My colleague, Charles Reid, gave a talk last week to a gathering at our school exploring the question of Christianity and ideology, using the story of Hypatia as a case study. I thought it might be of interest to MoJ readers:
I have been asked to reflect on religion and ideology today. As my students know, I am by training and inclination a legal historian. And both callings -- that of lawyer and that of historian -- demand attention to facts, to stories, to narratives, to the complex weave of the personal, the idiosyncratic, and the principled, the ideal, the abstract. History -- like the practice of law -- is always a blend of "one-time-oneliness" and foundational principles and axioms.
Perhaps the best place to start my reflection is with the word "ideology." It has, it seems, two primary meanings in common speech today. The first is a fairly innocuous, fairly benign understanding -- the motivations, the mainsprings, the ideas and ideals that give rise to political action. But there is also a second, less benign, more ominous definition -- the manipulation of reality to fit personal ends, a quest for power, a misguided effort to blend together belief and the desire to have control over others, whether on a small-scale, or in society, writ large.
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Thursday, October 14, 2010
Tomorrow and Saturday, Princeton is hosting a conference on abortion titled, "Open Hearts, Open Minds, and Fair-Minded Words: A Conference on Life and Choice in the Abortion Debate." I'll be participating, along with MoJers Rick Garnett and Lisa Schiltz. You can watch the proceedings live, and you might at least want to check out the session in which Peter Singer, Maggie Little and John Finnis will discuss the moral status of the fetus.
I highly recommend John Inazu's forthcoming book, Liberty's Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly. For those who can't wait for the book, John has generously posted the introduction. It is a wonderful contribution to our understanding of the foundational issues that underlie many of our conversations on MoJ.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
The amazing story of the Chilean miners is a powerful reminder of, among other things, the social nature of the human person, though that nature is too often concealed by the isolation of modern life. I don't think it takes a crisis to bring this to the fore -- even in the simplified form of daily living that often happens on a vacation, I find myself drawing closer to those around me. The trick, it seems, is maintaining that social orientation when the vacation is over, when we've been returned to the Earth's surface.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
In the New Republic, Bill McKibben wonders why Republicans have become so uniformly resolute over the past few years in their opposition to the conclusions of scientists regarding climate change. (Only 1 in 10 believes that climate change is a very serious problem.) He also speculates that religious believers may eventually bring the GOP around to a more nuanced view.
Elizabeth Scalia takes the anti-bullying conversation in an interesting (and, in my view, helpful) direction:
I wonder if [the Church's] bishops and religious leaders will, for example, have to acknowledge with loving support the numerous celibate homosexual priests who, throughout history and still today, serve her faithfully, courageously, and with great joy. Such an acknowledgment could go a long way repairing that disconnect that keeps everyone talking about tolerance while walking away from it.
It would speak to the value of the human person as he is created; it would reinforce the church’s own teaching that the homosexual inclination is not in-and-of-itself sinful; in a sex-saturated culture where “gay” has become in some minds synonymous with “promiscuous” and both heterosexual and homosexual couples see no particular value in chastity, it would present the radical counter-narrative.
Most importantly, such an acknowledgment would be call of olly-olly-oxen free for the church herself. Battered by the revelations of the past decade, poorly served by past psychological studies suggesting that child abusers could be “cured” and therefore distrustful of more recent findings that homosexuals are no more inclined to pedophilia than heterosexuals, the church has reflexively pulled the curtains over a number of her priests, and in doing so, she has hidden the idea of “acceptable otherness” from a flock that is sorely in need to see some of it.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Given our recent conversations on MoJ, I took an interest in a speech over the weekend by Carl Paladino, the GOP candidate for governor of New York. His prepared remarks included a couple of eyebrow-raising assertions, including: "there is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual." Whether or not the bishops would agree with this assertion on its face, I'm guessing that they don't exactly welcome the often abrasive and, at times, racially/ethnically insensitive Paladino covering his comments with the Church's imprimatur. His spokesman explained, “Carl Paladino is simply expressing the views that he holds in his heart as a Catholic . . . Carl Paladino is not homophobic, and neither is the Catholic Church.”
I think Paladino's text (he did not actually deliver that line in the speech) is an example of a message that teenagers struggling with their sexuality do not need to hear. I'm not suggesting that they (or straight teenagers) need to hear the opposite message -- "Act on, and define yourself by, whatever desires you're experiencing!" -- but there must be space for something in between.
Since a number of MoJ contributors and readers write in the field of legal ethics, you might be interested in this call for papers from MoJ-friend Sam Levine:
Submissions and nominations of articles are now being accepted for the first annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility. To honor Fred's memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility with a publication date of 2010. The prize will be awarded at the Professional Responsibility Section program at the 2011 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: [email protected]. The deadline for submissions and nominations is November 1, 2010.
