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.
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.
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.
Michael Greve at the American Enterprise recently posted in a Liberty Fund blog a trenchant analysis of the recently announced HHS regulations that will compel all insurance policies to cover contraception, sterilization, and morning after pills
He provides a very lucid analysis of the way in which vague statutory language about preventive care for women turned into preventing pregnancy and then got written into regulations.
Follow the progression: first comes a statutory text of sufficient ambiguity to keep the Catholic Health Association, representing Catholic hospitals, on board in support of the ACA. (Now that it’s been had, one hopes the association has learned its lesson.) Then comes an administrative creep forward and a de facto delegation to a private organization of known disposition, whose perceived authority and expertise provide cover for the bureaucracy. Then comes the wholesale, underhanded adoption of the interim rule.
By Greve’s reckoning, this travesty is of a piece with the entire agenda of Obamacare. It can’t be implemented, because its a Rube Goldberg contraption, and because dysfunctional as written, what does get done will get done by regulatory fiat.
In a New York Times Op-Ed, history professor Sara Ritchey makes much of the fact that married Anglican clergy will become Catholic priests under the new Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter.
Ritchey provides some useful historical background that outlines the early medieval shift to an all-celibate clergy. But I was struck by her naive ignorance of the recent history of the Catholic Church. The existence of Priests’ wives should, she tells us, provide the occasion on which “a real conversation about the continuation of priestly celibacy might begin.”
Might begin? In the first place, the new Ordinariate doesn’t inaugurate a new era of married priests. The Catholic Church has in fact been ordaining married Anglican and other Protestant ministers for more than a decade now. But more importantly, the “conversation” about priestly celibacy was rather fully engaged in more than three decades ago. Perhaps in the splendid isolation of some academic precincts it still goes on, though only in a one-side way of the progressives talking to themselves. Meanwhile, the rest of the Church regards the conversation as having been in some respects useful, in some respects frivolous, but in most respects over.
The National Catholic Reporter is almost always predictable, and their choice for 2011′s “person of the year” was true to form: Elizabeth Johnson.
Johnson, a professor of theology at Fordham University, is a standard issue Catholic Theological Society of America theologian, which means a bit of simplified Karl Rahner and lots of talk about contextualization mixed with progressive social attitudes. Yawn. Her great achievement in 2011 was to have her 2007 book, QUEST FOR THE LIVING GOD, criticized by the USCCB doctrine committee as promoting a theology not in accord with Catholic teaching.
So that’s were liberal Catholicism is these days: circling the wagons. Writing and publishing the book wasn’t such a notable thing for Elizabeth Johnson to do. Ah, but to be criticized! One hears the cries of “censorship,” and “oppression.” As the NCR story tells us, after the official criticism of her book was released, “the Fordham faculty rallied around her, as did the leadership of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the College Theology Society, each issuing supportive statements.” The NCR as well wants to play it’s supportive role. Thus Elizabeth Johnson as victim, oops, I meant to say person of the year.
I wrote about this minor dust up in a recent Public Square (The Changing of the Guard, Aug/Sept), drawing attention to a Commonweal symposium that featured the fevered hyperbole of the Catholic theological Old Guard and the rather more measured and intelligent analysis put forward by Fritz Bauerschmidt.
It’s this contrast that’s the real story here. The Catholic Theological Society of America was once a serious academic organization. Today it’s a Trade Union for Dissent. How dare the bishop criticize theologians! Left with very little of interest to say in the current intellectual and ecclesial context, the Trade Union for Dissent can rouse itself to denounce any who would make the quite obvious observation that the substance and trajectory of their theologies are not in accord with the Church. Yawn.
Among the 57% of Iowa caucus-goers who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians, Santorum finished in first place with 32% support. Ron Paul garnered 18% of the evangelical vote, while Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry each received 14% of the evangelical vote.
I’m not someone who pays close attention to every inning of the long political game. But the data seems clear. A Catholic candidate got a great deal of the Evangelical vote.
What this suggests to me is that the “religion factor” has shifted. Today Catholic, Protestant, and Jew make little difference. I’ll go out on a limb and say that Mormon makes little difference. (Muslim does make a difference, a big difference, but that’s for another time.) What seems to move voters is a combination of authentic piety, or at least the appearance of genuinely believing, and clarity about crucial moral and social issues.
I’m convinced that an Orthodox Jew could win as many votes from Evangelicals in Iowa as Santorum did—assuming of course that he had similar unequivocal views about the key issues of concern to Evangelicals.
The same is probably true for a Mormon. I find it hard to believe that Romney got fewer votes from Evangelicals because he was a Mormon rather than a Catholic. As the former governor of Massachusetts Romney has a track record of compromise, accommodation, and silence (if not outright agreement) with liberals on all sorts of issues, some economic and some social. That—and not Mormonism—was his liability among Evangelicals in Iowa.
In any event, it ain’t 1960 anymore. Pious Baptists in places like Houston or Des Moines don’t seem worried about the nefarious influence of priestcraft. These days it’s just religious conviction plain and simple that arouses loyalty among some voters—and anxious antipathy from others.
I imagine that Leon Wieseltier and I disagree about many things. But I’ve long found him to be a reliable enemy of cant. I was not disappointed by his recent Washington Diarist column in The New Republic.
He takes Duke University philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg and author of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions to the woodshed.
We had a fine and hard-hitting review by Edward Feser back in the November issue (Scientia ad Absurdum). Feser observed, as does Wieseltier, that Rosenberg simply asserts an untenable scientism, which means the presumption that because science explains things so effectively, the only things that exist are those that science explains.
I’m not a fan of rap music, but it’s a supremely verbal musical idiom that works well with the substance of this music video, which is the difference between F. A. Hayek’s free market approach and the use of government intervention endorsed by John Maynard Keynes. What I found especially engaging is that John Papola and Russ Roberts, the producers of this video, begin with the classic debate about how and why we eventually pulled out of the Great Depression, but then turn to more fundamental questions. Economics and politics (in the deep, Aristotelian sense) are linked, and they draw out the moral dimension of the great economic debate. Keynes: unemployment is not a statistic; it’s real people, and waiting for markets to correct themselves reflects a very cold and remote attitude. Hayek: “I want plans by the many, not by the few.”
The fight ends with Keynes declared the victor, which has been in fact the case in government policy over the last couple of years, though this marvelous video suggests that Papola and Roberts think Hayek has the best arguments. As I said, very clever and well-done.
Over at the New York Times “Room for Debate” page, Tim Shah and Tom Farr observe that our liberal counterparts are often tempted to define democratic culture as, well, liberals talking the way liberals talk.
Drawing from Barack Obama’s meditations on the role of faith in public life, they give us his conclusion: “What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.”
It’s the standard Rawlsian boilerplate: universal values, public reason, and so forth. I can understand the impulse. Civic responsibility seeks to promote the common good, not private interests, and the common good is, well, common, and in that sense universal. But it’s a mistake to translate a virtue—civic responsibility—into an epistemological principle or criterion.
It’s a mistake because the principle or criterion that promises to be formal—only universal truths, only public reasons—ends up being substantive. By the reasoning of nearly all Catholic thinkers, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are universal truths accessible to natural reason. Thus a good Rawlsian should allow me to make public policy arguments based on these universal truths: obligatory philosophy of religion classes in high school, for example.
That I don’t make these arguments stems from my prudential judgment that such policies would be either ineffective or counter-productive, which is to say contrary to the common good. It’s these sorts of judgments—we all make them all the time—that makes public advocacy responsible and appropriate for a democratic society.
In some circumstances an explicitly Christian and theological argument serves the common good. Martin Luther King, Jr., provides the most obvious recent example, with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural providing another. In other circumstances the most responsible arguments are empirical—the debate leading up to the Welfare Reform Act in the 1990s provides a good example. In still others it’s a philosophical argument that serves the common good, the pro-life argument being a current example. There is not formula, no criterion, not principle that can tell us what bests promotes the common good. That requires good judgment, which is a virtue.
You can imagine my surprise this Christmas weekend when I discovered an essay on ancient and medieval spiritual theology in the Sunday Book Review section of the New York Times. In “The Noonday Demons, and Ours,” Brandeis English professor John Plotz reminds us that temptations toward distraction, dissipated attention, and unproductive work are not unique to our age. It’s true that monks in the Egyptian desert during ancient times weren’t tempted to check facebook or shop on the internet, but like us they identified the “noonday demon,” the vice of acedia or sloth, as it is known in the spiritual literature of Christianity.
As Plotz points out, its a complex and seemingly contradictory vice. Imagine yourself unable to get out of bed to go to work. That could be acedia. Or imagine running around doing errands when you should be sticking to an important task. That’s acedia as well. What unifies lassitude and busyness is a common consequence: both prevent us from doing what we should do, and often from what we actually want but can’t discipline ourselves to do.
Acedia—which means literally without care—may be the cardinal vice of our postmodern era. So I argue in my own essay, “Fighting the Noonday Devil.” And in Fighting the Noonday Devil, a recently published collection of my essays, I offer meditations on love and loyalty, the motivating cares that help us fight the carefree vice.
Patrick Reilly and Rick Garnett mix it up over how best to respond to the aggressive way that Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and Human Services has crafted regulations that stipulate what employers must include in the health insurance policies they provide. The long and the short of it is that the regulations require payments for contraception, day-after pills, and other drugs and procedures that are contrary to Catholic moral doctrine.
Catholic and other religious institutions have pushed back, asking for revisions, the details of which get us pretty deep into the legal weeds. You know that you’re on to something serious when the conversation turns on how to interpret and apply section 414(e) of the federal tax code! In any event, check out the back-and-forth at Mirror of Justice.
A friend wrote me today, saying, “When I was studying philosophy in graduate school I never imagined that I would live to see a thoughtful profile in the New York Times on Alvin Plantinga, let alone a respectful discussion of his new book on religion and science and the renaissance of Christian philosophy. But here it is:”
“There are vastly more Christian philosophers and vastly more visible or assertive Christian philosophy now than when I left graduate school,” Mr. Plantinga said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Grand Rapids, adding, with characteristic modesty, “I have no idea how it happened.”
Mr. Plantinga retired from full-time teaching last year, with more than a dozen books and a past presidency of the American Philosophical Association to his name. But he’s hardly resting on those laurels. Having made philosophy safe for theism, he’s now turning to a harder task: making theism safe for science.
He’s right. Who would have imagined? Good for Jennifer Schuessler. She is an editor at the New York Times Book Review and wrote the review.
I was visiting Columbia recently, and Fr. Dan O’Reilly, the chaplain there told me that Fr. Richard John Neuhaus often preached there—and that his homilies were recorded and are available on the Columbia Catholic Ministry website. “No way,” I said. “Yes, way,” he replied. Check it out. The list of homilies that you can download and listen to are on the bottom of this page.
We’re in the middle of our Fall fundraising campaign, a new effort to raise funds for the mission and work of the First Things website. I hope you will step forward to be counted among those who give.
The First Things website does many things. We provide one and often two (and sometimes even three) new articles each day. Our First Thoughts blog engages current issues. You have access to many articles in the current issue of First Things. Our archive is filled with more than twenty years of great essays.
All of this costs money to produce, edit, and maintain, and unlike First Things magazine we receive no subscription income from you to underwrite the expense. So if you are a regular reader, please donate to our Fall campaign. It’s easy to do. Just click here to donate.
Our goal is to enroll 500 readers as web donors during the month of October. It’s an ambitious goal, but you are remarkable readers. Make a difference. Support the mission of the First Things website. Please donate now.
James B. Jordan is remarkable. There are plenty of Bible preachers in America who know the Scriptures well. Lots of professors read books in philosophy, history, and literature and have all sorts of interesting things to say about culture. Pundits cultivate a sharp, pungent, and readable style. But Jim is perhaps unique. Who else writes detailed interpretations of the Book of Daniel and quotes Allen Tate’s poetry? Who else can give a lecture on echoes of Leviticus in the apocalyptic vision of Zechariah and then chat over cigars about Friedrich von Hayek and Richard Weaver? Moreover, who can cover such a range with vivid images, punchy tag lines, and memorable turns of phrase? Not many, which is why I’ve come to think of Jim Jordan as one of the most important Christian intellectuals of our day.
We’re in the middle of our Fall fundraising campaign, a new effort to raise funds for the mission and work of the First Things website. I hope you will step forward to be counted among those who give.
The First Things website does many things. We provide one and often two (and sometimes even three) new articles each day. Our First Thoughts blog engages current issues. You have access to many articles in the current issue of First Things. Our archive is filled with more than twenty years of great essays.
All of this costs money to produce, edit, and maintain, and unlike First Things magazine we receive no subscription income from you to underwrite the expense. So if you are a regular reader, please donate to our Fall campaign. It’s easy to do. Just click here to donate.
Our goal is to enroll 500 readers as web donors during the month of October. It’s an ambitious goal, but you are remarkable readers. Make a difference. Support the mission of the First Things website. Please donate now.
Today we’re launching a new effort to raise funds for the mission and work of the First Things website, our Fall fundraising campaign. I hope you will step forward to be counted among those who give.
The First Things website does many things. We provide one and often two (and sometimes even three) new articles each day. Our First Thoughts blog engages current issues. You have access to many articles in the current issue of First Things. Our archive is filled with more than twenty years of great essays.
All of this costs money to produce, edit, and maintain, and unlike First Things magazine we receive no subscription income from you to underwrite the expense. So if you are a regular reader, please donate to our Fall campaign. It’s easy to do. Just click here to donate.
Our goal is to enroll 500 readers as web donors during the month of October. It’s an ambitious goal, but you are remarkable readers. Make a difference. Support the mission of the First Things website. Please donate now.
Attention First Things readers. The Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. is sponsor a Theological Symposium on marriage on Friday and Saturday, October 21-22.
The speakers are excellent: Reinhard Huetter from Duke, Fr. Michael Sherwin from the Dominican faculty at Fribourg in Switzerland, Steven Long from Ave Maria, and others. Highly recommended.
Sunday’s New York Times ran an op ed by Warren Buffet, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” in which The Oracle of Omaha chided our legislators for failing to tax the rich at sufficiently high rates.
He points out that he paid nearly than $7,000,000 in taxes last year. Sounds like a lot, but since most came from taxes on dividends and capital gains, his tax rate was actually lower than most of the folks he pays to work for him at Berkshire Hathaway. Unfair, he thinks. Thus he proposes raising taxes on people with incomes of over $1 million (including dividends and capital gains), and even more for those making over $10 million.
I’m always a bit suspicious of wealthy people who want to raise taxes on income. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure Warren Buffet is a stand up guy. But he does like to invest in companies that have what he calls “moats,” which his way of describing strong protections against the profit-reducing effects of competition. And what better way to suppress competition for super-wealthy status than to raise taxes on income! If we slow down wealth accumulation with higher marginal tax rates, then the already super-rich will enjoy a moat, as it were, because they can arrange their financial affairs (as does Buffet) to minimize transactions, suppress taxable income, and otherwise preserve their wealth.
So I propose a better approach, one that actually targets the super-rich, and one I’m sure Mr. Buffet will endorse: a 2% tax on any net worth over $50 million. Let’s see, his net worth is $60 billion or so, which means that after my proposal is enacted, his tax bill will be $200 million.
That should make him feel like he’s pulling his weight.
The year is the 400th anniversary of the Authorized Version of the English-language Bible that often goes by the name of the monarch who commissioned the translation. It was a tremendous theological, scholarly, and literary achievement, producing the most influential book in the English language. The American Bible Society is holding an academic conference on July 9th to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, along with an exhibition charting the history of the KJV. As part of the conference, N.T. Wright will be in town and is preaching around the corner for the First Things office at Calvary-St. George Episcopal Church (21st and Park Avenue South) on Sunday morning at 11am. Well worth attending.
A gay rights group put pressure on King & Spaulding, a prominent Atlanta law firm, to drop its representation of the federal Defense of Marriage Act—and succeeded. By Franck’s analysis, the fact that the law firm caved is unfortunately typical. He’s certainly right about academia. As he writes:
In all except the most resolutely religious colleges, there is no doubting that the default position of the American academy is to dismantle the institution of marriage and remake it on a new basis. The result is a good deal of self-silencing—self-exile into the “new closet” on issues involving sexuality—not just by students but by faculty, too. The path of least resistance turns out to be the path of no resistance. For institutions that claim to be homes of diverse views and free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, this creeping orthodoxy is a sign of wounded institutional integrity and failed leadership.
I’m not in favor of an approach to university culture or the public square that rejects all standards and adopts an anything-goes mentality. But there is something very wrong with our establishment institutions when, as Franck points out, a widespread, venerable, and commonsensical view gets driven into the closet. And what could be more conventional and more normal that the view that marriage is between a man and a woman? Perhaps the progressives are right. Perhaps traditional views of marriage are without foundation. But it’s patently absurd to imagine that they are irrational or extreme or somehow a threat to civil society (all legitimate reasons to censure and perhaps even censor).
As Franck also suggests, we undermine our democratic culture when the views of the majority of citizens are silenced or excluded for the important institutions that are essential for the health of our nation. We need an academic culture and legal culture that responds to democratic realities rather than kow-towing to factions that want to gain the upper hand and disenfranchise their opponents.
For many decades the Liberal Establishment has provided responsible leadership for important institutions in America. But it seems to have become enfeebled and decadent, often unable to resist the intimidating (and often puerile) behavior of extremists on the Left. (The universities provide the clearest examples. Political correct extremism commands very little loyalty, but it reigns because the dominant liberals acquiesce.) To a very real degree, the Liberal Establishment is collapsing into liberal political activism.
That’s why we need to consolidate a Conservative Establishment, a mentality committed to political and social goals, of course, (as was the Liberal Establishment) but also able to take responsibility for running institutions that transcend the political debates of the moment and provide space for the necessary give-and-take of civic life.
Of theology, that is. The Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is hosting a conference in September, “The Intellectual Tasks of the New Evangelization.” The purpose? “The Committee hopes this conference will provide an occasion to build relationships between bishops and the next generation of theologians.”
A good idea indeed. Today, the academic Establishment in Catholic theology tends to set itself up as an authority over and against the teaching role of the bishops. It’s a counterproductive outlook that needs to change.
Interested? The Committee on Doctrine has a grant to subsidize travel and lodging for young theologians. Check it out.
Sam Harris is the poor man’s Richard Dawkins, and he was recently at Notre Dame University to debate whether or not God is the source of morality. In an amusing and at time affecting meditation on the entire phenomenon of our Latter Day Atheists and their determined efforts to set science over and against religion, Notre Dame professor of philosophy John O’Callaghan wonders how it is that we’ve come to the point of imagining that our scientific explanations are at odds with our beliefs about God.
Must we chose between scientific explanation and belief in the God who is the creator of heaven and earth? Here’s part of O’Callaghan’s answer:
The greatest among our Christian forebears certainly didn’t think we had to. Even if one remains unconvinced by the logic of Aquinas’ Five Ways, the attitude expressed in them is not one of natural explanations in competition with God. His natural science was almost unimaginably false with regard to what we now know or claim to know. But the reality of natural causes that allows for scientific understanding was for him the best and “most manifest” argument for the existence of a god, a god Who does not compete with His creatures but, rather, enables them.
For Aquinas, God was not an alternative hypothesis or theory to be superseded by subsequent science; on the contrary God was the best explanation for why there is an intelligible world at all to be understood by successive stages in science. Without God, there is no science and no scientific progress. The best reason for thinking there is a God, after the fact that your mother told you so, the same mother who told you who your father is (and I dare you to tell her you don’t believe her!), is the glory of science, not its failure. The glory of God displayed in scientific explanation “gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.” (Homework for Sam Harris: explain that line from Hopkins’ poem.)
Well put, as is the rest of his meditation on the strange phenomenon of atheists who imagine that science provides them with trump cards.
From the very outset of the order, people have been criticizing the Jesuits. The Society of Jesus has long tended toward extremes that raise hackles. I’m no exception, I suppose, having skewered a few of the liberal Jesuits over the years, most recently Fr. Jim Keenan and Fr. Mark Massa, a not-so-dynamic duo at Boston College.
Ah, but I’m falling into my usual critical tropes again, which isn’t only tiresome after awhile (though perhaps only after a long while, given the target rich environment of the liberal leadership of the Society of Jesus), but also doesn’t capture the whole picture.
There are in fact some very interesting and smart and effective and orthodox Jesuits abroad. For example, take a look at a very interesting group blog, Whoseover Desires, run by some younger Jesuits in various stages of formation.
I recommend visiting regularly. They’re one group among many in the Society who are putting the Jesus back into Jesuit. May they prosper.
