The New York Times has found another Catholic priest scandal to explore. On today's front page, the paper offers a "rare look at the lengths the Catholic Church goes to to keep clergy members' clandestine relationships hidden." The article documents the sexual affair between Fr. Henry Willenborg, a Franciscan, and a woman he was counseling. Along the way, the reporter notes that these relationships are "hardly unique" and reveal how the Church was "tightfisted" with its money when the child produced by the affair developed cancer. (Given the Church's endless supply of money, greed is the only possible explanation.) There are plenty of questions to ask from a journalistic standpoint (As one reader asked in the comments, If a priest's consensual affair warrants the front page, why didn't the Times deem the sexual affair of a major presidential candidate, John Edwards, newsworthy?), but I'm interested in the Church's handling of this mess. For now, one question jumps out at me: why does the Church insist on confidentiality agreements in these cases? Isn't transparency essential in a situation like this, not only in terms of the confidence we place in the clergy, but in terms of the clergy members' own accountability? The surrounding culture, including the New York Times, would have a harder time shouting "Scandalous cover-up!" whenever sin among the clergy is discovered if the Church stopped acting as though the clergy are sinless.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Sex + priests = front page
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Prayer as surrender
For me, faith entails walking a frequently uncomfortable line between ultimate hope and a willful blindness to persistent and unanswerable questions. Sometimes the public policy pronouncements of religious believers reflect that willful blindness (e.g., "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve . . ."), and sometimes I hear it in the face of tragedy (e.g., "God must have needed another angel . . .") I just ran across a quote from the writer James Agee that nicely captures my own discomfort. Agee's father was killed in a car accident when he was young, and Agee's mother retreated into religious devotion. In an autobiographical novel, Agee describes the scene of the children overhearing their mother's earnest and trusting prayer:
And they felt that although everything was better for their mother than it had been a few minutes before, it was far worse in one way. For before, she had at least been questioning, however gently. But now, she was wholly defeated and entranced, and the transition to prayer was the moment of her surrender.
Yes, prayer is and should be a type of surrender, at least in the sense that it is an acknowledgement of our fundamental dependence, our lack of self-sufficiency. At a certain point, though, I think that the acknowledgment can function almost as a relinquishment of our humanity, of the tragedy and mystery of the human condition.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Picturing fetal remains
Get Religion has follow-up coverage of the New York Times' story on abortion protestors, noting that this may be the first time that a mainstream media outlet has published photos of aborted fetuses.
Idleman on Religious Community Conflict
Scott Idleman has posted a new paper, A Legal Perspective on Conflicts Involving Religious Communities, that should be of interest to MoJ readers. Here's the abstract:
Within any given state or society, numerous factors can influence both relations among religious communities and relations between these communities and other institutions or value systems, including scientific communities, schools of economic or legal thought, and various ideological or political movements. Though some of these factors obviously arise from within the beliefs and structures of the religions themselves, many arise from the history, political culture, and legal framework of the state or society in which a given religious community is situated. This paper discusses the potential role of law and the legal system in influencing these relations and addressing conflicts among these communities and institutions. After explaining in general terms the relevance of a legal perspective to the assessment and resolution of such disagreements, the paper specifically examines characteristics of the constitutional framework and political culture of the United States that appear to prevent or minimize conflicts involving religious communities.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
SSM and Religious Liberty
The current Commonweal has my review essay on the recent book, Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty (edited by Doug Laycock, Anthony Picarello, and Robin Wilson). It's a well-done book on an important issue. My review is accessible only to subscribers, but here's an excerpt:
Few same-sex-marriage advocates favor a diminishment of religious liberty for its own sake. The problem is rather that the institution of same-sex marriage will need to rely heavily on state power. As a legal institution, heterosexual marriage encounters relatively little resistance from the citizenry because it is grounded not just in legal norms, but in social, cultural, religious, and biological norms as well. Same-sex marriage still encounters significant resistance from the citizenry, in part because it conflicts with the traditional religious conception of marriage, but also because it lacks the broader social and cultural supports that heterosexual marriage has, even outside the religious context.
It is not enough for society to respond to those who object to same-sex marriage simply by saying, “If you oppose same-sex marriage, don’t enter into one.” After all, those who object to same-sex marriage make up many of the associations that constitute civil society. Once the state has expanded the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, the pressing task will be to determine how aggressively to enforce that definition.
And from the conclusion:
The institutions of civil society are not simply vehicles for the implementation of widely held norms; they are also bulwarks against the imposition of widely held norms. This does not mean that institutional freedom should be unfettered. It does mean that using state power to subvert the moral authority of these institutions comes at a significant social cost, no matter how noble the purpose. Eventually, proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage will need to have a conversation about their shared interest in a society that ensures room for dissent from majoritarian norms. Consider this book the conversation-starter.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Where does adoption fit when marriage is defined by procreation?
Greg Popcak offers this response to my questions about the place of adoption in the procreative institution of marriage:
Adoption has been a wonderful blessing to me and my family, and I couldn’t imagine life without my youngest daughter or my sister. Further, adoption is certainly entirely in keeping with the generative nature of the marital relationship. Social science data shows that even the adopted child fairs best in a home in which they are being raised by a mother and a father in an exclusive, traditional, marital union (as opposed to being raised a single parent or cohabiting parents). As such, I don’t see an issue focusing on the nature of the procreative act. Interpersonal neurobiological studies (c.f., The Neuroscience of Human Relationships—Louis Cozolino for a great summary) show the sexual act between a man and woman (in general, but especially in marriage) leads to a series of biochemical and neurological changes in the structures of the brains of the man and woman causing them to be bonded to each other in a way that does not exist in same sex relationships (it also tends to not be as present in co-habiting couples for reasons that are not yet well-understood. Although some bonding does occur here as well, the bond tends not be as deep or stable either socially or biochemically leading to “defensive” or even “reactive” attachment problems in adulthood). Therefore the nature of the procreative act in a committed marriage serves both as the glue that holds together a stable home life AND leads to the rearing of children. And so, the child who is adopted by a married man and woman in a committed, traditional marriage enjoys at least most of the benefits of the nature of the procreative act because of the increased intimacy and stability in the home where mom and dad are intimate partners. Adoption is not so much an “exception to the procreative boundaries of marriage” as it is a logical extension of the procreative boundaries of marriage.
Marriage's procreative boundaries: who's left out?
I can join Robby in agreeing with Gerry Bradley's point about there being no morally neutral definition of marriage. But to the extent that Prof. Bradley seeks to establish that marriage should be defined in law as a procreative institution, I still have questions. Put simply, why must we define marriage as a procreative institution, rather than as a child-rearing institution? The examples he uses to buttress his claim of how the law protects the biological relationships within the family -- bans on polygamy, incest, adultery, fornication -- are noticeable for what is omitted: there is no mention of adoption. Should adoption be viewed as a concession to a fallen world, an exception to the procreative boundaries of marriage? Or should adoption be viewed as fully in keeping with the nature of the marital relationship, to be stabilized, protected, and even celebrated by our public understanding of why marriage is such a vital social institution? One concern I have is that, by defining marriage in a way that can logically exclude same-sex couples, we also marginalize family relationships that are not biological.
I should also note that I don't see Robby's arguments against same-sex marriage as exhibiting the same tendency, for he, at least in my reading, focuses more on the nature of the procreative act, rather than on the procreative origins of the parent-child relationship. I have no reason to believe that Prof. Bradley disagrees with those arguments, but he's emphasizing another aspect in this post, and that emphasis sends some significant, if unintended, messages about some relationships counting more than others. For Robby, my question has been whether the nature of the act can carry the normative/policy weight he places on it, and this in turn gets back to the question of whether I'm a hopeless instrumentalist . . .
Monday, October 5, 2009
What do our Halloween costumes say about our society?
Today I took my daughter to shop for a Halloween costume. I often wonder what a visitor from another society would conclude about our society by looking at our Halloween costumes. The most obvious conclusion, I think, is that we value women primarily for sex. Women's costume options generally derive from one "meta" costume: "naughty maid," "naughty soldier," "naughty firefighter," "naughty nurse," etc. What struck me this year is that the genre is beginning to expand to the "tween" category. As my daughter remarked, "Why are all the girls' costumes for Florida weather? Don't they know we live in Minnesota?" The sexualization of children does not take time off for holidays, apparently.
I also wonder what an outsider would conclude about our view of religion. The costume store has a whole section of costumes mocking priests, pastors, nuns, and monks, including one called "naughty priest," which I could not even begin to describe without blushing. (The costume includes a hand pump. See? I'm already blushing.)
So should we boycott Halloween? Absolutely not -- it continues to be one of my favorite holidays, and since I'm a guy, I've got plenty of costume options. (Though even fully clothed choices have been known to cause embarrassment to my family members.)
Obviously, this issue is bigger than Halloween. The sexual objectification of women (and girls) is not new. Making fun of religious figures is not new. It strikes me that mainstream, all-ages venues are becoming more blatant in their embrace of both themes, though.
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Friday, October 2, 2009
Religious Legal Theory at Seton Hall
You should start making plans now to attend Seton Hall's conference, Religious Legal Theory: The State of the Field, on November 12 and 13. Here's the description:
During the twentieth century purely secular perspectives dominated legal theory. Most legal scholars thought of religion with regard to the law exclusively in terms of church-state relations and freedom of religion. In recent years, however, scholars of law and other disciplines have expanded their focus to include the contributions that religious convictions and perspectives can make to general legal theory and to our understanding of many areas of the law that seem at first sight unrelated to religion.
For example, in his address at the 2008 annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, AALS President John Garvey emphasized the importance of religious perspectives on law. Major university presses have published volumes on the intersection of faith, legal theory and theology (”Faith and Law: How Religious Traditions from Calvinism to Islam View American Law” (Cochran, ed. NYU Press 2007); “The Teachings of Modern Christianity on Law, Politics and Human Nature” (Witte and Alexander, eds. Columbia University Press 2006); “Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought” (McConnell, Cochran & Carmella, eds. Yale University Press 2001). Established legal scholars have published work in law reviews offering explicitly religious perspectives. The Journal of Law and Religion publishes symposia on topics such as “Emerging Applications of Jewish Law in American Legal Scholarship,” and The Journal of Catholic Social Thought offers symposia on a variety of topics, both global and domestic. Numerous blogs and other non-traditional publishing venues are devoted to serious reflection on religious conceptions of law and public good.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
On Prof. Feldblum's nomination
Thanks to Rick for passing on the news that Chai Feldblum has been nominated to be a member of the EEOC. I'm hoping that Prof. Feldblum has (or will develop) a more fulsome understanding of liberty of conscience than the one reflected in a comment she made about the Elane Photography case. She remarked, "if you run a wedding photography service, even if you don't like the fact that those two gays are getting married, you'd better have someone on your staff who will take those pictures."
Here's how I respond in my forthcoming book:
[The idea] that the Huguenins [the photo agency owners] can avoid the problem by hiring an employee who is willing to shoot events that their own moral convictions do not permit them to shoot . . . solves nothing unless we conceive of conscience in individualist terms, as though its claims apply to my own conduct and no further. In reality, conscience refers (literally) to shared moral belief, and while not every claim of conscience will actually be shared, such claims are, by their nature, susceptible to sharing. As such, the Huguenins’ resistance to offering, through creative hiring, a “full service” photography agency is not an imperialist expansion of conscience’s interior domain; it is a natural outgrowth of conscience’s relational dimension. Institutions do not possess a conscience in some ontological sense, but they do embody distinct moral identities that are shaped by their constituents’ consciences. When we preclude the cultivation and maintenance of such institutional identities, it is not just moral pluralism that suffers; it is the cause of conscience itself.
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