Wednesday, September 9, 2009
This article may be of interest:
Every £4 spent on family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a ton, whereas a minimum of £19 would have to be spent on low-carbon technologies to achieve the same result, the research says.
The report, Fewer Emitter, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, concludes that family planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
I've become so depressed about the prospects of passing meaningful health care reform that I've refrained from posting on the subject. I don't have time for an extensive response to the statement of Bishops Naumann and Finn, but since Rob Vischer was chiding me this morning about my silence on the subject, let me offer a couple of thoughts prompted by their statement and his post.
First, one of the things that is persistently ignored when people react with horror to government involvement in the health care area is that the failed system we have now did not grow up through operation of a free market unaffected by government law and policy. The system that has developed is largely a result of federal tax law which encourages the provision of health care through employer plans by providing favorable tax treatment to those plans. (And those plans started to come into common existence during a time when the governmetn imposed wage controls during WW2 and employers wanted a way to increase compensation without increasing wages.) The dominance of employer-provided medical coverage is a significant part of what skews the insurance market, making purchase of insurance by individual so costly. So when we talk about federal involvement in health care reform, we are not talking about the federal government stepping into an area that has been completely private, but rather helping to address a situation it helped create. Add to that the existing government involvement in health care through, e.g., the VA. (When have you heard anyone saying that subsidiarity means we should cease providing health care to veterans via the federal government?)
... hands down ... is The Hurt Locker.
Read Richard Alleva's review, just published in Commonweal, here.
Bishops Naumann and Finn issued a statement on health care reform last week. I am not by any stretch an expert on health care reform, but I think there is much to talk about in the document. For now, three quick points/questions:
First, I always think it's interesting to see how our worldviews, including our religious worldviews, are shaped by our surrounding culture, and I suspect that the central concerns of these bishops -- defending personal responsibility against centralization and bureaucracy -- might look strikingly American to bishops in other parts of the world.
Second, was end-of-life counseling "mandated" by any of the reform proposals, as the bishops assert, or was it just covered by the proposals?
Third, according to the bishops, "the right to health care" is merely "the right to acquire the means of procuring [health care] for one's self and family." If that explanation is accurate, what substance is left to the right? Who is denying anyone the right to acquire the means of procuring health care? Is this formulation a prudent concession to economic reality or a hollowing-out of the Catholic social tradition?
Our own Richard Stith has an excellent essay in the current First Things titled "Her Choice, Her Problem." An excerpt:
Throughout human history, children have been the consequence of natural sexual relations between men and women. Both sexes knew they were equally responsible for their children, and society had somehow to facilitate their upbringing. Even the advent of birth control did not fundamentally change this dynamic, for all forms of contraception are fallible.
Elective abortion changes everything. Abortion absolutely prevents the birth of a child. A woman’s choice for or against abortion breaks the causal link between conception and birth. It matters little what or who caused conception or whether the male insisted on having unprotected intercourse. It is she alone who finally decides whether the child comes into the world. She is the responsible one. For the first time in history, the father and the doctor and the health-insurance actuary can point a finger at her as the person who allowed an inconvenient human being to come into the world.
Richard earlier posted an earlier version of the essay, but the First Things version is now available here.
Monday, September 7, 2009
If you're interested in Catholic legal theory, any day should be a good day to talk about the right of association, but Labor Day seems like an especially fitting occasion, and John Inazu has posted a nice conversation-starter in the form of his new paper, The Strange Origins of the Constitutional Right of Association. Here's the abstract:
Although much has been written about the freedom of association and its ongoing importance to the American experiment, much recent scholarship mistakenly relies on a truncated history that begins Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609 (1984), the case that divided constitutional association into intimate and expressive components and introduced the paradigm that continues today. Roberts’s doctrinal framework has been rightly criticized. But neither the right of association nor all of its doctrinal problems start with Roberts. The Court’s foray into the constitutional right of association began a generation earlier, in its 1958 decision, NAACP v. Alabama. This Article offers a new look at the Court’s initial approach to the right of association. I highlight three factors that influenced the shaping of association: (1) the conflation of rampant anti-communist sentiment with the rise of the civil rights movement (a political factor); (2) infighting on the Court over the proper way to ground the right of association in the Constitution and the relationship between association and assembly (a jurisprudential factor); and (3) the pluralist political theory of mid-twentieth century liberalism that emphasized the importance of consensus, balance, and stability (a theoretical factor). I suggest how these factors shaped a right of association with an ambiguous constitutional anchor and an ill-defined doctrinal framework. Despite its shortcomings, the right of association quickly took hold in legal and political discourse and handed the Court a resource that has arguably become more responsive to political pressure than constitutional principle. Part of that whimsicality stems from the Court’s reformulation of the right of association in Roberts. But Roberts cannot bear all of the blame. If today’s freedom of association is less than we might like it to be, the roots of its problems may lie in the political, jurisprudential, and theoretical factors present at its inception.
John is a very promising new scholar in this area; he has contributed to my own understanding of the field, particularly of the Jaycees case.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Thanks Michael P. Setting Bradford's injury aside, ESPN's Pat Forde had these damning words for Coach Bob Stoops and the Sooners:
Say this much about the Sooners: they're not Michigan. This performance was compelling evidence that they're not violating the 20-hour weekly practice rule in Norman. At times it looked like they'd barely practiced 20 hours all August.
Here.
Ah, the best laid plans ...
Friday, September 4, 2009
Last week Tony Blair spoke at Communion and Liberation's annual meeting in Rimini. The full text of his speech is here. Here are some highlights:
[T]here is not just room, but a growing space today for organisations of civic society to step forward and do things that neither market nor state can do.
Many such activities derive from people of Faith; many from our Church. I think of the work it does in tending the sick, comforting the distressed, befriending those without friends on our streets, in our cities but also in remote parts of Africa where without our Church, driven by our Faith, many would be without hope, without love, even without life itself. I only wish these good works received as much publicity that any failings receive.
But such work has a more profound significance and this I also learnt in my years running the government of a major country. I learnt over time that person and state, even bolstered by community is insufficient. That a society to be truly harmonious, to be complete, also requires a place for Faith.
The limits to individualism are in one sense, plain. We only need to contemplate the financial crisis to understand that the pursuit of maximum short-term profit, without proper regard to the communal good, is a mistake and leads to neither profit nor good. Yet, at a deeper level, the case against a purely individualistic or materialistic philosophy has to be made. Young people today have access to technology, to opportunity, to experiences good and bad on a scale my generation never knew and my father’s generation would find fantastical, like something out of science fiction.
The danger is clear: that pursuit of pleasure becomes an end in itself. It is here that Faith can step in, can show us a proper sense of duty to others, responsibility for the world around us, can lead us to, as the Holy Father calls it “Caritas in Veritate.”
* * *
Faith enlarges and enriches the idea of community. The recent Papal Encyclical is a remarkable document in many respects. It repays reading and re-reading. But one strand throughout it, is a strong rejoinder to the notion of relativism, to the description of the human condition in society as just some amoral negotiation or set of compromises with modernity; or even just obedience to the majority opinion. Not that it is anti-technology or anti-modern; or indeed anti-democratic.
But it widens and deepens the relationship between individuals and the community in which they live. It puts God’s Truth at the centre of it. In one passage, it describes humanism devoid of Faith as “inhuman humanism”: “Without God, man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is.”
* * *
How will we deal with the world’s scarce resources? Who will speak up for the poor, the dispossessed, the refugee, the migrant? How will we bring understanding in place of ignorance and tolerance in place of fear?
It is into this space that the world of Faith and of course the Catholic Church, the universal Church – itself the model of a global institution – must step.
Political leaders on teir own – I tell you very frankly – cannot do this. Not because they are bad people; but because the context and constraints within which they operate make it hard for them to do so. But they can be helped.
* * *
This is surely the role of Faith in modern times. To do what it alone can do. To achieve what neither a person, nor a state, nor a community, on their own or even together, can achieve. To represent God’s Truth, not limited by human frailty, or by the interests of the state or by the transient mores of a community, however well intentioned; but to let that Truth bestow on us humility, love of neighbour, and the true knowledge that indeed passes all understanding.
This is Faith, not as superstition, not as an insurance against life’s pitfalls, but Faith as the salvation of the human condition.
Faith not as magic, not as an escape from life’s complexities, but Faith as purpose in life. Faith, not as a mystery we seek to solve; but Faith as a mystery which expresses the limitations of the human mind.
Faith and Reason are in alliance, not opposition.
They support each other; embrace each other; strengthen each other. They are not in a struggle for supremacy. Together they are supreme.
That is why the voice of the Church should be heard. That is why it should speak confidently, clearly and openly. Because within any nation and beyond it, in the community of nations, the voice of Faith needs to be and must be heard,
It is our mission for the 21st century. For modern times. For the future. Science, technology, all the advances of humankind, do not make its voice less important. They make it more so.
So, even with all the diffidence of someone newly into full communion with the Catholic Church, I say: be strong and of good courage. The best days of our Faith, with God’s will, lie ahead of us.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Facilitating the common good requires the cultivation of a political culture in which people of opposing views can engage each other in good faith and with open minds. It took a few years for anti-Bush hysteria to work itself up into such a frenzy so as to preclude much of our national capacity to have a reasoned conversation (Theocrat! Facist! Try Him For War Crimes!); it has only taken a few months for anti-Obama hysteria to reach the same level (Un-American! Socialist! Don't Let Him Speak to Our Children!). Especially for the type of conversation that is key to pursuing the political priorities contemplated by the Church's non-partisan vision of social justice, these are not encouraging developments.
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