Friday, December 12, 2008
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has just issued Dignitas Personae, an important new document on biotechnology. This document is a successor to Donum Vitae, which was issued in 1987. I haven't had a chance to read the document yet but I hope to have a comment soon. Here is a link to John Allen's commentary.
Richard M.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
From Christianity Today:
Richard Cizik resigned Wednesday night as vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) during a week of growing uproar over his comments that he is shifting his views on same-sex unions.
Cizik later apologized and said he was opposed to civil unions as well as gay marriage, but it's not clear how convincing the retraction could be. The resignation of Cizik, the strong evangelical advocate for anti-global-warming policies, could end up meaning any of several things. (1) The movement to mobilize evangelicals to take steps against global warming will lose credibility because one of its main voices has been discredited for suggesting he was moving outside the evangelical consensus against same-sex unions. (2) This is a sign of how strong that evangelical consensus remains. Or (3) Cizik's (temporary?) shift is a sign of where more and more evangelicals will go in the future. Or all of the above.
On the same radio program, Cizik also expressed openness to government-supported contraception to reduce abortions, saying that evangelicals "are not Catholics who oppose contraception per se." But the Christianity Today story suggests (though it does not explicitly say) that it was the civil-unions remark that caused the greatest disturbance.
Tom B.
Here. The interchange, which took place this week, begins at about 13:50.
Those who are interested, as we all should be, in the state and future of Catholic education in the United States, might want to check out this new report, "Faith, Finances, and the Future: The Notre Dame Study of U.S. Pastors", just put out by my colleagues with Notre Dame's Institute for Educational Initiatives.
In (somewhat) related news, I was delighted to learn that the founder and energy behind Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education program, Fr. Tim Scully, was awarded the Presidential Citizenship Medal by President Bush, for “committing his life to strengthening communities through faith-based education that prepares individuals for a lifetime of achievement, service and compassion."
The Irish are stinking up the football field, but moving the ball pretty well (sorry!) when it comes to Catholic schools.
Alabama law prof and friend of MoJ Bill Brewbaker has posted a new paper, Law, Higher Law, and Human Making. Here's the abstract:
This paper is a preliminary investigation of what Christian theology might teach us about the nature of human creative activity and its relationship to judging and lawmaking. Rather than attempt to survey and synthesize multiple theological accounts of human making, it focuses on just one - Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of the Maker. The foundational analogy that drives Sayers' account of human creativity is the relation between God's creative activity and that of human beings made in his image. Sayers argues that human creative activity has a trinitarian structure, which she identifies as Idea, Energy and Power. These three elements correspond roughly to (i) the whole Idea of the work in the mind of the artist, with reference to which the creative activity is carried out (Father), (ii) the creative Activity that makes the work incarnate (Son) and (iii) the work's Power to influence the human person and the community's public context (Spirit).
Sayers' account suggests an alternative to simple affirmations that law is either found or made. There may well be in a society a normative institution that we might call The Law - an accretion of cultural artifacts that form the context of public action, reflecting a community's values and particular circumstances - or at least those of its ruling elites or groups, as well as its rules, its legal traditions, and, in an incomplete way, the general loves and commitments of the community. While one might presume, on the basis of the Christian revelation, that there will always be some connection at some points with moral truth, there is no reason to presume that such a connection necessarily exists all the way down, or even very much of the way down, the chain of legal particularities. Yet it would seem to be undeniable that a community's traditions - though they themselves are shifting and changing - exert a remarkable pull in particular and identifiable directions at any given time. This pull may be strong enough that it is possible for judges to declare The Law, with the attendant goods of stability, predictability, consonance with existing social norms, etc. without equating The Law with transcendent moral truth.
This looks like a must-read for MoJers.
Newsweek's cover story on the Christian case for same-sex marriage has drawn a heap of criticism. Fanning the flames is editor Jon Meacham's introductory note stating that "No matter what one thinks about gay rights — for, against or somewhere in between — this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism." Get Religion criticizes the article and the editor's note here.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
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My daughter Anamaria writes:
"Professor Perry posted a letter by a law student addressing the issue of same-sex marriages within the Catholic Church. The student says, "For all of the good done by the Church, and for the strength and beauty of its tradition, I have a hard time imagining myself returning to weekly mass if the Church does not address what I feel is its immoral treatment of many people within and without its sanctuaries." He misses the point. I don't go to mass because of "the good done by the Church" but because God became man and walked among us, founded this Church, and is physically present within the Eucharist. With that starting point, two things follow: 1. I have to go to weekly mass, even if the Church is participating in something that I see as wrong and 2. I have to approach what she is saying with great humility and a great openness, with an idea that perhaps the Church is right and I am wrong.
"How do we follow the Church when we disagree with her? First, we have to ask, why do we want to follow the Church in the first place (assuming, of course, that we do)? I can't answer this question for the rest of you, but only for myself. I follow the Church because this is where I have met Christ and where, despite the faults of people in the Church, I have seen Christ most evident in my life. Christ has been evident through the Eucharist; through the Church's teachings and the way they make sense of my life; and through my friends. I follow the Church because it is the most reasonable thing for me to do. I follow Christ, and through my experience I know that the Church is one of the primary ways that Christ remains present in the world. So I follow that.
"The Church is, of course, a diverse organization/institution/people. We are the Church in a very concrete and real way. So, who do I follow when I say that I follow the Church? Honestly, on a daily basis I follow my friends because they are the way that the Church is most present to me. I have benefitted invaluably when they can explain my life to me better than I can explain it myself. Through the encounter with my friends, I am continually drawn back to the reality that is in front of me with a new perspective and a greater understanding. In following my friends, I do so with great humility due to firm belief that the “other” has something to offer. I may argue and point out areas in which the “other” seems mistaken, and I might not change, but my starting point must be a great openness to change and humility.
"I also follow the Church in a different sense. I follow her traditions, the Sacraments, that nebulous thing of "the Catholic Intellectual Tradition," and doctrine. I follow this in much the same way that I follow my friends: with great humility and openness and a belief that the Other has something to offer. My humility in regards to this aspect of the Church is even greater because it has been around for so long and has hashed out many of the same issues I sit around talking about (virtually or physically) with my friends. It has worked through many of these issues and questions over its two thousand year history with the aid of many contributing scholars and thinkers. In addition, I do think the Church is lead by Christ and protected by the Holy Spirit, despite its leadership by us fallen humans.
"In short, I trust the Church. This doesn't mean I don't question or debate, but my starting point is and, I think, must be a trust that the Church knows more than me. Sometimes I follow like Peter and the others in John 6. Jesus says, "Eat my body, drink my blood, and you will not die," and almost everyone says, "This guy is nuts, this guy is crazy, I'm outta here" and they leave. But Peter and the others, they've been following Jesus for longer, so they stay. Probably many of them are wondering if they should stay, but they stay, and Jesus asks if they want to leave. Peter answers for all of them, "Where would we go?" He doesn't understand what Jesus says any more than those who left, but he has to keep following. He's seen the evidence. He can't do anything else, go anywhere else. It would be unreasonable after all he's seen. For me, too, it would be unreasonable after all I've seen, so I continue to follow. Sometimes, like Peter and the others, I don't understand, but I keep following. For me, this means two things: Questioning and obeying simultaneously. I question because I have to, because I want to understand, and I obey, too, because I have to and I want to understand. I have to keep following Christ and the way that Christ is evident in my life (through the Church), so I obey what the Church says. Sometimes, I think, only in obeying am I able to understand. I'm not sure how well I can explain this, but just think about things you only understood abstractly, and then when you start doing them you understand them all the better.
"So, then, back to my original question: how do I follow when I disagree with the Church? I start with a great humility and ask for openness that I will be able to see what is true. I talk to those I trust within the Church and "dialogue" with those who have come before me by reading explanations for the Church's position. Since the Church’s unfolding doctrine has been developed over 2000 years, I think I can give the Church at least a year of trying to understand its position and praying for openness before I really decide I disagree. Probably, though, this period should last even longer than a year. If, after all of this, I do disagree, I would come to more concrete dialogue with those people in the Church and, again, ask why and very humbly begin to criticize. Then, perhaps, I would criticize more loudly and, yes, call for change from within. But this, too, must always be done with humility and respect, holding myself open to the possibility that I am mistaken."
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Jeremy Waldron has posted his new paper, Basic Equality. (HT: Solum) Here's the abstract:
This is a three-part study and defense of the idea of basic human equality. (This is the idea that humans are basically one another's equals, as opposed to more derivative theories of the dimensions in which we ought to be equal or the particular implications that equality might have for public policy.) Part (1) of the paper examines the very idea of basic equality and it tries to elucidate it by considering what an opponent of basic human equality (e.g. a philosophical racist) might hold. It explores the idea of there being no morally significant fundamental divisions among humans (of the kind that some people insist on as between humans and others animals). Part (2) considers whether basic human equality must be based on some descriptive similarity among us (naturalistic or metaphysical); it considers the positions of a number of thinkers who have denied this. Part (3) considers John Rawls's conception of basic equality in terms of range properties. (Being in Ohio is a range property; Columbus and Cincinnati are both equally in Ohio even though even though Columbus is in the center of the state, while Cincinnati is just over the river from Kentucky.) It explores the application of this Rawlsian idea to the descriptive properties that might be thought relevant to human equality. This three part paper is a rather technical philosophical exploration. And it is just a beginning; we need much more work on the idea of basic equality. Some of the energy that has gone into discussions of equality as a policy aim (e.g. in the Dworkin/Sen literature or in the literature surrounding Rawls's Difference Principle) needs to be devoted to this more fundamental conception.
Professor Perry, I write
to you concerning an article you posted on Mirror of Justice by Kate Childs
Graham.... I’m wondering if you feel, as I do, that room can easily be made, and
should be, for a marriage like Kate and Ariana’s within the Church. Obviously,
this would require that the “institutional Catholic Church” (as Childs Graham
put it) adopt a change to its definition of marriage. The Catechism in Paragraph
1660 refers to marriage as “an intimate communion of life and love… ordered to
the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children.”
This, to me, is very broad and seemingly could be opened to couples not
consisting of a man and a woman. Even the “generation… of children,” by virtue
of modern science, does not require a heterosexual union in order to be
effected. Perhaps more to the point, and directly on point with the sentiment of
Ms. Childs Graham’s editorial, “From a valid
marriage arises a bond between the spouses which by its very nature is
perpetual and exclusive; furthermore, in a Christian marriage the spouses are
strengthened and, as it were, consecrated for the duties and the dignity of
their state by a special sacrament.” (Catechism, Paragraph 1638)
Granted, we are provided a one-sided and biased account, but the
relationship between Kate and Ariana exhibits all of the qualities valued by the
Church in a marital union, save heterosexuality. What ill can come from such
communion based on love and dedication between two people? I know that I am
short shrifting the Church’s definition and understanding of “marriage,” but is
the position of the modern Catholic Church (emphasis on modern)
sustainable on principle? Or, is it as I fear, merely clinging to tradition and
a (possibly flawed) interpretation of Old Testament allegory? I ... often find myself critical of the
tradition I grew up in. This is at least one of the reasons I find myself drawn
to many of your posts. (The latest by John Kavanaugh is no exception. By the
way, I think he puts easier “questions” to the pro-life extremists than those he
puts to the pro-choicers.) For all of the good done by the Church, and for the
strength and beauty of its tradition, I have a hard time imagining myself
returning to weekly mass if the Church does not address what I feel is its
immoral treatment of many people within and without of its sanctuaries. The
LGBTQ community, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, represents one group that I
believe gets such treatment from the Church. The thought-provoking columns in
your posts suggest that you may share some of this sentiment. Is there any truth
to this, or are you dedicating yourself to making sure that all voices and
viewpoints are heard from in the MOJ discussion? Respectfully, [a law student] [I replied, explaining that in my judgment, the Church's teaching on homosexuality is false teaching and that the Church's position on gay and lesbian unions is unjust.]
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