The community here is still reeling from Wednesday's bridge collapse. We're grateful for the miraculously low number of fatalities and the courage displayed by those involved in the rescue and ongoing recovery efforts. As Rob's post noted, people seemed almost nonchalant about incredible feats of bravery. One young man interviewed on the local news who escaped the wreckage only to return and help others out of the rubble kept telling the reporter, "I just did what I was supposed to do."
Many of us here spent a good part of Wednesday evening and Thursday responding to phone calls and e-mails from family and friends all over the country checking up on us. Within the community, too, friends were calling, e-mailing, checking to make sure everyone they knew was safe. After a day of connecting with people over the collapse of a physical bridge, I was really struck last night by the metaphorical bridge referenced in a little introductory passage to Psalm 25 in Magnificat:
If the Lord rescues me from the snare of my faults, should I not extend the same hand of rescue to my neighbor? Resentment, grudges, retaliation do not help the one who offends me. They merely confirm the breach between us. Bridge-building is costly, as the cross demonstrates, but the people stranded on both banks are all freed by the bridge.
I'm heading into some August vacation time, and am starting to hunt for good summer reading suggestions. Any ideas? (Maybe in a bit lighter vein than Greg's summer reading, Inside the Third Reich....)
I've read a couple over the summer that I'd recommend (besides Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows which I thought was a beautiful ending to an extraordinary gift of the imagination to the world). One was for my "Church & the Biomedical Revolution" class. It's Joel Shuman & Brian Volck, Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine. They suggest that "modern medicine" has in some ways taken the place of faith for many people today. (An excerpt: "Indeed, much of what drives modern medicine is an admittedly noble concern to 'eliminate suffering' and increase the individual's control over his or her life. . . . That these claims sound so benign and noble -- so 'Christian,' in fact -- is, we think, a big part of the problem. By assuming medicine and Christianity are pursuing the same things -- which, coincidentally, happen to be things we want, such as health, the power to choose, and an able-bodied, painless death -- Christians transfer even more authority from their religious community to medicine, reinforcing one of the least-appreciated phenomena in Christianity since the Reformation -- the growing amnesia that Christinas can and should think, speak, and act differently than the rest of the world.") They suggest that Christians ought to "reclaim" the body in various ways -- including reclaiming an appreciation for the body as "a gift to accepted with confidence and gratitude, with all its limits and failings", and reclaiming the notion of the Christian community as a "gathered body" that ought to worship together in service and practice outside the confines of Sunday worship. They look at various issues of modern medical ethics -- reproductive technology, end-of-life issues, even cosmetic surgery, through this filter, with some very interesting results.
And speaking of living your life as though your faith really mattered, I'd like to put in another plug for a book that's already been mentioned here -- Rob's brother's story of the founding and floundering of Big Ideas, Inc., the company that created Veggie Tales. (Phil Vischer, Me, Myself & Bob.) I will confess that my interest is piqued by the fact that we have one very ardent Veggie Tales fan in our household. But I think anyone -- even a person who hasn't spent the last 11 years of her life with the sprightly tunes of Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber as the soundtrack of much of her home life -- could learn something from reading about Phil Vischer's struggles to build a Christian alternative to the Disney empire. How about this lesson for your Contracts classes: When the growing company needed to move into new quarters as they expanded, and Phil Vischer was tempted to play hardball with the old landlord to get out of his old lease contract, his lawyer asked him whether he really wanted to renege on this commitment. Turns out, when he thought about it, he decided he didn't -- he just paid the rest of the rent under the contract, as promised.
Finally, at the risk of sounding pretentious, the reading that I was assigned for one of my classes that I was most surprised to enjoy as much as I did (in fact, so much that I read way beyond the assignment & I fully intend to finish the whole book) was Dorothy Sayers' translation of Dante'sInferno . As I understand it, it's the only translation that preserves the original rhyming scheme. Though purists undoubtedly argue that this distorts some meaning, I think it's absolutely delightful. Our professor told us to read it out loud to ourselves, which was a wonderful suggestion. And Sayers provides just enough notes and background to help an unclassically-educated, post-Vatican II Catholic like me understand what's going on without breaking the flow of the poetry.
Anyone else read anything good so far this summer?
This recently-posted article suggests an interesting angle for the "CST and the City" conference, an aspect of the exploration of "how physical settings contibute . . . to strengthening the family as a social and spitual institution."
Baird Silbaugh, Katharine, "Women's Place: Urban Planning, Housing Design, and Work-Family Balance" . Fordham Law Review, Vol. 76, 2008.
Abstract: In the past decade a substantial literature has emerged analyzing the role of work-family conflict in hampering women's economic, social, and civil equality. Many of the issues we routinely discuss as work family balance problems have distinct spatial dimensions. 'Place' is by no means the main factor in work-family balance difficulties, but amongst work-family policy-makers it is perhaps the least appreciated. This article examines the role of urban planning and housing design in frustrating the effective balance of work and family responsibilities. Nothing in the literature on work-family balance reform addresses this aspect of the problem. That literature focuses instead on employer mandates and family law reforms. This article fills the gap by evaluating the effect of 'place' on work-family balance and the role law plays in creating our challenging geography. I argue that effective work-family balance requires attention to the spatial dimensions of the work-family conflict.
The study found that only 6.83% of the students in Catholic Schools had disabilities compared with the 11.4% of students in public schools. In addition, 87% of the dioceses reported that they were unable to enroll children with disabilities because they lacked the capacity to meet their special needs.
The study did discuss some of the problems that parents and Catholic schools encountered when trying to get children enrolled in Catholic schools their share of IDEA funds.
I'm travelling right now, and have only a very creaky internet connection making it very difficult to access the USCCB report. While I do have much sympathy for the budget constraints under which all schools, including Catholic schools, operate, I just find some of these budgetary arguments for not accepting kids with disabilities by Catholic schools less than compelling. The lack of federal funding for the IDEA mandate that I discussed in my last post means that these same constraints affect public schools, as well. Public schools have a federal mandate to find some way to accommodate kids with disabilities, anyway. Catholic schools don't have that federal mandate, it's true, but it seems to me they do operate under the mandate of an even higher authority. That authority tells us we parents are responsible for raising all the children we are given, no matter what sorts of disability they might have. Why doesn't that authority give the same message of joint responsibility to our parish communities?
In response to both Rob and Rick, let me start by conceding that this topic taps into a couple of my personally most deeply-felt frustrations over unfairnesses in the world that I just have no idea how to address. So I'm not sure I'm an especially good debate partner on this -- I'm not very objective and I haven't yet figured out for myself what I think the solutions might be.
My post conflated two different sources of that frustration. First is the unfairness of the inequities in our public school systems. Kids with special needs just bear the heaviest brunt of that unfairness. IDEA is one of the largest unfunded mandates that the federal government has ever imposed. When IDEA was passed in 1975 it was supposed to be funded 40% by the federal government. I think the highest amount of federal funding that it's ever gotten was 20%, and it's a struggle every year to get even that much. That leaves local school districts with special ed budgets that are growing every year. The inner-city schools that have the fewest resources generally obviously have the fewest resources for their kids with special needs, too. And their parents have the fewest alternatives for placing their kids in more appropriate settings, because private schools are NOT obliged to take kids with special needs; IDEA doesn't apply to them.
The kids with special needs living in really poor, urban school districts are burdened with the consequences of their poverty in a particulary dramatic way, because they really have no options. Their parents don't have the luxury of moving to suburban districts with more generous programs. The private schools that might provide scholarships to some lower-income kids don't have to take kids with special needs.
Which brings me to my second sources of frustration -- the unwillingness of most Catholic schools in my experience (and based on truly LOTS of anectodal evidence over the years from other parents) to voluntarily take students of kids with special needs. I actually incline more toward agreeing with Rick than Rob about the importance of Catholic schools, but not so much for what they do or do not do to immerse our own kids into a vibrant faith life from an early age, but rather in the (maybe naive) notion that Catholic schools might provide a great alternative to public schools in the poorer school districts. But they typically seem to choose NOT to embrace as part of their mission or community kids with special needs. And, no, Rob, I really don't think this is simply a question of resources -- it's so much more a question of will, imagination, and flexibility. School funding & special ed is really complicated & varies in different states, but in both the states where I have lived with a kid with special needs -- Indiana and Minnesota -- the school district continues to provide services like therapies & things, even to the kids in Catholic schools - you just have to find a way to transport the child to the public school facility to get those services. But if your Catholic school doesn't signal a willingness to reach out and engage in some dialogue about what accommodating your child might really entail, you'll never get a chance to explore those possibilities.
The refusal of a local parish to even seriously consider educating a child with special needs feels like a particular betrayal to Catholic parents with such kids. I never even tried to enroll my son with special needs in a local Catholic school, but I did experience that rejection (and the real feeling of betrayal that accompanied it) and a couple of different parishes in just trying to enroll him in the religious education programs. As a Catholic parent, you just assume that the one place you're not going to have to fight for your child is going to be your church. It really hits you hard in the gut when you realize you're going to have to have the same sorts of meetings with your parish priest that you've had with your local public school principals, just to remind them that your kids are just as much members of the parish, and thus the responsibility of the community, as all the other kids. It's enough to cause many parents to leave the Catholic church. The Protestant churches seem to be much better at really reaching out to people with disabilities than the Catholic church. I will admit to feeling my first-ever pangs of curiosity about whether I could leave my parish when I visited a Protestant mega-church in the area a few months ago, and on the racks in back of the church saw a glossy brochure about all the programs for people with disability offered by that Congregation.
OK, I can't help myself. I have a question for you Catholic urbanites. How many of you are sending your children to your local public shool? If you are, instead, sending your children to a local parochial or private school, what's the percentage of kids in those schools with special needs? Does it come close to approximating the percentage of the general population with special needs?
I'll bet some of your neighbors with school-aged children (OK, maybe not your immediate neighbors, but maybe neighbors four or five blocks away from you) do not feel quite as content with urban life, or feel quite as welcome in your urban Catholic parishes, as you do. The only Catholic school I've ever known to actually recruit kids with special needs (OK, well, maybe just one kid, the daughter of a friend of mine) is the school of my comfortably suburban parish.
If we're going to start talking about what kinds of parishes "feel" more Catholic to us than others, I think we're going to end up finding it very, very, hard to generalize.
Mark -- It might be interesting to include a (long range) historical perspective in your CST and the City conference, too. Maybe my perspective's warped a bit right now, because I'm still immersed in the Europe of late antiquity & the Middle Ages, but this came up in some class reading I'm doing this morning, from Christopher Dawson's Religion and the Rise of Western Culture:
The late Ernst Troeltsch, following Max Weber, went so far as to maintain that it was the medieval city which first provided the favourable conditions for a thorough-going Christianization of social life such as had existed neither in the city culutre of the ancient world, which was based on slavery, nor in the feudal agrarian society which had been built up so largely by the strong at the expense of the weak.
Dawson goes on to quote Troeltsch (from Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen):
The very condition of existence of the city as an essentially economic association is peace, the freedom and the common interest of all the citizens, together with freedom to work and the basing of property on personal effort and industry.
In all these respects the city corresponded to a great extent with the demands of Christian ethics. As a non-military peaceful community of work, using the military element only for its defence and still devoid of capitalistic urban features, the medieval city was a pattern of Christian society as we find it in Thomist theory.
It also seems to me that this would be a conference where an international perspective might be particularly interesting and important. The vast differences between what we as American Catholics experience as city life and what the inhabitants of cities such as Mexico City, Beijing, and Mumbai experience must have implications for CST.
Morereasons to be leery of pre-implantation genetic testing, from CNN:
An older woman's slim chances of getting pregnant could be made worse if embryos are screened for defects before being implanted into the womb, doctors said Wednesday.
Pregnancy and live birth rates were substantially lower among women whose embryos were screened compared with those whose were not, according to a study presented Wednesday at a Lyon, France, meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. . . .
In the study, also published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, Mastenbroek and colleagues were trying to determine the value of pre-genetic screening, a process that involves taking a single cell from a developing embryo to look for chromosomal defects that could lead to problems such as Down's syndrome. Doctors have generally thought selecting the most promising embryos will give older women a better chance of getting pregnant.
But some experts have expressed concern that fertility centers promote the genetic tests because they generate profit -- with a single test costing up to $5,000.
An MOJ reader shared the following comments about my recent post on the feminization of the lay ecclesial ministry. I think his arguments ought to apply equally to the "middle-aged women" running the Catholic Church who are mothers, though.
I am an alumn of Franciscan University of Steubenville, which turns out a disproportionate number of lay ecclesial ministers. Four of my male classmates found jobs in the Church upon graduation: two youth ministers, a high school teacher, and a parochial director of music and liturgy.
None of them were employed by the church thee years later, and interestingly enough, all have entered the traditional business world or law school. The economic and social implications both weighed heavily on their decisions. None felt confident that he could support his family on the salary offered by the Curch. At the same time, most reflected a significant impact of the large female employee majority in the parish office to the point where one even remarked, "The Catholic Church is run by middle-aged women."
I think the underlying problem is the tension inherent in the difference of the idea of fairness in the Church and in the American psyche. In the Church, a fair wage is what somebody needs to adequately support his or her family. Thus, ceterus paribus, a single man, and a married man with five children should receive different wages, since the familial supporter needs more to live. In the American culture, on the other hand, a fair wage means the same compensation for the same work. It doesn't matter if the person is a bachelor with an extravagent lifestyle or a father trying to send five kids to Catholic School, so long as both men perform the same task, they should be compensated identically. This is even taken to the extreme where the single man can work 60 hour weeks and not sacrifice other aspects of his life, where the married man struggles to work 40. Obviously, the single man will become more important to the company and receive promotions which, in turn, increase his salary even more.
I'm not arguing that the American ideal of fairness is bad, but simply that there are some unintended consequences resulting from it. It would be quite challenging for secular businesses to pay based on state in life when it is a much clearer system to pay according to benefit for the company. But regarding the Church, we would have to convince the Church secretary who has worked there for 10 years as a second income while her children are in school that she should get paid less than a person with no experience who has a family to support, so the income tends to be small, and women earning second incomes tend to remain in these types of jobs. Obviously, there are no easy solutions. I have heard of a couple of Catholic organizations who give raises along with the birth of a child to go along with this idea of a living wage, but it would be challenging to make this more prevalent.
John Allen 's latest column discussesthe "feminization of the Church", evidenced by statistics showing the overwhelming predominance of women in the growing ranks of the lay ecclesial ministry that is assuming a greater & greater role in parish life. He discusses the general discomfort with this trend, based on fears that too much "feminization" of the Church makes it less attractive to men. He also discusses the bind the Church finds itself in that keeps it from working too hard to attract more men to the lay ecclesial ministry to balance things out -- it doesn't want to siphon off men who might otherwise choose to become priests.
On men's "alienation" from church, Allen cites some recent books:
In that light, some recent writers have voiced concern that Christianity actually alienates men. David Murrow's Why Men Hate Going to Church (Nelson Books, 2004) and Leon J. Podles' The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity (Spence, 1999), illustrate the point. Murrow is a Presbyterian and Podles a Catholic, but both have noticed something similar about their respective denominations.
As Podles put it succinctly, "Women go to church, men go to football games."
I'd be interested from hearing from some of you men bloggers -- do you, in fact, feel your own churches are become "feminized" to the extent that the church experience is somehow alienating?
Allen ends with this interesting social justice challenge:
One final observation is worth making. If lay ecclesial ministry continues to be a largely female profession, church officials will want to pay close attention to its impact on salary levels.
A 2007 study by the AFL-CIO found that as job categories come to be dominated by women, the social prestige attached to the position declines, as do average wages. Employment categories in which women occupy 70 percent or more of the jobs, the study found, typically pay a third less than jobs that are similar in terms of the skills required and the nature of the work, but which are more likely to be held by men. The 25.6 million American women who work in these predominantly female jobs lose an average of $3,446 in income each per year, compared to holding a similar job which is less gender-defined. Since men typically earn more than women across the board, the four million men who work in predominately female occupations lose an average of $6,259 each per year. Together, this amounts to a whopping $114 billion loss for men and women in predominately female jobs in the United States.
For a church that supports a "just wage" in the broader society, making sure its own employees are not the object of gender-based discrimination in wages will be an on-going challenge.
