Friday, June 19, 2009
When I went to mass this morning, and heard the readings to celebrate the Feast of the Sacred Heart, I was taken by the beauty of the selection from the letter to Ephesians 3:8-12.14-19. Here’s a snippet: “…that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
The Gospel (John 19:31-37) then drove home just how fleshy is the whole endeavor: “But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out.”
What I like about the questions of our thoughtful practicing-lawyer friend is that they seem to be a call for a deeper sense of the connectedness of the whole project. I wonder if the idea of a “root” and a “ground” – specifically in love – might be an interesting starting point in answering the question of what is the point of spending time working out a theoretical framework, but in a way that does not become disconnected from the lived experience, and in particular, the lived struggles and sufferings of humanity (including lawyers) around us – so as to ultimately surpass knowledge, and in some way touch the fullness of the experience of God.
I also thought it was interesting that so many of our practicing-lawyer-friend’s questions rang true for me, but I would have framed them not as a tension between practice and theory, but as a more feminine critique of the inaccessibility of theoretical abstractions; or in some contexts, as came up in our discussion of the documents, as a North-American critique of European tendencies to high (for me inaccessible) levels of abstraction.
I am a big believer in the importance of taking time to spin out a theoretical ground and framework for our scholarship. For me the highlight of the Conference on Catholic Legal Thought last week was the help that I received in working out what could be a fairly abstract argument about the relationship between law and morality as a grounding for my summer work in progress on duty to rescue. We wrestled quite a bit with the question of whether the underlying story we tell about rescue makes a difference, regardless of the legal outcome. But I do think that our practicing lawyer friend is right, that in the work of theory, we do need to keep in mind the “questions and needs of real people” – and perhaps having this as a focal point (or to put it another way, being “rooted and grounded in love”) might be the ultimate key to comprehension in any meaningful sense.
Finally, over the past week I have spent some time thinking about the journey of the CCLT since the initial 2006 brainstorm. At that initial gathering we faced a fork in the road: whether to focus more intensively and purposefully on projects to form the next generation of legal scholars in the Catholic intellectual tradition; or more on building an intentional community of mutual encouragement and support among those who are working in the field, with the secondary goal of initial and continued formation in the tradition. While the first remains a vitally important project and piece of unfinished work, we chose to take the second path.
As Susan and Rob already mentioned, the group includes a very diverse span of perspectives and approaches to the tradition. My Fordham colleague and others who were there for the first time were impressed to find in an academic environment such an encouraging, accepting atmosphere where one finds what I think is a rather extraordinary capacity to listen to and welcome each other across and within differences. As our culture, the blog world, and the church itself face the risks of increasing polarization, perhaps one of the real beauties of the CCLT project is the priority that it gives to building these kind of relationships, the space it fosters to be “grounded and rooted in love,” and in this way, to nourish an exchange which is all the richer because of the real differences in our theoretical, practical and experiential perspectives, perhaps even giving us a taste of the “breadth and length and height and depth” of God’s love.
Marc DeGirolami adds these further comments to our discussion of CLT's focus on theory:
Part of the trouble with these sorts of discussions is that it is difficult to know exactly what lawyers "need" from Catholic legal thought. Sometimes what they need isn't what they think they need. Sometimes what they think they need is only one small tip of an iceberg that extends much further down than they know about, or perhaps even want to know about. And I hastily add that I am very much among those lawyers who do not know, but who want to know.
I am not in disagreement with your correspondent that it is foolish to ignore matters of practicality, or application. But I do very much think that it is unwise to tear away the top-most branch of a tree -- because the urgencies of the day-to-day are all too pressing, or because one just wants to be told the "takeaway" (an ugly, voguish phrase suggesting that what is not immediately consumable is probably useless anyway), or because one finds the branch especially aesthetically pleasing all by itself -- and expect that little fragment to live for long. The branch belongs to the tree. I am not suggesting that your correspondent thinks otherwise. Yet sometimes I wonder in discussions about theory and practice whether those "against theory" can really be against it and still retain a proper sense of intellectual self.
Recently, I was appointed to St. Gregory's University's Board of Directors. Yesterday, I attended my first board function - an all day retreat, And, I came away inspired and very hopeful about the future of Catholic higher education, at least in Oklahoma. The day started with the University's Chancellor, Abbot Lawrence Stasyszen, O.S.B. providing an overview of St. Gregory's mission and vision. What was clear from the start was that St. Gregory's aspires to provide an integrated Catholic education in the fullest sense. Abbot Lawrence said that although the Board has a separate Committee on Mission Effectiveness, mission effectiveness ought to be a top or central priority for every committee. He said that the Catholic and Benedictine identity of the university must be intentionally fostered and not left to chance and must be present in every facet of the university. He pointed to Paragraph 49 of Ex Corde Ecclesiae (the Catholic university as "a living institutional witness to Christ and his message...") as a foundation for the work of the university. I look forward to contributing my small part to the development of this wonderful institution.
St. Gregory's is a small Catholic liberal arts university located in Shawnee, Oklahoma (with a College for Working Adults located in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Shawnee). Its fascinating history dates to the 1870's when the Citizen Potawatomi Nation asked the Benedictines to send priests to Indian Territory. The relationship between the Benedictines and the Citizen Potawatomi continues to this day with the current Chairman of the tribe serving on St. Gregory's board. (As an aside, both Jim Thorpe and Tony Hillerman were baptized by this group of Benedictine's in their Sacred Heart Mission in nearby Konawa, Ok).
Two quick responses to the practicing lawyer's concernsthat our conversations may be too theoretical and too disconnected from the issues that matter to Catholic lawyers.
- As Marc DeGirolami's comments suggest (to me anyway) the issue isn't theory vs. practice so much as examination of the foundational structures of our society vs. the practical day to day issues facing practicing lawyers. Both sides of the equation have theoretical and practical aspects. What I hear from the practicing lawyer is that s/he would like those of us who are gifted with more time for reflection to devote some energy to helping envision a way to make the practice more human. And, this seems to be a worthy goal.
- The Catholic Legal Theory project is developing along multiple fronts. Some professors devote the bulk of their scholarly energy to what I consider a rear guard action of protecting the religious liberty of the faithful. Others are involved primarily in exploring the foundations of our political communities, attempting to mine what is good in the liberal tradition, disregarding what is inhumane (radical autonomy, for instance), and recover what the Catholic tradition has to offer our ailing culture. Still others focus on humanizing the law practice. As to the latter, in the Spring of 2007, MOJer, Lisa Schiltz organized and hosted an excellent conference at St. Thomas, Workplace Restructuring to Accommodate Family Life, which is published in the St. Thomas Law Journal.
The Catholic attorney who has raised questions about the direction of the Catholic legal thought project offers this clarification in response to Marc DeGirolami's post:
At one level I agree with Marc that the issue isn't whether CST is too focused on "theory"; it's whether the "theory" has any application to practice. Mathematics, like CST, is, at one level, all theoretical, but academics still make a distinction between theoretical and applied mathematics. I think the more important question is whether Catholic academics are using CST to speak to the questions and needs of real people (applied) or are using CST to engage the "law" as a purely, or at least primarily, theoretical matter.
