Wilfred McClay takes issue with the suggestion that there is a "party of death" at work in America, rather than a party "in love with . . . a shortsighted and impoverished vision of life: the dream of complete and unconstrained personal mastery, of the indomitable human will exercised on the inert and malleable stuff of nature by the heroically autonomous and unconditioned individual who is ever the master of his fate and captain of his soul, and whose own existence is, or deserves to be, infinitely extensible." One obvious symptom of this mindset is, according to McClay, our reliance on rights talk, which "does not necessarily give rise to responsibility-talk. Sometimes it may have the opposite effect, in luring us into a false sense that we have fulfilled all righteousness merely by dutifully observing the rights of others."
Much less eloquently, I try to press a related point in this Christianity Todayarticle, appearing as part of the magazine's coverage of the controversy over pharmacists' claimed rights of conscience.
As we gear up for another semester of loving the law, I want to commend to the wider world three very helpful books that I read this summer. In the first, Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism?, James Smith, a philosophy prof at Calvin College, explains why Christians should not presume that postmodern thought is a threat to the faith. By way of (woefully) cursory summary, he argues that:
Derrida's insight that there is "nothing outside the text" should push us to "recover two key emphases of the church: (a) the centrality of Scripture for mediating our understanding of the world as a whole and (b) the role of community in the interpretation of Scripture."
Lyotard's assertion that postmodernity is "incredulity toward metanarratives" is "ultimately a claim to be affirmed by the church, pushing us to recover (a) the narrative character of Christian faith, rather than understanding it as a collection of ideas, and (b) the confessional nature of our narrative and the way in which we find ourselvesin a world of competing narratives."
Foucault's claim that "power is knowledge" should "push us to realize . . . (a) the cultural power of formation and discipline, and hence (b) the necessity of the church to enact counterformation by counterdisciplines. In other words, we need to think about discipline as a creational structure that needs proper direction. Foucault has something to tell us about what it means to be a disciple."
Smith, writing as an evangelical, concludes that postmodern theology will be "much more hospitable to both dogmatic theology and the institutional church," and that the postmodern church "must be radically incarnational," affirming the incarnation's scandalous "particularlity with respect to both space and time." This requires, in turn, "a healthy sense of being constituted by our traditions as we look forward to an eschatological hope in the future."
A fascinating read, due in part to the fact that the postmodern evangelical church, as prescribed by Smith, looks quite Catholic.
Ross Douthat asserts that liberals tend to be peacetime utilitarians (e.g., stem cell research) and conservatives tend to be wartime utilitarians (e.g., torture), then makes an interesting observation as to why we seem doomed to utilitarianism:
This reality, I think, offers the umpteenth example of why the Victorian project (which persists to this day) of doing away with Christian dogma but trying to keep Christian morality intact is doomed to failure. Not because Christian morality can’t be approached rationally by nonbelievers of good will, but because without the lived experience of a religious tradition it will never be anything more than an abstraction, an arid intellectualism, something that gets followed when following it is easy to follow and abandoned as soon as the going gets tough.
Heather MacDonald's criticism of conservatism's religious rhetoric has triggered quite a response: Michael Novak here, Joe Knippenberg here, Andrew Sullivan here, and Ramesh Ponnuru here.
Heather MacDonald laments conservatism's reliance on religious rhetoric (HT: Volokh):
The presumption of religious belief -- not to mention the contradictory thinking that so often accompanies it -- does damage to conservatism by resting its claims on revealed truth. But on such truth there can be no agreement without faith. And a lot of us do not have such faith -- nor do we need it to be conservative.
What does Catholic legal theory have to say about this?
Three quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White's seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices, according to a poll on pop culture released on Monday.
I'd like to offer a couple of brief comments in response to Dave Harris's observation that the Catholic legal theory project seems "confusing and unproductive at best." I have to acknowledge that, to a certain extent, I agree with Mr. Harris. As I've expressed before, sometimes I fear that our debates mirror the conservative-liberal policy arguments taking place everywhere else, only we dress up our reasons with labels from Catholic social thought.
In my less jaded moments, though, I think we're engaged in important work. Gerald Russello articulated some of the reasons why, and I'll just provide a brief supplement. First, though most liberal theorists participating in our public discourse won't find references to "human dignity" or the "common good" to be especially new or insightful, Catholic legal theory expands the discourse by analyzing our temporal reality through the lens offered by the conviction that our temporal reality is not all that there is. We do not start from the premise that we exist, we start from the premise that we are created. That's a key distinction, and though its implications often will correlate with existing positions on the political spectrum, it should give rise to a normative framework that is not easily replicated by any single strand of thought within our public discourse.
Second, I''m becoming more convinced that CLT's primary value lies not in its revelatory power for the wider world, but in its articulation of the link between faith in Christ and our stance toward the surrounding legal and political cultures. St. Peter asked, "What kind of people ought you to be?" (2 Peter 3:11) That's the basic question we're asking ourselves as lawyers, teachers, and citizens. If my conclusions are entirely unoriginal, so be it. What matters is not that the lived expression of my faith is meaningfully different from the political prescriptions of libertarians, value pluralists, or communitarians; what matters is the impetus for my expression: devotion to Christ.
Grant Gallicho points out that, over at the First Things blog, Stephen Webb (a conservative) has offered a bright-line definition of liberals. I find the definition astounding, not because of what it says about liberals, but because of what it implies about conservatives. He writes: "You know you are a liberal if you think that the poor need money more than they need moral discipline."
If Mr. Webb is making an empirical statement that poor people lack moral discipline more than they lack money, that's not far from coming right out and asserting a causal relationship: poor people are poor because they lack moral discipline. If he is making the less astounding claim that, within the subset of poor people who lack both moral discipline and money, it is wrong to focus on the latter to the exclusion of the former, I can go along with that (without, of course, conceding that the definition is more than a caricature of liberals).
Commonwealweighs in on philosopher (and former Clinton aide) William Galston's critique of the Democratic Party:
Are Democratic Party leaders listening to Galston and others who warn about the Democrats’ deep-seated “religion problem”? So far the signs are not promising. When fifty-five Catholic Democrats in the House released a “Statement of Principles” last February, the careful parsing of their position on abortion was particularly disappointing. Galston reports that his own efforts to moderate his party’s abortion-on-demand policy have been met with vociferous resistance. Still, prolife Democratic candidates have received the party’s backing in important Senate and gubernatorial races for this fall. One thing is certain, the voters the Democrats need are waiting for the party to prove it is as open-minded and liberal about religion as it prides itself in being on other issues.
If you're looking for a helpful example of how followers of Christ in positions of public leadership can engage the secular legal culture constructively, don't read this.
