Yesterday, while I was listening with students to the oral arguments in the Hosanna-Tabor case, I noticed something I hadn’t caught before.  Here’s Leondra Kruger, Assistant to the Solicitor General, responding to a question from Chief Justice John Roberts:

The government’s interest extends in this case beyond the fact that this is a retaliation to the fact that this is not a church operating internally to promulgate and express religious belief internally.  It is a church that has decided to open its doors to the public to provide the service, socially beneficial service, of educating children for a fee, in compliance with State compulsory education laws.

The reasoning here is perfectly consistent with the thought animating the narrowly-drawn exemption to the widely reviled contraceptive mandate.  Whenever a church or house of worship ceases to be simply inward-looking, when it in any way engages or serves the wider public, it becomes subject to much the same sort of government regulation as any secular entity.  Relgious freedom is a purely private freedom.  The moment you enter the public sphere, you’re subject to regulation.  The public sphere is by definition secular, not pluralistic, with its tone, terms, and limits set by governmental authority. (more…)

Dino Marcantonio asks how would St. Germanus site your church?

For St. Germanus, praying toward the east meant that at Mass, the priest and assembly were both on the same side of the altar. The priest was not facing the people; all faced God together. Likewise, church buildings, including St. Germanus’ Hagia Sophia, were commonly orientated, that is, the front doors were located toward the west and the sanctuary was located toward the east.

Also today, Howard P. Kainz on the weirdness of commanding love:

The greatest commandment, Jesus tells us, is: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Well, of course. But a commandment?

Today the Wall Street Journal features Richard Cipolla’s reflections on living as a married Catholic priest. Among other things, Cipolla speaks in favor of priestly celibacy:

My experience as a married Catholic priest for 28 years brings to mind several thoughts, both practical and spiritual. First, the church must support new priests’ families financially. During my first years as a married Catholic priest, there were times when we could not pay the heating bill. When I was ordained, it was made quite clear to me that I should not look to the church as my main source of income but rather to a full-time job outside of the church. My parish duties have thus always been secondary.

Secondly, the new priests must be prepared for the spiritual struggles that come with the territory of being a married priest in the Catholic Church. It is difficult for children of priests to hear everyone call their father, “Father.” It is one of my regrets that I could never be a “normal Dad” who was able to attend school functions and sporting events. Priests’ wives often bear the brunt of this special status, for they must allow their husbands to be “priest” at a real cost to themselves and their children. [ . . .]

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How to Fight the Man
David Brooks, New York Times

College May Lower Marriage Chances
United Press International

Divorce Counseling Law for Couples with Minors
Loretta Park, Standard-Examiner

What Raskolnikov Knew
Anthony Esolen, Touchstone

Obama’s Touts Faith
Laura MacInnis, Reuters

Harvard Law professor (and longtime First Things contributor and supporter) Mary Ann Glendon offers advice to young Christians inclined to politics in a recent interview with the National Catholic Register. Her main point is one especially worth noting in an election year: that while an obsession with the contemporary political scene can often distract us from more enduring truths, it still must be taken seriously and engaged thoughtfully. Glendon even goes as far as asserting that:

nearly everyone who takes his or her baptismal vocation seriously has some form of calling to participate in that process [ie, politics broadly understood], as he or she is able. If we Christians truly believe we are called to be a transformative presence in the world — to be salt, light and leaven — we have to do our best to improve the conditions under which we live, work and raise our children. Even our cloistered contemplatives are not merely meditating on the mystery of the universe — they are praying for the world.

This is helpful advice for Christians in the public square today, where a sense of defeat can become overwhelming. Indeed, in recent years, there has been a movement among some on the ‘religious right’ towards shunning—even disdaining—politics altogether. This attitude has enjoyed a resurgence as something of a reaction to the previous decades of alliance between Christian leaders and partisan figures, especially in more fundamentalist circles. And, and Glendon notes with concern, many of today’s brightest and most devout students scarcely consider a political career at all, often believing it to be a certain path to corruption.

Ultimately, however, as Glendon points out, this retreat impulse is misguided, overwrought, and even dangerous, as it allows others very hostile to religious faith to step in and have free reign. It is, as the ironic title of her lecture and interview alludes to, an implicit agreement with Max Weber’s thesis that “he who lets himself in for politics … contracts with diabolical powers.” So, she concedes, while “culture” may indeed more important than “politics” narrowly construed, there is a larger sense in which the latter is a constitutive element in the former. Referencing the example of Vaclav Havel, she calls the two part of a “two-way street” and notes that the two are, to a significant extent, inseparable. Especially in today’s America, where (national) politics occupies an admittedly bloated position, Christians really don’t have much of a choice in the matter.

See more, including Glendon’s thoughts on Cicero, Pinocchio, and Mitt Romney, here.

The Catholic Phoenix has posted a shorter version of James Wilson’s wonderful piece, “Saint Augustine and the Meaning of Art.” Exploring the “scandal” of Deconstruction in art history and its more far-reaching effect on one’s religious vision of the world, Wilson thinks that beauty—the kind St. Paul believed to be proof of the divine—may be more easily discerned by an undergraduate than someone familiar with revisionist theories of art:

“All of us are aware of the de-signification of everyday life that stands out as one of the apparent hallmarks of modernity. A number of years ago, cultural critics bemoaned the loss of the “figural imagination,” the “sacramental imagination,” the “ritualistic imagination,” or of, as the anthropologists had it, “savage thought.” The surfaces and interior of the things of this world seemed to have been scoured with lime, until all that remained were the inert facts and things of “objective” reality. Things had been reduced to facts rather than objects; that is to say, the world beyond the human intellect seemed to stand in no real or meaningful relation to it. But such a narrative describes neither the necessary course of history nor an irreversible course. What makes the world seem to coruscate with meanings is not primarily the conventions a given society builds up over time, as if culture were constructed upon the meaningless void of “thing-ness.” Meaning inheres in things. The signs that we call conventional or cultural are founded on natural signs, upon the real disposition of all things to signify more than their literal, factitious existence.

Roger Scruton’s well-received 2009 documentary, “Why Beauty Matters”, is something of a companion to Wilson’s piece, exposing the poverty and dehumanization of modernist and post-modernist cynicism, reductionism, and nihilism. It serves as a defense of the importance of mankind’s natural aspiration and yearning for goodness, truth, and beauty, and makes a good case against Oscar Wilde’s snarky (and rather sinister) one-liner: “All art is useless.”

Read Wilson’s article here

Russell E. Saltzman reviews What a Young Husband Ought to Know:

In my last column, I reviewed What a Young Wife Ought to Know (1901) by Emma Drake. It was part of a “sex and self” series that focused on what a young woman should do to establish a successful Victorian-like home at the turn of the last American century and one of two books my wife plucked off the shelf at a used book store. She spent eight dollars for the pair. I may have mumbled about more antiquarian books coming into the house but that ended right after I found a copy ofYoung Wife selling on eBay for thirty-eight dollars.

Precipitated by the Hosanna-Tabor Case, Winnifred Sullivan has written an interesting survey of the priority and influence, as well as the essential features, of “the Church” in legal discourse:

“Here the Court speaks of the doctrinal priority of “the church,” and presumably, therefore, of its current earthly would-be representatives…The Court here seems to be saying that, as Douglas Laycock, representing Hosanna-Tabor, did at oral argument, that “the church” is prior to the sacraments because the church forms the consciences of individuals. Preserving the hierarchical discipline and right to autonomy of the church is structural to the US Constitution evident in the priority which disestablishment (read as a rejection of Henry VIII’s rejection of the Pope in the Act of Supremacy) has to free exercise in the ordering of the religion clauses in the First Amendment itself, while acts performed in obedience to the religious conscience of the individual must bow to secular law.”

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame

Writing at Get Religion, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway nails down the essence of the Komen for the Cure fracas. Liberals aghast over Komen’s move are being forced to acknowledge that Planned Parenthood is very far from the uncontroversial, mainstream organization they thought it was:

 If you were familiar with Susan G. Komen for the Cure but weren’t familiar with the fact that this funding arrangement was extremely controversial, something is off . . .

And yet the mainstream media apparently only realized that Planned Parenthood was a lightning rod after Komen made changes to their funding policy. I’m not exaggerating. Take this amazing Politico story by Kate Nocera headlined:

Did Susan G. Komen turn itself into a lightning rod?

Turn itself into? Turn itself into? Help me out here. Funding a group that terminates 330,000 pregnancies a year is not controversial but deciding not to fund that same group is? In what world? It’s important to note that Planned Parenthood doesn’t just do abortions. But many of the other things they do — teaching kids about sex through a text-chat program, receiving hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, spending high sums on fundraising and public policy to fight political opponents, selling or otherwise distributing contraception and abortifacients — are also controversial. Giving a woman a slip of paper to get a mammogram somewhere else is not controversial, unless by the standard that it’s not sufficient work for scarce breast cancer dollars, but you have to put the controversy in context.

More here. The surprise and anger over Komen withdrawing funding is above all naive: As it turns out, killing unborn children is actually really controversial. Who would have thought?

The Fight After Komen
Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, Christianity Today

Christian Fears in Arab Spring
Oren Dorell and Sarah Lynch, USA Today

Conservatives and Poverty
Ryan T. Anderson, Public Discourse

WA Senate Passes Gay Marriage Bill
Rachel La Corte, Associated Press

Contraception Mandate Not Just a Catholic Issue
Bob Allen, Associated Baptist Press

Jason Hoyt of the national Christian fraternity Beta Upsilon Chi has the story of what’s happening at the prominent Nashville university.  Evidently inspired by the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded ruling in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez in 2010, the university’s administration changed the student organization handbook in the fall of that year, in order to impose an absurd “no-discrimination” principle on student groups that constitute themselves precisely by reference to their religious beliefs.  Hence a Christian student group cannot limit its membership or the privilege of officeholding to Christian students.  This cannot be any reasonable person’s idea of what it means for students to associate freely with one another.

Like most private universities in this country, Vanderbilt had a kind of Christian founding.  Though it appears never to have been sectarian, its founder was a Methodist bishop, and the university’s first chancellor (the officer who would be called president in most places) preached sermons to the student body in the chapel.  I dare say that in the 1880s, when Chancellor Garland was running the show, there was more real freedom on campus than there is now.  The fashionable oppressions of our own day can hardly be called progress.

Mitt Romney continues to follow his campaign strategy based on emulating Mr. Collins by once again saying the very worst thing you can say. It’s like watching ten or twenty years of hard-won progress in teaching the people who understand economics how not to talk about poverty go right down the drain in front of your eyes.

This is not really about substance, this is about language. But language matters. A lot! People use stories to organize their lives. One of their stories is that good people care about the poor and bad people don’t. It’s a good story! (In fact, you can read about it in a good book.)

So you have to show people that you’re part of that story. Once you’ve shown them that, you can then move on and show them that there are a few chapters of the story that they haven’t read yet – the ones about what really works and what doesn’t in actually helping the poor. (more…)

If the first wave of New Atheism was excessively strident, the second wave is shaping up to be unbearably sentimental. Alain De Botton, a Swiss-British television personality who has recently been selling something called “Atheism 2.0” at tech conferences, has begun planning and fundraising for the addition of what he considers a missing piece of London’s cityscape. As part of his ongoing campaign to refute the charge that atheism must necessarily be destructive, he’s rolling out a grand new project for the historic City of London: a towering “temple” for fellow atheists. Reports the Guardian:

The philosopher [sic] and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre (151ft) tower to celebrate a “new atheism” as an antidote to what he describes as Professor Richard Dawkins’ “aggressive” and “destructive” approach to non-belief.

Rather than attack religion, De Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

“Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha, but you can build a temple to anything that’s positive and good,” he said. “That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens atheism has become known as a destructive force. But there are lots of people who don’t believe but aren’t aggressive towards religions.”

Well, when’s the last time London needed St. Mary Woolnoth to keep the hours, anyway?

The first public rendering of the project, about which De Botton seems fairly serious, was printed in the Telegraph a few days ago. It hardly looks inviting or “positive,” though it’s quite revealing: an ominous black stalk (more…)

George Weigel on religious seekers versus finders:

On the Solemnity of the Epiphany, I heard a sermon—a rather well-delivered one at that—about the Magi as religious “seekers.” The same note, I’ll wager, was struck from pulpits and ambos across the country, perhaps across the world.

But isn’t there something a bit askew here?

Isn’t the point of Matthew’s tale of the “wise men from the East” (Matthew 2:1) that they were finders, not just seekers? Moreover, isn’t the further point that what was found was “he who has been born king of the Jews,” to whom they, gentiles from afar, wished to offer gifts? Don’t we lose the evangelical thrust of this charming story of seers, stars and caravans, “gold and frankincense and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11), when we focus on the seeking, not the finding, which was the first moment of messianic encounter with the gentile world (meaning most-of-us)?

There has been a spate of stories about Occupy Wall Street protesters disrupting pro-life events (on one occasion, they reportedly showered a group of female Catholic students with condoms). All this has led Ben Johnson to ask, “Why does Occupy Wall Street support Big Abortion?”:

The American Life League’s Stop Planned Parenthood (STOPP) International has released a new report showing that 27 percent of the CEOs at Planned Parenthood offices have a base salary of $200,000 a year or more, not including bonuses or other forms of incentive pay. The national organization’s president, Cecile Richards, makes more than $350,000, placing her safely in the top one percent of income earners. Occupy Wall Street may be the 99 percent, but its beneficiaries are not.

OWS claims to oppose taxpayer bailouts of huge corporations. Yet Planned Parenthood is a $1 billion a year industry that received $487.4 million in taxpayer funds in 2010. These young people protested, in part, to “protect” its federal subsidy.

Then there is the question of the abortionists’ business practices. Whatever the merits of the movement’s other targets, the abortion industry embodies the worst corporate behavior OWS could imagine in its most feverish nightmare. Abortionists lie about their service. (“It’s safe, legal, and rare.”) They mislead women about the unborn child whose limbs they will sever. (“It’s just a blob of tissue.”) They intimidate and sometimes force women to have abortions. (For but one example, read the allegations against Alberto Hodari). They often injure and occasionally kill their unsuspecting patients due to lax regulations and lack of enforcement. With the aid of a compliant media, they cover up the long-term physical and psychological damage their service causes their clients, who are disproportionately poor and minority women . . .

More here.

Komen Drops Planned Parenthood Support
Sarah Pulliam Bailey and Ted Olsen, Christianity Today

Steven Pinker’s Wrongness on Dignity
Christopher Kaczor, Public Discourse

Capitalism and the Hebrew Bible
Aryeh Spero, Wall Street Journal

Should the Church Have to Dispense Birth Control?
Megan McArdle, Atlantic

Marilynne Robinson’s Intellectual Pilgrimage
Charles Petersen, Book Forum

We seem to be in a season of judicial sanity. As Jeremy Tedesco, the lawyer who argued the case reports, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that vindicated the claims of Julea Ward.

Ward was a counseling grad student at Eastern Michigan University, and when she used the recommended procedures to refer a gay couple that she felt she could not counsel appropriately because of her Christian beliefs, she was summarily tried and executed by the faculty—in other words expelled from the program.

In a strongly worded opinion the Sixth Circuit reversed a lower court decision and reinstated Ward’s lawsuit. As the court put it: tolerance is a two-way street. Professors can’t insist that all values and life-style choices are equally valid, and then turn around and punish those who happen to be Christians.

Read the rest of Tedesco’s account here.

Some legislators in Colorado have filed suit to overturn the Colorado Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, a cap on spending and taxation that requires voters to approve increases directly by way of a referendum.

It’s a sign of the times. As the post-War middle class dominated social and political consensus has come unraveled in recent decades. (The financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent explosion of government spending put an exclamation point on this unraveling.) The upshot is a greater and greater gap between the governing class and everybody else, with the truculent populists in the base of the Republican Party that has made Mitt Romney’s life miserable (and frightened the Republican establishment) being the most vocal and obvious example to date.

A representative democracy works well when the representatives function in accord with the same political intuitions—and incentives—as those they represent. For many complicated reasons, that’s less and less true today. For example, in a place like Colorado a there are communities and constituencies that have won big-time with globalization. (Think Boulder.) They want increased spending, in large part because they can afford it. Not so Pueblo or Grand Junction.

Moreover, as is the case in Washington, Denver has a permanent population of bureaucrats and lobbyists whose interested are strongly aligned with spending. This is true of any state or local government that collects and spends a lot of money. Legislators get socialized into the permanent government.

Because our society is undergoing deep structural changes, the permanent government (which always protects legacy spending) is more and more out of sync with middle class social reality. Thus the gap. Thus the demand for referenda. Thus the legistators frustrated that too much democracy gums up everything.

Perhaps the fact checkers were on vacation or simply dozing on the job. Whatever the reason, thanks to the venerable New York Times, I can now add another illustration to my argument in “Same-Sex Science” (First Things, February, 2012) that science is often misrepresented in our debates about homosexuality.

Frank Bruni, in his essay “Genetic or Not, Gay Will Not Go Away“(New York Times, January 28, 2012), makes a broad point regarding which I am in complete agreement: Our societal, legal, and cultural debates will not be solved by science. But when you do cite the science, you ought to get it right.

His essay was occasioned by the recent revelations of actress Cynthia Nixon, who commented in the New York Times Magazine that she is gay by choice. Predictably, she has been savaged by those in the GLBT community who rely on the “born gay” argument, supposedly supported by science, to justify sexual orientation being analogous to race and thus to be accepted and celebrated as a “given” of the human condition.

In support of the argument that at least sometimes sexual orientation is a condition of birth, Bruni describes how “One landmark study looked at gay men’s brothers and found that 52% of identical twin brothers were also gay.” This brief explanation both fails as a description of that 20+ year old study and fails to reflect the better research published since.

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Elizabeth Scalia on Obamacare’s great gift:

Recently we have learned that under Obamacare—that is, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—employer insurance plans must provide free non-medical contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization for their employees.

Free is as affordable as it gets; for an accountability-spurning culture, it’s just the right price, indeed. Let us pay nothing in order to beget nothing and, says this government, let us force those interfering “churchy” institutions—who keep insisting that there is something worth contemplating beyond ourselves—to pick up the tab, for good measure.

Charles Murray’s Values Inequality
W. Bradford Wilcox, Wall Street Journal

An Administration’s Against Civil Society
Yuval Levin, National Review

Catholic Colleges Consider Trustee Roles
Libby A. Nelson, Inside Higher Ed

Nature, Nurture, and Liberal Values
Roger Scruton, Prospect

Gingrich and Food Stamps
Ramesh Ponnuru, Bloomberg View

Thomas B. Edsall at the New York Times speculates about the future of the religious right in light of its current public representatives, citing an Clinton-era letter in which Paul Weyrich despaired over whether or not there really was a “moral majority”:

“I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values…Cultural Marxism is succeeding in its war against our culture. The questions becomes, if we are unable to the escape the cultural disintegration that is gripping society, then what hope can we have?”

What would Weyrich have to say, Edsall asks, now that Newt Gingrich, “who was himself having an adulterous affair during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, won the 2012 South Carolina Republican primary with a plurality of voters who described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians?”

Edsall goes on to claim that Gingrich is the first conservative presidential candidate to run on a platform of traditional values from which he is exempting issues relating to personal sexual behavior. But Gingrich wouldn’t have reacted so furiously to John King’s question about his “open marriage” if he really was indifferent to personal sexual ethics. Sensitivity is its own kind of concern.

I noted this morning that the Obama HHS mandate has contributed to a crumbling of the Catholic left, and Matt Cantirino offered further evidence of that crack-up in the form of a column by E.J. Dionne. Now I see that even secular stalwarts are backing away from the administration’s decision. Here’s New York mag’s Jonathan Chait:

I think one relevant point here is that, by the standard of medical care, contraception is not terribly expensive. It’s not the sort of cost you need to insure against. If all medical care cost what contraception costs, there would be no such thing as “health insurance.” We would all just pay for it out of pocket.

A chorus of conservative criticism greeted the invocation of martial virtue in his State-of-the-Union speech. Max Boot wrote that the military is “not a model for the rest of society.” Matthew Cantirino found Obama’s “conflation of ‘military’ and ‘society’ [to be] worrying.” George Will similarly opined that “The armed services’ ethos, although noble, is not a template for civilian society.”

I don’t disagree with the main thrust of these criticisms. And yet I would want to blunt the sharpest edge of the claim that the military holds no lesson for relationships in civil society:

When he had entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to him, appealing to him, “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.” And he said to him, “I will come and heal him.” But the centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israelhave I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And to the centurion Jesus said, “Go; let it be done for you as you have believed.” And the servant was healed at that very moment. (Mt 8.5-13)

The short “I too” in the 9^th verse is powerful. The centurion suggests that, like Jesus, he too is “a man under authority, with soldiers under me” and so he more fully understands Jesus’ authority. In response, Jesus marvels

To be sure, this centurion would seem exceptional, even among military men. Nonetheless, military life would seem to hold some lessons appropriate to civilian life.

Today’s New York Times reminds us that the Jesuits haven’t gone entirely off the rails. Their exposé exposes the fact that Fordham has resisted compliance with a New York state law that requires insurance coverage that pays for birth control pills. Nice to know that on this issue they’re keeping the C in Catholic up at Rose Hill in the Bronx.

Of course this conflict between Planned Parenthood Jihadists and Catholic institutions is now going national. The HHS mandated health coverage requires birth control as a “preventive service.”

The absurdity of all this has united Catholics, as Fordham demonstrates. It’s hardly a hard line institution, but the strange notion that birth control is an essential health care imperative is something any intelligent liberal, Catholic or otherwise, should reject.

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