By contributing to water's privatization, does drinking bottled water ignore our obligation to practice solidarity with the poor?
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
The Sin of Aquafina
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Harvard and Benedict in the Dock
It's not often that Pope Benedict and Harvard University stand accused as accomplices in a scheme to overemphasize the importance of faith to reason. This op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education does so, focusing on the Pope's Regensburg speech and Harvard's (now abandoned) proposal to include religion in the core curriculum. Here's an excerpt:
Of course one may attempt to apply reason to the study of faith, as the pope remarked. Because of my own efforts to defend science against religious attacks, I have had the opportunity recently to learn a tremendous amount from distinguished theologians. For example, I find fascinating the intellectual machinations that the Roman Catholic Church has used to accept historical facts associated with the evolution of life and, at the same time, to insist that the facts are consistent with a divine plan and free will.
But such analyses are esoteric at best. Why should college students or the religious faithful be held accountable for connecting reason and faith when reason is as irrelevant to the experience of religious faith as it is to, say, romantic love? As the French have known since Blaise Pascal's day, nearly four centuries ago, "the heart has its reasons which reason does not know."
It is true that religious faith has profoundly affected human history, and that students need to understand the role of religion in both the past and the present — for example, its impact on current American politics. But if Harvard feels that its graduates need such knowledge, should the university not expect them to get it through required courses in world or American history?
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, voiced similar concerns in The Harvard Crimson shortly after the Task Force on General Education released its report. Religious faith may have been a powerful historical force, but, Pinker argues, "so are nationalism, ethnicity, socialism, markets, nepotism, class, and globalization. Why single religion out among all the major forces in history? ... For us to magnify the significance of religion as a topic equivalent in scope to all of science, all of culture, or all of world history and current affairs, is to give it far too much prominence. It is an American anachronism."
Friday, January 5, 2007
Return from Realism
Should Catholic legal theorists swim against the academy's realist current by approaching jurisprudence as legal formalists? (Consider the recent embrace of formalism by Brian Tamanaha and Larry Solum.) Here's the tension: the proper ends of law from the Catholic perspective -- e.g., respect for life, economic justice, privileging of the traditional family form -- can easily give rise to an instrumentalist approach to adjudication, whereas legal formalism may be less adept at getting to the preferred outcome on a given issue, particulary if the preferred outcome is not preferred by enough voters to bring about legislative action. Legal formalists see judges as umpires, and legal realists see judges as lawmakers. Are Catholics comfortable with judges as umpires?
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Empirical Support for the Natural Law?
Penn law prof Paul Robinson, Penn psychology prof Robert Kurzban, and Vanderbilt law/biology prof Owen Jones have posted their paper, The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice. Here is an excerpt from the abstract:
Contrary to the common wisdom among criminal law scholars, the empirical evidence reveals that people's intuitions of justice are often specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself - physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions - the shared intuitions are stunningly consistent, across cultures as well as demographics. It is puzzling that judgments of moral blameworthiness, which seem so complex and subjective, reflect such a remarkable consensus. What could explain this striking result?
The authors theorize that one explanation may be an evolved predisposition toward these shared intuitions of justice, arising from the advantages that they provided, including stability, predictability, and the facilitation of beneficial exchange - the cornerstones to cooperative action and its accompanying survival benefits. Recent studies in animal behavior and brain science are consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that moral judgment-making not only has biological underpinnings, but also reflects the effects of evolutionary processes on the distinctly human mind. Similarly, the child development literature reveals predictable stages in the development of moral judgment within each individual, from infant through adult, that are universal across all demographics and cultures.
Or do the shared intuitions suggest a common author? Is this evidence of the law written on our hearts?
Kudos to Shiffrin
MoJ-er Steve Shiffrin will be honored in February at a gathering of legal luminaries including Nadine Strossen, Eugene Volokh, Robert Post, Martin Redish, Kathleen Sullivan, Erwin Chemerinsky, and Charles Fried. Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) is hosting a conference titled Commercial Speech: Past, Present & Future, A Tribute to Steven Shiffrin.
Prison Decision Fallout
David Opderbeck wonders whether groups like the Family Research Council and the Becket Fund are overreaching in their doomsday portrayal of the recent federal court decision holding Prison Fellowship's Innerchange Initiative unconstitutional.
Are lawyers intellectuals (or just smart)?
Reflecting on the Volokh Conspiracy's discussion of whether science fiction qualifies as literature, Joseph Bottum wonders whether lawyers qualify as intellectuals.
Friday, December 22, 2006
The Santa Question
Even on a sleepy pre-Christmas Friday afternoon, the Santa question can stir thoughtful responses. Thanks to J. Peter Nixon for forwarding me his own post on the subject from three years ago. Here's an excerpt:
Nor am I convinced that children finding out the “truth” about Santa is a serious threat to their faith. At some point my children are going to learn about the questionable historicity of certain elements of the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew. Will learning that the two accounts disagree about whether the angel appeared to Mary or Joseph shake their faith? Will learning that the scriptures never depict the shepherds and the magi under the same roof shatter them? Should I keep the crèche under wraps next year?
I actually think that believing in Santa is good practice for living a life of faith. One begins with naïve, uncritical belief: Santa is a flesh and blood person who lives at the North Pole and who flies around the world on Christmas Eve giving presents to five billion people. Eventually, though, such a belief becomes untenable. We then face a choice. We can walk away in anger at having been deceived about what “really happens” at Christmas. Or, we can recognize that the Santa myth embodies deeper truths about ourselves, about God, and about the meaning of Christmas that are best expressed through the stories and rituals associated with that myth.
Believing in Santa Claus, like believing in God, is an act of the imagination. It cultivates our faculties of wonder, awe, and trust. Anyone who believes that these faculties are somehow ancillary to the transmission of faith is dangerously naïve. My children believe in any number of things that do not exist--dragons, superheroes, talking animals, invisible friends. Their world is gloriously full of the supernatural, and I relish watching them live in it. For I know from personal experience that the mind that has stretched itself in imagination will never be able to accept that the visible, measurable, quantifiable world is all that “really exists.”
I guess I don't have much of a problem with my kids believing in something and then naturally coming to realize that it's not true. But I start having a problem if I actively promote their misdirected belief. I do not point out the historical inaccuracy of the manger scene depicting the magi with the shepherds, but last week when my daughter asked me when the magi arrived at the manger, I pointed out that they arrived much later. I will provide presents "from Santa" and facilitate the possibility of Santa's reality, but if my daughter asks point blank, "Is Santa real?," I will not say yes. (So far I've gotten away with "what do you think?") My discomfort is not with the belief in make-believe, but with my abuse of their trust that I will not steer them into falsehood once they've grown skeptical.
And Karen Heinig points out that:
[A]n active Christian faith isn't just a whimsical decision to believe, it's experiencing God's love and forgiveness in one's life. Something that can't just be written off as being made up by "some guy". It is this real encounter with God that we ought to model and encourage for our children, not merely apologetics.
Amen. But this might be where my own baggage comes in. I'm a believer who has always been strong on apologetics, but fairly flimsy on experience. Not that I don't experience God, but I don't experience God in the unshakeable, faith-affirming way that some of my friends do. For them, the cognitive dissonance of truth uncovered as falsehood may not be that jolting because the foundation is personal experience. For me, both now and when I was a child, experience did not take me all that far on the path toward belief. My struggle with truth was the core of my faith journey, and that struggle required me to distinguish the Christian story from fairy tales. I appreciate the imagination-bolstering power of myth, but I am reluctant to put my own credibility on the line once the project aims to confuse my children's power of discernment. For the time being, though, Santa is coming, and the magic of belief will hold sway at least for another year.
Human Nature, the Transcendent, and Truth (and the Seasonal Tolerance for Untruth)
I believe that humans are hard-wired to believe in a reality beyond the material world, and that this belief is most clearly evident in children. So when we facilitate our children's belief in Santa (or the tooth fairy), are we supporting a healthy exercise of their capacity to believe in the unseen, or are we unhealthily fostering confusion between reality and make-believe? In my house, we try to proceed carefully, not dispelling our daughters' belief prematurely but also not propping it up after they begin to show skepticism. Last night my 6 year-old was quizzing me about the tooth fairy (she has been a frequent visitor lately), then related that one of her classmates told her that "Jesus and God aren't real -- they were just made up by some guy." (In first grade!) At that moment, my instinct was to pull back the curtain on Santa and the tooth fairy, then have a long talk about the historical reliability of the New Testament documents. Thankfully, I remembered not to drop my own baggage on my 6 year-old, so I gently affirmed the reality of God and Jesus but did not attempt to disprove her other objects of faith.
But my question remains: do we strengthen or diminish our children's inclination toward faith when we prop up society's portrayal of make-believe as reality? Our society is more than willing to lump Jesus in with Santa and the tooth fairy, and if we want to avoid that categorization, shouldn't we be drawing the boundaries now?
Remembering Evil
Miroslav Volf has a beautiful essay on forgiveness and memory in the current Christian Century. Here's an excerpt:
In a prayer on behalf of the survivors of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel writes: "Oh, they [the survivors] do not forgive the killers and their accomplices, nor should they. Nor should you, Master of the Universe. But they no longer look at every passer-by with suspicion. Nor do they see a dagger in every hand. Does this mean that the wounds in their soul have healed? They will never heal. As long as a spark of the flames of Auschwitz and Treblinka glows in their memory, so long will my joy be incomplete."
Christian readers should not stumble over the first lines of this prayer and thus miss the import of its last sentence. For Wiesel's request for the Master of the Universe not to forgive killers and their accomplices echoes the psalmist's request that the sins of "wicked and deceitful men" may "always remain before the Lord" (109:15). Wiesel is a modern-day psalmist, not a follower of the Christ whose forgiveness knows no bounds.
But the last line of the prayer makes a point on which the followers of Christ will agree with Wiesel: Remembering horrendous evils and experiencing joy, especially joy in one another, are irreconcilable. A world to come that keeps alive the memory of all wrongdoings suffered—and not just of horrendous evils—would be not a place of uplifted radiant faces but one of eyes downcast in shame, not a place of delight in one another but a place enveloped in the mist of profound sadness. For Wiesel, the unforgiving and never-to-be-forgotten memory of the flames of Auschwitz precludes the experience of pure felicity. So it would be for everyone who remembered the wrongs of history truthfully and whose heart had not grown hard.
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