As the hot days of summer draw to a close, I find myself possessed of a full inventory of images. I certainly knew about the recent fashion of tattooing. But in the summer season of exposed skin, I found myself surprised by how widespread it has become.

A morning under an umbrella on the patio of the local coffee shop gave me a typical view. In the pleasant early sunshine, a man and woman strolled by with their retriever on a leash. His left leg was doodled up with decorations, and his wrists and lower arms featured colored bands. As they walked past, I noticed that his companion sported a delicate design on her semi-exposed lower back. A woman in her forties sat at a nearby table. She had a small tattoo on the backside of her right shoulder. The young lady who served me my coffee was heavily illustrated—and pierced. A man jogged by with his shirt off, exposing two strange looking figures on his right and left sides.

In my perplexed state of mind, I consulted a younger friend (who has some tattoos). It wasn’t long ago that tattoos were for Marines, sailors, and guys on Harley Davidsons. Now, women in graduate school doing dissertations on Elizabeth Gaskell are getting tattoos. What gives? “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s just a way to express your individuality. Everybody’s doing it.”

Individuality—and everybody’s doing it. Hum. That pretty much sounds like the ethos of middle-class culture since the 1960s. Blue jeans and tee shirts. The Rolling Stones. Punctuating conversation with emphatic expletives. It’s a wave that has been crashing onto the beach for a long time now. Everybody tossing off the horrible, oppressive conformities of bourgeois culture—together.

Mass non-conformity has always been a fantasy, of course. In fact, by my lights, it’s the great and abiding fantasy of my lifetime. And it’s a fascinating fantasy, one well worth contemplating in its latest, flesh-altering form.

The first thing to observe is surely the psychological reassurance that a tattoo can provide. I haven’t examined the specimens, but I’m willing to wager a large sum that significant number of Harvard Law School students have tattoos. These students can seem terribly privileged, but we need to understand their profound dilemma. They epitomize the striving young men and women who discipline themselves to produce exactly the right resume to ensure the fullest possible participation in our productive and rich society. But our post-1960s culture holds such conformist personalities in disdain. Thus the profound appeal of the symbols of transgressive individuality: a pierced eyebrow, hair dyed a fluorescent color, a tattoo. It’s a way of saying, “There’s a real me that can’t be reduced to everything I’ve had to do in order to be successful.”

As a middle-aged college professor who observes the lives of his students, I find myself sympathetic. I can confidently report that our contemporary society demands far more extensive and detailed compliance from young people then was the case in my day. They take batteries of standardized tests, and face a long slog through undergraduate and then graduate education in order to be assured a place in the professions. Every facet of their personal lives is assaulted with exhortations. Be sure to have protected sex! Don’t smoke! Avoid fatty foods! With so much of their lives sacrificed to the gods of health and success, is it surprising that they want to take a piece of their bodies and do with it as they please?

I’ve often looked at young men and women with tattoos and shaken my head. Don’t they realize how quickly fashions change? You can throw away the old bell-bottom pants, but a tattoo? But the more I have thought about it, the more I have come to realize that permanence is part of the appeal.

When we take a sober look at contemporary society, we can see that one of the main results of the cultural revolution of the last half century has been the demolition of soul-binding permanence. Marriage and family are the most obvious examples. It’s a simple fact: An astonishing number of well-educated and successful Americans delay marriage and forego children. They live a great deal of their lives without the weight of family responsibilities.

In a more subtle way, our postmodern culture of irony and critique also works against permanence. The old binding loyalties of faith and patriotism are openly mocked. The ability of truth to compel the soul is reinterpreted by our culture of critique as an ideological ploy to mask and advance the interests of power. Thus we are taught that nothing rightly compels devotion of heart and mind.

So we are free, freer than any people have ever been in the history of humanity. The old bonds of commitment hang loosely about us. How this came about would require telling the complex history of modern western culture, but the current consequences are not hard to identify. A free soul is a slave of desires for success, desires for social acceptance, desires for all the goodies that our wealthy economy so efficiently provides, to say nothing of our primitive passions. Increasingly uncommitted—free from the limits of marriage, children, faith, devotion, and loyalty—we are more purely and more entirely defined by our social roles as productive workers and eager consumers, and by our passing desires for satisfaction and pleasure. Again, I ask myself, is it surprising that in an age with so few binding commitments postmodern men and women seek symbols of permanence etched into their bodies?

By all accounts, we are heading toward a more fluid cultural situation. These days I am struck by how mobile young professionals have become. Shanghai, Berlin, London, Dubai—they seem to end up all over the globe, only to relocate a year or two later. I don’t doubt that the socially acceptable sexual “partnering” options will continue to expand, along with all sorts of new reproductive technologies. We’ll be increasingly free to do as we please—and undo as we please.

As the tide of impermanence rises, I’m fairly sure that the tattoo fashion will expand. The human heart hungers for permanence. We don’t want to be dispersed into endless possibilities; we want to be held responsible for being a particular person. Thus, absent strong cultural forces that encourage and enforce limitations on the will, in the coming decade we will see all sorts of strange self-mutilations and radical commitments of the body. Self-mutilation will provide a powerful symbolic compensation for our inability to commit and bind the soul.

And it will become socially acceptable, perhaps even fashionable. Because at the end of the day, manipulation of our bodies creates an impotent symbol of permanence. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., it’s the content of your character that matters, not what you do with your skin. Like tattoos, clipping off the tops of your ears or removing your little toe won’t stand in the way being a slave to your desires and society’s demands. Tasteful self-mutilation is perfectly consistent with any life-trajectory (and in our tolerant society, even the tasteless gets a free pass). In contrast, the most individual man or woman is the one who cannot do or be otherwise—and that comes from a heart circumcised by convictions that we allow to command our lives.

R.R. Reno is features editor of First Things and associate professor of theology at Creighton University.

Collecting, naming, and organizing things—anything, from banana labels to dachshund paperweights—seems to be built into human nature. At least, that’s what the Bible tells us. The first task God gave Adam was the naming of the animals. God “brought them to Adam to see what he would call them” and “the man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field” (Gen. 2:19–20). No matter how you imagine this scene, its meaning seems clear enough. The gift of language is what separates us from other species. We can name them, but they cannot name us.

Far from being an ancient myth with no contemporary relevance, the story of Adam’s task has inspired and shaped human endeavor throughout the centuries. Modern science got its start in the golden age of exploration, when collectors began cataloging exotic plants and animals in the hope of restoring Adam’s complete knowledge of the world. Some sixteenth-century scholars, like Benito Montano (1527–1598), gave Hebrew names to the places Columbus discovered, because they assumed that the Bible must contain all the words we need to understand the New World. Others realized that there were more things to know and to be named than they ever imagined. Francis Bacon exhorted gentlemen of means to build gardens “with rooms to stable in all rare beasts and to cage in all rare birds . . . so you may have in small compass a model of the universal nature made private.” Adam’s sin, Christians believed, not only expelled the first couple from the Garden. Plants and animals too had been dispersed, but now scholars could imagine a return to paradise by achieving universal knowledge.

If God were to bring all the animals before man today, the line would be too long. This scene could only take place on the computer, which is exactly what the new Encyclopedia of Life proposes. This remarkable project aims to gather descriptions of every species known to science on a single website. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson has been the driving force behind the Encyclopedia, and his enthusiasm for it is unbounded. “It’s going to have everything known on it,” he said, “and everything new is going to be added as we go along.” Nearly two million species are known, but scientists estimate that ten times that many are yet to be discovered. Most of these unknown species are bacteria, fungi, and insects. We can name them because we know, or want to know, everything about them.

Call it what you will—an electronic ark, the final chapter in the book of nature—the Encyclopedia of Life is the culmination of Adam’s task. Wilson’s own specialty is the study of ants, and he hopes that putting all 14,000 known species on the website will stimulate others to add all the unknown ones, a number that might be as high as 25,000 additional species.

Wilson is a worthy heir of Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), who is known as the Father of Taxonomy, the science of identifying, naming, and organizing species. As a young man, Linnaeus set himself the monumental task of classifying everything in existence. “God created,” he is said to have boasted, “Linnaeus ordered.” By the time of his death, his magnum opus Systema Naturae described 15,000 species in 2,300 pages. His division of species into strict hierarchies was overturned by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, but other aspects of his system of classification survive to this day. Indeed, his recognition of the similarities between humans and apes makes him one of Darwin’s most important forerunners. Linnaeus was the first person to define humans as an animal among animals, giving us the name Homo sapiens.

Linnaeus’ exuberance for naming brought him worldwide fame, but today the status of taxonomy is pretty low. Taxonomy is a thankless task, made even more so by the anonymity of websites, especially one as vast as the Encyclopedia of Life. Why be content to describe the world when you can develop theories to explain it and, better yet, change it? Wilson’s project is going to demand a significant increase in the number of taxonomists in the world. It will be interesting to see whether enough people will dedicate themselves to the task of description to make it succeed.

Our ancestors were inspired to name the animals by the idea that the world is a good and orderly gift from God. Adam named the animals as an act of husbandry and stewardship, but Genesis also portrays Adam’s task as a quest for companionship. Right before God parades the animals before Adam, he says, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner” (Gen. 2:18). The next verses states, “So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air.” The Israelites were an agricultural people, so it should not be surprising that this sacred text portrays the animals as the first companions of man. It should also not be surprising that Adam did not find among the animals “a helper as his partner” (Gen. 2:20). At this point in the Genesis story God creates the woman to be flesh of the man’s flesh. Animals, Genesis teaches, are a good part of a divinely sanctioned order, but we are not one of them. We can name them because we know that we have a destiny that transcends the animal world.

The current frenzy for naming has a different basis. Post-Darwinians can name the animals because we know that we are the same as them, not different. We share the same biological structure, and, more importantly, we share the same precarious existence on the environmentally troubled planet Earth.

Indeed, much of the hype for the Encyclopedia of Life concerns the claim that only by naming every species can we hope to preserve them from extinction. Yet there is no reason to think that this quest for absolute knowledge will lead to the protection of animals rather than their exploitation. Wilson is a champion of biodiversity and the love of nature for its own sake, yet even he admits that the Encyclopedia of Life will accelerate “the discovery of wild plant species adaptable for agriculture, new genes for the enhancement of crop productivity, and new class of pharmaceuticals.” If knowledge is power and humans are one animal among many, then what will keep us from using this knowledge to lord our power over all other animals?

Genesis describes Adam’s task in the Garden as innocent and almost childlike. In fact, the story captures the way that animal names and sounds are among the first things that children learn. The Encyclopedia of Life is also exciting for its novel opportunities, but whether we end up completing Adam’s task out of a spirit of gratitude for what God has given us or in an attempt to play god over the animals remains to be seen. In either case, Adam’s task is still our own, and perhaps now more than ever before.

Stephen H. Webb is a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College. His recent books include American Providence: A Nation with a Mission, The Divine Voice, and Dylan Redeemed: From Highway 61 to Saved.

During the Saddleback debate two weeks ago, John McCain, asked by moderator Rick Warren to define who the “rich” are, offered a response that has elicited mockery from some on the left when he (half-jokingly) said, “Someone who earns $5 million.” He followed up that response by saying that the question was really irrelevant, since he doesn’t want to raise anyone’s taxes, but would rather see all Americans grow rich. By contrast Barack Obama defined the rich more liberally, suggesting that anyone earning $150,000, or perhaps $250,000, belongs in that category, and hence ought to be paying higher taxes in the name of fairness. At the same time he has proposed a system of “refundable” tax credits, so that those who paid less in taxes than the amount of the credit will receive a check to make up the difference. (Obama’s rival for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, similarly called at the beginning of her failed campaign for a “new progressive vision” to combat income inequality.)

The contrast between today’s liberals and conservatives on the issue of economic inequality and fairness covers much wider ground than the question of who the rich are. Most importantly, it concerns the very purpose of a tax system, and the criteria of fairness. Liberals point to the persistence and even increase of income inequalities in recent decades as signs of a lack of fairness in American society, and hence demand that taxes on wealthier people be raised to reduce that gap. By contrast, conservatives note that (as Wiliam McGurn of the Wall Street Journal recently observed) the top 1 percent of American taxpayers already pay 40 percent of all income taxes, the highest level in forty years, while the upper 10 percent pay 71 percent of taxes. The very notion of “progressive” taxation rests on a questionable moral foundation, as liberal University of Chicago law professors Harry Kalven and Walter Blum pointed out in their now-neglected classic The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation, published in 1953: Why should some individuals be taxed at a higher rate than others just because they earned a greater total sum of income? (Even at a flat rate, the highest earners are already contributing more per capita to the federal treasury than others do.) But even if one were to accept some level of gradation, McGurn’s figures surely suggest that it has gone too far—especially since President Bush’s tax cuts removed a substantial share of Americans (the lowest-income earners) from having to pay federal taxes at all.

The most striking aspect of today’s liberal position emerges when spokesmen like Obama confront the possibility that setting taxes at a lower rate might actually increase government revenues—and nonetheless hold out (as Obama did in a conversation with ABC’s Charles Gibson) for a higher rate in the name of fairness. Similarly, back in 2006, Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, took some Democratic strategists to task for not addressing the issue of inequality more forthrightly, tellingly remarking, “I think it’s a distraction [from the actual situation of middle-class Americans] to debate whether we have a higher standard of living now [compared to 1979] or not. We probably do. But so what? Middle-class Americans are not getting their fair share” (because the rich had gained even more over the same period of time).

How is one to decide between these opposing conceptions of fairness? To begin with, we might ask about how far that notion properly applies in comparing the income and wealth of discrete individuals. Implicit in the view of today’s self-styled liberals is the notion that any person’s wealth is ultimately the product of an overall economic “system”—so if he is receiving what looks like disproportionate rewards, there is something wrong with the system. But surely, under a system that allows freedom of enterprise (misleadingly labeled a “capitalist” one, as if all economic regimes didn’t require capital), an individual’s earnings typically have some connection with his own efforts (including the effort he put in to acquiring the necessary skills in the first place). As the late Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick put it, implicit in the redistributionist view is the misleading assumption that wealth somehow falls “like manna from heaven,” rather than being produced by individual human beings.

Of course, under any economic system, there is no necessary correlation between an individual’s efforts and his economic rewards. Economic success is influenced by native talent, schooling, the familial and neighborhood environment in which one grew up, and just plain luck. Some people, moreover, have the good fortune to receive substantial gifts from their parents when they launch their careers, or inheritances later on. For all these reasons, there has long been a broad consensus in America, as well as in other prosperous commercial republics, that government should expend considerable funds to broaden the opportunities available to poorer people—most obviously through free public education—as well as to soften the impact of economic duress on them (through free health care for those who cannot afford it, food and housing assistance, unemployment compensation, and so on).

It is a big leap, however, from the notion that government should try to help alleviate the condition of the poor, to the belief that all income earned by individuals somehow forms a collective asset, a “fair” share of which (the amount to be fixed by the government) “belongs” to all classes of the population—so that the tax system should be used not only to finance needed public services, but to reduce the inequalities in people’s wealth and income just because they seem “unfair.” This was the doctrine taught by the late, highly influential Harvard philosophy professor John Rawls, notably in his book A Theory of Justice. But as Kalven and Blum wrote, “whether the argument for redistributing income is put in terms of increasing the general welfare or of redressing the injustice of the existing rewards, it is always precariously close to being rested simply on envy.” (Remarkably, Rawls even espoused a doctrine of what he called “excusable envy,” encouraging people to feel envy whenever levels of inequality exceeded a particular–and unspecified–level, on the ground that envy would be “rational” in such cases, as it would lead to a demand for redistribution.)

It would appear more fitting to recall the thought expressed by Abraham Lincoln in his 1864 reply to a letter of support for the Union cause from the New York Workingmen’s Democratic Republican Association:

Property is the fruit of labor—property is desirable—is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich, shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.

Despite intervals of recession or near-recession that are an inevitable phenomenon in a market-driven economy, the overall standard of living of working Americans at all levels of income continues to rise. There is good reason to think that most Americans continue to share Lincoln’s outlook, rather than that of our academic and partisan teachers of envy. It is the opportunity to get ahead through one’s own efforts, rather than the hope of living off other people’s earnings, that continues to attract so many people to our shores.

David Lewis Schaefer is Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross and author of Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition.

I shall ignore the shrill personal attacks upon me in Robert Miola’s spleen-venting review of my book, The Quest for Shakespeare, in your August/September issue. I would, however, like to respond to the factual errors and seriously misleading rhetoric with which his review is peppered.

In seeking to undermine the scholarly authority of my study on the basis of my dependence on secondary sources, he fails to acknowledge that the vast majority of studies of Shakespeare, many of which he is happy to cite positively, are similarly dependent on such sources. The primary sources surrounding Shakespeare’s life have been so thoroughly trawled and authenticated by generations of scholars that their authenticity is not in question. As such, a condemnation of my book on the basis of its use of secondary sources is a de facto condemnation of almost all books on Shakespeare. Such an attack also fails to mention my own acknowledgment, at the very outset, of my dependence on such secondary sources. I quote from my own book:

It would be somewhat remiss of me to fail to acknowledge the scholarly pioneers who have laid the path along which the present study has trod. As such, I doff my cap in the direction of my illustrious forebears . . . Suffice to say that a perusal of the bibliography at the end of this volume will identify those scholars upon whose shoulders I have stood in order to gain the perspective contained herein.

Miola’s critique of my discussion of John Shakespeare’s “spiritual testament” is awash with rhetorical sophistry designed to undermine its objective importance. Reading between the lines illustrates, however, that Miola is unable to refute the solid evidence or its wide-ranging ramifications. He offers what he terms Robert Bearman’s “devastating critique” of the evidence in 2003 without mentioning Robert Bridgman’s even more devastating critique of Bearman’s arguments. Here, as elsewhere, Miola’s review is decidedly selective in its choice of “evidence.”

His discussion of John Shakespeare’s recusancy is distorted and misleading in its one-sidedness. He offers the old red herring of the “fear of process of debt” without mentioning the wealth of scholarship surrounding John Shakespeare’s finances or the reasons why “debt” might have been cited in the official records.

Miola’s use of rhetoric in the pursuit of sophistry is impressive. Having employed the red herring, Miola stoops to erect straw men to defame my scholarship. He raises the spectre of Edmund Campion to illustrate the insufficient evidence to link the Jesuit with Shakespeare without mentioning that my whole chapter on the so-called Shakeshafte Theory indicates that I share his own skepticism on the subject. To be accused of credulity is one thing, but to be accused of credulity in an area in which one has declared oneself a skeptic is beyond the bounds of belief.

One might think that Miola could not stoop lower, but he offers a litany of other “errors” in my book without offering any evidence beyond his own supercilious self-righteousness. To take but one of many examples, his assertion that other portraits of Shakespeare have more claim to authenticity than the Chandos portrait flies in the face of the view of many of the world’s experts.

The next abuse arises in Miola’s use of the non sequitur. He dismisses my discussion of King Lear for not addressing the textual issues surrounding the quarto and folio texts without admitting that my critique of the play and its meaning is not dependent on such a discussion.

And Miola’s final faux pas is his descent to the woeful depths of the argument ad hominem. He ends by accusing me of painting Shakespeare in my own image and, in so doing, of being a hypocrite for attacking others for doing the same thing. In fact, it is my whole argument, expressed at considerable length in my book, that we must all be servants of objectivity. A Christian does not have the liberty of lying. He must be honest. I have sought to be honest. I don’t believe that Shakespeare is a Catholic because I am a Catholic. Such a belief would be gutter relativism. I believe that Shakespeare was a Catholic because the evidence, both historically and textually, shows him to be a Catholic. I will remain convinced that the evidence is overwhelming until someone shows me otherwise. Miola has certainly failed to do so.

As for his own prejudiced agenda, it is summed up with the banal “cautionary aphorism” with which he concludes his review: “Dante was a Catholic; Milton was a Protestant; Shakespeare was a dramatist.” Unfortunately nobody is simply a dramatist, or a poet, or a carpenter, or a taxi driver. Whatever else Shakespeare was, he was not simply a dramatist. The (post)modern academy doesn’t want to face the unwelcome truth that Shakespeare’s beliefs informed his works because it fears that his beliefs might not be acceptable to the academy. In this, as in so little else, the academy is right.

Joseph Pearce is author of The Quest for Shakespeare.

Joseph Pearce’s reply is as overheated and inaccurate as his book. I shall gladly leave it to your readers to determine whether there is anything of a “shrill personal attack” or ad hominem argument in my review, or whether those appellations better describe Pearce, who preens himself on his “Bellocian bellicosity” and repeatedly mocks those who have different viewpoints as gutter-oriented scholars, silly asses of academe, and the like. In his short reply he accuses me of spleen-venting, factual errors, misleading rhetoric, sophistry, abuse, faux pas, red herrings, straw men, supercilious self-righteousness, non sequitur, and a prejudiced agenda, among other things—that’s quite an achievement for both of us. Anyway, to his response:

1) We don’t need to look at primary sources any more because their “authenticity” is not in question? (Quick, close the grad schools, the academic presses, and scholarly journals!). That is simply an indefensible and ludicrous proposition. The authenticity of many documents, including the will, is precisely at issue, and, besides, it is the interpretation of the documents that requires first-hand examination by anyone who presumes to discuss them. Yes, all scholarly books rely on secondary sources but none worth reading do so to the exclusion of primary sources. No scholars, graduate students, or undergraduates can reliably discuss the period without looking at the evidence. All reputable Shakespeare biographies (contra Pearce) do so. That evidence primarily consists of sixteenth and seventeenth century imprints, English and Latin (and modern editions), manuscripts (for which one needs paleography skills), as well as the vast traditions of commentary. Or should we just skip all that with Pearce and just say what someone else said while ridiculing those who disagree?

2) Reading between the lines illustrates that I am unable to refute Pearce’s analysis of the will? I do not wish to refute the analysis (which actually belongs to DeGroot), however, as I am not arguing for or against it but reviewing Pearce’s inadequate account. This account, as I demonstrated, misleads the reader by misrepresenting Malone’s role, by neglecting all contrary evidence, and by ignoring all pertinent discussion after DeGroot (1946)—Bearman, Bridgman, and everyone else. (It is not a good idea to try to read between the lines until one understands the lines themselves.) Ironically, had Pearce bothered to do his homework here, he might have made a stronger argument regarding the will, as Dennis Taylor has just done in a recent issue of The Shakespeare Newsletter.

3) Regarding John Shakespeare’s notice of recusancy, the original document in Elizabethan hand distinguishes among absentees for different reasons—debt, death, present conformity, age and infirmity, as I note in the review. Pearce cannot even begin to discuss this document because, by his own admission, he has not read it, resting confident it has been sufficiently “authenticated,” whatever that means; but these careful distinctions warrant serious investigation and discussion. I submit that it is his responsibility to do this investigation and to take into account alternative possibilities before leaping to sensational conclusions in defiance of what the documents say. Of course, there is a lot of scholarship on John Shakespeare’s finances and debt and I could easily provide a long list to supply the deficiencies in his slight bibliography, beginning with the books I mention in the review by Park Honan and Katherine Duncan-Jones. But I think he should have read and considered all that in the first place.

4) Yes, Pearce does show some skepticism about the Shakeshafte theory but closes his discussion by saying: “It doesn’t really matter. In the quest for William Shakespeare we know that he was raised in a militantly Catholic home, whether or not he ever stayed in that other militantly Catholic home in Lancashire” (p. 78). Some skepticism. We know nothing about the religious practices of Shakespeare’s home. In any event Pearce’s memory fails him on the Campion connection, on which he actually said, “This seems the most likely means by which John Shakespeare received the copy that he used as the template for his ‘spiritual will’” (p. 36). Hardly likely at all, in the opinion of those many Pearce deigns neither to read nor to discuss, including the recent article by Davidson and McCoog, as I point out in the review.

5) The errors I list in the review are so elementary as hardly to need demonstration, and, in any event, providing documentation for Pearce’s mistakes would have swollen the review to many times its allotted length. I am happy here to provide some explanation and some preliminary references for the five “howlers” I noted:

a) On the W.S. dedication to the 1616 edition please see, for starters, the discussion of this point in the standard edition of Southwell’s works by James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford, 1967), p. lxix.

b) On Rowe’s dubious account of Shakespeare and Jonson’s EMI (which Pearce accepts uncritically) please see any modern edition of Jonson’s play (e.g., Oxford, vol. 9, 1950, p. 168; Yale, 1969, p. 218; Revels, 2000, p. 41).

c) On the Shakespeare likenesses, consider that both the Droeshout engraving and Trinity bust, unlike the Chandos portrait, are likely to have been commissioned or at least approved by friends and family, the one by fellow actors, the other by surviving relatives in Stratford. See S. Schoenbaum’s judicious discussion in a book which Pearce lists in his bibliography, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford, 1975), pp. 254–5, 258–9.

d) The identification of the Annesley analogue for Lear (which Pearce misattributes to a modern scholar) appeared before that in articles by G. M. Young (1947) and C. Sisson (1951), and is treated in the standard compilation of Shakespeare’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources by Geoffrey Bullough (vol. 8), 1973.

e) On Sonnet 23, see an introductory handbook or essay on Elizabethan bibliography and printing (McKerrow, Gaskell, Blayney, etc.); any one will quickly disabuse Pearce of the idea that capitalization in early modern texts is authorial rather than compositorial (i.e. done by the workmen setting type by hand). As for the detection of an allusion to the Mass in Sonnet 23 as “the perfect ceremony of love’s right,” just look at the preceding line, “So I for fear of trust forget to say” and ask how it is that any non-clerical speaker can claim to “say mass,” an impossibility for Elizabethan (and later) Catholics; look also at modern commentaries on this sonnet by Stephen Booth, Helen Vendler, Colin Burrow, etc.

6) Regarding King Lear, Pearce claims that his failure to distinguish between quarto and folio texts is irrelevant to his interpretation. But how can this be true when there are huge and significant differences between the two texts, each containing different speeches and actions? To take just one example, Pearce makes much of Edgar as Catholic and climactically quotes his last speech, “The weight of this sad time, etc.,” hearing in it a lament for contemporary England and perhaps for Shakespeare’s own father (p. 198). But Edgar’s role is significantly different in the two texts, and in the quarto it is Albany, not Edgar, who says those (and other) lines. Pearce’s complete ignorance of the textual, critical, and theatrical history of the play (he does not even identify the edition he uses) disqualifies his discussion as serious consideration.

7) Pearce may be honest and may be a Christian, as he feels necessary to declare, but such assertions will not justify the hypocrisy of recreating Shakespeare in his own image while excoriating others for doing exactly the same thing. And after all, how does Pearce know that the scholars he ridicules are not honest or Christians also? And what difference can such extra-textual claims make to readers anyway? Pearce may well continue to believe that Shakespeare was a Catholic (or a Jew, or a Buddhist, for that matter), and I have little interest in trying to persuade him otherwise; but he is seriously mistaken if he thinks he has made any kind of a credible case for his views.

8) Yes, Shakespeare may well have been other things than a dramatist but we cannot know what these were without evidence and serious investigation—both of which Pearce fails to provide. There is not a single new idea in his book; there are many errors of fact and omission. I do not know what he means by the “post(modern) academy” or how his closing remarks against it are relevant to my review. As the byline indicates, I teach at Loyola College, a Jesuit institution, where we take seriously Catholicism, belief, and scholarship, ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

Robert S. Miola is the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor of English at Loyola College in Maryland and editor of Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources.

I once wrote a book on the American experiment and the idea of covenant, Time Toward Home. A covenantal understanding of America is distinct from, although not incompatible with, a contractual understanding. Most writing about the American experience, and especially about the American political order, accents that it is based on a “contract theory” of government. Contract theory has a very honorable philosophical pedigree. It is based upon a narrative, some would say a myth, about people entering into a mutually beneficial agreement or contract in order to form a government. The telling of that story by John Locke had a significant influence on the thinking of the American founders, but it was hardly the only influence, and, in subsequent history, has not been the most important influence.

Time magazine reported on the aforementioned book and highlighted my writing that, “When I meet God, I expect to meet him as an American.” Admittedly, that is a statement that can easily be misunderstood. It is not intended as a boast or as a claim on God’s favorable judgment. It is a simple statement of fact. Among all the things I am or have been or hope to be, I am undeniably an American. It is not the most important thing, but it is an inescapable thing. Nor, even were I so inclined, should I try to escape it. It is a pervasive and indelible part of what is called one’s “identity.”

Identity has become something of a buzz word in our public discussions, leading to the frequently deplored “identity politics” that constructs the world around race, gender, sexual orientation, and other contingencies that should not be expected to bear the weight of the world, or even the weight of defining who you are. And yet identity is important. To borrow a motto from the people at American Express, “Don’t leave home without it.”

Once one leaves a secure world of taken-for-granted realities, one is at a loss without an identity. We want to know who we are in relation to who others are, or who they want us to think they are. I am indebted to the sociologist Peter Berger for the phrase “identity kit.” We all have one. They are the pieces of biography that people produce in introducing themselves to strangers or in writing a resume for a job or in privately measuring our successes and failures. As Berger says, “Any identity is better than none.”

One’s identity is, as often as not, a work in progress. And it is not entirely a matter of choice. One cannot make it up out of whole cloth. After all, one is born at a particular time and place, with particular parents and other circumstances that shape our opportunities and expectations. Being an American is among the most important of those circumstances. Needless to say, our identity, who we think we are, is formed in large part by who other people think we are. Recall the line of Robert Burns, “Oh, would that God the gift would gee us / to see ourselves as others see us.” One hopes for that gift not because others necessarily see us more accurately than we see ourselves, but because how we see ourselves is significantly informed by how we think others see us.

Among American thinkers, and not least among American religious thinkers, one frequently encounters an attempt to escape one’s time and place, including one’s identity as an American. It is a very American thing to try to do. Such attempted escapes are not necessarily because one dislikes America and is uncomfortable with being identified as an American, although that is no doubt often the case. Rather, there is something in American culture, reinforced by Christian impulses, that prompts people to think that they should be more than Americans.

An academic friend who teaches religious ethics fervently insists that she is not an American citizen but “a citizen of the world.” You perhaps have friends like that. It is a very American thing, thinking that we have transcended being American. We are, after all, as some like to say, the world’s first “universal nation.” By that is meant we are a “nation of immigrants” and therefore American identity is an amalgam of the identities of all the peoples of the world. The phrase universal nation is also intended to mean that American identity is established not by national origin, ethnicity, race, religion or other historically contingent factors but by subscribing to certain universal principles–for instance, the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence.

The Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson employs to fine effect the phrase, “the story of the world.” The story of the People of Israel and the Church, he writes, is nothing less than the story of the world, and the world is today lost in its confusions because it has “lost its story.” I would add that, for those of us who are Americans, we are as Americans part of the story that is the story of the world. Moreover, America itself–this nation that the founders called an experiment and, like any experiment, may succeed or fail–is part of the story that is the story of the world. Of the many ways of thinking about America–economic, political, cultural, etc.–there is today a striking scarcity of thinking about America religiously, even, if you will, theologically. It was not always so.

This subject touches, of course, on the familiar question of the one and the many, of particularity and universality, and whether, as modernity has led many to think, one must choose between them. Recently published is the last book by John Paul II, whom history will, I believe, call John Paul the Great. It is titled Memory and Identity and is a profound reflection on the connections between personhood and peoplehood, between national experience and God’s purposes through time, and one’s own little place in that drama. Of course, the book is about Poland and being Polish, both of which John Paul explores and affirms in a way that many might think scandalously chauvinistic but I believe is provocatively wise.

It was not so long ago that American intellectuals, including American theologians, thought in a similar way, albeit not always so profoundly, about the American experiment. In the last half century or so, Americans have largely lost their story and its place in the story of the world. Religious thinkers, too, have succumbed to the false-consciousness of having transcended the American experience, which is expressed, more often than not, in a typically American anti-Americanism that is relished and imitated by others, notably by European intellectuals. As in the writing of biography, or of history more generally, one cannot think truly about a story with which one is not sympathetically engaged. Love is sometimes blind, but contempt is always blind.

Richard John Neuhaus is editor in chief of First Things.

References
Time Toward Home by Richard John Neuhaus

In the present agonies of the Anglican Communion, and of many other denominations besides, it is almost impossible to avoid labeling each other. Sometimes we assign or adopt labels in a sincere effort to indicate our own or others’ loyalties and identities; sometimes we use labels more aggressively to associate one another with positions we think we can safely attack. Often our labels are confusing. In communities where the liberal tradition has long been deeply embedded, for example, it may well be conservative to be liberal: a bias in favor of change may be a deeply entrenched tradition.

In current debates, two key yet confusing labels are legalist and antinomian. In Euro-American culture it is much more damaging to be labeled legalistic than to be labeled antinomian. I doubt there is any community anywhere where legalistic does not refer to a bad sort of excessive law-abidingness. Not so with antinomian. In Euro-American settings, at least, being labeled an outlaw, maverick, or rebel activates mostly positive associations. In liberal discourse, especially about religion, anyone who can successfully claim to be a rebel fighting against legalists has already won an important political victory. We have seen this dynamic working ironically in press reports of Church debates about same-sex relationships: Where conservatives can be seen as successfully obstructing change, we are given pretty unsympathetic coverage; where liberals, however, have gained enough control of local church institutions to begin terminating licenses and seizing parish assets, the press often takes a much friendlier tone toward the now rebel diehards.

The actual word, antinomianism (from Greek anti, “against” and nomos, “law” or “convention”), apparently entered English in the period of radical Christian experimentation and conflict following the Reformation. Back then, antinomians were Christians who allegedly denied the relevance of the moral law. In the Reformation, Protestants came to reject the un-biblical ceremonial laws of late medieval Roman Catholicism, while Catholics and Protestants alike rejected the perceived “ceremonial laws” of “Pharisaic,” Rabbinic Judaism. Some Christians inevitably went further and declared themselves altogether emancipated in the gospel from obedience to any and all law, whether moral law or ceremonial law. As Markus Bockmuehl wrote in Jewish Law in Gentile Churches,

There has long been a popular antinomian point of view in mainstream Protestant thought, which denies that New Testament faith could involve binding moral norms of any kind. On this view, aside from the general exhortation to “love,” any “imposition” of substantive and non-negotiable moral warrants must be a legalistic distortion of the gospel of grace.

For many of us, indeed, the moral law of Scripture and Tradition is admirable to the extent that we judge it moral, rather than binding as we may be judged by its law. “Thou shall not kill” is commendable advice, for what it’s worth, despite its stodgy legalism.

It is against such antinomians as those Bockmuehl mentioned that, in Anglican tradition, Article VII of the Articles of Religion insists on the distinction between “the Commandments which are called Moral” and ceremonial law. The moral law of the Old Testament is distinguished from the ceremonies of Ancient Israelite Religion, in order to claim that the former is still obligatory for Christians. Ominously for Jewish-Christian relations and for Anglican identity, the ceremonial and civil law of the Old Testament is then rejected in principle. Instead, Christian ceremonial laws are largely devised and enforced on the Church’s local, temporary and quite human authority—bolstered, ideally, by the support or at least the active toleration of the state and its also divinely-sanctioned yet widely variable civil law.

The distinction between moral law and ceremonial law is essentially un-biblical, based sadly in anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic polemics. Christians have so often been taught to distinguish between moral and ceremonial law(s), that this kind of moralizing reading becomes second nature to us. The distinction, however, is not made in the Bible itself. Often, we look for the moral or spiritual “principle” underlying a practical, “ceremonial” provision, for example, the principle of devoted rest beneath the practice of avoiding ordinary work on Sabbath. The Bible itself, however, does not detach principle from practice. Marriage law, in fact, dramatizes the unhelpfulness of separating the “moral” and the “ceremonial”: marriage is both. Christian marriage norms are derived from Jesus’ unusually strict reception of biblical marriage law (Mark 10). By analogy, moreover, marriage law has important doctrinal implications (Eph. 5). Marriage law, and, indeed, most biblical law, is at the same time moral, ceremonial, doctrinal and civil.

The concept law is rarely made clear either. In English, law usually refers to conventions more or less agreed upon by representative groups (for example, synods) and enforced by proper authorities. We value the rule of law in civil and church society, but we also recognize that such law changes and is imperfect: Any particular legal provision may be here today, but gone tomorrow. Law in this sense is tremendously important, but is still, over time, subordinate to the wishes of the community which creates it. The law is an instrument by which we freely govern ourselves; therefore we must (almost always) obey it. For many moderns, law is essentially a human, social construct, though a noble and necessary one, the cumulative and constantly evolving product of debates, votes, and trials. In this sense late modern legal constructivists are not obviously antinomians: they believe passionately in socially-legitimated law, precisely because they can no longer appeal to much in the way of socially shared moral consensus. But the law in this sense is emphatically human legislation, not the Torah-law of God. Many Anglicans, indeed, most Christians in Europe or North America take this view at least some of the time, so that biblical laws can safely be dismissed as relics of past societies, merely “Jewish laws,” while the constructed laws of yesterday’s synod can be enforced as though delivered on Sinai. Similarly in post-Christian civil societies, as a biblical moral law is abandoned and with it any right to disapprove usefully of each other’s misconduct, more and more ethics must be codified in the civil law and enforced by the state.

I am unable to lay to rest an adolescent memory of an Anglican bishop explaining to me and my classmates what he called “creedal affirmation”: the ability to recite the creeds at the correct liturgical moments as an affirmation of moral commitment to the historic Christian community, without in any way taking upon oneself the propositional, ideological content of the creeds as texts. Here the lex credendi seems to have drowned in the lex orandi and doctrine has been reduced to a function of that ceremonial law which is wholly at the church’s discretion.

In the Bible, by contrast, law usually refers to God-given Torah norms, interpreted or misinterpreted by human tradition, but deriving its unique authority from God rather than from the consent of the community. It is basic to biblical Christianity, vehemently renewed in the Protestant Reformation, that our standing before God does not derive from any obedience we may achieve to Torah-law. No one’s relationship with God depends on Torah observance. Ideally, Israel and the Church observe Torah in sheer gratitude to God. Sometimes we are even saved from Torah, in the sense that we need to be delivered by trust in Christ from a false trust in our compliance (whether Anglican or Jewish) with Torah-law. I know some people who feel that as long as we do our best in life, God will treat us OK. This sentiment seems to me neither Christian nor Jewish. Certainly non-Jewish Christians do not need to convert to Judaism, lest we seem to be basing our relationship on God on a false appropriation of Torah given to Israel, rather than on our incorporation by faith into Jesus Christ.

Nonetheless, Torah expresses God’s will for humanity; Torah frames the gospel freedom of the Spirit. If non-Jewish Christians are not required to keep kosher, to be circumcised, or to worship on the seventh day, it is because these duties distinguish Jews as such, rather than because Torah no longer matters. Non-Jewish Christians are free from those aspects of Torah which are designed for Jews only, but everyone is bound by those aspects of Torah which were designed for human beings universally. Although the Bible does not distinguish between moral and ceremonial Torah, it does distinguish between Torah-laws specific to Israel and laws which speak universally to human existence under God. I feel free to eat foods that are forbidden to Israel, because I am not a Jew. I feel constrained by Torah to respect marriage, because the Torah of marriage is given not only to Israel, but to all humanity.

Especially since the Holocaust, there has been a huge change among biblical scholars toward recognizing that Jesus remains forever a Jew. Jesus is a Jew not only in some accidental cultural-ethnic sense, but also programmatically and eschatologically. In Jesus “something greater than the Temple is here” (Matt. 12:6, Heb. 12:18-29), as Torah finds its heart in the Incarnate Word. Jesus of Nazareth was a Torah-observant Jew; he challenges other Jews with the extravagance of God’s grace, but he never repudiates Torah as such. Neither Jesus nor Paul understood the gospel to be a religious system in opposition to Torah-Judaism as a religious system.

Yet, as Christians have begun to value Judaism more respectfully, we often remain committed to a view of Torah-observance as obviated by the work of Christ. Against such a view, the critical difference between (non-Christian) Judaism and Christianity is Christological, not moral. For Paul, as E. P. Sanders put it in Paul and Palestinian Judaism, “what is wrong with the law is that it is not Christ.” Paul did not cease to be a Jew when he became an apostle of Jesus Christ, nor did Paul ever cease looking to biblical Torah for rules of Christian conduct. Too often, those who accuse others (whether Jews, Catholics, or Puritans) of legalism—of claiming that strict Torah-observance validates the Covenant relationship—do so because they themselves are reducing Christ’s role to that of moral example, teacher, and enabler. Overwhelmingly, both Jewish and Christian normative texts recognize that Torah-observance has meaning, but only and precisely inside the covenant relationship freely given by God. Both Judaism and Christianity intend to practice covenantal nomism. Moreover, New Testament moral instruction is unintelligible apart from a Christian aspiration to obey the universal aspects of biblical Torah.

Paul does say some shockingly critical things about Torah observance. Paul is concerned to make absolutely clear that even Torah, divinely-inspired religion at its very best, cannot give us a relationship with God. The only way to have a meaningful relationship with God is to place all our confidence in Jesus Christ. The enormity of the limits which Paul sets on the role of Torah can only be appreciated when we take with full seriousness that what he is talking about is not law in some vague sense, or the religious traditions of his ancestors extrapolating on Torah, still less “conventional morality,” but divinely-revealed Torah itself. When the New Testament speaks of Law it is almost never speaking of “Jewish Law” and almost always of God-given Torah.

It is God’s own Torah embedded in creation and given to Israel and to humanity by divine revelation and prophetic inspiration which for Paul loses its precedence compared with the wonders of a life entrusted to Christ (Phil. 3). Interesting things happen if, instead of translating the Hebrew Torah and the Greek nomos as law, we try the exercise of translating them as “divinely ordained religion.” It is divinely-ordained religion at its very best which Paul subordinates infinitely to the gospel-power of God in Jesus Christ.

The point is therefore not that Torah-law no longer matters. The point is that even the most wonderful thing in the universe (that is, God’s Torah itself) finds its proper meaning only under Christ. Torah and the gospel are not opposites in the Bible, so that the one may be abolished by the other. Instead God speaks both Torah and gospel in every paragraph of Scripture. Torah is everywhere subordinate to the free gift of God proclaimed in the gospels, but a grateful and trusting heart always receives God’s Torah as the means of responding to grace. There is a deep antinomianism wherever the moral law is thought of as a changeable set of human, social conventions, “ethics policy” for Jews and Christians. There is a deep antinomianism and implicit anti-Semitism wherever biblical Torah is dismissed as an alien, dispensable cultural left-over. There is an even deeper antinomianism wherever Torah-authority is attributed casually and sometimes ruthlessly to the political decisions of local Synods and the jurisdiction of Bishops.

Ian Henderson is Associate Professor of New Testament at the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal and a lay member of St. Stephen’s Church in Westmount.

Christian and Muslim leaders from around the world met this summer at Yale University for the first of four conferences to discuss “the foundational principles” of the two faiths. The willingness of Islamic authorities to engage in dialogue with their Christian counterparts is, to be sure, a welcome development. Whether the religious leaders involved in these meetings will confront the thorniest issues dividing these faith communities—while avoiding the historic mistakes of other inter-faith dialogues—is an open question.

The Yale conference will be followed by meetings between Muslims and Anglicans at Cambridge University in October; with Catholics at the Vatican in November; and at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. next year. The effort grows out of a challenge issued by Pope Benedict XVI that Muslims grant the same freedoms to Christians living in their countries that they receive in the democratic West. Last fall, 138 Islamic leaders from forty nations sent a letter, “A Common Word between Us and You,” addressed to the pope and other Christian leaders worldwide. The twenty-nine-page letter invited Christians to meet with Muslims on the basis of “what is common to us and most essential to our faith and practice: the Two Commandments,” i.e., love of God and love of neighbor.

Many are ready to dismiss this appeal as mere piety or naivete. They should reconsider: The history of democracy in the West owes a great debt to these two commandments. Secular-minded historians and political scientists would like us to believe that democratic ideals emerged from the triumph of Enlightenment thought—in opposition to Christian doctrine. In fact, the Biblical concepts of human dignity and equality supplied the philosophical pillars of liberal democracy, especially in the Anglo-American tradition. Ministers on both sides of the Atlantic, for example, regularly cited the golden rule—what they called “the great rule of equity”—to argue for religious toleration and equal justice under the law.

Are the Christian leaders who gathered at Yale familiar with this history, and are they willing to press its lessons upon their Muslim guests? Participating groups such as the liberal National Council of Churches have shown scant interest in defending the persecuted church, the principle of religious freedom, or the democratic institutions that sustain it. Yet if Muslims are serious about the golden rule, they must explain why the governments of most Islamic states represent such a brutal contradiction to its democratic expression.

Another potential problem with “The Common Word” dialogue is its implication that the Christian Church must reform itself no less so than the Islamic community. There’s no doubt that reform is needed. Whether the issue is materialism, hypocrisy, or the politicization of the gospel, there are real problems in the Church. Yet the danger here is the trap of moral equivalency—the assumption that modern Christianity is as prone to terrorist violence as Islam. As the Muslim letter put the matter: “The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.”

The future of the world depends on no such thing. The existential threat to international peace and security is not a religious war between Islam and Christianity. The global threat today is a faith-based version of European fascism—a re-emergence of the totalitarian impulse, animated by the theology of radical, Islamist jihad. This ideology of bloodlust and martyrdom claims millions of adherents worldwide, inspires terrorist cells across entire continents, and is obsessed with acquiring the world’s most destructive weapons to unleash against civilian populations. “Why were millions of people astounded by what happened to America on September 11?” writes Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s second in command. “We have the right to kill four million Americans—two million of them children—and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands.”

There is simply no equivalent to this perverted religion anywhere in the Christian world—it is a crisis within Islam, a moral and spiritual malaise that has grown unchecked for decades. It is incumbent upon the Christian leaders engaged in this dialogue to ask why this is the case, and what their Islamic interlocutors intend to do about it.

They might take a cue from a Muslim reformer, Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ansari, the former dean of the law faculty at Qatar University. He argues that terrorism is the result of a “culture of hatred” in Arab countries and “a discourse of denial” about its homegrown sources. “How can this miserable creature called the Arab and Muslim individual not turn to extremism, when he is surrounded by an overall atmosphere of extremism, bound by the shackles of repression and prohibitions, and girded by the ideas of intimidation and terrorization, and of almost endless torment?” he writes.  “Go to hear a Friday sermon, and you will find a preacher who is enraged at the world, angry at civilization, spreading the poison of hatred and enmity.”

Ironically, a similar rhetoric of denial about Islamist radicalism, fed by a sense of self-loathing, has infected much of the Christian community in the West—from the political rants of Anglican bishops to the moral agnosticism of Ivy League theologians. Whether the Christian leaders assembled at Yale and beyond possess the clarity and courage to overcome these besetting sins remains to be seen.

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy and the editor of The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm.

“Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.”

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer

As we head toward November, Catholics might profit from recalling a few simple facts.

First, surrounding a bad social policy or party platform plank—for example, permissive abortion—with religious people doesn’t redeem the bad policy or plank. It merely compromises the religious people who try to excuse it. One of the more miraculous, or suspicious, side-effects of the 2004 election was the number of candidates in both political parties who suddenly began talking about their religious faith. There’s no doubt that many public officials, regardless of party, do take their religious beliefs very seriously and do try to live by them. That’s a good thing. So maybe this latest trend implies a new Great Awakening. Or maybe, as one of my skeptical friends says, “it’s just another charm offensive to get the shamans off their backs.” Time will tell. Words are important. Actions are more important. The religious choreography of a campaign doesn’t matter. The content of its ideas does. The religious vocabulary of a candidate doesn’t matter. The content of his record, plans, and promises does.

Second, there’s no way for Catholics to finesse their way around the abortion issue, and if we’re serious about being “Catholic,” we need to stop trying. No such thing as a “right” to kill an unborn child exists. And wriggling past that simple truth by redefining the unborn child as an unperson, a pre-human lump of cells, is the worst sort of Orwellian hypocrisy—especially for Christians. Abortion always involves the deliberate killing of an innocent human life, and it is always, inexcusably, grievously wrong. This fact in no way releases us from the duty to provide ample and compassionate support for unwed or abandoned mothers, women facing unwanted pregnancies, and women struggling with the aftermath of an abortion. But the inadequacy of that support demands that we work to improve it. It does not justify killing the child.

Obviously, we have other important issues facing us this fall: the economy, the war in Iraq, immigration justice. But we can’t build a healthy society while ignoring the routine and very profitable legalized homicide that goes on every day against America’s unborn children. The right to life is foundational. Every other right depends on it. Efforts to reduce abortions, or to create alternatives to abortion, or to foster an environment where more women will choose to keep their unborn child, can have great merit—but not if they serve to cover over or distract from the brutality and fundamental injustice of abortion itself. We should remember that one of the crucial things that set early Christians apart from the pagan culture around them was their rejection of abortion and infanticide. Yet for thirty-five years I’ve watched prominent “pro-choice” Catholics justify themselves with the kind of moral and verbal gymnastics that should qualify as an Olympic event. All they’ve really done is capitulate to Roe v. Wade.

Third and finally, national campaigns—of every political party—always run on the language of hope, change, and the American Dream. This makes sense. Our leaders should inspire us; they should stir our hearts and call us to live the ideals that make America great. But sometimes the answer to the realities we face is not “yes, we can,” but “no, we can’t.” No, we can’t spend money like hedonists and outrun our debts forever. No, we can’t ignore the poor of the Third World and expect to be loved abroad. No, we can’t allow the killing of roughly one million unborn children a year and then posture ourselves as a moral society. No, we can’t make wicked things right by spinning them in a clever way.

Robert D. Kaplan once wrote that “Americans can afford optimism partly because their institutions, including the Constitution, were conceived by men who thought tragically.” The American Founders, most of them Christians, had a hard and unsentimental understanding of the limits of human reason and virtue. The last thing we need in 2008 is the kind of bogus hope rooted in mystical good feeling.

The real world involves hard conflicts and intractable issues that can’t be talked away or smothered under evasive language. Plenty of very good Catholics inhabit both major political parties. It’s our job as Catholic citizens to press our parties and our political leaders to respect the sanctity of human life—all of it, from conception to grave—whether our leaders and party elites like us or not.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is archbishop of Denver and author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life (August 2008, Doubleday).

It’s common to assert that faith-based schools are more successful than public schools—at least, in inner cities—in educating students. Sure, their teachers get paid less and often have fewer credentials, and they receive much less federal funding. So what is it that has apparently made faith-based education better? When I asked a former president of the National Catholic Education Association, it took several minutes before the notion arose: “There may be something about the fact that faith-based schools are,” he paused, “faith-based.”

Not that you’d know it from the people at the Department of Education, who have in recent months become interested in the success of urban faith-based schools—and, sadly, not that you’d know from many of the people actually running those faith-based schools.

I ran into plenty of both kinds at the Summit on Inner-city Children and Faith-based Schools, a conference hosted by the White House this past April. The summit—drawing roughly three hundred teachers, school administrators, clergy, policy-makers, philanthropists, and others generally invested in religious education—became a platform for lauding the academic excellence of these schools, for lamenting recent closings, and for seeking new solutions. President Bush brought his trademark intensity to his opening statement: “When schools like these fail our inner-city children it is unfair, it’s unacceptable, and it is unsustainable for our country.”

The argument looks something like this: America’s inner-city schools are in crisis, with average graduation rates around 52 percent. In some cities—Cleveland, for example—only 35 percent earn diplomas. This grim situation has caused many parents to look to private schools (often Catholic schools) for sanctuary, paying for it themselves, or using vouchers, or seeking scholarships.

But now even those schools are facing a crisis. Built decades ago in downtown areas to serve an immigrant Catholic population that has since moved out, they have stayed to offer education to local, poor families. But as Catholic schools’ costs have skyrocketed, the parish-supported income for inner-city churches has plummeted. More than 1,300 urban Catholic schools have closed since 1990, displacing over 300,000 needy students, according to an April 2008 report of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The question, of course, is what these schools offered that the urban public schools did not. Throughout the day’s events, the panelists struggled to put their finger on just what that might be. It is “a little bit of a mystery,” admitted Karl Zinsmeister, the president’s domestic-policy advisor, “but part of the explanation seems to be the school culture, that these institutions outperform others at presenting—you know, creating things like discipline and safety and racial harmony and a sense that all children can succeed.”

It’s something to do with “the salience of moral education,” which “does not have to be religious, just the teaching of right and wrong,” ventured Dr. William Jeynes, a panelist who, slideshow and all, analyzed the advantages of religious schools. It’s “a better school culture.” It’s “a sense of moral discipline, self-worth, and community obligation,” added another panelist. And for Dr. Vernard T. Gant, it is something indescribable that made him want to shout—despite being at a White House event in an election year—“Yes we can!”

Although they fell short of precisely defining what it is that makes religious schools special, the panelists had nothing but zealous applause for the schools’ superior results. Religious schools contribute to “the public good,” which, as Zinsmeister put it, makes them “every bit as much public institutions as, you know, the Red Cross or the United Way or the YMCA or any of the other entities that we think of as serving the public good.”

Could it be that religious identity, the greatest single thing distinguishing religious schools from public schools, plays some part in the different results we’re seeing? This question was the least explored at the summit. Even some figures from religious schools dismissed the notion that religious identity could be instrumental in their schools’ success.

While waiting in line at the summit, I struck up conversation with an energetic, silver-haired woman wearing a well-worn blouse, slacks, and a name tag that identified her as a religious sister. She readily told me about the Catholic girls’ school she runs in inner-city Washington, D.C., and the laborious but worthwhile task that is. When I asked her how much of a role Catholic teaching plays in her curriculum, she hesitated to answer: “pretty much all of our girls are non-Catholic, so we don’t really think we should be pushing our beliefs on them. . . . I mean, they learn about moral values, yes, but as for Catholic [history and doctrine]—we don’t really see that as our place to teach them.”

She is one of many educators today who takes part in this line of thinking, a line of thinking that Pope Benedict criticized only a few days prior at the Catholic University of America, imploring “teachers and administrators” to live up to their “duty and privilege” to instruct students in “Catholic doctrine and practice.”

But despite the pope’s words, many Catholic educators think that it is somehow more Catholic not to stress Catholic identity in schools. The summit participants often invoked the late Cardinal Hickey’s words: We should help others “not because they’re Catholic, but because we’re Catholic.” While one wants to praise the notion that it’s right to help others in need on the basis of their human dignity, it’s quite another thing to imply that creed and faith play no important role in a religious school. That would suggest a fundamental shift in both the purpose of these schools and the call of the faithful—that it is better for a school to be essentially more faithful-sponsored than faith-based.

Consider, for instance, Cristo Rey, a system formed by Jesuit priests in Chicago to help low-income students afford Catholic education by teaming with city businesses in a “Hire for Ed” program. Of the program Bush remarked, “It’s interesting that the Jesuits took the initiative. I would hope that corporate America would also take initiative.” Sure, it’d be nice if corporate America and the government were more naturally inclined to do this, but they’re not. History shows us that these kinds of ideas are more likely to sprout on the local level, and are often fueled by something greater than a concern for educational excellence for its own sake—something more like faith.

Once religious identity is considered less than integral to the school’s welfare, it’s no small leap to what the summit’s concluding panelist, Lawrence Weinberg, described in his vision for government-sponsored religious charter schools. In these schools, courses “can teach morality” or “culture,” but “no religion course may endorse the religion being taught” or “identify [with] a faith.” He insists, “the critical point for religious leaders considering opening a charter school is whether they will be able to fulfill their desired mission through a school that can accommodate religion but does not endorse religion.”

That the government finds this a handsome alternative shouldn’t surprise us. But it should surprise us when we see this view coming from religious-school teachers themselves. Certainly, demanding that students of different faiths believe in the school’s religion is wrong; but equally extreme is the notion that educators dare not teach students about the faith that inspired the charitable organization’s founding. (Even more shocking is the notion that they could consider it in the students’ best interest to be deprived of the slightest exposure to teachings they consider to be the truth.) In the face of the problems religious schools currently face, it is doubtful that a shift from the faith-centered focus of their founding is the ticket to reviving them.

Mary Rose Rybak is managing editor of First Things.