Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Because it's summer . . .
Thursday, June 3, 2010
More on repentance
Steve's post on "repentance", and the insightful thoughts of Susan Guthrie to which he linked, came to mind when I read this article about the State of Minnesota's recent resolution apologizing to Minnesotans with mental and developmental disabilities for their past treatment by the State -- forced sterilizations and lobotomies, forced labor, and institutionalization. It took 13 years of advocacy by a disability rights organization to get this apology passed. It finally passed only after a section "devoted to the practices of physicians and medical professionals was removed." And when Governor Pawlenty signed it, he accompanied it with an explanatory letter in which he said, "However, it is important to note this resolution also negatively paints with a very broad brush the actions of State employees who, in most cases, took actions based in good faith and the scientific understanding at that time." That qualification was apparently in response to concerns raised by the leadership of state employee unions that any admission of wrongdoing might open the door to state accountability for this behavior.
This struck me as a rather sad example the way in which fear (of lawsuits) pervades our culture, affecting our willingness to apologize, to ask for forgiveness, in a manner that displays true regret and sincere repentance.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
The Glory of Poland
Roger Cohen has a wonderful op-ed piece in the New York Times, The Glory of Poland, for those of us trying to make sense out of the recent death of 95 of Polish's top leaders on their way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the intentional slaughter of the cream of Poland's intelligentsia at Katyn Forest. He emphasizes Poland's extraordinary history of reconciliation with the nations that destroyed it again and again in its history -- Germany and, most recently, Russia. The reason so many of Poland's top government officials were on this plane was Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's decision to join the ceremonies. Cohen writes:
Cohen ends:
For scarcely any nation has suffered since 1939 as Poland, carved up by the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, transformed by the Nazis into the epicenter of their program to annihilate European Jewry, land of Auschwitz and Majdanek, killing field for millions of Christian Poles and millions of Polish Jews, brave home to the Warsaw Uprising, Soviet pawn, lonely Solidarity-led leader of post-Yalta Europe’s fight for freedom, a place where, as one of its great poets, Wislawa Szymborska, wrote, “History counts its skeletons in round numbers” — 20,000 of them at Katyn.
It is this Poland that is now at peace with its neighbors and stable. It is this Poland that has joined Germany in the European Union. It is this Poland that has just seen the very symbols of its tumultuous history (including the Gdansk dock worker Anna Walentynowicz and former president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski) go down in a Soviet-made jet and responded with dignity, according to the rule of law.
So do not tell me that cruel history cannot be overcome. Do not tell me that Israelis and Palestinians can never make peace. Do not tell me that the people in the streets of Bangkok and Bishkek and Tehran dream in vain of freedom and democracy. Do not tell me that lies can stand forever.
Ask the Poles. They know.
For all the Poles out there, if you haven't listen to their national anthem in a while -- such a sprightly, hopeful tune, and such tragic words, here it is (with English subtitles).
Friday, February 19, 2010
Nothing About Us Without Us
A fundamental tenet of the contemporary disability rights platform is "self-advocacy" -- letting people with disabilities speak for themselves, rather than having others speak for them. (This is nicely captured in the slogan: "Nothing About Us Without Us.") In that vein, here is what Andrea Fay Friedman, the voice actress who portrayed the character with Down Syndrome in the controversial Family Guy episode has to say. A very interesting interview (HT Michael Perry). (And the interview DOES tie all of this nicely to Catholic Legal Theory, because she reveals that she works at a law firm.)
UPDATE: I was trying to link to the same article Bob Hockett identifies in the post above, but somehow messed up the link. I tried to fix it twice, and it's still not working for me. So use the link in Bob's post. It's well worth it!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Maybe the Family Guy's just taking its Cue from our Leaders?
From Family Guy to our government leaders, there seems to be no shortage of support for the discouraged conclusion of a mom who recently wrote a touching essay in the Globe & Mail: ". . . intellectual disabilities or developmental delays or mental differences are the last stance for discrimination."
Monday, February 15, 2010
John Allen and Expanding Lay Roles
This post continues our discussion of John Allen’s top ten trends revolutionizing the Church. (See these links for the first, second, third, and fourth trends.) The fifth trend that he identifies is one in which most of us MOJ bloggers and readers are participating – the expanding role of the laity in the Church. Allen starts by justifying labeling lay activism as a “trend”, given that lay activism has always been a part of the Church’s history, from its earliest days of the house churches of Rome. The Second Vatican Council’s challenge to the clericalism that increasingly marked the Church in the intervening centuries has led to what Allen identifies as the current “trend”: “That the laity are emerging as protagonists both inside and outside the Church. Internally, laypeople are occupying ministerial and administrative positions once held almost exclusively by priests. Externally, laypeople are taking it upon themselves to evangelize culture and to act on Catholic social teaching. It’s the one-two punch, lay ministers inside the Church and lay activists on the outside, that constitutes the trend.”
Allen attributes the expansion of lay activism as being so ubiquitous as to be almost unremarkable, encompassing everything from organized movements such as Focolare and Sant’Edigio, to the informal, grassroots leadership being provided by ‘lay pundits’ and ‘bloggers’ – that’s us! Among the forces driving this expansion are practical forces, such as priest shortages creating gaps in pastoral care that have been filled by laity, and theological developments, namely, contemporary theological understandings of the role of the lay apostolate articulated at the Second Vatican Council in documents like Aposticam Actuositatem (“The lay apostolate is a share in the Church’s mission of salvation.”).
The most visible sign of the expanding lay roles is the explosion of organized lay movements. Allen describes three of them as representative of the wide range of outlooks and activities represented by these movements: L’Arche, consisting of small communities of friendship between people with disabilities and people without, creating “little places . . . where love is possible”; Focolare, (about which Amy can – and I hope will – say much more than either Allen or me) focusing on ecumenism and interreligious dialogue and sponsoring a network of businesses adhering to the “Economy of Communion”, with 4.5 million adherents over 182 countries living different levels of affiliation to the movement ; and the Community of Sant’Egidio, the “UN of Trastevere”, focusing on international conflict resolution.
Equally dramatic is the growth in lay ecclesial ministry. Allen documents the growing imbalance between lay ministers and priests in the U.S. Between 1990 and today, the number ecclesial lay ministers working in Catholic parishes grew by 9,000; the number of Catholic priests, diocesan and religious, decreased by almost 6,000. There are currently more than 20,000 people in the U.S. in programs of formation to become lay ecclesial ministers, roughly six times the number of graduate-level seminarians. The same trend can be documented in Europe. While it’s more difficult to document the growth of lay ministry in the rest of the world, Allen suggests the same imbalance is present, and growing, globally.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Applying Subsidiarity to the Regulation of Consumer Credit
I've just posted a paper I presented at the Journal of Law & Religion's fall symposium on The Global Economic Crisis, Law and the Religious Traditions, entitled:
The Paradox of the Global and the Local in the Financial Crisis of 2008: Applying the Lessons of Caritas in Veritate to the Regulation of Consumer Credit in the United States and the European Union. It's a case study in the application of subsidiarity to debates about the regulation of consumer credit in the United States and the European Union, through the lens of Pope Benedict's Caritas in Veritate. I'd be most grateful for any feedback. Here's the abstract:
In one sense, the question of whether a global or a local response is most appropriate is largely academic, since there is no global authority with the power to implement any response. But on a smaller scale, this question is the subject of active debate in two significant political arenas – the U.S. and the E.U. In the U.S., the battle over whether consumer credit should be regulated on the local (state) level or on the federal level has been raging in banking circles and federal courts for years. Proposals to tinker with the balance of federal and state authority over consumer credit laws are part of every version of financial reform legislation currently under consideration in Congress. This same question is also being raised in the E.U., which is currently considering a European directive on consumer rights that would diminish the authority of national governments to regulate consumer credit locally, while increasing the authority of the E.U. to impose uniform standards across member states.
In Caritas, Pope Benedict portrays the current global economic crisis as a crisis of world development. He argues that the globalization of the world economy leading to the current crisis has exposed inadequacies in our views of the authority of existing political structures and the authority of the market. Our conception of the state as an institution capable of fostering human development is flawed because the authority of states ends at their borders, while markets cross borders. Our conception of the market as an institution capable of fostering human development is flawed because it does not incorporate the essential insights of the principle of gratuitousness – the internalization of solidarity and mutual trust necessary for the human subjects of market transactions to be recognized as members of the same human community. Our current views of the structures of political and economic authority are flawed because they are rigidly, but unrealistically, dualistic. They fail to acknowledge the multiplicity of values at stake in the various spheres of human activity. Benedict thus concludes that both political and economic authority has to be articulated. There will be different levels at which governmental and market forces can most effectively act to protect the different values at stake.
This article first describes how the tension between a local or a nonlocal approach plays out in the debates about the appropriate regulatory scheme for consumer credit in the U.S. and the E.U. In both jurisdictions, the primary motivation for the increasingly predominant uniform, nonlocal approach has been economic efficiency. Next, the article explores Pope Benedict’s arguments in Caritas for why only an articulated response to the root causes of the global economic crisis protects the multiplicity of values required to achieve an authentically humane global economy. Finally, it applies Pope Benedict’s general framework to the debates in the U.S. and the E.U. It concludes that, while this framework does not reject entirely the value of economic efficiency that supports some uniform nonlocal regulation, it also counsels for the preservation of the possibility of some differentiated, inefficient, local regulation of consumer credit. The most effective regulatory responses to the current crisis, therefore, will be those that support an ongoing dynamic balancing of the competing claims of local and nonlocal interests.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Pope Picks OUR Mirror as 2010 Lenten Theme!
(Did that National-Enquiresque headline grab you?)
Lent begins Feb. 17, and Pope Benedict is inviting us spend some time during Lent to reflect on "the great theme of justice." His message for Lent on that theme is available here. An excerpt:
Strengthened by this very experience, the Christian is moved to contribute to creating just societies, where all receive what is necessary to live according to the dignity proper to the human person and where justice is enlivened by love.
Frontiers of Informed Consent -- Communicating with Patients in PVS
Fascinating new evidence of significant brain activity in patients thought to be in a persistent vegetative state, coming from the University of Liege, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. Brain scans of some patients thought to be in that state showed that the patients were, when questioned by the researchers, able to imagine themselves playing tennis, walking through rooms in their own homes, and even answer detailed yes-or-no questions about his life before the accident that put him in that state. The NYT report of it quotes Dr. Joseph J. Fins, chief of the medical ethics division at Weill Cornell Medical College in NY, discussing new ethical challenges raised by this possibility of communicating with people in this state: "If you ask a patient whether he or she wants to live or die, and the answer is die, would you be convinced that that that answer is sufficient?"
Another commentator, Dr. Allan Ropper, worries: "It will now be difficult for physicians to tell families confidently that their unresponsive loved ones are not 'in there somewhere.'"
It seems to me that the Church has been suggesting this very thing all along -- it SHOULD be difficult for physicians to say this confidently to anyone.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Interesting Defense of the Tebow Ad
Kate Michelman, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for Choice, published an interesting defense of the Tebow ad in the Washington Post, analyzing it as an example of how effective the pro-life movement has been in changing people's mind about abortion.They conceded that: "Today, all sorts of well-educated and progressive people are comfortable calling themselves pro-life. [editorial comment: Imagine that!!] In the public eye, the term seems to encompass a broader and more moderate vision, not focused solely on what it opposes."
Among the reasons they give for this shift in public opinion are scientific advances giving everyone visual evidence of early fetal development and making fetal surgery possible, and Congressional action:
The main focus of the article, though, is the effectiveness of the rhetoric of the advocacy messages of groups like one of my favorites, Feminists for Life. Michelman and Kissling explain:
Now, I don't think FFL really takes a position on eating meat or killing whales, but it certainly has done yeoman's work in saving babies and supporting mothers!
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