There is a trenchant commentary on Mark Lilla's much-commented-on The Stillborn God here. Here's a passage:
... Lilla turns aside to the small cadre of the Enlightened who see the
story for what it is: “Those of us who have accepted the heritage of
the Great Separation must do so soberly. Time and again we must remind
ourselves that we are living an experiment, that we are the
exceptions.” Wavering between insider code and an invitation to join
this inner circle of the exceptional, Lilla ends with a manifesto of
inverse gnosticism: “We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated
by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely
on our own lucidity.” “We” turns out to be the sect of modern-day
Essenes living on the upper West Side, who have vowed to abstain from
the illusions of the masses and consigned themselves to the cold, hard
desert “reality” disclosed by reason. Lilla and his exceptionalist
monastic brotherhood of enlightened “us” have girded their loins in
order to make their way in the world without the comforts of faith and
revelation (I’m guessing one would bump into Hitchens and Harris in the
same rationalist desert after all).
Where does that leave the rest of us—the us not included in Lilla’s enlightened “us?”
Thursday, December 27, 2007
"Modern-day Essenes living on the Upper West Side ..."
Love the Dutch!
New York Times
December 27, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
A Colony With a Conscience
By KENNETH T. JACKSON
THREE hundred and fifty years ago today, religious freedom was born on this continent. Yes, 350 years. Religious tolerance did not begin with the Bill of Rights or with Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786. With due respect to Roger Williams and his early experiment with “liberty of conscience” in Rhode Island, this republic really owes its enduring strength to a fragile, scorched and little-known document that was signed by some 30 ordinary citizens on Dec. 27, 1657.
[Read the rest ... here.]
Religion, Politics, and JFK
The Kennedy Momement:
Religion and the Race for the Presidency
16 January 2008, 6 – 8 pm
Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus
Pope Auditorium, 113 West 60th Street
Free and Open to the Public
RSVP: [email protected], 212.636.7347
“Whatever issue may come before me as President . . . I will make my decision . . . in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictate.”
-- Senator John F. Kennedy, speaking to Houston ministers, Sept.12, 1960For almost fifty years, President John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960 has been a key reference point for American debates about church-state relations and the place of religion in presidential campaigns. In January 2008, amid news about early primaries, a distinguished panel will reexamine the speech, its political and cultural context, its argument and rhetoric—and its relevance for the 2008 presidential election.
The Houston speech, a response of a Catholic presidential candidate to suspicions about his faith, has been widely praised as a brilliant defense of the separation of church and state and a careful delimiting of religion’s role in American politics. But the speech has been no less vigorously criticized as a politically expedient argument for quarantining personal religious and moral principles from public service and official responsibilities. To read JFK's speech, click here. To watch JFK's speech on C-Span, click here.
Both partisans and critics of the speech frequently quote it selectively or out of context. Bringing together publicly engaged scholars of different perspectives, this Headline Forum will explore what the Houston speech meant in 1960 and what it might mean today.Moderator:
Peter Quinn, novelist essayist, author of Banished Children of Eve and Looking for Jimmy. He served as a speech writer for New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo.
Panelists:
Shaun Casey, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C. He is completing a book on the role of religion in the 1960 presidential election, including archival material on the Kennedy speech.
William Galston, Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland. He served in the Clinton administration and as an advisor in the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Albert Gore, Jr.
Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program, Princeton University. A member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, he has advised the administration on abortion and embryonic stem-cell research.
J. Bryan Hehir, Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard. His research and writing focus on ethics and the role of religion in American society and world politics.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Obama at Newman Catholic High School, Mason City, Iowa
According to the New York Times,
Flying in from Chicago, Mr. Obama arrived here [Iowa] on Wednesday morning, where about 500 people were waiting in the gymnasium of the Newman Catholic High School in Mason City. His remarks conveyed a fresh moment of urgency in the race . . .
Who is Obama, you ask? Check out this (seasonal) YouTube feature to find out:
Benedict XVI and the Environment, Revisited
[from NYTimes online, "The Opinionator".]
The Pope on Hope (For the Environment)
“Pope Benedict XVI reinforced the Vatican’s growing concern with protecting the environment in the traditional midnight Christmas Mass on Tuesday, bemoaning an ‘ill-treated world’ in a homily given to thousands of pilgrims here in the seat of the world’s billion Roman Catholics, reports The Times’s Ian Fisher from Rome.
The gang at Truthdig was impressed, adding that “He’s not just all talk: it turns out the Vatican bought carbon credits this holiday season to offset emissions. It’s just a little present to the world from the biggest little city in Italy.”
Frank Pasquale at Concurring Opinions feels the address built on the recent encyclical on hope that stated, “It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater.”
“These may seem rather dark ideas for an encyclical on hope,” notes Pasquale. “But an idea of redemption is a common thread throughout the document; ‘It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love.’ Here is to hoping that ‘progress in man’s ethical formation’ can begin approaching our technical prowess in 2008.”
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel ...
... is one of the most important American religious figures of the last fifty years. "[N]o modern Jewish thinker has had as profound an effect on other faiths as Heschel has; the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said he was 'an authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in the religious life of America.' Nor has any Jewish theologian since Heschel succeeded in speaking to such a wide range of readers while rigorously attending to the nuances of Judaism."
New York Times
December 24, 2007
A Rabbi of His Time, With a Charisma That Transcends It
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
In 1965, after walking in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil-rights march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was at the Montgomery, Ala., airport, trying to find something to eat. A surly woman behind the snack-bar counter glared at Heschel — his yarmulke and white beard making him look like an ancient Hebrew prophet — and mockingly proclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.” She told Heschel that there was no food to be had.
In response, according to a new biography, “Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972” by Edward K. Kaplan (Yale), Heschel simply smiled. He gently asked, “Is it possible that in the kitchen there might be some water?” Yes, she acknowledged. “Is it possible that in the refrigerator you might find a couple of eggs?” Perhaps, she admitted. Well, then, Heschel said, if you boiled the eggs in the water, “that would be just fine.”
She shot back, “And why should I?”
“Why should you?” Heschel said. “Well, after all, I did you a favor.”
“What favor did you ever do me?”
“I proved,” he said, “there was a Santa Claus.”
And after the woman’s burst of laughter, food was quickly served.
Of course Heschel, with his rabbinic features, could not have looked too much like the jolly gentleman expected to visit homes late Christmas Eve. But the spirit evident in this anecdote must have served him well over the years as he taught aspiring rabbis, met with Pope Paul VI and became a leader in the civil-rights, anti-Vietnam War and interfaith movements. At his death in 1972 he was one of this country’s best-known Jewish figures.
This year’s centennial of Heschel’s birth, commemorated by the new biography and a conference this month at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, takes place in a very different world. Surely no one today could write, as he did in his landmark 1955 book, “God in Search of Man,” that there is an “eclipse of religion in modern society.” If anything, there is no escape from talk about faith. Nor is the relationship between religious convictions and political activism as simple as it might have once seemed.
[Read the rest ... here.]
Texas hold-em or Texas hang-em?
New York Times
December 26, 2007
Executions Decline Elsewhere, but Texas Holds Steady
By ADAM LIPTAK
This year’s death-penalty bombshells — a federal moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade — have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.
Over the past three decades, the proportion of executions nationwide performed in Texas has held relatively steady, averaging 37 percent. Only once before, in 1986, has the state accounted for even a slight majority of the executions, and that was in a year with only 18 executions nationwide.
But this year, enthusiasm for executions outside of Texas dropped sharply. Of last year’s 42 executions, 26 were in Texas. The remaining 16 were spread across nine other states, none of which executed more than three people. Many legal experts say that trend is likely to continue.
Indeed, said David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston who has represented death row inmates, the day is not far off when essentially all executions in the United States will take place in Texas.
“The reason that Texas will end up monopolizing executions,” he said, “is because every other state will eliminate it de jure, as New Jersey did, or de facto, as other states have.”
Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., the district attorney of Harris County, which includes Houston and has accounted for 100 executions since 1976, said the Texas capital justice system is working properly. The pace of executions in Texas, he said, “has to do with how many people are in the pipeline when certain rulings come down.”
Asked why Texas’s share of executions nationwide is rising, he said, “I frankly don’t know.”
The rate at which Texas sentences people to death is not especially high given its murder rate. But once a death sentence is imposed there, said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, prosecutors, state and federal courts, the pardon board and the governor are united in moving the process along. “There’s almost an aggressiveness about carrying out executions,” said Mr. Dieter, whose organization opposes capital punishment.
Outside of Texas, even supporters of the death penalty say they detect a change in public attitudes about executions in light of the time and expense of capital litigation, the possibility of wrongful convictions and the remote chance that someone sent to death row will actually be executed.
[To read the whole article, click here.]
Monday, December 24, 2007
More on Margaret Farley's "Just Love"
RJA sj suggests (here) that Margaret Farley is beyond the (Catholic) pale because she disagrees with the magisterium on issues of human sexuality. Well, that's one view. Here's another ... that of RJA's fellow Jesuit, David Hollenbach, who holds a chair in theology at Boston College.
Hollenbach writes, in a passage that appears on the cover of Farley's Just Love:
Just Love is a true breakthrough--the best book on sexual ethics in many decades. Farley shows how justice can guide sexual love along liberating paths that lead to genuine fulfillment, while also paying attention to the brokenness that touches all lives. She makes an indispensable contribution to the life of the Christian community and to ethical theory in our pluralist cultural setting. This is must reading.
For MOJ readers who aren't familiar with David Hollenbach--whom I've never heard anyone accuse of being beyond the Catholic pale, much less of being a "throwback to the 1960s"--here's some info:
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Before coming to Boston
College, Hollenbach taught at Georgetown University and at Weston
Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, MA. He has been Visiting
Professor of Social Ethics at Hekima College of the Catholic University
of Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya, and at the Jesuit Philosophy
Institute in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In 1990, he conducted the
annual Winter School of Theology in six cities in Southern Africa,
sponsored by the Catholic Bishops Conference of Southern Africa.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
His research interests are in
the foundation of Christian social ethics, particularly in the areas of
the human rights, theory of justice, the common good, and the role of
the religion in social and political life.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES AND AWARDS
Hollenbach
served as President of the Society of Christian Ethics (1995-1996) and
on the Board of Directors of the Catholic Theological Society of
America (1982-1984). He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of
Religious Ethics and the steering committee of the Consultation of
Religion and Human Rights of the American Academy of Religion. He
assisted the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in drafting their
1986 pastoral letter Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching
and the U.S. Economy. In 1979 he received a Walsh-Price Fellowship for
travel in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt to do research on
religion and human rights in the Middle East. In 1996 he received a
Fulbright Fellowship for research and teaching in Kenya. In June, 1998,
Hollenbach received the John Courtney Murray Award for outstanding
contributions to theology from the Catholic Theological Society of
America.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
His
publications include The Common Good and Christian Ethics (2002);
Catholicism and Liberalism: Contributions to American Public
Philosophy, edited with R. Bruce Douglass (1994); Justice, Peace, and
Human Rights: American Catholic Social Ethics in a Pluralistic World
(1988); Nuclear Ethics: A Christian Moral Argument (1983); Claims in
Conflict: Retrieving and Renewing the Catholic Human Rights Tradition
(1979). A new book, Faith, Politics, and Society: Essays on Christian
Ethics, will be published by Georgetown University Press in 2003.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Congratulations to Sister Margaret Farley!
[As is well known, Margaret Farley's moral positions on several issues regarding human sexuality--including homosexuality--differs from that of the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. In my judgment, Farley's (dissenting) moral positions are compelling.]
The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 6, 2007
Yale Scholar Wins Grawemeyer Award in Religion
[Sister of Mercy Margaret Farley] has won the 2008 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for her views on sexual ethics, the University of Louisville announced this evening.
Margaret A. Farley, an emeritus professor of Christian ethics [at Yale Divinty School] and a Roman Catholic nun, will receive the prize, which carries a $200,000 award, in recognition of her efforts to promote fairness in sexual relationships. In her 2006 book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (Continuum International Publishing Group), Ms. Farley argues that justice is the quality that forms, guides, and protects loving relationships.
Susan Garrett, director of the award program, said in a written announcement that Ms. Farley’s argument “is an important message in light of all the confusion surrounding sexuality today.”
The award in religion is one of five annual Grawemeyer prizes presented in recognition of achievements in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Ms. Farley is the third Yale scholar to receive a Grawemeyer this year. On Wednesday two psychologists from the university, along with a professor at Fordham University, were named the winners of the award in education. The winners of the awards for music, psychology, and “ideas improving world order” were announced earlier this week.
The awards were established in 1984 by H. Charles Grawemeyer, an industrialist and University of Louisville alumnus. More information about the Grawemeyer Awards and the Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville is available on the organization’s Web site. —Jason M. Breslow
[Click here to read the announcement posted by Yale Divinity School. An excerpt from that announcement follows:]
Farley, a member of the Sisters of Mercy order of nuns, is a widely known Christian ethicist who was on the faculty of YDS from 1971 to 2007. During the course of her career, she has been a progressive theological voice in a broad range of areas including feminist theology, medical and sexual ethics, the role of women in the church, homosexuality and the church, and religious perspectives on the environment. Not infrequently, her views have been seen as a challenge to those of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
"I am deeply honored to receive this award, and humbled,” said Farley. “It is an author's greatest hope that her work will be well received not only by scholars but by general readers who seek insights into human experience and activity. The Grawemeyer Award in Religion has been so important for writers like myself who try to explore human relationships, including relationships with the divine. I am extremely grateful to be included in a long line of religious authors selected for this Award over many years."
In his nomination of Farley for the Grawemeyer Award, Yale Divinity School Dean Harold Attridge wrote, “ Just Love is a carefully nuanced work that demonstrates the synergies of science and religion; how coupling religious awareness with other forms of knowledge can serve to elucidate matters fundamental to the human condition; and how customs particular to diverse religious traditions can each contribute to the process of discernment despite differences.”
The decisive question posed in Just Love is,
“With what kinds of motives, under what sorts of circumstances, in what
forms of relationships, do we render our sexual selves to one another
in ways that are good, true, right, and just?” Farley's answer rests on
the fundamental notion that morally appropriate sexual relationships,
heterosexual as well as same-sex, must be characterized by justice.
“It's
an important message in light of all the confusion surrounding
sexuality today,” said Susan Garrett, a professor at Louisville
Presbyterian Theological Seminary, in a Dec. 6 announcement from the
seminary. Garrett, who directs the award program, added, “The religious
right issues stark decrees while the entertainment industry tells us
‘anything goes.' People are confused about what's right.”
For Farley, “just love” requires consideration for the autonomy of persons, recognizes the uniqueness and equality of partners, and does no harm to self or others. Individual differences should be respected, but each individual must be treated as having unconditional value. In the book, Farley uses that framework to challenge traditional— and frequently negative—views of homosexuality, masturbation, divorce, and remarriage after divorce.
“As a Catholic ethicist,” Attridge said, “Farley grounds her analysis in Christian theology and tradition. But she underscores the importance of enlisting the best information available—across a broad range of intellectual fields and religious/cultural traditions—to examine this complex aspect of life that is so connected to feelings of meaning and purpose.”
Indeed, in Just Love Farley declares, “In sexual ethics, the relevant disciplines will include not only philosophy but biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and even history, literature, and art. . . Insofar as these disciplines give us a kind of ‘access' to reality – to the world and the universe, to human persons and the meanings of sexuality, to tragic or beneficial consequences of action – they are necessary for the doing of sexual ethics.”
Reviews of Just Love praised it as a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions of topics so difficult that they threaten the unity of the church. Writing in The Christian Century magazine, William C. Placher said, “Margaret Farley has the guts and the clarity of mind to give us a third alternative to ‘narrowly constituted moral systems and rules' on the one hand and sexual chaos on the other.” And Dolores L. Christie, in Catholic Books Review , wrote, “No topic more than sexuality needs to be treated in a dispassionate manner . . . Farley has, in her usual fashion, covered the topic with impeccable scholarship, practical wisdom, and a compassion and acceptance for the existential reality of human beings in a sexual world.”
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Pagans & Christians, Rejoice!
First Dec. 25 Xmas Tied to Pagan Shrine
ROME (AP) -- The church where the tradition of celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25 may have begun was built near a pagan shrine as part of an effort to spread Christianity, a leading Italian scholar says.
Italian archaeologists last month unveiled an underground grotto that they believe ancient Romans revered as the place where a wolf nursed Rome's legendary founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus.
A few feet from the grotto, or ''Lupercale,'' the Emperor Constantine built the Basilica of St. Anastasia, where some believe Christmas was first celebrated on Dec. 25.
Constantine ended the frequent waves of anti-Christian persecutions in the Roman empire by making Christianity a lawful religion in 313. He played a key role in unifying the beliefs and practices of the early followers of Jesus.
In 325, he convened the Council of Nicaea, which fixed the dates of important Christian festivals. It opted to mark Christmas, then celebrated at varying dates, on Dec. 25 to coincide with the Roman festival celebrating the birth of the sun god, Andrea Carandini, a professor of archaeology at Rome's La Sapienza University, told reporters Friday.
The Basilica of St. Anastasia was built as soon as a year after the Nicaean Council. It probably was where Christmas was first marked on Dec. 25, part of broader efforts to link pagan practices to Christian celebrations in the early days of the new religion, Carandini said.
''The church was built to Christianize these pagan places of worship,'' he said. ''It was normal to put a church near these places to try to 'save' them.''
Rome's archaeological superintendent Angelo Bottini, who did not take part in Carandini's research, said that hypothesis was ''evocative and coherent'' and ''helps us understand the mechanisms of the passage from paganism to Christianity.''
Bottini and Carandini both said future digs could bolster the link between the shrine and the church if structures belonging to the ''Lupercale'' are found directly below the basilica.
The Basilica St. Anastasia was the first church to rise not on the ancient city's outskirts, but on the Palatine Hill, the palatial center of power and religion in imperial Rome, Carandini said. Though little known today, at the time of Constantine it was one of the most important basilicas for Christians in Rome, he said.
The ''Lupercale'' shrine -- named after the ''lupa,'' Latin for she-wolf -- is 52 feet below ground. So far, archaeologists have only been able to see it by inserting probes and cameras that have revealed a vaulted ceiling decorated with colored marble and a white imperial eagle.
Though some experts have expressed doubts that the grotto is in fact the mythological nursery of Romulus and Remus, most archaeologists believe the shrine fits the descriptions found in ancient texts, and plans are being drawn up to excavate the structure further.
Recent Posts
Categories
Monthly Archive
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
