both the market and the state. In doing so, Daly persuasively argues that faith-based initiatives, if fully implemented, will lead to public policies more, not less, committed to helping those who are poor and on the margins of society.”
Stephen V. Monsma, Professor Emeritus of Political Science,
Pepperdine
University
Gerry Whyte (Trinity College Law [Dublin]) writes:
[T]he relationship between socialism and Christianity ... may be closer than
many US conservatives realise.
For a start, socalists arguably inherited from Christianity
a particular way of seeing history, namely, as a linear progression to a future
utopia. According to John Gray ("Black Mass - Apocalyptic Religion and the Death
of Utopia"), this characteristic of Christianity also influenced Jacobinism,
Fascism and, more recently, neo-liberalism - remember Fukuyama's 'End of
history'? - with often catastrophic consequences for
humanity.
More positively, Christianity has had a strong influence on
the social democratic tradition, especially in the UK. The last three leaders of
the UK Labour Party, John Smith, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, all come from the
Christian Socialist tradition. This is what Tony Blair has written on the topic
in the foreword to Graham Dale's "God's Politicians: The Christian Contribution
to 100 Years of Labour":
'The Labour Party and the nation are indebted to people
whose Christian faith motivated their political service: individuals who were
outraged by the social injustice they say all around and believed that it was
their duty to stand up for the downtrodden; individuals who wanted to show
compassion towards their neighbours and saw the Labour Party as a means by which
this could be done; individuals who saw a connection between the values of
Christ and the values of Socialism, and who chose to work out these connections
in the rough and tumble of party politics.
It was the Christian values of these people that informed
their political thinking. They believed in community, in equality and in
individual responsibility. Their beliefs forced them to take political action
when faced with the great need around them - the need for jobs, the need for
homes or the need for health care (emphasis added!). They believed that
legislation, not just charity, was needed to transform the inadequate present
into a better future."
Finally, MOJ-ers may also be interested in the following
comments:
'Demonstrations, protests, strikes and passive resistance -
all these are means of class struggle that need to be considered appropriate.
The struggle for rights, after exhausting all peaceful means ... is a necessary
act of justice that leads only to the achievement of the common good, which is
the goal of social existence...
It is clear that from the view of the ethical assumptions
of the Bible, such a struggle is a necessary evil, just like any other human
struggle... It is also evident from the Bible that struggle itself is not the
opposite of love. The opposite of love is hate.
A struggle in a specific case does not have to be caused by
hate. If it is caused by social and material injustice, and if its goal is to
reinstate the just distribution of goods, then such a struggle is not [hatred]
... Social justice is the necessary condition for realisation of love in
life...
Many times Jesus Christ has proven that God's kingdom
cannot be achieved in man without a struggle .. Achievement of social justice is
one element of achieving God's Kingdom on earth..."
"Marxism ... does not see any other way to solve the
burning social issues ... Catholicism sees the possibility of solving ... social
issues by evolutionary means. The struggle of the oppressed classes against
their oppressors becomes the stimulus for the evolution to proceed faster
...
The class struggle... grows stronger when it meets
resistance from the economically privileged classes. Pressure from the class
struggle should bring appropriate changes in the socioeconomic
system."
"The Church realizes that the bourgeois mentality, and
capitalism with its material spirit, are contradictions of the Bible. According
to the tradition of ... monastic/religious life, the Church also can appreciate
the idea of communism... Communism, as a higher ethical rule of ownership,
demands from people higher ethical qualifications."
"At the present state of human nature, the universal
realization of this [communist] ideal ... meets with insurmountable
difficulties. Private property is suited to human nature. The goal that should
be pursued is to achieve, in the system based on private property, such reforms
as will lead to the realization of social justice. The class struggle leads to
this ...
Revolution is not the doom of society but at most a
punishment for specific offenses in socioeconomic life."
All of the above comments are from a work called "Catholic
Social Ethics", written by the then Fr. Karol Wojtyla in the early 1950s and
distributed by the Catholic underground in communist Poland - see Kwitny, "Man
of the Century - The life and times of Pope John Paul II" (1998)
pp.138-140.
Give it a read, if you haven't recently. There's some good stuff in there:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. . . .
Richard Esenberg has a very thoughtful post up at Prawfsblawg about "the Catholic notion of subsidiarity and what how it may inform our thinking about proposed expansions of the state in response to various 'crises,' e.g., the financial seizure, global warming and perceived flaws in the delivery of health care." Check it out! The commenters include several MOJ-ers. Here is what I wrote:
Subsidiarity is more than a rule that "things should be done at the smaller, more local level", and also more than a "vertically oriented prudential judgment about effectiveness." As Russell Hittinger puts it, "subsidiarity presupposes that there are plural authorities and agents having their 'proper' (not necessarily, lowest) duties and rights with regard to the common good." The danger (and Rob has explored this in some of his work) with thinking of subsidiarity in terms of "devolution" is that this thinking presumes that the state possesses powers that are somehow being "circulated" (Hittinger's word) to "lower" bodies, from the top down. Sure, this kind of devolution sometimes happens, and sometimes is a good idea (more efficient, more responsive, etc.), but it's not the same thing as subsidiarity. "The point of subsidiarity is a normative structure of social forms," Hittinger writes. It is not a "trickling down of power or aid. . . . The principle is not so much a theory about state institutions, or about checks and balances, as it is an account of the pluralism in society." (For more, see Hittinger's essay in the Witte & Alexander volume, "The Teachings of Modern Christianity").
