A serial killer of children was executed in Iran, with the victims' family members participating in a slow and brutal process of stabbing, flogging, and hanging. Eugene Volokh embraces this approach:
I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. . . . I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.
Putting the question of capital punishment to the side, is there any basis in Catholic legal theory for seeking to inflict pain in our punishment of criminals? According to the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church (para. 402), the state "has the twofold responsibility to discourage behaviour that is harmful to human rights and the fundamental norms of civil life, and to repair, though the penal system, the disorder created by the criminal activity." And in correcting the offender, punishment is to encourage "the re-insertion of the condemned person into society," and foster "a justice that reconciles, a justice capable of restoring harmony in social relationships disrupted by the criminal act committed." (para. 403)
Given these objectives, is punishment to be as painless (physically, mentally, and spiritually) as possible, or in fulfilling its duty to discourage improper behavior, especially monstrous behavior, does pain have a place?
Rob
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
In the current Books & Culture, noted evangelical theologian J.I. Packer paints an intriguing portrait of William Shea's recent book, The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America (Oxford 2004). Shea traces:
the parallel between the Catholic and evangelical volte-faces during the past century and a half. The Catholic story is of defensive anti-modernism capped by Vatican II's new openness to dialogue with the world and with non-Catholic Christianities, a move that left integralists behind. The evangelical story is of anti-liberal fundamentalism trumped by the commitment of the 1942 National Association of Evangelicals to interactive engagement with both secularism and Protestant liberalism, a move that left fundamentalists behind.
In many ways, it seems conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians have more in common with each other than they do with the more liberal elements of their own faith tradition. Packer explains that:
To all conservative Christians, liberals, however well meaning, appear as parasitic cosmeticians; cosmeticians, because they constantly aim to remove from Christianity that which outsiders, like some inside, find intellectually unsightly and unacceptable; parasitic, because they attach themselves to the historic faith and feed off it even as they whittle it down, diminishing, distorting, and displacing major features of it to fit in with what their skeptical conversation partners tout as factual truth. In mainline Protestantism, where doctrinal discipline is, alas, virtually nonexistent, liberals have a free run, but in Catholicism only a few steps along this road prove to be too far. Witness Hans Küng . . . . Liberal Catholicism may have charms, but has it a future? One doubts it.
Read the rest here.
Rob
Sunday, March 13, 2005
In its coverage of Saturday's Wisconsin church shootings, The New York Times dove right into the heart of the story, in its view: the crazy beliefs of the church, especially the church's "end times" beliefs:
The church's "pre-millennial" view of history, which asserts that humankind is moving inexorably toward the "end times," when the world will go through a series of cataclysms before the second coming of Christ, is not uncommon among evangelicals. Dr. Meredith preached in a recent sermon broadcast internationally that the apocalypse was close, warning members to pay off credit-card debt and hoard savings in preparation for the United States' coming financial collapse.
But James R. Lewis, author of "The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects and New Religions," said such focus on the end of the world "doesn't make them violent."
"All traditional, conservative religious groups have an end-time belief, even peace groups like the Amish and the Mennonites," said Mr. Lewis, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Steven's Point. "It is radically unfair to say that because they have a belief in the apocalypse, they are prone to violence. They shouldn't be stigmatized on basis of theology."
I appreciate the gracious opportunity afforded by The Times for Mr. Lewis to disassociate a belief in the apocalypse from any murder committed by an individual holding such a belief, but exactly who (besides the reporter) was making such an accusation in the first place? Perhaps the journalistic reasoning goes like this: reasonable folk recognize that mass murder makes no sense; reasonable folk recognize that a belief in a divinely ordained end to human history makes no sense; therefore, the two must be connected. Is this part of the mainstream media's effort to take religion more seriously?
Rob
