I am just back from a Focolare’s northeast summer gathering held at the University of Scranton, “Mariapolis” (city of Mary) where about 400 people of all ages and from an amazing variety of ethnic and social backgrounds, came together for three days to delve into the Focolare’s spirituality of unity and live it together. (This year translations were in Spanish, Korean and Chinese). The theme, “love generates wisdom” dug into some of the challenges that people are facing today.
A workshop on economic life opened a space for discussion about how efforts to love might inform the approaches to the recession, with examples of living through a layoff, and helping small children to participate fully in a family’s efforts to discern wants from needs.Another on family life explored how to find time to communicate in the midst of a frenetic pace; and how to maintain unity in situations when the couple finds they have different approaches to parenting.The youth put together for everyone else a workshop on how they try to let love inform their efforts to navigate the media and means of communication (social networking, text messaging, etc.) in order to build solid and respectful relationships.
The CST insight?I think it might have something to do with how the communal effort to love and be open to receiving love creates a social space of total inclusion in which people can fully participate, giving the gift of themselves.Like the man in the scooter-wheelchair who formed a deep bond with a group of kindergartners, who were delighted to take rides on the scooter, and “race” him; and then together they formed an amazing team to help clear the tables in the dining area and put the dishes on the conveyer belt.Or the profoundly autistic teenager, unable to communicate verbally, who was clearly happy and comfortable dancing with the other young people at the end of the program, and the youth were clearly focused on her and the priority of creating a space to include her just as she was.
On our way back to the Focolare house in the Bronx, my friends and I stopped at an ATM machine, where there was an older man obviously struggling with finding the right buttons, and taking quite a while.Realizing that he had forgotten his glasses and needed help, we were able to create enough trust, even at a NYC ATM machine, to give him a hand.I am normally prone to impatient “sidewalk rage” with anyone slower than the usual NYC pace, but the “Mariapolis” spirit had made a dent on that, enabling us to bring something of the “city of Mary" into the Bronx, too.
That's the title of the symposium published in the Summer 2009 issue of Villanova's Journal of Catholic Social Thought (Vol. 6, No. 2). Many interesting papers--including one by MOJ blogger John Breen and another by former MOJ blogger Greg Kalscheuer, SJ. Check it out.
According to one of the pieces--by John Keown, Rose Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University--"it is far from obvious that [the insurrection of the American colonists against King George] satisfied all (or indeed any) of the [seven] crieria [laid down by the just war tradition for the waging of a just war], convincingly or otherwise" (p. 304). An interesting and sobering conclusion!
Abstract:
The question of the place of
higher law in the ordinary practice of law is even now dogged by the brooding
omnipresence caricature. This Article seeks to introduce and apply a
philosophically defensible account of natural law, the one defended by Thomas
Aquinas, to various problematics of contemporary law and jurisprudence. The
Article argues that such higher law is not so high as to be relevant only to
sexy constitutional questions, as is often supposed, but to everything we do in
law. The Article argues that liberals and conservatives alike should acknowledge
both the place of natural law in the positive law and the contingent/prudential
limits on judges' authority to speak the natural law directly from the bench.
Much of the Article is framed as a response to Steven Smith's Law's Quandary
(Harvard 2004).
A reader responds to another reader who wrote "government mandated health care may decrease the amount of charity given to those in need by generous strangers." The second reader responds:
Being charitable is not being generous. It is a duty. I was talking with a friend the other day, and he brought up the fact that we've really lost all concept of "enough," which is to say that the Catholic tradition has always been very strong on the fact that once you have a certain level of stuff/quality of life, the rest that you get isn't yours anymore. It may be that prudentially we are better off letting the individual dispose of that excess rather than the government, but that does not mean that ontologically it belongs to the individual.
A reader responded to my posting of Prof. Wertheim's comments on health care rationing. The reader seems skeptical (perhaps less skeptical than me) of the government's ability to ration health care in a better manner than the market. But, the reader raises what is to me a very intersesting point and one not heard much in the health care debates. As with government take over of other social services, government mandated health care may decrease the amount of charity given to those in need by generous strangers. In short, the human contact - one person opening themselves up to another in need - might be further lost and this possible cost ought to at least be discussed. And, "if there is rigid government health care rationing that cannot be gotten around (in the name of equality) then whether a person needs extraordinary procedures or not, and whether private insurance might have been willing to pay for it, or generous strangers are willing to pay for it or not, some needed treatments will just be out of bounds as not fitting the health care specs and budget for the year. In that sense, there is a way in which government rationing can itself be unjust; precisely because of government's power, getting around whatever unjust decisions it makes is harder than if the market makes an unjust decision."
This morning, I posted Bernard Coughlin, S.J.'s essay "What Truths We Hold," referring to it as an excellent essay. After a back and forth email exchange with one of our readers, my opinion of the piece has been downgraded from "excellent" to "good" for its lack of nuance on an important point. We can always, in the midst of political realities, attempt to find common ground as Michael P. suggests here. That is not to say that I would support the legislation Michael refers to (I haven't read it) but only to say that we can attempt to find common ground.
What we cannot do, and I think this is what Fr. B. Coughlin was attempting to articulate, is compromise on the question of the fetus's right to life and the state's duty to protect innocent life, including fetal life.
