Thursday, June 30, 2005
On September 15th and 16th, the Yale Center for Faith and Culture is hosting a conference that will be of interest to MoJ readers, "Religiously Incorrect? Public Faith in a Pluralistic World." Participants include Yale law prof Stephen Carter, Boston University sociology prof Nancy Ammerman, Yale theology prof Miroslav Volf, Rev. Floyd Flake, Judge Emilio Garza (5th Cir.), Judge Robert Henry (10th Cir.), and Judge Joan Gottschall (N.D. Ill.).
Rob
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Today the Court ruled (5-4) that local governments may seize private property for private development as long as the development is in furtherance of a public purpose. Justice Stevens, for the majority, writes:
Those who govern the City were not confronted with the need to remove blight in the Fort Trumbull area, but their determination that the area was sufficiently distressed to justify a program of economic rejuvenation is entitled to our deference. The City has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including--but by no means limited to--new jobs and increased tax revenue. As with other exercises in urban planning and development, the City is endeavoring to coordinate a variety of commercial, residential, and recreational uses of land, with the hope that they will form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. To effectuate this plan, the City has invoked a state statute that specifically authorizes the use of eminent domain to promote economic development. Given the comprehensive character of the plan, the thorough deliberation that preceded its adoption, and the limited scope of our review, it is appropriate for us . . . to resolve the challenges of the individual owners, not on a piecemeal basis, but rather in light of the entire plan. Because that plan unquestionably serves a public purpose, the takings challenged here satisfy the public use requirement of the Fifth Amendment.
A stirring invocation of the common good by the majority, putting down individuals' attempts to sabotage the limited collective action needed to promote human flourishing.
On the other hand, Justice O'Connor, in dissent, writes:
Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded--i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public--in the process. To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings "for public use" is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property--and thereby effectively to delete the words "for public use" from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Ah, a stirring invocation of civil rights acting as a needed bulwark against the encroachments of collective power -- a position seemingly buttressed by subsidiarity.
From the perspective of Catholic legal theory, who's right?
Rob
As I noted yesterday, the relationship between Catholics and evangelicals is still evolving. Witness the Church's tepid response to this weekend's Billy Graham crusade in New York City. (HT: Open Book)
Rob
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
For those interested in the evolving relationship between evangelicals and Catholics, a new article by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, Is the Reformation Over? (derived from their forthcoming book of the same name), is a must-read. Of particular interest is their reporting on notable recent evangelical conversions to Catholicism, asking their subjects not just the reasons for their conversions, but what they lost along the way. BC philosophy prof Peter Kreeft is one example:
What does Kreeft feel he lost and gained? He gained an appreciation for the richness of God's mystery. Having come to think of Protestant theology as overly infected with Descartes' scientific view of reason, Kreeft learned to appreciate "wisdom rather than mere logical consistency, insight rather than mere calculation." He also learned to worship God through all of his senses, not merely the mouth and ears of Protestantism. Perhaps most important, he found himself swimming within the two-thousand-year stream of historical Christianity. But Kreeft also speaks of losses. He inherited from his evangelical roots a serious concern for truth that he finds sadly missing among many Catholics. For example, although he finds Catholic theology quite clear on the subject of justification by grace through faith, "well over 90 percent of the students I have polled … expect to go to Heaven because they tried, or did their best, or had compassionate feelings to everyone, or were sincere. They hardly ever mention Jesus." And he misses music. He remembers evangelical worship with "beautiful hymns, for which I would gladly exchange the new, flat, unmusical, wimpy 'liturgical responses' no one sings in our masses." Kreeft envisions a time when all of these losses will be redeemed. "I think in Heaven, Protestants will teach Catholics to sing and Catholics will teach Protestants to dance and sculpt."
As a former evangelical, I know the feeling. I'm consistently surprised by how quickly the sanctuary empties out after communion, how infrequently the homily diverts from the "do good to others" theme, and how most parishes I've found seem to think that spiritual formation and education stop in childhood. (I was pleased to find one parish with an "adult education" committee, only to learn that its only task was to make sure that the pamphlet racks in the back of the church were filled.) Indeed, even for the youngsters, there is much to be desired -- e.g., on a recent Sunday as we picked up our daughter from her "children's liturgy," we discovered the class watching this video. Couldn't quite make out the spiritual connection.
Then again, don't get me started on the pitfalls of an evangelical upbringing. In this regard, Noll and Nystrom remind us that:
evangelicals who remain highly critical of Catholic theology and practice have much to teach members of both traditions. Their persistence in criticism points to genuine weaknesses within Catholicism as well as to outdated prejudices. Both bodies can also become self-corrective as they listen to firsthand accounts of conversion.
Rob
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Thanks to Michael for uncovering the substitute resolution passed by the UCC, but I'm puzzled by the perceived need to propose a substitute. What is objectionable about the original resolution? The only thing I can decipher is its statement that "the Lordship and divinity of Jesus Christ" is not an optional doctrine for UCC members and pastors. But shouldn't one who joins a Christian community be required to believe that Jesus is Lord? What else can a Christian believe?
Perhaps the problem with the resolution is that those who proposed it are known to be "fundamentalists." This is a term that seems to be used with the same sort of pejorative abandon as "liberal" was back in the 1988 presidential campaign. Are they fundamentalists because they want to require members to believe that Jesus is Lord, or because they oppose gay marriage, or for some other reason? Gay marriage and the divinity of Christ seem to be readily separable issues. It strikes me that the original resolution was much less political than the substitute one; I'm wondering if the embrace of the substitute stemmed more from its implicit (and justified, in my view) repudiation of the Religious Right than from any doctrinal substance.
Rob
At the end of the article discussing Dean Rudenstine's speech, another law school dean adds his own incredible take on those religious zealots out there:
Dean Lawrence Raful of Long Island's Touro Law Center, affiliated with an Orthodox Jewish undergraduate program, doubted that strong religious belief promotes valid debate.
"What fundamentalist people don't understand is that if they take a stance based on religion, they're promoting a religious view," said Mr. Raful. "God created you to have an open mind. God gave us free will to understand science and belief at the same time, and He gave us some idea of how to live with the Ten Commandments, and then I think He said something to us like, 'Good luck.'"
I'm not even sure where to begin with this passage. I'm fairly certain that most "fundamentalist people" understand that their religion-based stances amount to "religious views." So what? Does Dean Raful assume that, once he's established their status as "religious views," they are disqualified from expression in the public / legal sphere? (See, e.g., Perry, et al.) And how exactly can he discount the public validity of the religious views espoused by those "fundamentalist people" by offering his own explicitly religious view? (i.e., that God just told us "Good luck" and is not actively involved in history)
As for the broader point raised by both Dean Raful and Dean Rudenstine -- that faith threatens legal discourse -- Steve Smith's "Hollow Men" thesis speaks to this better than I could. My own experience is that faith gives lawyers and law students a foundation for their belief in transcendent principles. I'm not saying that faith is required to create such a foundation, but I have found the foundation sorely lacking as I explore topics like ethics in the classroom. It seems a bit strange to penalize those who enter into legal discourse actually having an articulable reason for their belief in the principles on which the system depends.
Rob
Monday, June 20, 2005
Perhaps inspired by Dean Rudenstine's "keep faith out of the law schools" lecture, Mario Cuomo has jumped into the stem cell debate with his "keep faith out of the law" solution. It's a fairly simple plan:
the president should start by following the successful pattern established in other areas of dealing with the clash of religious and political questions, including the law concerning abortion. The right of true believers to live by their own religious beliefs will be guaranteed: no one will be compelled to use stem cell research or its products, just as no one will ever be compelled to have an abortion.
It's nice to be reassured that the abortion laws have been such a success. More broadly, it seems that these culture wars will soon be a thing of the past if we can simply trot the esteemed Governor out as new moral quandaries arise. See, e.g., Cuomo on cloning ("True believers will never be compelled to be cloned."); Cuomo on euthanasia ("True believers will never be compelled to end someone's life.").
Finally, a blueprint we can all get behind!
Rob
Friday, June 17, 2005
The John Danforth column posted by Michael is a valuable reminder that recognizing the limits of human knowledge is a prudent stance when translating religious convictions into public policy. The danger is when that stance begins to overwhelm foundational religious convictions themselves. I initially thought this was a spoof, but Christianity Today reports that the United Church of Christ is set to defeat a resolution proclaiming that "Jesus Christ is Lord." As one pastor complained, "there is a judgmental quality to [the resolution] that implies very strongly that those who do not agree with us are condemned or damned or hopeless - and that's exactly the thing that UCC is against."
Rob
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Here's a wonderful essay by Ragan Sutterfield on the use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's legacy in today's just war debates. An excerpt:
Bonhoeffer's life is wrapped in the dilemma of faithfulness. And we who come after him are left with that dilemma no more clearly resolved. Are we to follow Bonhoeffer in his calls toward peacemaking, or are we to go his way of drastic action for the sake of justice? Some would-be followers deny that there is any ambiguity in his example. They make him a pacifist and only a pacifist, or a model just warrior who rejected his earlier idealism. To step out of line with either position is a step that demands correction.
When John Buchanan, editor of The Christian Century, wrote that Bonhoeffer "move[d] to the Niebuhrian conclusion that the evil of Nazism should be opposed on Christian ethical grounds," he was upbraided by a reader who responded that "there is no hint that Bonhoeffer ever justified this choice on the grounds of Niebuhrian 'Christian realism' or denied that pacifism was the most faithful Christian commitment." In the same vein, Walter Wink wrote a short piece in Sojourners reminding readers that "American thinkers who have used Bonhoeffer as a way of justifying the just war theory overlook his clear statement that he does not regard this as a justifiable action—that it's a sin—and that he throws himself on the mercy of God."
The essay also details the conflicting applications of Bonhoeffer's work by Jean Bethke Elshtain and Stanley Hauerwas, concluding with a point of agreement:
While Bonhoeffer sees the state as an ordained "restrainer" that establishes and maintains order, it is the Church that must remind the state of its obligations. It is the Church's existence as a truth-telling community that gives it this role. "The failure of the church to oppose Hitler," Hauerwas writes, "was but the outcome of the failure of Christians to speak the truth to one another and to the world." And it was in the context of this failure that Bonhoeffer took action at the risk of incurring guilt through violence.
On the imperative of truth-telling Elshtain and Hauerwas agree, and it is here that they are closest to Bonhoeffer. But how can we begin to speak truthfully? Elshtain calls us to the task of describing things as they are. The attacks of September 11 were clearly murder, an act of evil that we must respond to. But Hauerwas is more cautious; with Bonhoeffer, he reminds us that telling the truth sometimes requires more silence than the world would like. "No good at all can come from acting before the world and one's self as though we knew the truth, when in reality we do not," Bonhoeffer once said. "Qualified silence might perhaps be more appropriate for the church today than talk which is very unqualified."
Rob
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
In Commonweal, William D. Wood criticizes recent comments by Cardinal Francis George that suggested the Cardinal's embrace of a rejuvenated Christendom:
Like Pope Benedict XVI, George believes that contemporary democratic societies are awash in relativism. Indeed, George seems to believe that secularism is the same thing as relativism, and that all secular, relativist societies will inevitably meet the same end as the totalitarian societies of the Soviet bloc. For example, he likened the present pope’s coming fight against secularism to the previous pope’s fight against communism. The lesson of both, said George, is that “you can’t deliver a stable society if, in order to protect personal freedom, you sacrifice objective truth and, particularly, moral truth. It’s a fault line, and it will destabilize our societies and bring them down...as certainly as the fault line in communism effected its demise.” This is an unfortunate confusion. Secularism isn’t the same thing as relativism, and neither is tantamount to state-enforced atheism. Convenient though it may be to think so, it simply is not the case that critics of the church are committed to the denial of all objective truth. Nor are they committed to the proposition that all is permitted and nothing is immoral. The conflation of secularism with relativism is an unfortunate mistake because it misrepresents the real pastoral context in which the church finds itself. The church must find a way to engage secular and religious people who embrace alternative moral codes and values that are genuinely compelling, though they are not the codes and values of the church. This is rather harder than thundering against imaginary relativists. As Alasdair Mac- Intyre said at the beginning of the conference: “In the entire universe, there are absolutely no relativists who are not American undergraduates!” The church hierarchy would do well to take those words to heart.
More to the point, I doubt that it makes much sense, either rhetorically or substantively, to deploy “Christendom” as the category with which the church opposes secularization. As Charles Taylor emphasized in his presentation, the church, at its best, has always realized that it must express itself in different ways to different cultures and civilizations in order to be heard. I can hardly imagine a worse way to evangelize Europe than by appealing to the virtues of a politically reconstituted Christendom.
Even if treating secularism as a political problem were rhetorically effective, it is a bad idea. To address the spiritual problem of secularism, the church must deploy spiritual tools: it must present the gospel as surpassingly beautiful and worthy of love. Sometimes, I think, the church even needs to get out of the way, and let the gospel present itself as surpassingly beautiful and worthy of love. But the church never needs to promote the gospel with the tools of the state. The tools of the state are gross and coercive. The love they elicit is, by definition, disordered. It is indeed wrong-as a certain kind of Catholic is fond of pointing out-to suppose that the authority of the church flows from the political order, but it is equally wrong to suppose that challenges to that authority are best countered with the tools of the political order.
Rob
StatCounter
PageViews
Since February 19, 2008
