As long as we're throwing bombs in the spirit of Christian fellowship, I'll try one of my own. I agree with Rick's non-endorsed proposition that Catholic schools are important. I do not agree that making it possible for all Catholic kids to attend Catholic schools is the most important business of the parish. Rather, I believe that the most important business of the parish is shaping Catholics to be followers of Christ. That process should not stop at high school graduation. If there was one-tenth of the emphasis placed on Christian education for adults in the average parish as there is on keeping the parish school afloat, lives would be dramatically transformed. Further, we should never mistake the true objective here (and I'm not accusing Rick of doing so): the goal is not to have all Catholic kids in Catholic schools; the goal is to facilitate every Catholic's walk with Christ. Some Catholic schools, in my limited observation, seem so market-driven that I am not altogether certain what sort of spiritual formation occurs there. If we're talking about providing kids with a deep grounding in their faith tradition, I'll take my evangelical Sunday School / youth group upbringing over what goes on in most of the parishes I've experienced, including those with schools. My kids' education in the faith has to be more than a periodic crash course in whatever sacrament is up next. I don't mean to knock Catholic schools, but sometimes I think we are so focused on institution-preservation that we can lose sight of the reasons why we have the institutions in the first place.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
A dissenting view on Catholic schools
Suburban Life, the Preferential Option for One's Family, and Catholicism as Culture
I share Eduardo's concerns about the suburbs' implications for justice, community, and the environment, and I believe that CST should accordingly have something to say about suburban life. I also believe that the attraction of the suburbs is understandable -- even natural -- and is supported by CST to the extent that parents are encouraged to turn their hearts toward home, replacing Plato's rejection of exclusive relationships and particularized care-giving with preferential commitments to our own offspring. The primacy of the family may help pave the path to the suburbs. When I see the world through the eyes of my children, I would much rather provide them with good schools, a lawn, and a quiet, safe neighborhood.
We must, of course, balance our family-centric focus with a concern for the broader community. But what does that mean? Is it enough for me to flee the city, but vote for candidates who will address urban problems with my tax money? Or should I commit myself -- and my children -- to the city, warts and all. I have a friend who moved with his wife and young children to the Desire housing projects in New Orleans, reasoning that it would be a joke for him to claim a commitment to the needs of that community while retreating to the suburbs every night. I readily admit that I have not -- and probably will not -- make such a sacrifice. I have lived in many urban settings, but my decisions on where to live were always shaped by quality of life considerations, not by any abstract commitment to the city and its inhabitants. But my friend's example has always stayed with me.
As for Lisa's question, I do live in the city and I do send our kids to public school. It's a good school, though, so I can't claim some sort of noble purpose. On the question of special needs kids and urban Catholic parishes, I assume it's primarily a matter of resources. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) If an urban parish had the financial support of the suburban parish that recruited a special needs student, is there any reason to believe that its school would be resistant to taking in those students? While the resistance is certainly cause to head to the suburbs for parents of such students now, isn't the resistance at least partially a result of other parents heading to the suburbs over the previous decades? If state-funded school vouchers were a reality, is there any evidence that Catholic schools would still keep out special needs students?
And let me throw one other observation into the mix, which may be more provocative than I intend. Some of the more frustratingly dormant parishes that I have attended have been urban parishes. I realize that I cannot judge an individual's spiritual life by their exterior, but still . . . parishes where no one sings, no one greets visitors, and the average pulse rate during services seems to hover around 27 are difficult for me to reconcile with the life-changing message of the Gospel. At one parish in Queens, I was excited to learn that there was an adult education committee. Then I learned that its sole responsibility was to replenish the informational pamphlets in the rack at the back of the church. Are there lots of "dormant" suburban parishes? Of course. Are there benefits to living in close proximity to others within an urban parish? Undoubtedly. But there is, in my view (here comes the provocative part), a cost to a religious life that is so much part of the cultural background that it never seems to make it to the foreground. When we are Catholic simply because that's who we are and that's what we do, that seems (at least to my evangelical sensibility) a recipe for complacency. Without a personal decision to embrace the Gospel as truth, Catholicism can simply serve as the wallpaper of our lives. In the places I've lived where virtually everyone is Catholic, the parishes have been much less "vibrant" than in places where the majority is non-Catholic. This does not correspond to a clean urban/suburban distinction, but it is a problem I've observed in several urban parishes.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Vermeule on Legal Instrumentalism
On MoJ we've had some good discussion about (and with) Brian Tamanaha and his work highlighting the dangers of legal instrumentalism (see, e.g., here, here, and here). In the new Harvard Law Review, Harvard law prof Adrian Vermeule reviews Tamanaha's book, Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law. An excerpt:
My basic suggestion, in Part I, is that there is no such thing as “instrumentalism." There is only a variety of instrumentalisms, offered in different theoretical contexts for different purposes. The merits of these different instrumentalisms must be evaluated locally rather than globally. Furthermore — this is a separate point, but a complementary one — there are several antonyms for legal instrumentalism that are materially different. It is no more coherent to praise all of them, just because they are not instrumentalism, than it would be to praise all of anarchism, fascism, and communism because they are alternatives to liberal democracy.
Subsequently, in Part II, I ask what prescriptions for the legal system follow from a critique of legal instrumentalism. I suggest that in a legal culture pervaded by instrumentalism (in all of its possible senses), there are powerful discursive pressures to justify an antiinstrumental view by reference to the beneficial effects that holding such a view will produce — by reference, that is, to the instrumental benefits of anti-instrumentalism. When combined with the claim that anti-instrumentalism requires certain beliefs, not merely certain actions, this is an intrinsically paradoxical stance; it leads, perhaps unavoidably, to a type of esoteric legalism, under which the theorist is quite willing to promote a false belief in the truth of antiinstrumentalism in order to secure the benefits of that belief. Unfortunately, however, there are well-known paradoxes of esotericism that make views of this sort self-defeating.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Recovering Self-Evident Truths
The long-awaited volume Recovering Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law has now been published and is available for purchase. Edited by MoJ-er Michael Scaperlanda and my colleague Teresa Collett, the collection includes essays from me and fellow MoJ-ers Rick Garnett, Amy Uelmen, and Robert Araujo, along with Catholic luminaries such as Francis Cardinal George, Mary Ann Glendon, Avery Cardinal Dulles, James Gordley, and Robert George.
Same-sex marriage as trademark tarnishment
Yale law prof Kenji Yoshino compares the argument against same-sex marriage to the intellectual property law doctrine of tarnishment:
To people like Henry Hyde, the idea that same-sex marriage demeans or assaults the institution of marriage is a tarnishment claim. It doesn't matter that he can still marry a woman. If a woman can also get married to a woman, he feels the value of his trademark has gone down. Even those who regard cross-sex and same-sex marriage as separate institutions will conjure up both when they hear the term "marriage." So now we have an answer to Edwards' query about what another person's marriage has to do with hers.
But tarnishment analysis cannot justify the objection it illuminates for at least two reasons. First, intellectual property law seeks to protect intangible goods that belong to people because they have created and built up good will for them. No such claim can be made about state-sponsored marriage, because no individual invented marriage, and no individual owns it. Second, and probably more importantly, the tarnishment analogy reveals the homophobia in Hyde's claim. Tarnishment claims arise only when the mark is being associated with something uniformly deemed unsavory. The paradigm case is a famous mark used in a sexually explicit context, like the 1996 case in which the game manufacturer Hasbro successfully barred a sexually explicit Web site from using "Candyland" as part of its domain name. To say that marriage would be tarnished by including gays is an oblique way of saying straight marriage is sacred while gay marriage is profane.
Joe Carter responds here.
Law, morality and contract
Minnesota law/philosophy prof Brian Bix has posted a new paper, Contract Rights and Remedies, and the Divergence Between Law and Morality. (HT: Solum) Here is the abstract:
There is an ongoing debate in the philosophical and jurisprudential literature regarding the nature and possibility of Contract theory. On one hand are those who argue (or assume) that there is, or should be, a single, general, universal theory of Contract Law, one applicable to all jurisdictions and all times. On the other hand are those who assert that Contract theory should be localized to particular times and places, perhaps even with different theories for different types of agreements. This article considers one facet of this debate: evaluating the relevance of the fact that the remedies available for breach of contract can vary significantly from one jurisdiction to another. This wide variation in remedies for breach of a (contractual) promise is one central difference between promises in morality and enforceable agreements in law. The article asserts that variation of remedies strongly supports the conclusion that there is (and can be) no general, universal theory of Contract Law.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Christ the King (of the Courthouse)
Let's put disputes over the propriety of displaying the Ten Commandments on government property to the side for a moment. Anyone care to defend a courthouse portrait of Jesus? If so, your services are needed in Slidell, Louisiana. (HT: Religion Clause) Whatever creative Establishment Clause argument city officials can come up with, the rally last night did not help their cause:
[P]rotesters claimed that the portrait, which has been on display since the building opened in 1997, has never posed a problem and fairly represents the majority of residents in their largely Christian community. . . .
"You know, (the ACLU) is picking on a small community," said Randy Lee, 60, of Slidell. A self-described Christian fundamentalist, he gripped a hand-lettered sign that read "In God We Trust.""Christians are seen as very passive. It's time for Christian people to stand up and say, 'Hey!'"
The rally lasted about an hour and was peppered with prayer and shouts of "Hallelujah!" and "Praise Jesus!" Toward the end of her speech, the Rev. Kathleen Javery-Bacon, of the Holy Ghost and Fire Revival Ministries in Slidell, raised her arm to the sky while chanting, "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus" as the crowd echoed her cry.
How should we respond to this data?
Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame) is apparently nervous about releasing his new study because he fears it will be hijacked by anti-immigration folks. I can see why:
Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.
Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”
Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. “Americans raised in the 1970s,” he writes, “seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s.” And the “hunkering down” occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness.
Rod Dreher comments: "I predict this research will have absolutely zero impact on the immigration debate. Why? Because Diversity is a dogmatic secular religion."
Condoms and the Media
Condom-maker Trojan is involved in a bit of a controversy regarding its new ad campaign "Evolve." It seems that CBS and Fox have refused to air the commercial, even with late-night restrictions. Fox explained that condom advertising is appropriate for health reasons, but not for pregnancy prevention. One critic commented:
“It’s so hypocritical for any network in this culture to go all puritanical on the subject of condom use when their programming is so salacious,” said Mark Crispin Miller, a media critic who teaches at New York University. “I mean, let’s get real here. Fox and CBS and all of them are in the business of nonstop soft porn, but God forbid we should use a condom in the pursuit of sexual pleasure.”
Miller makes a good point, and I'm frankly surprised that networks still are drawing those lines. Another interesting angle is Trojan's tag line: "Evolve. Use a condom every time." Yale law prof Ian Ayres comments:
If people followed this advice literally, it would mean the end of evolution as humans would stop procreating. Thanks mom and dad, for not using a condom everytime.
So what should the advice be? Ayres suggests that we should:
stress a modern day equivalent to the three date rule. When I was going off to school, my parents emphasized to me that it was not wise to have sex with anyone until at least the third date. The modern day update for condom advice is to use a condom no matter what for the first three times you have sex with someone. The power behind the three condom rule is that most sexual pairings in the U.S. don't last 3 encounters. [His coauthor] Kathy Baker and I found that 46% of sexual pairings had sex only one time. From a public health perspective, if we could get people to use condoms the first three times they had sex with someone else we might cripple the power of many STDs.
Of course I won't be able to control what my kids do, but 'm hoping that my advice on sex will be a bit more robust than the "three date rule" or the suggestion that their evolution as a person turns on their willingness to "use a condom every time."
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
A new sort of inclusiveness
I sometimes get puzzled looks when I describe myself as an evangelical Catholic. I feel a lot more confident about my own religious identity after reading the story of Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, an Episcopal priest in Seattle who is also a practicing Muslim. (HT: Evangelical Outpost) She explains:
"I am both Muslim and Christian, just like I'm both an American of African descent and a woman. I'm 100 percent both."
Redding doesn't feel she has to resolve all the contradictions. People within one religion can't even agree on all the details, she said. "So why would I spend time to try to reconcile all of Christian belief with all of Islam?
"At the most basic level, I understand the two religions to be compatible. That's all I need."
And when do the church's disciplinary proceedings get underway? Well . . . maybe not right now:
Redding's bishop, the Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner, says he accepts Redding as an Episcopal priest and a Muslim, and that he finds the interfaith possibilities exciting.
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