I have a review of Steve Shiffrin's excellent new book, The Religious Left and Church-State Relations, in the current issue of Commonweal. I don't agree with everything in the book, but I heartily endorse his willingness to respond to the religious right's influence in politics, not by demanding that they take their theologically informed political views out of the public sphere, but by seeking to offer better political views, and to "combat bad theology with good theology."
Thursday, March 11, 2010
"Public Reason Disease"
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
How should a Catholic react to the new national education standards?
It looks like we're going to have national education standards soon, as 48 states have come together, along with the Obama Administration, to support standards laying out what students should be learning year by year, from kindergarten through high school, in math and English.
It's probably not too tough to guess the two holdout states: Alaska and Texas. Texas Gov. Rick Perry explained that only Texans should decide what their children learn. (In reality, I think Texans have a big role in deciding what all American children learn, but that's another issue.)
So how should fans of subsidiarity respond to the new standards? It's reassuring that states seem to be taking the lead on this, and it will be up to the states to decide whether to adopt the standards. More broadly, is there any harm in adopting a "best practices" model to ensure that all Americans are equipped with the skills necessary to thrive in an increasingly competitive and connected world? Or is the danger related more to the trend that this represents -- i.e., if we can have national math and English standards, maybe we should have national standards on social studies, civics, service learning, sex ed, etc. In other words, are the Texans just being Texans, or are they wise to stay on the sidelines?
Monday, March 8, 2010
Who may attend Catholic schools?
I'm all in favor of religious communities managing their own membership boundary lines -- a meaningful sense of belonging presumes a right to exclude -- but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the rationale behind removing the child of same-sex parents from Catholic school. This story is generating the predictable left-right divisions within the blogosphere, and I don't have much interest in contributing on that front. I'm more interested in what this says about the nature and mission of Catholic education. I can see how tailoring the school's teaching to the preferences of parents might cause concern, but assuming that the school stays true to Church teaching, why would the presence of a child being raised by a same-sex couple cause a scandal? And don't the kids who are not exposed to the Church's values at home have the most pressing need for the Catholic school's teaching?
I did not attend Catholic school (nor do my kids), so I'm by no means an expert here -- is it common for kids to get kicked out of Catholic schools based on the conduct or lifestyles of their parents? E.g., Are children of Mafia figures kicked out? Have children of divorced and remarried parents been kicked out? I don't intend these questions to be snarky or rhetorical -- the Church's witness on an issue that is so prone to reflexive accusations of mean-spirited discrimination requires consistent and principled policies. Has the Church been consistent in deciding which children may attend Catholic schools?
SSM and employee benefits
Thanks to Fr. Araujo (and others) for responding to my post asking how the extension of benefits to same-sex spouses legitimizes same-sex marriage. I'm trying to figure out what's doing the "work" of legitimization here: whether it's the very fact that benefits are being extended to a same-sex partner that matters, or whether it's the message sent by that extension, which obviously will depend on the circumstances. Let's say that, in a state where SSM is not recognized, the state legislature, rather than passing a law recognizing SSM and forbidding discrimination against same-sex spouses in the provision of employment benefits, passed the following law:
The state government will not enter into a contract for services with any organization unless the organization 1) makes health care coverage available to its employees; and 2) makes coverage available for the employee's dependents, as well as for one other adult with whom the employee is in a caregiving relationship, as designated by the employee.
Inartful legislative drafting aside, would this still be a problem for Catholic organizations?
Friday, March 5, 2010
Is Bart Stupak wrong?
I confess that I'm one of those Americans who really wants to understand health care reform, but every time I see a sustained adult discussion of it on a show like Charlie Rose, my eyes begin to glaze over and I switch over to watch people say dumb things on Jay Leno so that I can feel smart again. Not surprisingly, then, I don't know whether the Senate health care bill ends up funding abortions or not. Timothy Noah says it doesn't:
What really rankles Stupak (and the bishops) isn't that the Senate bill commits taxpayer dollars to funding abortion. Rather, it's that the Senate bill commits taxpayer dollars to people who buy private insurance policies that happen to cover abortion at nominal cost to the purchaser (even the poorest of the poor can spare $1 a month) and no cost at all to the insurer. Stupak and the bishops don't have a beef with government spending. They have a beef with market economics.
Is he right?
Does providing benefits to same-sex spouses legitimize SSM?
The Washington Post reports on a former executive of Catholic Charities, Tim Sawina, criticizing the decision to change spousal benefits policies in order to avoid legitimizing same-sex marriage. A quote:
"Providing health care to a gay or lesbian partner -- a basic human right, according to Church teaching -- is an end in itself and no more legitimizes that marriage than giving communion to a divorced person legitimizes divorce, or giving food or shelter to an alcoholic legitimizes alcoholism."
The response from the Archdiocese of Washington -- at least the response reported by the Post -- was not exactly compelling:
The archdiocese responded to [Tim] Sawina's letter Thursday, calling it an inaccurate portrayal of the Church's position and saying that his appeal to the organization's board of directors would have no effect, because the board can't overturn the archbishop's decision.
For more analysis, check out Get Religion's coverage. So what should the Archdiocese have said in response to Sawina's letter?
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Wolfe & Hirsch on our common culture
Alan Wolfe has an interesting review of E.D. Hirsch's new book, The Making of Americans. Apparently Hirsch, as characterized by Wolfe, takes issue with school choice as a "conservative" movement:
School choice by its very nature militates against one of his major recommendations: the adoption of a common curriculum that all students must learn. Libertarianism, his analysis reminds us, is not the same as conservatism. Unquestioning reliance on the free market puts the individual and his or her immediate desires at the center of the moral universe, not unlike the cultural and moral liberationism celebrated during the 1960s. If the New Left was particularistic rather than universalistic, so are advocates of school choice. By contrast, Hirsch argues that we need more common space and not the invasion of the schools by consumer culture.
And then Wolfe adds:
[Religious schools] are not part and parcel of the common culture. Even if they are not narrowly sectarian, they still teach from a particular point of view. In doing so, their insistence on Christian or religious ways of knowing borrows from advocates of identity politics in the secular realm who insist that women or racial minorities have voices that must be heard in a multicultural curriculum. I for one do not believe that there would have been a religious revival in the 1980s without the countercultural revival of the 1960s as a model. If our common culture is fractured, religious communities must share the blame.
I agree that school choice need not be portrayed as "conservative," and that many Christians who are active in the public square today owe a lot to the identity politics of the past. But the purported tension between the emerging pluralism in the educational sphere (of which I'm a fan) and a "common culture" is overstated, I fear. There is a lot to say in response, but not having read the book yet, I'll limit myself to pointing out that a common culture is not a uniform culture, and that a shared civic culture is not necessarily precluded by a rich diversity of communities within that culture. If we think of American civic culture as the lowest common denominator in terms of shared ideals about liberty, equality, and virtue, why would we need to discourage communities from inculcating values that transcend -- without necessarily defying or ignoring -- the lowest common denominator? In that regard, does religious diversity itself threaten our common culture?
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Sex offenders, public safety, and human dignity
The horrifying rape and murder of high schooler Chelsea King brings to mind one of the most vexing questions facing our criminal justice system: what should we do with sex offenders? I don't have an easy answer, other than that we need to be careful not to expand the category of sex offenses to include folks who do not pose a significant risk of danger in the future. But for those who fall squarely within that classification, how do we safeguard the community while respecting the dignity of the offender? As science helps us identify tendencies, there will be a temptation to intervene earlier and more aggressively. Chemical castration is a popular option, especially since life imprisonment for most sex offenses is not an option. But as John Stinneford has argued in this excellent paper, chemical castration itself poses (or should pose) significant problems for those committed to human dignity.
Rational thought and moral choice
If we have more time to think, are we more likely to make the selfless choice? A new study of the sinkings of the Titanic and Lusitania seems to indicate as much. Is this evidence of "the presence of the divine?" Does it show that the intellect can be altruistic when it has a chance to trump instinct? Or does it show that we're "hardwired for empathy?" (Or maybe just that the men on the Titanic were more noble than the men on the Lusitania?)
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Can a state restrict immigration in order to protect its culture?
Liav Orgad has posted an interesting new paper, Illiberal Liberalism: Cultural Restrictions on Migration and Access to Citizenship in Europe. Here's the abstract:
This article addresses a simple but important and understudied question: Is culture a legitimate criterion for regulating migration and access to citizenship? While focusing on France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Denmark, I describe how these states embrace illiberal migration policies which violate the same values they seek to protect. I then construct a two-stage set of immigration-regulation principles: In the first stage, immigrants would have to accept some structural liberal-democratic principles as a prerequisite for admission; these principles are not culturally-oriented but constitute a system of rules governing human behavior in liberal democracies. In the second stage, as part of the naturalization process, immigrants would have to recognize and respect some constitutional principles essential for obtaining citizenship of a specific state. I call this concept 'National Constitutionalism'. As the American debate on immigrant integration policy comes at a decisive moment, the European experience has some important lessons for U.S. policymakers.
How does the Church handle this tension? On one hand, the Church emphasizes the importance of culture and warns about the homogenizing dangers of globalization. On the other hand, the Church speaks out in favor of liberal immigration policies. Would the Church ever support restrictions on immigration in order to maintain a distinct culture? Perhaps the Church teaches that keeping people out reflects an overly narrow or defensive view of culture? Or maybe that culture is not coterminous with political boundaries, so immigration policy is a poor proxy for defense of culture? Has the Church already addressed this tension somewhere?
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