Gendered Proclivities
Rhys Laverty (“Lady Scrooges,” December 2024) was perceptive in pointing out that women helped build today’s unforgiving cancel culture.
On the other hand, the feminism responsible is not a misplaced maternal vice arising from what C. S. Lewis characterized as “intense family patriotism of the wife” as argued by Laverty. It rather arises from radical feminism’s revision of the Marxist labor/capitalist categories of oppressed/oppressor into intersecting categories of oppression based on race, sex, gender and other marginalized group identities with the white heterosexual man being the most privileged oppressor. This radicalizing ideology justifies not only DEI activism but also an intolerant identity politics, insofar as tolerance for oppressors is deemed to be acquiescence in being dominated and oppressed. Furthermore, if the lack of forgiveness and “the proclivity to righteous injustice” were really a peculiarity of women, as Laverty suggests, then how could men ever have dueled to the death over insults or practiced honor killings?
R. Mary Hayden Lemmons
university of st. thomas
st. paul, minnesota
It seems that in “Lady Scrooges,” Mr. Laverty made an ontological error. In aligning biological sex with sinful inclinations and then interweaving the concept of Christian headship, he creates a muddled argument. In Christ there is neither male nor female. To place the fix for social ills in the hands of men is to favor a sex over the powerful purging presence of the Holy Spirit. The deification of any person, male or female, would be a balm to hurting souls.
Laverty alludes to the negation of this singular act of goodness in the line, “But if public life can suffer from the vices of men, it can likewise suffer from the likes of women.” Indeed! Therefore, his final closing thought, “it will often be men, especially in their roles as husbands, fathers, and pastors, who must open the door, so that even a Scrooge might be welcomed in,” misses the mark. Dickens had one view substantiated through his literary style that cannot form the trusses for such an argument.
I would disagree with Mr. Laverty and say it is in fact a stretch to claim that “part of the solution will be a reassertion of the male strength for forgiveness.” I do concur with Mr. Laverty that more forgiveness is often part of a solution, but he would have a stronger argument by claiming that without the presence of the Holy Spirit in any life, irrespective of sex, forgiveness is a mere fantasy.
Pamela Bruns
nicholasville, kentucky
Rejecting The Premise
In “What Catholics Should Think About Climate” (December 2024), Professor Arbogast makes interesting contributions to the environmental policy conversation. In particular, he points out the reality that developing nations cannot simply “go green.” While wealthy nations have the luxury of debating whether to switch from oil and gas to wind and solar, the rest of the world needs to turn on lights, heat homes, and transport food in order to survive. This means fossil fuels.
But there are two points (well, one point and one glaring lack of a point) that weaken this essay. First, Arbogast appeals to the need to remedy conditions of poverty in developing nations. Fair enough. But the examples he used were the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa without electricity and the number of Indians who still burn wood or other biomass to cook food. People have been living healthy, fulfilled lives for centuries without electricity, cooking over wood fires and living by the light of sun and flame. One would do better to present examples of remedying disease, lack of food and water, or fatal extremes of temperature to make the point. The lack of modern conveniences is not a particularly compelling example.
Second, the essay takes an essential point for granted. In the very first sentences of the piece, Arbogast talks about the risks posed by climate change and the duties of Christians to mitigate it. An essay of this sort needs to make at least an attempt to convince conservative religious readers that man-made climate change is indeed a reality that poses risk to human life and that can be remedied by human action. Conservatives have spent decades being told to accept supposedly incontrovertible theories on various scientific topics—from Darwinian evolution to Covid. Climate change is one of them. If one wants to convince readers of First Things that they should apply Catholic social teaching to addressing climate change, there should be at least a brief attempt to show that the problem as stated really exists. That cannot be taken for granted and, without that, the piece falls a bit flat.
Frank DeVito
bath, pennsylvania
Burning coal, oil, and gas has brought us longer lifespans on average, larger population, upward social mobility, medical breakthroughs, useful consumer products, and leisure. It has also brought extreme inequality, global warming with many adverse weather and health effects, plus pollution and destruction of ecosystems, along with their food and water sources.
S. V. Arbogast helpfully begins with the moral duty to mitigate the risks that climate change poses. He concentrates on gaps in official Catholic statements about climate change.
The “true cost” (his term) of both renewable energy and fossil fuels ought to be considered. Fossil fuels receive a hidden subsidy when their reasonably attributed and anticipated effects upon us, our grandchildren, and unborn generations go uncounted and unreflected in energy price.
Pope Francis and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, along with prominent economists and conservatives, support a carbon fee and dividend legislation. This market-based approach better reflects the true pollution and health costs of fossil fuels. A low initial fee per ton of carbon dioxide produced, that gradually rises annually, sends a price signal to industry that stimulates innovation and minimizes shocks. Revenue raised by the fee is returned to citizens as monthly dividend checks in a way that reduces net energy costs for most people, including almost all those with least wealth. A carbon border adjustment mechanism, as the European Union will soon impose, prevents foreign products that evaded a carbon fee from gaining an unfair advantage versus products that were subject to the carbon fee.
Greed may be a factor among those who profit from fossil fuels, and know that burning them harms the environment and human health, but nonetheless spread disinformation in order to kill a carbon fee and dividend and CBAM programs.
John C. Olson
weatogue, connecticut
Establishment Atheism
I thank Congressman Michael McCaul for reporting in “America’s Atheist Diplomacy” (December 2024) on the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. It is troubling to learn that the culture of the State Department might not have changed much since 2012, when the Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group published a white paper that noted: “The culture of the State Department is not always conducive to serious engagement with matters involving religion. . . . [T]here seems to be a cultural view that religion is anachronistic, and that it is a source of conflict and division.” That view must be even less conducive to serious work now than it was a decade ago.
I confess to having doubts, however, about Congressman McCaul’s assertion that the State Department’s nonreligious evangelization violates the Establishment Clause. The Department of State is an executive department, and the Establishment Clause, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” limits only Congress’s legislative power.
Timothy M. Terhaar
new york, new york
By Their Fruits
Michael Hanby’s “Resist the Conception Machine” (December 2024) and Louise Perry’s “Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button” (December 2024) pair surprisingly well. I say surprisingly because at first glance they seem to conflict, with Hanby focusing on how technology enables child production and Perry on how wealthier nations (built upon technological gains) stop having babies. Perry’s Babel allusion clues us in to the connection between the two articles: both highlight humanity’s stubborn and perennial aversion to living life by faith according to the Word of the Lord. Both operate from an understanding of the world marked more by scarcity than abundant gift.
Babel’s attempt to huddle humanity together behind a protective fortress-tower assembled by the latest brick-baking technology is not far from our more recent attempts to mitigate risk associated with children through technological means: by not having them (Perry) or engineering them (Hanby). If Babel was a rejection of God’s mandate in Genesis to “fill the earth,” what Hanby and Perry document is a rejection of the “be fruitful and multiplying” part.
The Proverbs state that the trough is clean where there is no ox, but the abundance of the land comes by its strength. Applied to children, our lives are “cleaner,” simpler where there are no kids (or only specially engineered ones), but the abundance of the land comes by their strength. It takes the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love combined with a sense that life is a gift to happily “messy” our lives with children born of love, but we will be better for it.
Casey Shutt
oklahoma city, oklahoma
Many thanks for Louise Perry’s very fine essay calling attention to the global collapse of birth rates. Perry is spot on that declining fertility poses an existential threat, but to whom, or to what? Her answer is to modernity, but what does Perry take modernity to be? The modernity of welfare states will surely “shrink and die” as she describes. Care for the poor, the sick, and the elderly will again be the responsibility of families, churches, and private charities. The modernity of economic growth, fueled by innovation, will surely stagnate with fewer risk-loving young people to invent and explore. These features of modernity, Perry argues, cannot be sustained by the people who inhabit modern societies.
Perry fails to mention a hallmark feature of modernity, one not obviously threatened by declining fertility, however. It is a feature she deals with in other work: women’s higher education and labor force participation. In fact, the shift to below-replacement fertility theorized as a second demographic transition was not timed with the arrival of modern pension programs or modern economic growth, but with the arrival of the Pill in the 1960s. So, while pension systems teeter and growth idles, women go to college at ever higher rates and make up seismic portions of the labor force. Ages at marriage rise as the path to marriage grows longer, and birth rates fall as women divide their time between family and work. Lowest-low fertility does not threaten this feature of modernity for the simple reason that it is its byproduct—there is no way to turn the causal arrow around in this case.
The uptake of the Pill in the West was stunningly quick. It was not forced on an unwilling public. American women were eager to go to college and enter professions without sacrificing partnership. They still are. We are left with a conundrum. Either highlight the real juggernaut in the crisis of modernity and risk blaming women for the difficulty—a sort of anti-feminist move. Or ignore personal decision-making and blame innovation and growth for its own failure—a sort of anti-market move. The trouble with the latter is that it’s false—economic growth is God’s provision in the temporal order for the growing family to support itself, Amish or otherwise—support that would be needed as infant mortality fell and larger final family sizes (net of infant deaths) became possible.
Perry wonders whether God doesn’t want us to be modern. As a Christian, I’m not sure about that. I am sure that God wants us to be fruitful and multiply. It isn’t “mere” religion that predicts sustainable birth rates, nor is it being old-fashioned, like the Amish. It is a view of marriage as the fulfillment of sexual love, and a rejection of conventional attitudes about birth limitation. There are plenty of thoroughly modern women in this group. They may not seek to rebuild social welfare, since they take the family to be of first importance, but their children will grow up playing Legos and Lincoln Logs, and may well become the techno-optimists of the future.
Catherine Ruth Pakaluk
catholic university of america
washington, d.c.
Leaving the Culdesac
Michael Root has written a programmatic piece for First Things (“Overcoming Theological Amnesia,” December 2024) on the order of Robert Jenson’s “How the Word Lost its Story” (October 1993) and R. R. Reno’s “Theology after the Revolution” (May 2007). In each case, a description of where theology has been provides a charge for where it must go. In Root’s case it is the great forgetting that has descended over Catholic theology in the wake of the dismantling of Scholasticism by the theologians of the nouvelle théologie. He grants that the motivation was not destructive but arose from a profound sense that the theology this intellectual culture produced was inadequate to the Church’s mission in the twentieth century. The rationalism that characterized theology after Trent was, they believed, less suited to combat secularism than the more personalist and biblical thought-forms of theology prior to the heyday of scholasticism.
Accordingly, they argued that theology could not move forward without first looking further back. The fathers of Vatican II agreed, purposely eschewing the conceptual language of past councils. Root grants all of that but notes the irony that a demand for a wider historical lens ended with wiping five hundred years of sophisticated theological work from the Church’s collective memory.
Root calls for a reversal of such forgetfulness. Catholic theologians must do the hard work of bringing those forgotten theologians back into the conversation. Root is also motivated by a desire for renewal. Like him, I agree that Catholic theology has entered a cul-de-sac of its own making, siloed into different camps, each with its own theological hero and methodology. However, I see danger in suggesting more historical work as the solution. There is, after all, another irony embedded in the legacy of Ressourcement, one that Root neglects to consider. A movement premised on the idea that better historiography can renew theology has resulted in the work of theology all too often being equated with the historical reconstructions of thinkers from patristic, medieval, and modern times. Adding forgotten figures from forgotten centuries will not, on its own, renew theology. Only authentic theological work can do that.
Root knows this better than most, having dedicated himself to the clarification and resolution of traditional theological problems in view of contemporary Church teaching. If theologians follow his example, the increase in historical dialogue partners can only enhance theology. If, however, historiography is viewed as an end in itself, scholarly reputations may be built, but Catholic theology will fall short of its vocation to serve the Church of its time and place.
James F. Keating
providence college
providence, rhode island
