Happy New [School] Year!

I have basically been an occasional observer at best about the current health care debates in the U.S., focused more on finishing my dissertation at this point, and more-or-less content to just see whatever Congress comes up with, willing to try it, and then make my judgments. But I have long had reservations about the way that the Republican Party's advertising – going back long before this particular episode of America's ongoing health care debate – has made noise about poor services in more nationally socialized medical programs like those in Canada and the U.K. I note this, specifically, as the advertisements play a report of someone who had an utterly dehumanizing experience in such a health care system, and repeat lines about "faceless bureaucrats" picking our healthcare options for us, as though these faceless government bureaucrats are qualitatively different than the faceless insurance company bureaucrats I now deal with.

Beyond the scare tactics designed to panic the masses (and make no mistake: I know perfectly well that the Democratic Party engages in the same kind of nonsense when they are protecting their own evil plots), I also have to say just how strongly these awful reports clash with every actual human being that I've ever talked with who live in such health care systems. When I was interviewing in Canada this past year, the Americans on the faculty to had been living there for some time positively raved about the quality of the health care, virtually sounding like I should get sick just so I can experience how good the system is. Along those lines, I was quite intrigued (and grateful; Thanks, J!) when nimoloth included this link to an American mother who blogged about the comparative positive and negative experiences she had of both the U.S. and U.K. health care systems. I hadn't read anything that thoughtful and un-alarmist in all of this sound and fury, and it was a welcome change from the soundbites I get from Congressional leaders in the newspapers or elsewhere. The simple declaration of access to medical care being a human right is putting the finger on the actual point, it seems to me, one our nation would do well to endorse.

I was particularly struck by the simple observation of it being comparatively crazy that people in the United State do not seek medical attention for fear of the cost. That's so true of my life that I never really thought about it as anything but a "given" in my life. My friend Amy was after me throughout the later end of the spring to go to the doctor for the persistent lung infection that had been weighing me down from Christmas to the end of April, and very much interfered with my work in that time, but it was a comparative no-brainer for me that it was better for me to try to "sweat it out" than deal with a medical expense that I couldn't afford. It's a brilliant business system: I pay insurance premiums that I cannot afford, which so alarm me in their cost that I then avoid using the insurance because I cannot afford the additional debt, even after the insurance picks up a percentage of the cost. It's utterly insane on my part, and yet a perfectly logical reaction given the insanity of the trap so many of us find ourselves in.

Thanks to magdalene1 for giving me the heads-up on this pretty fabulous article that goes a lot further than the news media has done in explaining to me the obscurities of what's been going on on Wall Street, and how our government is involved in it, or not involved enough. Horrifically enough, it reinforces that awful thing that Shirley Williams said to me over dinner at Notre Dame in 2001: that the most shocking thing she could see as an outside observer of American politics was that, over the last 20 years, America had actually gone from being a democracy to being a plutocracy – and no one had noticed.

The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

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Shades of Aragorn!

Imagine having a royal who didn't see their position as merely a license to party and make their life meaningless! A constitutional monarchy that has the stones to take a moral stance and to slow down modernity's endless rush to fixate on their immediate desires as the chief of goods – I kinda gotta dig that. Case in point: he takes one stand, which is entirely his right by his legal position, and rather than slow down and take the matter as worth waiting on and thinking through as a nation and culture, his political opponent immediately moves toward altering the constitution and stripping the Grand Duke of his last political power. There's another reason to be thankful that our Founding Fathers recognized that even too much democracy wasn't necessarily a good thing, and that it's so difficult for us to alter our constitution: despite all the times such changes are proposed, it really doesn't lend itself to too many quick and fashionable changes. If our own constitution were a victim of our own last few decades of political polarization... yuck.

Der Spiegel reports on a conflict that caught my eye for both reasons of ethics and of constitutional law, as well as characterizing a cultural flaw in Modernity where ethics are simply reduced to questions of power. The fact that Der Spiegel doesn't even notice the latter problem – to which its own reporting seems to contribute – strikes me as characteristic of why the Grand Duke's veto – the power to slow down a process and provoke even more conversation – is especially important for democracy. Too bad.

Euthanasia Controversy: Grand Duke of Luxembourg Will Lose His Veto
Luxembourg's parliament looks ready to strip the Grand Duke of his last lawmaking power as a controversy over euthanasia comes to a head. One of Europe's last royals with political sway may lose his formal veto by taking a stand against a law legalizing euthanasia.

The Grand Duke of Luxembourg, who has said he would interfere with a decision by parliament, will likely be stripped of his veto in a historic decision after a heated showdown over a bill to legalize euthanasia.

Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg protested the bill and threatened to kill it next week by refusing to sign it into law.

Since parliament is expected to pass the bill, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said the Grande Duke has overstepped his role. Juncker personally opposes the euthanasia bill but says he will propose a change to the constitution to deny the Grand Duke his veto. His role by the end of 2008 could be reduced to rubber-stamping parliamentary decisions, instead of deciding whether to approve them.

"That means he will only technically enact laws," Juncker said, according to Reuters.

The euthanasia bill passed a first vote by parliament in February. It looks set to pass a second and final vote next week, but the Catholic Grand Duke announced on Tuesday -- in a closed-door meeting with leaders of Juncker's ruling Christian Socialists -- that he would refuse to enact the law.

His position tipped the tiny nation into the worst constitutional crisis in its history. The Luxembourg royal house has tried to block a decision by parliament only once before, when the Grand Duchess Marie-Adelaide refused to sign an education bill in 1912.

"I understand the Grand Duke's problems of conscience," said Juncker, "but I believe that if the parliament votes in a law, it must be brought into force."

The euthanasia bill has been controversial since 2001. It would let patients with "grave and incurable" conditions die at the hands of a doctor if they ask repeatedly to be euthanized and earn the consent of two doctors and a panel of experts. Medical and physician groups have opposed the bill, though, and so have many citizens of this traditionally Catholic nation.

It follows similar laws in the Netherlands and Belgium, where King Baudouin -- Henri's uncle -- abdicated for a day in 1990 to avoid signing a Belgian abortion law. The current Belgian king, Albert II, has signed Belgium's recent euthanasia and homosexual-marriage laws over his private Catholic beliefs.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a constitutional monarchy, and the Grand Duke is its head of state. He has indicated that he won't stand in the way of any change to the constitution.

This Holy Saturday finds me tripping through notes from the noted German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a self-described “methodological atheist,” who Pope Benedict had engaged in very public conversation a few years ago before he was elected Pope. It was a funny moment in that lots of dogmatic atheists in the public sphere were crowing ahead of time about the beating that their "team" was going to give the clearly-inferior (after all, he's Catholic) Ratzinger on the question of Christianity's role in the public future of Europe, and what he had and has been arguing is the importance of acknowledging that in the Preamble to the European Constitution, along with the contributions of the Greeks and of the Enlightenment.

Then, to their surprise, the two of them engaged in very polite and accommodating conversation and Habermas did nothing of the sort, and instead very much supported Ratzinger on this point. Denying it is easy thanks to a determined effort to avoid the hard work of examining the question, he criticizes, and presents a potential threat to the foundations of our free public order. In an essay published in Italy right around that time as “A Time of Transition,” Habermas argues that Christianity, and Christianity alone, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy.

To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Some other samples:

I don’t resent it at all when I am accused of having inherited theological concepts. I am convinced that religious discourse contains within itself potentialities that have not yet been sufficiently explored by philosophy, insofar as they have not yet been translated into the language of public reason, which is presumed to be able to persuade anyone. Naturally, I am not talking about the neopagan project of those who want to ‘build upon mythology.’ Today, in the field of antirational postmodern criticism, these neopagan conceptual figures are back in fashion: a broad anti-Platonism carelessly spread by fashions inspired by the late Heidegger and late Wittgenstein, in the sense of a definitive repudiation of the universalism that characterizes the premises of unconditional truth. I rebel against this regressive tendency of post-metaphysical thought.

In the dialogical dispute among competing religious visions there is a need for that ‘culture of recognition’ which draws its principles from the secularized world of the universalism of reason and law. In this matter, it is thus the philosophical spirit which provides the concepts instrumental in the political clarification of theology. But the political philosophy capable of making this contribution bears the stamp of the idea of the Covenant no less than that of the Polis. Therefore this philosophy also hearkens back to a biblical heritage.

In the general leveling of society by the media everything seems to lose seriousness, even institutionalized Christianity. But theology would lose its identity if it sought to uncouple itself from the dogmatic nucleus of religion, and thus from the religious language in which the community’s practices of prayer, confession, and faith are made concrete.

I also found a West Coast graduate student's paper posted online entitled, Jurgen Habermas: A Secular Atheist Changes His Mind on Religion in the Public Sphere that was engaging reading on this point.

Here's a pretty good New York Times op-ed on the Founder's intentions regarding Church and State, and their vision of balance between maintaining religion in the country and maintaining the neutral, secular nature of the state. I wonder, though, where the invocation of the Founders here as against the contemporary Evangelicals' language of America as a "Christian nation" is entirely relevant. I look at efforts today to get the Christian heritage of Europe named as a basis of European culture in the preamble to the Constitution of the European Union, and the ferocious opposition put up to that acknowledgment, despite the willingness to show a debt to other cultural factors, like the Greco-Roman heritage of Europe and the secularizing philosophical movement of the 18th century that dubbed itself the Enlightenment, from which the American Constitution sprang.

It seems that there have been a change in our culture since the 18th century that is relevant to this question of the identification of the Christian roots of both Europe and America, and that has to be taken into account beyond just a "chapter and verse" quotation of either the Bible or the records of the Founders. We have to understand that the nature of the Enlightenment itself has changed. In the 18th century, the process of secularizing government was one that all religious people could support because of the benefits to their faith itself in a religiously-neutral state. The various faiths were guaranteed protection from the power of the State, and could compete freely in a culture of ideas, laying out their various claims to and arguments for truth, that the State refrained from adjudicating. In this way, religions were treated in much the same way that the State refrains from interfering in scientific or technological processes to determining what is true.

In recent decades, however, the nature of that movement that was the Enlightenment has evolved from seeing religious neutrality as an artifice to a dogmatic position of its own. That is, to the Founders' minds, the religiously-neutral orientation of the State allowed a Protestant, a Catholic, a Jew, or a Unitarian the equal opportunity to be a member of Congress and to try to persuade other members to support their legislative vision, inspired by whatever religious faith the legislator professed, as long as the others could be persuaded of the common good which would result from that person's bill. Today it is different. Today the Enlightenment philosophy has morphed and become its own position, an anti-religious one rather than a religiously-neutral one. Legislators are now not to speak from any ideological perspective that has a basis in a religious faith. You cannot be a Catholic who has persuaded his heavily Catholic and Jewish constituency to support her because of a mutually-shared vision: you are only to speak from a non-religious base. This is, of course, to win an argument by disallowing any other positions. The Enlightenment heirs today invoke "neutrality" with religious fervor, but in fact mean that their dogmatic orientation is the only allowable one. You must think as they do: non-religiously. Any religion you want to invoke or play with after that is allowable because it is banished from the public sphere.

It is from this change in what the contemporary force of the Enlightenment has come to mean that the American Evangelical inclination to speak of the United States as a "Christian Nation" springs: America was indeed once a country that allowed the various religions and denominations a voice in the public sphere. There they could succeed or fail on the basis of whether they persuaded others their positions were to the public benefit. Now, they are on the receiving end of a relatively new, later-20th century spin on Constitutional interpretation that moves the First Amendment to a position that is hostile to religious motivation in the public sphere, instead of neutral toward it. Their very motives, expressions, and thoughts are being politically disenfranchised. It is small wonder that they can look to the more distant American civil past and see a country more characterized by Christian faith. Even if was never a "Christian Nation" in law itself, it was a nation where Christians could be active and vocal in their politics in a way they are increasingly being told is illegitimate. A purely secular, anti-religious state, if that is what America is moving toward, is one Christians will not be able to support. A disenfranchising Secular Left will thus continue to create the Religious Right they so complain about.

Op-Ed Contributor
A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation
By JON MEACHAM
Published: October 7, 2007 in The New York Times

JOHN McCAIN was not on the campus of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University last year for very long — the senator, who once referred to Mr. Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance,” was there to receive an honorary degree — but he seems to have picked up some theology along with his academic hood. In an interview with Beliefnet.com last weekend, Mr. McCain repeated what is an article of faith among many American evangelicals: “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.”

According to Scripture, however, believers are to be wary of all mortal powers. Their home is the kingdom of God, which transcends all earthly things, not any particular nation-state. The Psalmist advises believers to “put not your trust in princes.” The author of Job says that the Lord “shows no partiality to princes nor regards the rich above the poor, for they are all the work of his hands.” Before Pilate, Jesus says, “My kingdom is not of this world.” And if, as Paul writes in Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” then it is difficult to see how there could be a distinction in God’s eyes between, say, an American and an Australian. In fact, there is no distinction if you believe Peter’s words in the Acts of the Apostles: “I most certainly believe now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is welcome to him.”

The kingdom Jesus preached was radical. Not only are nations irrelevant, but families are, too: he instructs those who would be his disciples to give up all they have and all those they know to follow him.
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Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the author of “American Gospel” and “Franklin and Winston.”

My Fourth of July was a quiet one, one of the many blessings of America: war is once again being fought elsewhere. I spent a few hours thinking about the Revolution and the Founders, and how it's all played out, much aided by the reading in McCullough and Ellis I've done for fun over the last few years. weaklingrecord's posting of quotations about patriotism and nationalism (and his earlier Independence Day Quiz) had me thinking about those two phenomena in particular. So many Americans have made the mistake of letting their patriotism make them nationalists. The Founding Fathers articulated a new vision that we have not always easily taken as our own: they were not speaking of a patriotism for America itself, now to be directed toward America instead of at Great Britain as though we were only to trade loyalties to a new football team. They envisioned a patriotism toward humanity as a whole, where our belief in the rights and dignity of human beings – that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" – was not a promotion of Americans and their welfare, but a promotion of all human beings against whatever unjustly impedes their flourishing. Their distrust of government, which they wove into the Constitution, was indicative of their knowledge that our own government could be the enemy of liberty, and that we ought to be prepared to challenge and improve our government for exactly that reason. To equate American patriotism with loyalty to the American government as such, to a particular administration, or to any of an administration's policies, is to miss the point of America. The petty politics of patriotism we have seen in recent years – the Republican party playing of the "patriotism card," with equating its policies to patriotism, and the Democratic party caving in craven cowardice to this cheap political move – has been as dismaying, unpatriotic, and unAmerican thing as I've ever seen. I hope this Independence Day took us one day farther toward a more American America.

Dan and Amy are leaving on Friday for their first vacation in four years – their first since their honeymoon – and so, since I had plans for Thursday, they invited me over for another night of visiting, this one much quieter than yesterday's farewell cookout for Crip and Lisa. They generously fed me the fruit of their grill and garden again, with a thick pork chop cooked in a marinade they've developed that's quite tasty, baked beans, and a cucumber/squash dish from their small vegetable garden. After Anna and Owen were down for the night, we drifted into the kitchen, with quiet talk around the table about marriage, love, and the struggle to make a family despite whatever obstacles our history throws at us. They showed me pics of the house they're staying in with Dan's family on the South Carolina beach, and that drifted into an introduction to Google Earth, where I showed them some features of that juicy program and the ability it grants to help log and scrapbook your travels. That led me to seeing places from their honeymoon vacation in Malta and Sicily. Quiet times. Good times.

I did some work on Sullivan, thinking toward a dissertation reading through his From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church, considering this as a shift from a charismatic mode of leadership to a formal mode, but without denigrating the latter, which I think is an easy tack to take, and one that has been done a gazillion times before as it plays to the crowd so well. While the Apostle as a charismatic form of leadership – one that is on the basis of a charism, a gift for leadership – is properly called "charismatic" in this sense, I'm toying with an angle that also calls the formal structure of leadership that gives us Bishops, the episcopacy, a charism as well, if not one that operates as a personal charism. This would be more of a "structural charism," if you will. I think I can talk about that in a way that makes sense, that ties into the charisms-oriented view of the church (and thus into an explicit vision of the Church as tied into the life and action of the Spirit of God), without watering-down the language. My goal is exactly that kind of vision of the Church that heightens, rather than obscures, the vision of the life of God acting in the Community (which is the too-often meaning of "church").

I'm listening to the overwhelmingly-awesome-and-rocking CD Chagall Guevara, tragically the only release of the band of that name, after MCA signed them and then didn't do a bit of promotion, even after a great review in Rolling Stone that compared them to nothing less than The Clash. Bill Oliverio talked with me at the party yesterday about his love of Steve Taylor's work, which seems as strong as mine. Taylor authorized the copying of this difficult-to-find disc (I looked for five years for a copy for less than $30 or $40: I'm flabbergasted to see used copies on Amazon right now for as low as $6.50) and so I'm listening to it again (and writing about it here) as a "note to self" to remind me to pass this on to him. Michael McGlinn, who produced my CD with me, was friends with a few of these guys, so I passed copies of Life and Other Impossibilities to them through him as a lame way of expressing my gratitude for their work.

Dad is getting ready for major surgery this morning, with the rest of his colon being removed. His quality of life should be immeasurably better after he recovers, but he's dreading the process, understandably. He had an awful night of preparation, having a pretty dreadful reaction to the antibiotic preparation he was going through, which seemed to rob him of any chance at a decent night's sleep, as well as an agonizing kind of pain I well remember after my own post-surgical infection in the fall of 2004. Those of you who are praying folk, I would surely appreciate a prayer right now for my Dad.

Huh. I missed this, but I would have been fascinated to watch. It was so clear after the 2004 election that the Democrats were being killed by having embraced the Secularist over-strong reading of "separation of church and state" having morphed into "separation of religion/spirituality from reality." In our polarized political landscape, as long as the Democrats kept sounded like they were opposed to any religious motive being acceptable for public and political action, they were going to drive far too much of the population into Republican voting as the only seeming possibility of free political exercise, no matter how opposed people might be to various Republican platforms. The Democrats needed to not try to suppress the use of religion in the public sphere (for which there is really no justification in the tortured First Amendment) but to rediscover the religious articulation of their own politics.

This sounds like a move in that direction, but Steinfels rightly points out it's a weak one. If the American Left is going to be as weak, shallow and misleading in its articulation of religious reflection and motivation as the American Right has been in recent years, that isn't much of an improvement: just more bumper-sticker philosophy. And for a country that's so anti-intellectual and so religiously/philosophically illiterate, it certainly won't "raise the bar" on the level of public discourse. (Here of course we must also point the finger at the American news media for collaborating with our politicians in dumbing things down to the lowest-common denominator.) The Democrats may talk about beating Bush, but this type of shallowness would be more along the lines of being just about winning and simply "becoming Bush." Steinfels' comments on the kind of questions that ought to be being asked seems right on target.


Beliefs
A Tentative First Step in Addressing Faith and Politics
By PETER STEINFELS
The New York Times
June 9, 2007

Almost a century ago, G. K. Chesterton made a comment that could most appropriately be applied to Monday night’s forum at which leading Democratic presidential candidates discussed faith and politics: anything worth doing “is worth doing badly.”

The purpose of the forum, organized by the liberal evangelical journal Sojourners and broadcast on CNN, was to hear what Democratic contenders might say about religion and whether they might convincingly enlarge the list of religious and moral (or “values”) questions to include topics like poverty, war and the environment rather than only those emphasized by the religious right.

Not a bad idea. Clearly, the nation and first of all the Democrats could use a better, broader, more sophisticated conversation about religion and politics.

Yet it is hard to imagine anyone serious about either of these subjects watching Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards on Monday without cringing at some of the questions or chafing at some of the speechifying and the general absence of intelligent follow-up.

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Two more recent columns of interest from Peter Steinfels of The New York Times.

Beliefs
A Catholic Debate Mounts on the Meaning of ‘Just War’
By PETER STEINFELS
Published: April 14, 2007

For over four years, George Weigel, staunch supporter of President Bush and biographer of Pope John Paul II, has never ceased to insist that the war in Iraq meets all the traditional moral criteria for a just war. And most leaders and thinkers among Mr. Weigel’s fellow Roman Catholics, along with many non-Catholic proponents of just-war thinking, have never ceased to disagree.

Now there is a fresh surge in this debate, with combat concentrated not only on how to apply these venerable moral principles to this particular war but also on how the principles should be understood in the first place.

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Beliefs
Moral Plots and Subplots in the Latest Ruling on Abortion
By PETER STEINFELS
Published: April 28, 2007

Life today is lived on slippery slopes. Which ones seize our attention and crystallize our fears? What moral outrages or absurdities, lurking at the bottom, stir our energies? How steep is the incline? Where can we throw up a railing, dig a trench, clear a landing, keep our footing? Questions like these determine a great deal of public moral debate.

That fact was amply demonstrated by the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 and the reactions the ruling engendered. There was wide agreement that the ruling would directly affect few abortions but wide disagreement on what the ruling meant.

Constitutional experts naturally and properly subjected the court’s opinions to fine-grained analyses, revealing in the process how much abortion law has come to resemble the challenge of lacing a shoe with a shoelace already knotted in several places. But the general public mainly cast the decision in terms of two larger stories focusing on two different slippery slopes.

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Here's a pleasant, educated, and blessedly sensible call by New York Times columnist Peter Steinfels on the need for a most minimal religious literacy for any basic education. I missed this when it came through the Times, and so I didn't see any Letters to the Editor in response, but I wonder if it provoked the classic enraged response that teaching anything about religion was the same thing as "forcing" religion on students (as though even parents can successfully force religion on their children). From an educator's standpoint – much less a theologian's – I've always been amazed and aghast by the viewpoint that equates ignorance with enlightenment and censorship with liberation. Studying constitutional law as part of my doctoral exam question on "religious discourse in the public sphere" was eye-opening: we've had a 60-year period of near-hysteria in the States on the subject. Going to Notre Dame after going to a state university was an eye-opener for me just to see students who could talk about any subject without panic....

At Commencement, a Call for Religious Literacy
By PETER STEINFELS
The New York Times
May 12, 2007

And so, members of the graduating class of 2007, we’ve come almost to the end of this commencement ceremony and of these brief commencement remarks.

We’ve told some predictable jokes about your imminent unemployment and your student loans. We’ve thanked your parents, praised your professors and stated the obvious about the world you are entering - that it is full of dangers, full of opportunities, full of wonders, misery, love, beauty, surprises and violence.

It is also full of religion.

There is some question whether your education has prepared you for this latter reality, which is, of course, very much related to the former ones.

For a long time, quite a few people assumed that a major point of higher education was to put religion behind you. Eventually, it was also assumed, the world would do the same. Things haven’t worked out that way.

Just what do college graduates know about religion? The data is sparse. But Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, has assembled a rather bleak picture from available polls as well as his own experience and that of other professors.

It is a huge scandal, Dr. Prothero writes in his recently published book, “Religious Literacy” (HarperSanFrancisco), that “every year colleges provide bachelor’s degrees to students who cannot name the first book of the Bible, who think that Jesus parted the Red Sea and Moses agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane, who know nothing about what Islam teaches about war and peace, and who cannot name one salient difference between Hinduism and Buddhism.”

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I'm loosely lumping this into the journal under my "Theological Notebook" heading (my other headings are "Personal," "Random," and "Musical") rather than the "Random" one just because of the political or philosophical implications of the move. While a lot of people would find this silly in the extreme, there are, I suspect, a growing number of people who would take this seriously at some level. Now, at some level, I think we see the underlying philosophy here expressed being dealt to us rather regularly from a variety of sources, whether in Discovery Channel or Animal Planet Channel documentaries or whether from the passionate lobbying of some sectors of philosophical vegitarianism. Animals are routinely personified and equated with humans in such quarters. I suspect that the mere fact that most of our population is removed now by our sheer bounty from the labour of food-production, whereas our ancestors a mere century or two ago would never sentimentalize most animals, the lot of which they would regard as food resources to be used against an all-to-real threat of hunger that most of us in the West no longer sense.

Curiously, the idea of a "person" is one that has migrated from Christian Trinitarian theology, where the word "person" was used to designate that which is distinct about the Three "priniciples" (for lack of a better word) perceived in the One God. Augustine noted the original more-or-less contentlessness of the word "person" in simply explaining that we needed a handy word by which to indicate that we were talking about the Three Persons in their distinctiveness. The word migrated to our psychology and philosophy of today by coming to be used of our own unique distinctivenesses, although in our case it wouldn't be contrasted with the divine ontological unity found in the One God, but rather is perhaps used in distinction to our collective traits as a species.

Still, there's something to be said for the capacities of higher animals to achieve certain deeper personality traits, although I note that that seems to be a "rubbing-off" of traits from those human animals already possessing personhood: thus the animal that would be a coyote in the wild is a faithful dog through its association with a good master: but I'm not fooling myself for an instant into thinking that such dogs are going to be found in friendly packs roaming the wild, and looking to help out any human in distress.

It would be interesting to see how this case might bring the notion of "personhood" back to the courts from a different angle than the one we usually see. The biggest legal battles regarding being a "person" have of course been in the area of abortion. The arguments that the fetus is not "human" or not "alive" are clearly and scientifically false. Thus the chief argument in support of abortion rights has been the denial that the fetus is a "person." Myself, I think this was a horrible route for the debate to proceed down, merely on an historical level, as the denial of "person" status has been the form of argument used in support of political programs against every oppressed and decimated peoples: as an argument for any politics, I think it is utterly unredeemable. I'm curious to see if the arguments used in support of the personhood of a nonhuman with such species' intrinsic limitations would end up having an impact on the legal or juridical strength of the denial of person-status to unborn children simply because of their incomplete developmental state.

Activists Want Chimp Declared a 'Person'
May 4, 9:57 PM (ET)

By WILLIAM J. KOLE

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - In some ways, Hiasl is like any other Viennese: He indulges a weakness for pastry, likes to paint and enjoys chilling out watching TV. But he doesn't care for coffee, and he isn't actually a person - at least not yet.

In a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting basic rights to apes, animal rights advocates are seeking to get the 26-year-old male chimpanzee legally declared a "person."

Hiasl's supporters argue he needs that status to become a legal entity that can receive donations and get a guardian to look out for his interests.

"Our main argument is that Hiasl is a person and has basic legal rights," said Eberhart Theuer, a lawyer leading the challenge on behalf of the Association Against Animal Factories, a Vienna animal rights group.

"We mean the right to life, the right to not be tortured, the right to freedom under certain conditions," Theuer said.

"We're not talking about the right to vote here."

The campaign began after the animal sanctuary where Hiasl (pronounced HEE-zul) and another chimp, Rosi, have lived for 25 years went bankrupt.

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Sandro Magister's article, with Benedict XVI's text, on the question of the public and historical role of Christianity in Europe's identity and ethics.

An “Apostate” from Itself: The Lost Europe of Pope Benedict

Even before its separation from God, Joseph Ratzinger sees the old continent withdrawing from itself, from “its very identity.” Fifty years after the Treaty of Rome, the most critical assessment is that of the pope. Here it is

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, March 28, 2007 – Fifty years after the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which in 1957 brought into life what today is the European Union, Benedict XVI has formulated a very severe diagnosis of the status of the continent. He has even come to the point of stating that Europe is falling into a “remarkable form of apostasy.”

John Paul II also spoke of “apostasy,” in the sense of the abandonment of the faith, in the 2003 apostolic exhortation “Ecclesia in Europa.” But Benedict XVI has gone even further. He has accused Europe of being ever more frequently an apostate “from itself, even before [being an apostate] from God”: to the point of “doubting its very identity.”

The pope formulated this diagnosis while receiving in the Vatican’s Sala Clementina on March 24 the cardinals, bishops, and politicians who were taking part in a conference organized in Rome by the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community, COMECE, dedicated to the theme of “Values and perspectives for the Europe of tomorrow.”

Among the Catholic politicians who spoke at the conference were the president of the Italian council of ministers, Romano Prodi; the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese; and the president of the European parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering.

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It is one of the more peculiar traits of today's Secularism that the renouncing of our own cultural heritage is seen as a prerequisite to being "accepting" or "tolerant" of other cultural identities, particularly where "religion" is concerned. Ironically, this often manifests itself as a more-or-less anti-European attitude as a kind of reaction of guilt to past European imperialisms. I call this ironic because the new "non-cultural" orientation then typically becomes the "neutrality" that is forced upon all other cultures that haven't embraced this "neutral" Western Secularity, thus becoming the newest, most pervasive version of Western imperialism ever seen, most enthusiastically promoted by those who conceive of themselves as opponents of imperialism and of the West.

In that face of that particular goofiness, John Paul II and Benedict now after him have both encouraged the European Union to explicitly recognize the Christian roots of its own culture. This is rejected by those Secularists who have a conception of their own history that has utterly edited Christianity's influence out of the history of the developing tradition of international law and human rights. It is instead imagined that such things came out of only an aggressively secular Europe. A Europe divorced from its spiritual roots is an increasingly self-loathing one, ideologically, and one whose ability to contibute a strong leadership toward justice in the world is increasingly compromised. Christianity offers a worldview that justifies the highest view of humanity and individual persons that the world has ever known. The most secular regimes of the last century in Europe have committed some of history's greatest horrors. One suspects this is therefore no small debate.

Pope says EU denial of European religious roots is form of 'apostasy'

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Denying the Judeo-Christian roots of European culture and affirming there are no absolute values shared by all European cultures is a form of "apostasy," Pope Benedict XVI said.

Europe's "unique form of apostasy" involves renouncing its own identity as well as its faith in God, the pope said March 24 to participants in a congress marking the 50th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, which led to the foundation of the European Union.

The congress, sponsored by the commission of bishops' conferences from European countries, brought together bishops, leaders of other European churches and Christian politicians to discuss ways to strengthen official EU references to religious and moral values.

The congress preceded a March 25 European Union summit and celebration in Berlin where leaders of the 27 countries that make up the union vowed to find a "renewed common basis" for their joint activities after France and the Netherlands failed to adopt the proposed European constitution.

Many church leaders and Catholic activists had criticized the proposed constitution for failing to make an explicit reference to the Judeo-Christian roots of Europe and a commitment to ensuring that EU policies would reflect Judeo-Christian values.

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A new case in the Supreme Court putting a new twist in the convoluted history of the relation between the government of the United States and religious organizations.

High Court Mulls Faith-Based Initatives
Feb 28, 10:08 PM (ET)

By FREDERIC J. FROMMER

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court wrestled Wednesday with the question of whether taxpayers have the right to challenge the White House's aggressive promotion of federal financial aid for religious charities.

At issue is whether a Wisconsin-based group of atheists and agnostics have legal standing, by virtue of being taxpayers, to bring their complaint in the federal court system.

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I was struck by this photograph on the Catholic News Service website: it looked almost more like a painting to me.


AFGHAN SCHOOL

A girl attends class in a village in Paghman, Afghanistan, in November. According to a Catholic Relief Services worker, there are around 4 million more Afghan children in school in the country today than in 2001. (CNS/courtesy of CRS)

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Two CNS news stories I thought of interest:

At Library of Congress, cardinal warns against secularism's dangers
By Mark Pattison
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Freedom of religion, and all freedom, can be placed at risk by an "aggressive secularism" that asserts its dominance in society, Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago warned in a Feb. 13 talk at the Library of Congress.

In his talk -- titled "What Kind of Democracy Leads to Secularization?" -- Cardinal George weighed in against both legal and cultural expressions of secularism that marginalize the importance of religion in society.

It is, the cardinal said, "an issue of great importance for our life together in a democratic republic." Religion "can remain a necessary and legitimate actor in our affairs," he added.

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Christian movements plan meeting to show European churches have life
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

ROME (CNS) -- Europe may not be as obviously Christian as it once was, but vibrant new movements and communities have been born among Catholic, Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox churches, said members of those movements.

Representatives from several of the larger movements met in Rome in mid-February to finalize preparations for "Together for Europe," a May 10-11 meeting in Stuttgart, Germany, of at least 3,000 leaders from more than 170 groups representing a wide range of Christian denominations.

"We want to send a strong signal that Christianity remains alive in Europe and that diversity is valued, including among Christians," said Marco Impagliazzo, president of the Catholic-founded Community of Sant'Egidio.

Gerhard Pross, head of a coordinating council for 130 new Lutheran movements and communities in Germany, told a Feb. 16 press conference, "We live at a time when the Spirit of God is bringing about new things all over Europe, in all churches.

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A significant figure in the history of "religion and politics" in the United States has died. Fr. Drinan served in Congress for a decade before John Paul II issued a directive forbidding clerics from holding political office, which on the whole seems the better route, given the success the Vatican has enjoyed as a moral authority since the loss of the Papacy's own kingdom of the Papal States in 1870, which it had held since 756. And given that the Vatican's approach in the 1980s was one conceived in the light of John Paul's/Karol Wojtyla's resistance to the abuse of government authority in Communist Poland, it's even less surprising to see a strong Church/State division in Vatican policy of the time.

The article seems to think that Fr. Drinan's "left" tendencies (by American standards) is something remarkable, but that sounds perhaps more like the American media idea that "religion" is a "conservative" thing, despite the fact that Cathoic Social Justice teaching tends to be much farther to the political "left" than any Democrats today in Congress. I'm of two minds as to whether Drinan should have been allowed to serve by Church authorities as a Representative. I can understand the abuses that we were trying to move away from, historically, but I think that perhaps a priest (as opposed to a bishop) might well have been in enough of a non-authority position in the Church that he could have served in the legislature of a democracy.

Pioneering Rev. Robert Drinan Dies at 86
Jan 28, 9:41 PM (ET)

By LOLITA C. BALDOR

Former Massachusetts Rep. Father Robert Drinan holds up a copy of the 1974 impeachment report of President Nixon while testifying on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearing in this Dec. 8, 1998 file photo. Drinan, a Jesuit who - over the objections of his superiors - became the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress, died Sunday. . (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All right reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Rev. Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who - over the objections of his superiors - was the only Roman Catholic priest elected as a voting member of Congress, died Sunday.

Drinan, 86, had suffered from pneumonia and congestive heart failure during the previous 10 days, according to a statement by Georgetown University which said he died at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington.

"His death was peaceful, and he was surrounded by his family," said the Rev. John Langan, rector of the Georgetown University Jesuit Community where Drinan lived.

An internationally known human-rights advocate, Drinan was elected on an anti-war platform and represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House for 10 years during the turbulent 1970s.

He stepped down only after a worldwide directive from Pope John Paul II barring priests from holding public office.

During his Congressional tenure, Drinan continued to dress in the robes of his clerical order and lived in a simple room in the Jesuit community at Georgetown.

But he wore his liberal views more prominently. He opposed the draft, worked to abolish mandatory retirement and raised eyebrows with his more moderate views on abortion and birth control.

"Father Drinan's commitment to human rights and justice will have a lasting legacy here at Georgetown University and across the globe," said Georgetown President John J. Degioia.

"Few have accomplished as much as Father Drinan and fewer still have done so much to make the world a better place," said Alex Aleinikoff, dean of the George University Law Center.

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This is the article I've been opening my Introduction to Theology course with, these two semesters. I've alluded to it before, and linked to it, but First Things, the journal in which it appeared, is now reformatting their website and this is no longer accessible to non-subscribers, and so I thought I'd directly copy it into my journal.

I suspect that I'm shooting a bit above the heads of the freshmen, at least in some parts of the material, but I both help them through the material and want them to see the type of thing they should be able to read by the end of the semester as lay readers with some basic background in philosophy or theology. I think that that might give them something of a target in their heads of what an informed, lay level of readership actually is.

The symposium is a discussion of the question of whether theology can be re-appropriated – or accepted again – as a kind of "knowledge" (as opposed to mere personal "belief") in the public sphere, particularly in that of the secular university. The participants are James R. Stoner, Jr., professor of political science at Louisiana State University; Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University; Paul J. Griffiths, Schmitt Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and David B. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian and author of The Beauty of the Infinite.

Stanley has taught a number of friends of mine, and is the guy magazines like Time usually point to as the United States' premiere theologian. He's a Methodist who is deeply Catholic and has the most amazing foul mouth. Griffiths is wicked smart: I had the chance to hear him at Notre Dame this December and was very impressed. I take the most issue with his part of the following symposium, but he's so often speaking as Devil's Advocate that I suspect he would take issue with what he says, as well. It's good stuff, if you've got the time.

Theology as Knowledge

A Symposium

Copyright (c) 2006 First Things 163 (May 2006): 21-27.

James R. Stoner, Jr.

Who stripped the public square and left it naked? That puts the matter a bit abruptly, but it is worth asking why religion lost its prominent place in American public discourse during the later decades of the twentieth century—and why the attempt to restore it has triggered a culture war among writers in the republic of letters.

The usual explanations—that secularization of public discourse necessarily results from increased pluralism in American society, or that it was the deliberate product of a determined faction on the Supreme Court—offer clues but remain inadequate. As recently as the 1950s, the pluralism of “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” was apt not to suppress attention to faith but to enhance its public voice. And in other areas of life, such as popular culture and cuisine, pluralism fostered engagement and emulation, not a retreat to the bland.

Meanwhile, blaming judges leaves unanswered the question of why they interpreted the Constitution in so secularist a manner. It underestimates the extent to which the decisions of the Warren Court reflected the common wisdom of their time, and it forces us to ask why those decisions succeeded in binding subsequent judges who are probably more friendly to religion.

In fact, I suggest, the secularization of the public square resulted from the prior secularization of the university. Of course, this itself had a variety of causes, but the academics’ decision that theology is not a branch of knowledge, merely an elaboration of belief, helped turn America away from a religiously informed public square.

The issue is as old as Cardinal Newman’s day. Several discourses in The Idea of the University are devoted to theology as “A Branch of Knowledge,” its bearing on other branches, and their bearing on it. In America, it seems to have been around the beginning of the twentieth century when theology was eclipsed in the curriculum of the nation’s leading universities, as they transformed themselves from Protestant seminaries into research institutions influenced by the German model. Darwinism in the natural sciences and pragmatism in the others made theology superfluous, the professors thought, and by mid-century the natural sciences were increasingly autonomous, while the humanities and social sciences were enamored of such thoroughly antitheological figures as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

As George Marsden explains in his Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, the full meaning of these curricular developments was hidden for a long time—not least from the universities’ alumni—by the continued, visible extracurricular religious life of the students: The Yale Christian Association, known as “Dwight Hall,” remained a center of student life, and in the 1920s both Harvard and Princeton constructed grand new chapels at the center of their campuses. Religious idealism of a generic sort was a regular object of appeal in addresses by university administrators, even as denominational idiosyncrasies dropped from the curriculum and study of the Bible was marginalized. Though theology was no longer treated as a field of knowledge, the old religious establishments persisted for more than fifty years.

But the shell cannot survive forever without the living organism, and in the 1960s the religious establishments collapsed as clergyman presidents, mandatory chapel, and even formal affiliation with the founding denomination disappeared. The crisis in the universities in those days may or may not have been precipitated by this collapse, but no one can deny the crisis revealed a vacuum of authority. Indeed, American universities today still live with that crisis.

My question, however, is not whether theology ought to be restored as the queen of the sciences, but whether she belongs among them at all. As a political scientist, I am particularly interested in what happens to the national polity when graduates of many universities—especially the oldest, wealthiest, and most prestigious—never saw theology as a serious field of knowledge and thus see religion as, if not an illusion, at most a form of mere belief.

One consequence is obvious: The equation of theology with belief has now been written into the law of the land. In the 2004 case Locke v. Davey, the Supreme Court upheld a state of Washington statute that denied theology students state scholarships that were available for vocational training in every other field. Only Justice Thomas in dissent distinguished “devotional theology” from theology in any other form, and that was to distinguish “the study of theology from a secular perspective.” Religion, it seemed to the Court, is all emotion or commitment, not thought, so the state can with reason exclude theological study from its support, even though it was admitted that, since the choice of what to study was made by mature individuals, there was no Establishment Clause objection to including theology if the state had so desired. That the word vocational is itself a term of religious origin seems to have occurred to the justices not at all.

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Every once in a while, you read an article or essay and just think, "Damn.... I wish I had written that." A few months ago, somewhere in here, I made a passing comment about how – as a scholar of the history of ideas, and one who has come to specialize even more strongly in theology and its history – the current publishing fad of screaming of dangers of "theocracy" in America was making me roll my eyes. The careful ignorance of history that it would take to throw that word on the function of religion in American politics didn't seem to me to be worth much more than embarrassed amusement. Another spin on Chicken Little's "THE SKY IS FALLING!!! THE SKY IS FALLING!!!" was, after all, more the game of the tabloid media, wasn't it?

I stand corrected. Ross Douthat, an associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly, read more widely in the literature and wrote a gently damning indictment of the overall thesis and the integrity of analysis throughout the recent publishing/intellectual phenomenon. Obviously, I've had an academic interest in "religion in public discourse" for some years, even doing one of my doctoral exam questions on it, under Professor Thomas Hughson, which was a real honour and opportunity for me. While I'm used to a certain level of hysteria about the subject from the dogmatically secular, I wasn't ready to see the lumping in of American religiosity (at least that segment of it that might have voted for Bush and could be called "religious conservatives") with the Taliban mullahs of Afghanistan. Yes, one could certainly say that they both had political beliefs that were influenced by religious beliefs, but I could say the same for such diverse figures as Michelangelo, Martin Luther King Jr., and even a Deist like Thomas Jefferson. Such lumping-together, though, has little to do with the reality expressed in such beliefs: instead of looking at the diverse content of various religious beliefs, we are given instead the dogmatic line that religious belief as political motivation is illegitmate in itself. Forbidden thoughts. (I include Jefferson because he was, after all, a real Deist, and not an anti-religious zealot, even though he's often been adopted by such people today as their secular patron saint. He thought his Deist beliefs were more true and better than the opposing beliefs around him, and he drew some political inspiration and guidance from them: just like any other religious believer thinking their own thoughts correct and drawing on their faith as informing their political philosophy. Believing your own opinions to be true: such an unusual crime!)

What Douthat's thorough survey of this latest run of public argument really offers is taking these authors more seriously than I had, and working through their collective argument with an eye toward similar themes, technique, and use of evidence and theory. I can hope that such a serious treatment might check the spread of such thinking from affecting the rhetoric of American politics much further. The curious parallel is with 20th century Anti-Communism. For all the milage that the American Left has gotten over the last fifty years in dealing with that paranoic outburst in American intellectual and political life, it would be the most bizarre of ironies if they cultivated such a similar all-explaining, paranoic theory against a home-grown reality like American religion. I understand that we'll always have a cultural taste for conspiracy theory: I do hope, however, to keep it away from government and the core of our culture. Religion is, of course, a trans-national force, one not limited to anything as minute as the destiny of a mere country like America, and its passing politics. To turn it into the target of such suppressive politics is blowing against the wind. So much better to learn to sail, whatever the conclusions of one's best (I hope!) religious reasoning.

Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocracy

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Ross Douthat

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American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
by Kevin Phillips: Viking, 480 pages, $26.95

The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us
by James Rudin: Thunder’s Mouth, 300 pages, $26

Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
by Michelle Goldberg: W.W. Norton, 224 pages, $23.95

Thy Kingdom Come: How The Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament
by Randall Balmer: Basic, 242 pages, $24.95

This is a paranoid moment in American politics. A host of conspiracies haunt our national imagination, and apparent incompetence is assumed to be the consequence of a dark design: President Bush knew about the attacks of September 11 in advance, or else the Israelis did; the Straussians took us to war in Iraq, unless the oil companies did; the federal government let the levees break in New Orleans, unless it dynamited them itself.

Perhaps the strangest of these strange stories, though, is the notion that twenty-first-century America is slouching toward theocracy. This is an old paranoia: Back in 1952, the science-fiction libertarian Robert Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 envisioned a religious tyranny toppled by a Freemason-led rebellion; in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale imagined America as a Christian-fascist “Republic of Gilead,” with its capital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its public executions staged in Harvard Yard. But the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era, reaching a fever pitch in the weeks after the 2004 election, when a host of commentators seized on polls suggesting that “moral values” had pushed the president over the top—and found in that data point a harbinger of Gilead.

Later, more cool-headed polling analysis suggested that the values explanation was something of a stretch: The movement of religious voters into the GOP played a role in Bush’s victory, but the uptick in his support between 2000 and 2004 seems mainly to have reflected national-security concerns. Still, these pesky facts didn’t stop Garry Wills from announcing the end of the Enlightenment and the arrival of jihad in America, or Jane Smiley from bemoaning the “ignorance and bloodlust” of Bush voters in thrall to a fire-and-brimstone God, or left-wing bloggers from chattering about “Jesusland” and “fundies” and plotting their escape to Canada.

The paranoia hasn’t yet burned down to embers. The term theocrat has become a commonplace, employed by bomb-throwing columnists, otherwise-sensible reporters, and “centrist” Republicans such as Connecticut’s Christopher Shays, who recently complained that the GOP was becoming the “party of theocracy.” And now the specter of a looming Khomeini’ism has migrated into the realm of pop sociology, producing a spate of books with titles like The Baptizing of America, Kingdom Coming, Thy Kingdom Come—and, inevitably, American Theocracy, the Kevin Phillips jeremiad that shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list this spring.

Most of these books aspire to be anthropologies, guides for the perplexed that lead the innocent reader through what the subtitle of American Theocracy calls “the perils and politics of radical religion.” There isn’t perfect agreement on what to call the religious radicals in question: Everyone employs theocrat, but Kingdom Coming also proposes Christian nationalist, while The Baptizing of America favors the clunky Christocrat. Others have suggested Christianist, the better to link religious conservatives to Osama bin Laden—and of course there’s the ubiquitous theocon, suggesting a deadly mixture of Oliver Cromwell and Paul Wolfowitz.

But the various authors are in agreement about the main point, which is that something has gone terribly wrong with the separation of church and state in this country, and that America is poised to fall into the hands of people only one step from the ayatollahs. Today’s battles aren’t just a matter of ordinary political factionalism, they insist. The hour is much later than that, and nothing less than the republic itself hangs in the balance.

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Another very striking article that I read today – and of considerable importance if it helps bring the issue to the legal forefront – is Charles Chaput's essay on the prejudicial targeting of sexual abuse lawsuits at Catholic dioceses. Having been a high school teacher (and just a reasonably-informed person who pays attention to the news), it was obvious to me that the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church that made such news over the last few years was merely the tip of the iceberg as far as the sexual abuse of children goes. Far more occurs in the family, and far more occurs in the schools of America. Looking at the targeting of Catholic dioceses in lawsuits seeking damages for sexual abuse cases – that is, where Catholic parishes, schools, homeless shelters, hospitals, nursing homes and all such institutions belonging to a diocese have to pay for the crimes of priests who were never associated with the particular institution – I began to wonder what was going to happen to the finances of school districts and towns where they, too, would be held liable for the actions of single employees.

As I suspected, this standard seems to only apply to the Catholic Church.

That is, all other institutions in the country seem to be legally protected from paying damages by such "guilt by association" and specific ex post facto-style laws are being passed to suspend statutes of limitations so that even I can be liable for the actions of a priest who died before I was born.

I am all for justice for victims of such abuse, and justice in some cases has an institutional aspect that is rightly pursued. But for a clear case of the Church being singled out for prejudicial reasons, I have to cry "foul!" Idiotic stereotypes of "the rich Catholic Church" – as though all our property holdings don't go to the most wide and active service of humanity, and particularly the poor, that human history has ever seen – are being milked for agendas of greed in increasingly-crass ways. Never do I see media stories following up the social programs that have to be destroyed – without replacement by the government, even if it wasn't Bush's America – in order to feed the ever-attractive percentages going to the attorneys who specialize in this venture. One might be less suspicious if these attorneys were working pro bono. Having been observing this trend for a while, I'm glad to see a substantial addressing of it.

The article by Chaput itself

A news story treating the article and summarizing it, for the reader in a rush.

( A copy of the text here )

Here's a review of Jimmy Carter's book on Values in America which features a strong traditional Baptist critique of contemporary American Protestant fundamentalism (and Baptist fundamentalism in particular) and its affect on American public ethics both at home and abroad. It is a distinctly Christian and political critique, but noteworthy in its distinction from the fundamentalist political paradigm. Professor Wills is a capable reviewer for the book, both in that he doesn't fall to pieces in pseudo-intellectual panic in the presence of a religious topic, and in that he is a reasonably-informed critic himself of some of the objects of concern in the book. Its various points – not all equal in weight – are worth giving a hearing.

The New York Review of Books
Volume 53, Number 2 · February 9, 2006
Review

Jimmy Carter & the Culture of Death
By Garry Wills

Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis
by Jimmy Carter

Simon and Schuster, 212 pp., $25.00

In 1972, I was asked by New York magazine to survey Southern reactions to the attempted assassination of George Wallace. On my list of people to call was Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. When I called his press secretary, Jody Powell (a name I had never heard before), I was told it would be better for me to come to Atlanta than to talk on the phone. (Powell was drumming up attention for his man, with a view to his running for president.) When I arrived there, Powell had arranged for me to fly with Carter in his little state prop plane to Tifton, a small South Georgia town where there was a meeting with local sheriffs. The sheriffs were unhappy with Carter's liberal racial policies, and Powell obviously thought it would be good for his reputation nationally to be seen as standing up against regional prejudice.

Carter used all his local ties to defang the critics—the sheriffs did not openly turn against him—and I was impressed. On the flight back, he said he wanted to drop off in the town of Plains and see how his peanut business was doing—a homey touch the press would be treated to ad nauseam over the next two years. I do not remember any mention of his local church while we were in Plains. In fact, I cannot recall that religion was brought up in all our hours together. Perhaps he thought that was not something New York magazine readers would respond to. At any rate, I was surprised when, four years later, so much was made of his religion as he ran for president. It began when he was asked, while visiting Baptist friends, if he thought of himself as "born again." He answered yes—not surprisingly, since the Gospel of John (3:5) says that one must be born again to enter the kingdom of heaven, and Saint Paul says that baptism is being reborn into Christ (Romans 6:4). Reporters did not know this as a basic belief of Christians—they treated it as an odd cult claim.

That led to his second-most-famous remark of the 1976 campaign. Carter was asked in a Playboy interview if he thought he was a holier-than-thou person because he was born again. He answered that, no, in fact he had committed lust in his heart—again quoting the New Testament (Matthew 5:28). That did it. For much of the Carter presidency, the line of some in the press (and, as I know well, in the academy) was that he was a religious nut. I followed him in the 1976 race and heard a reporter ask Carter why he constantly brought up religion. He replied that he had made a determination never to bring up religion in the campaign. But the reporters kept asking him about it, and he had to answer them or be criticized for dodging the issue.

His attendance at church was not announced; we reporters had to ferret that out by ourselves. Carter is an old-fashioned Baptist, the kind that follows the lead of the great Baptist Roger Williams—that is, he is the firmest of believers in the separation of church and state. Unlike most if not all modern presidents, he never had a prayer service in the White House. His problem, back then, was not that he paraded his belief but that he believed. All this can seem quaint now when professing religion is practically a political necessity, whether one believes or not. There is now an inverse proportion between religiosity and sincerity.

Carter rightly says in Our Endangered Values that the norms of religion and politics are different. His religion, at any rate, places its greatest priority on love, of God and one's neighbor, even to the point of self-sacrifice. But a president cannot make his nation sacrifice itself—that would be dereliction of duty. The priority of politics is justice, and love goes beyond that. But love can help one find out what is just, without equating the two. That is why none of us, even those who believe in the separation of church and state, professes a separation of morality and politics. Insofar as believers—the great majority of Americans—derive many if not most of their moral insights from their beliefs, they must mingle religion and politics, again without equating the two.

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The New York Times
March 22, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Called by God to Help
By ROGER MAHONY
Los Angeles

I'VE received a lot of criticism for stating last month that I would instruct the priests of my archdiocese to disobey a proposed law that would subject them, as well as other church and humanitarian workers, to criminal penalties. The proposed Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives in December and is expected to be taken up by the Senate next week, would among other things subject to five years in prison anyone who "assists" an undocumented immigrant "to remain in the United States."

Some supporters of the bill have even accused the church of encouraging illegal immigration and meddling in politics. But I stand by my statement. Part of the mission of the Roman Catholic Church is to help people in need. It is our Gospel mandate, in which Christ instructs us to clothe the naked, feed the poor and welcome the stranger. Indeed, the Catholic Church, through Catholic Charities agencies around the country, is one of the largest nonprofit providers of social services in the nation, serving both citizens and immigrants.

Providing humanitarian assistance to those in need should not be made a crime, as the House bill decrees. As written, the proposed law is so broad that it would criminalize even minor acts of mercy like offering a meal or administering first aid.

Current law does not require social service agencies to obtain evidence of legal status before rendering aid, nor should it. Denying aid to a fellow human being violates a law with a higher authority than Congress — the law of God.

That does not mean that the Catholic Church encourages or supports illegal immigration. Every day in our parishes, social service programs, hospitals and schools, we witness the baleful consequences of illegal immigration. Families are separated, workers are exploited and migrants are left by smugglers to die in the desert. Illegal immigration serves neither the migrant nor the common good.

What the church supports is an overhaul of the immigration system so that legal status and legal channels for migration replace illegal status and illegal immigration. Creating legal structures for migration protects not only those who migrate but also our nation, by giving the government the ability to better identify who is in the country as well as to control who enters it.

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Roger Mahony is the cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles.

Huh. (I said it again.) Well, there it is. I feel kind of pleased with myself for finally having "made it" after probably half a dozen letters over the last few years. At the same time, I am underneath it all experiencing that vague anxiety where you think you've said something intelligent, but are worried that perhaps in fact you've said something idiotic, and that you--and only you--can't see it. Getting this printed, then, at a national/international level seems to really heighten the sensation.... :-)

It's not a major insight, of course, but when I read the Times' editorial yesterday on getting rid of the Electoral College, I certainly was aware of the fact that it was not the College that made me feel the most disenfranchised during the last election....

To the Editor:

While I can appreciate the reasoning of your call to drop the Electoral College as an antidemocratic force in American presidential politics, it seems to me that we have a greater antidemocratic threat than that.

Our system of presidential primaries as it stands grants enormous power to a few select states, and all but guarantees that most Americans in effect have two candidates handed to them by the major parties.

The people of Iowa, New Hampshire and the like have the opportunity to decide among many candidates. In theory, yes, someone could become a party's candidate by taking all the later primaries, but in fact we all know that momentum and the ability to raise the cash needed for our elections (another issue) all but determine the outcome of the primaries early on, if not the entire election process.

The Electoral College does not come close to the primary system in its power to circumvent democracy in American presidential politics.

Michael Anthony Novak
Milwaukee, March 14, 2006

I just spent an hour hanging with Lech Walesa. And it's not even lunchtime yet.