Today the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace has published "Vocation of the Business Leader: A Reflection." Sr. Helen Alford and my colleague Mike Naughton coordinated the project, supported by a cast of contributors that includes Stefano Zamagni, Andre Habisch, and my colleagues Ken Goodpaster and Bob Kennedy. From the foreword by Peter K.A. Cardinal Turkson and Bishop Mario Toso: "This reflection offers business leaders, members of their institutions, and various stakeholders a set of practical principles that can guide them in their service of the common good. . . . [T]he Church does not relinquish the hope that Christian business leaders will, despite the present darkness, restore trust, inspire hope, and keep burning the light of faith that fuels their daily pursuit of the good."
Friday, March 30, 2012
Vocation of the Business Leader
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Vischer on Inazu on Assembly
I've posted a new paper, How Necessary is the Right of Assembly? Here's the abstract:
This paper continues the conversation initiated by John Inazu's new book, Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly, by locating Inazu's analysis within our legal system's broader struggle to reconcile liberty claims by groups with our commitment to the individual's rights-bearing primacy. I underscore the timeliness and relevance of his approach, then ask three questions: 1) Why does Inazu limit the freedom of assembly to non-commercial groups? 2) Is Inazu's argument more appropriately pitched to judicial or political actors? and 3) If the right of association were to be interpreted less narrowly by courts, could it carry the burden that Inazu seeks to lay on the right of assembly?
Feedback is welcome.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Saletan on "After-Birth Abortion"
Will Saletan weighs in on the "after-birth abortion" article discussed earlier on MoJ:
The challenge posed to Furedi and other pro-choice absolutists by “after-birth abortion” is this: How do they answer the argument, advanced by Giubilini and Minerva, that any maternal interest, such as the burden of raising a gravely defective newborn, trumps the value of that freshly delivered nonperson? What value does the newborn have? At what point did it acquire that value? And why should the law step in to protect that value against the judgment of a woman and her doctor?
Rights Gone Wrong
In the current issue of America, I review Richard Thompson Ford's Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Live-blogging from Malibu: Steve Smith on secular legitimacy
Steve Smith presented a paper on the secular paradigm of legitimacy:
What makes a government legitimate? Elements of tradition, public display, and effectiveness, but will also be made in light of intellectual premises that prevail in that society -- divine right, consent of the governed, etc. That is the paradigm of legitimacy. We've moved from a Christian paradigm to a secular paradigm. In a pluralist society, legitimacy paradigms depend on strategies of assimilation and marginalization.
Does a secular paradigm require that criteria of legitimacy be secular (e.g., consent of the governed), or that the government be secular in order to be legitimate? Today society practices strategies of assimilation to inculcate secularism (e.g., through public schools), but proponents have made use of other strategies, including the neutrality strategy (i.e., government is neither favorable nor unfavorable to religion, but simply neutral), which tends to marginalize religion by pushing it to the private sphere. In many parts of the world, including the U.S., religion has not cooperated with the secular paradigm, and secularization has not proved to be irresistable.
The secular paradigm is in serious distress. For example, though Rawls might fit comfortably within a largely secularized culture, it does not fit with a pluralist but still religiously vibrant culture. His favored position doesn't fit the world as it actually is.
What do we have to look forward to? A paradigm in crisis can recover, and an ailing paradigm can persist until another one comes along. It is possible that our most fundamental commitment is to making sure that the government is based on the consent of the people, rather than to making sure that the government is secular. Relationship between religion and democracy has been reassessed in places like Iraq; may also ultimately be reassessed in a place like America.
Live-blogging from Malibu: Calo responds
Zachary Calo offers a second response to Prof. Hunter:
Prof. Hunter's account of Christians being in the world offers important models for Christians engaging the law in a world of intensifying and unstable pluralism. In the absence of any shared moral meaning, law just becomes a weapon in the culture wars. But the problem of pluralism goes deeper than this, for post-secularity challenges the idea that law possesses a universal meaning. Legal universalities that were developed in modernity depended on severing law from religion. Now post-secularity undermines these foundations of the modern legal project. Legal modernity remains resistant, though, and post-secularity may not have penetrated the modern legal imagination to the extent that Hunter believes it has.
Post-secularity has shown how legal modernity has subsisted on inherited intellectual and cultural capital. Question is not whether there should be more or less secularism, but how to give law meaning. Theology might offer itself as an alternative legal imaginary, emerging in the space afforded by pluralism. Hunter's "faithful presence" -- i.e., that Incarnation is the only adequate reply to the current condition, inhabiting the world rather than trying to change the world -- is an intriguing model. Law creates and preserves space for culture. Law is not just about power, but also about contextualizing the meaning of power. The problem is not with power as such, but with lack of cultural resources to exercise it properly. The task of Christian theological jurisprudence is to relocate law and law's meaning within a theological jurisprudence. Law is oriented for, and ultimately consummated by, grace. Law is grounded in a basic act of trust, in the meaningfulness of creation, and the possibility of justice.
Live-blogging from Malibu: Brennan responds
Patrick Brennan responds to Prof. Hunter's paper:
Law is not just about power. It's also about authority, which is legitimate power, and it's up to human action to make it legitimate by deriving it from sources beyond law itself that are relatively independent and objective. Hunter takes a minimalist view of the natural law, relegating it to one footnote, and noting that people have found it very difficult through the centuries to know the natural law. Indeed. Historically the Church has taught that the divine law is available to assist us in our understanding of the natural law, which can be difficult to ascertain due to our fallen state. So we need institutionalized sources of understanding the natural law and the good. The Church, through the Magisterium, provides such a source, making it possible for humans to access the natural common good and the supernatural common good. Expanding the realm of the possible requires us to take seriously the possibility of reinfusing our law with the insights of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It may seem like a long shot, but one of the heresies under which we live is that the notion that "the supernatural is finished." If we have hope, that hope should lead us to recover the sources of authority in our living, and allow those sources of authority to unfold in human law.
Live-blogging from Malibu: James Davison Hunter on the common good
This morning at Pepperdine's fabulous religious legal theory conference, we are kicking off with what promises to be a productive exchange on law, religion, and the common good featuring James Davison Hunter, Patrick Brennan, and Zachary Calo. What a better time for some weekend live-blogging?
Prof. Hunter kicks things off. Here is a (very) rought outline of his comments:
The shared narrative of secularization drives both conservatives and liberals, leading them to approach the relationship of law and religion as zero-sum game. But now we are seeing the debunking of the secularization thesis, and this may change the terms of the debate about the relationship between law and religion.
Post-secularity brings us to recognition that secularity is not a value-neutral proposition. The distinctions between law and religion as separate spheres are overdrawn. The state cannot be neutral toward the public good, and the secular is not neutral; it is also a particular normativity. Tension, conflict, and violence are inherent to pluralism, and the state always takes sides. Difference tends to be absorbed into new working agreements about the common good.
Arguably the most important way pluralism expands today is in moral and metaphysical differences -- e.g., abortion. They are metaphysical because they are rooted in different worldviews. Can late modern American society aborb differences as deep as these? We don't know yet. The state no longer plays role of limiting or containing pluralism; now is a free agent whose patronage is intensely sought after by the parties. Conflict is between those who have competing understandings of the good society, and the battle envelops the First Amendment. Progressives want a broad definition of religion for Establishment purposes and a narrow definition for Free Exercise purposes; conservatives want the opposite for both. The First Amendment battle is geared toward what consensus over the good will look like.
Two possible directions that we can take: 1) We will see a hardening of the lines of conflict, with laws less a tool of justice and more a way of forcing compliance. 2) The alternative would be to recognize that power of state is unstable and unsustainable source of social order. Because state is clumsy instrument rooted in coercion, it will never address the human elements that make these problems poignant in the first place.
For law to be about more the power, current conflation of public and political must be disentangled. Law itself may not be able to offer this path, but law, policy, and politics must protect space where culture, in its generative capacity, is free to do its work. We would need broader understanding of religion for both Establishment and Free Exercise purposes.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Sharia and claims of conscience
Yesterday I wondered whether we were going to start seeing the "Sharia" label attached to any request by a religious believer for conscience-based exemptions from generally applicable laws. Apparently that train has already left the station. Consider this statement:
"Religious rules should end ‘at the door of the temple’ and give way to the ‘public law’ laid down by Parliament.”
“To me, there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work,” he added.
And who's the "he?" Must be some guy sitting in his basement writing a blog post for an audience of three, right?. He couldn't be the chairman of the British Equality and Human Rights Commission, could he?
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Tweet of the day
Matt Yglesias, a respected blogger and writer for Slate, offered this "tweet" yesterday:
Newfound GOP enthusiasm for religious exemptions from generally applicable laws seems dangerously close to sharia.
Judging from his past writing, my guess is that this was a tongue-in-cheek jab at GOP candidates' disturbing tendency to use the "Sharia" label as a punching bag on the campaign trail. I fear, though, that it is a harbinger of sincere arguments to come, as reasonable, right-thinking folks are asked to line up in either the Enlightenment camp or the Theocracy camp. Nuance may be in short supply.
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