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First Things
The Public Square
(April 1997)
Richard John Neuhaus
Copyright
(c) 1997 First Things 72 (April 1997): 56-74.
God and Bigotry at Yale
Yale Law School, like others, makes provisions for prospective employers
to interview students on campus. In December 1994, the Christian Legal
Society (CLS), a national organization that has hired Yale students before
and has many Yale graduates as members, applied to take part in the February
1995 interview process. The Yale application form stipulates that employers
must take a pledge not to discriminate on the basis of, inter alia, religion.
With its application, CLS sent a letter pointing out that it is of course
a religious organization, that it takes religion into account in hiring,
and that it assumes Yale recognizes the pertinent exemption for religion
stipulated in, for instance, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and other
laws.
Not at all, responded Barbara Safriet, associate dean of the Law School.
"While I do not question the sincerity of your organization's beliefs,
I must affirm Yale Law School's equally strong commitment to the views
articulated in its nondiscrimination policy." CLS is excluded from
the hiring program. Gregory Baylor, assistant director of CLS, promptly
wrote back that Yale's position means that "CLS must alter its religious
beliefs to gain access" to the program. "Does Yale Law School
really intend to pressure religious nonprofits like CLS to alter their
religious beliefs? If so, why? We assume that it is not because you disagree
with our interpretation of Scripture or because you believe that Scripture
is not a reliable basis for decision making." He again cited laws
and court decisions upholding religious exemptions from nondiscrimination
regulations.
The curt answer from Safriet was uncompromising: "We cannot offer
our placement services to employers who, for whatever reason, do not abide
by our nondiscrimination policy in its entirety." A few months later,
in July 1995, CLS wrote again, pointing out that Harvard Law School had
at first excluded CLS from its interview program, but when a couple of
Harvard law professors got wind of it they promptly went to the front office
and had that policy reversed. The Harvard professors, it should be noted,
were Mary Ann Glendon and Alan Dershowitz, who disagree on many things
but are strongly opposed to antireligious bigotry. No matter. The answer
from Yale was that Harvard is not Yale.
By this time, a number of prominent Yale alumni and experts on religion
and law had written Yale's dean, Anthony Kronman, protesting the school's
exclusionary policy. The experts included such worthies as Marc Stern of
the American Jewish Congress, Dean Kelley of the National Council of Churches,
and Forest Montgomery of the National Association of Evangelicals. "A
public institution," they pointed out, "would be prohibited from
penalizing religious employers for exercising their rights under the First
Amendment as well as federal statutes." The implication was that independent
institutions, such as Yale Law School, should be able to go farther than
government agencies in respecting diversity, especially the free exercise
of religion.
Beginning with Dean Kronman's response of August 8, 1995, it would
become evident that quite the opposite is the case. One of the pleasures
of a private school is that you can be as discriminatory (against religion)
as you wish. "The Law School has made a lasting commitment to oppose
discrimination against its students on the basis of race, sex, and sexual
orientation, among other considerations. . . . To do anything else would
be to act contrary to our own ideals and sense of community," declard
Kronman. Nonetheless, the dean said he would take up the CLS matter with
a faculty committee. Since Kronman had raised the question of sexual orientation,
Baylor responded for CLS that a religious organization has a right to take
"sexual conduct" into account when making hiring decisions. He
awaited the outcome of the faculty's deliberation.
And he waited. Four months later, on December 8, he wrote inquiring
what was happening, since Kronman had said that the faculty would consider
the matter "at an early date." The dean responded with a brief
note explaining that the pertinent committee "has been late getting
started." Yet another six months passed and CLS had still heard nothing.
On June 6, 1996, Baylor wrote: "I do appreciate the possible sensitivity
of this issue on your campus and the suitability of a careful analysis.
However, the long delay is becoming increasingly unacceptable, especially
given the remarkable consensus among religious groups of divergent ideologies
and faiths on this issue. Although I can only speculate, it is difficult
to imagine that Yale would procrastinate so badly on a matter involving
some other 'constituency.'"
A month later, Dean Kronman came back with the definitive answer. The
committee had concluded that Yale should allow no exemptions on religious
or other grounds. "Exclusion on any of these grounds would be antithetical
to the community the Law School aspires to create. . . . The ideal of community
that animates the life of the School demands this." If Yale's view
of nondiscrimination gets in the way of the free exercise of religion,
too bad for the free exercise of religion. Constitutional protections of
free exercise may be fine for government and lesser institutions, but they
do not fit Yale's "ideal of community." As Chevy Chase might
have said, "We're Yale Law School-and you're not."
As it happens, Dean Kronman deems himself something of an expert on
the ethics of civil community. In a 1993 book, published, one notes, by
Harvard University Press (The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal
Profession), the dean is eloquent on the need for "political fraternity."
"Tolerance, unaccompanied by the spirit of sympathetic fellow-feeling
that distinguishes the condition of political fraternity, is not enough,"
he declares. "For political fraternity to exist, it is not necessary
that the different views which the members of a community take of its values
and purposes all be assessable from some common point of view. Indeed the
demand for political fraternity is likely to be greatest in just those
situations where the competing conceptions of the disputants are not comparable
in this way." It is necessary "to see the concerns of others
in their best light." We are sometimes presented with "a conflict
among incommensurable values, and if a community is to survive such disagreements,
it is reasonable to think that it needs something more than disinterested
toleration. What it needs is political fraternity."
Precisely. As, for instance, in trying to engage in "the spirit
of sympathetic fellow-feeling" and to understand in the "best
light" the "incommensurable values" of Christians and Jews
who think that organizations devoted to advancing their religious purposes
should reasonably take religion into account in hiring people. Or, to put
it more simply, as in having a decent respect for the free exercise of
religion.
It turns out that Dean Kronman's "spirit of sympathetic fellow-feeling"
is rather anemic. It certainly does not extend to the millions of fellow-citizens
whom he consigns to the darkness of the "Religious Right." He
was invited to give a lecture, in February 1996, at Cumberland School of
Law in Birmingham, Alabama. He chose as his topic "Civility."
The quality of the dean's civility is very strained indeed. The members
of what he calls the religious right are not legitimate participants in
the political community, he asserts, because they "treat politics
in a strictly instrumental fashion" for promoting other ends, namely,
the family and church. The "decrease in the appetite for citizenship,"
Kronman claimed, "correlates with an increasing devotion to family
and church." It follows that such people are not really concerned
for the "common good."
Set aside for the moment that this ludicrous claim is contrary to all
we know from the social sciences, and contrary to the keenest analyses
of American democracy from Tocqueville to the present day. Set aside, I
say, Dean Kronman's thoroughly muddled understanding of how our society
and polity work. One is even more struck by the irony that his exclusive
identification of authentic citizenship with concern for the polis as a
whole is logically antithetical to his own flaunting of Yale's private
status, by virtue of which it has the right to defy both constitutional
protections and common decencies when it comes to respecting the free exercise
of religion. It would seem that the "decrease in the appetite for
citizenship" does indeed correlate with a rigid devotion to "the
ideal of community that animates the life" of Yale Law School. The
confused contentions of Dean Kronman suggest that he-and, according to
him, his colleagues-are prone to an antireligious bigotry that is the enemy
of the civility he claims to champion.
The Creeping Coup D'Etat
At age eighty-four, Mr. Park Chamberlain of Woodside, California, now
retired from practice, has had a lot of time to think about matters judicial,
and he has been especially pleased by our pressing the question of the
judicial usurpation of politics. From 1934 to 1937 he studied at Yale Law
School under worthies such as William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, Thurman Arnold,
and Fred Rodell. That was during the New Deal when the Nine Old Men on
the Supreme Court were threatening what today would be called Big Government.
His worthy teachers-all "liberals" according to the nomenclature
of the day-drummed into their students the premier lesson of "the
wickedness of judicial resistance to the popular will."
The times were exciting, Mr. Chamberlain writes. "To be young
was very heaven. Over the teacups in our lounge we debated ways of bringing
the lawless judges to heel, and similar discussion filled the law journals
and newspaper editorials." The great question so urgently posed then
was: Can democracy survive under so powerful a nonelected body? As it happened,
FDR managed to restructure the Court and the sense of crisis subsided.
Folks at Yale settled back to enjoy what was anticipated as a golden age
of judicial restraint. "How then can it be," writes Mr. Chamberlain,
"that now some six decades later, the Supreme Court and its judicial
underlings have taken over the minutest detail of state and federal prison
administration, state criminal procedure, state educational systems, the
approval or disapproval of books in public libraries and lastly-indeed
as a necessity to support the grandiose programs ordained-even the taxing
power."
The great change came, Mr. Chamberlain believes, with the Warren Court
and the 1954 Brown decision. Before that, judicial review entailed
a negative veto power; in striking down a law, the Court simply said, "You
can't do that." Now the Court began to exercise what Chamberlain calls
a "positive veto." After saying what could not be done, the Court
now adds: "And therefore you must do this, and exactly this and only
this; and to see that you do, we will pursue you like avenging furies over
the years, directing and overseeing your each and every act, and furthermore
(and what a furthermore) if what we command you to do costs more money
than you can legally raise, we will not only order you to raise taxes,
but specifically compel you to levy taxes as we shall dictate."
In what Mr. Chamberlain terms a "creeping coup d'etat," the
Court transformed its judicial role into a legislative role, and assumed
executive powers in implementing its own laws. As for the People, sometimes
referred to as "the fourth branch of government," they can safely
be ignored by judges who are accountable to nobody but themselves. Chamberlain
writes, "What we have seen, of course, is a coup d'etat-just as blatantly
a coup d'etat as any lawless takeover of government in a banana republic.
The principal difference is, of course, that it has not been sudden and
bloody, but mostly peaceful and bit by bit."
And as for his revered teachers, Douglas, Fortas, Arnold, Rodell, et
al., they quickly appreciated the great good that could be done (at least
by their lights) through judicial ukase, and reversed their principles
of constitutional interpretation, drumming into the heads of another generation
of students the great wickedness of popular resistance to the judicial
will, precisely the opposite of what they taught Mr. Chamberlain and his
classmates. So what is to be done? Mr. Chamberlain notes that in California
a long-suffering but finally enraged electorate reasserted its right to
govern by booting three imperial judges off its Supreme Court. "Let
us hope that some day (after my time, alas) we will see a restoration of
the power in the people to mete out the same fate to federal judges who
have been faithless to their trust."
A creeping coup d'etat. Not a bad phrase, that. Also useful is the
distinction between a negative and positive veto, between the Court's proscriptive
and prescriptive powers. William F. Buckley has recently written: "Some
of the issues raised by First Things point to ultimate divisions; others
derive from temperamental reflexes. In the abstract, the point is obviously
reachable when a rogue society forfeits the loyalty of responsible and
courageous citizens. It is not always easy to recognize that point, which
often passes by societies that wake to find a despotism in power."
As we have insisted in these pages, this government has not forfeited
the loyalty of its citizens, but the judicial usurpation of politics does
constitute a despotism in the making, and partly in place. It is gratifying
to see other publications taking up this question with the urgency that
it deserves. Thanks in part to the timely action of a federal judge in
California who decided that his one vote nullifies the judgment of 55 percent
of the electorate who voted to end racial and other discriminations in
the form of affirmative action. Some readers have complained that the discussion
of judicial usurpation so far has been short on remedies. As the discussion
continues, possible remedies will be canvassed with care. For starters,
however, it is no little thing that we be aroused from sleep.
Religion within the Limits of Morality
Alone
R. R. Reno got it exactly right. He writes, "The end result is
the situation which drives traditionalists to distraction: modern theologians
who repudiate the authority of Christian doctrine but insist upon a role
in teaching and proclaiming that doctrine." That is the end result,
says Reno, who teaches theology at Creighton University in Omaha, of the
entire project called modern theology. And it is most particularly the
end result of contemporary feminist theology, which is solidly in the tradition
of Kant's theological work, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
In that work, Christian belief and practice is subjected to rigorous critique
by Kant's moral vision.
Reno's article in the current issue of Pro Ecclesia, "Feminist
Theology as Modern Project," gives particular attention to the work
of Elizabeth Johnson, who is very much in the mainstream of academic theology
(she is a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America),
and Rosemary Radford Ruether, who for decades has been one of the shapers
of the feminist project. Like Kant, both subject the entirety of the Christian
tradition to a moral critique. In a book that Reno calls her feminist summa,
She Who Is, Johnson sets forth the normative theological principle:
"In the course of this program [of feminist theology] one criterion
recurs as a touchstone for testing the truth and falsity, the adequacy
and inadequacy, the coherence and incoherence of theological statements
and religious structures. This criterion, variously enunciated, is the
emancipation of women toward human flourishing."
Applying that criterion, says Johnson, results in "a new experience
of God" which is "a new event in the religious history of humankind."
Some critics claim that, in fact, it results in a new religion that is
not Christianity. To that, Johnson and others respond that they are the
ones who are faithful to the tradition, rescuing its "essence"
and "true meaning" from the constricting shell of "literalism,"
also known as fundamentalism. Reno states their position this way: "Precisely
because the dogmatic form of received formulations is intrinsically defective,
the tradition requires the red pencil of the modern theologian. Without
the ministrations of the modern theologian, without the critiques and correctives
born of the distinctive genius of the present age, the apostolic tradition
would be a dead letter. When the day is done, modern theology holds the
key which unlocks the gospel."
In all this, the feminist theologians are faithful epigones of Immanuel
Kant. They cannot abide the particularity of revelation, as in the particular
person of Jesus as God incarnate or in the possibility that the finite
language of doctrine is capable of bearing the infinite truth about God.
"Witness Kant's treatment of Jesus," Reno writes. "Kant
affirms Jesus as a representative of moral rectitude, but that affirmation
is hollow, for the part of Jesus which makes him a person rather than a
principle is precisely that part which Kant seeks to excise from his reading
of Scripture."
So with Johnson and others, particulars such as Jesus' cross and resurrection
are but symbols to be judged as useful or not, depending on whether they
advance contemporary understandings of the emancipation of women. Reno
incisively makes the point that this leaves us without any authentic communion
with God, since the only fixed point of reference is not God and his revelation
but the "inner self." "Thus, the anchor becomes oneself,
and one clings to one's sentiments and experiences with a tenacity born
of knowing that otherwise one is adrift." I have offered here but
a sampling of insights from an article that is an intelligently sympathetic,
but finally devastating, critique of the dominant forms of feminist theology
now current in the academy.
As Reno knows, the children of Kant are hardly limited to feminists.
The family of modern theology embraces all those who have attempted for
purposes ideological, political, or psychological to hijack the Christian
tradition. A good rule of thumb is that, whenever you hear a theologian
speak about "the essence" of Christianity, he is probably promoting
something other than Christianity. Christianity is not an essence or principle
but the story of the world, and is composed of the inconvenient historical
particularities of God's revelation of Himself in Israel and the Church.
Establish a criterion by which you strip away what is difficult and you
end up with a new but very old religion that is, finally, the idolatrous
worship of the Self.
"Americanism" Lives On
I don't know if the editors intended the juxtaposition, but the same
issue of Pro Ecclesia includes another, although very different,
display of "religion within the limits of morality alone." Michael
J. Baxter of Notre Dame offers a blistering critique of the way historians
have construed the Catholic experience in America. "Writing History
in a World Without Ends" is in some ways a brilliant polemic against
major historians of American Catholicism, including the late John Tracy
Ellis, Jay Dolan, and David O'Brien. All of them, writes Baxter, portray
American Catholicism as a success story because Catholicism ended up by
fitting neatly into their understandings of the American Way of Life. Baxter's
title points to the fact that these historians assumed that there is no
conflict over "ends" between Catholicism and Americanism. Part
of Baxter's argument is that Rome was right when, at the turn of the century,
it condemned "Americanism." American bishops and intellectuals
dismissed Americanism as a "shadow heresy," but that, Baxter
suggests, is only because they were so deeply implicated in it.
It is a provocative thesis and well worth an argument. Among Baxter's
villains is Father John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit who did more than anyone
else to make the case, finally ratified by the Church, that the kind of
democratic pluralism experienced in the United States is compatible with
Catholic teaching. Murray, says Baxter, made Christian truth claims safe
for, and subordinate to, Americanism. This is hardly a new criticism of
Murray. While Baxter is a pacifist and would on most questions be located
on the left, the same charge is relentlessly pressed by such as David Schindler
and the Communio circle, who are viewed as champions of Catholic
conservatism.
Like all things human, Murray's was a limited achievement. Contra Baxter
and other critics, Murray was well aware that a conflict over "ends"
could come into political play when the moral assumptions of a society
are badly fragmented. See, for instance, Murray's posthumously published
article in these pages, raising an alarm about the Supreme Court's school
prayer decisions and the ascendancy of a militant secularism in our public
life ("A Common Enemy, A Common Cause," October 1992). Baxter
himself, albeit in a footnote, quotes Murray as writing, "It has been
remarked that only in a disintegrating society does politics become a controversy
over ends; it should simply be a means to ends already agreed on with sufficient
unanimity."
During most of Murray's life, he believed, and rightly so, that that
agreement marked the happy circumstance of American public life. Under
the pressure of the judicial usurpation of politics, but under other pressures
as well, it is now evident that ours has become what Murray called "a
disintegrating society." Baxter warns against judging earlier thinkers
by the standards of our own time, but I'm afraid that he does precisely
that in the case of Murray and others.
Consider, for instance, Man and the State, a 1951 work by the
French philosopher Jacques Maritain, who stood in a line running from John
Carroll to Tocqueville to Murray, all of whom celebrated the happy circumstance
that made politics in America a matter of means rather than ends. Procedural
rather than ideological politics was possible in America, according to
this view, because shared moral convictions and habits of civic virtue
were so secure. The question of ends was defined and secured by religion,
and permeated the body politic. Those who today read Maritain and others
on the American circumstance can easily accuse them of being pathetically
naive. Much too easily. The right lesson to be drawn is not about their
naivete but about how far the disintegration of society has progressed
in the past four decades.
Baxter's article contains penetrating criticisms of Catholics who subordinate
the faith to being of "service" to social establishments of which
they have no fundamental criticism. Although they had somewhat different
views of what constitutes progress, Baxter writes, Ellis, Dolan, and O'Brien
all assume that "the Church's destiny lies in finding its home in
the United States of America." He is particularly scathing in his
judgment of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), whose activities
David O'Brien, picking up on Martin Marty's idea of "public church,"
praises as exemplifying "public Catholicism." Baxter writes:
"'Public Catholicism' never seriously considers a scenario in which
the United States of America proves incapable of adhering to the teachings
of the gospel, or to the precepts of the natural law, or even to the watered-down
natural law principles regularly churned out by the NCCB in the form of
public policy recommendations." The story told by Ellis et al. "should
be read as a neo-Constantinian narrative." Readers will recognize
here the influence of Methodist ethicist Stanley Hauerwas and his familiar
condemnation of "doing ethics for Caesar," which is not surprising
since Baxter is a student of Hauerwas.
What Kind of Church?
"Writing History in a World Without Ends" is a bracing polemic,
and much of what Baxter says should be taken to heart. But finally one
must ask whether it is not true here, as Reno says is true of feminist
theology, that "modern theology marches to Kant's orders." Philosophically
and theologically, Baxter is light years removed from Kant. But he, too,
offers a version of "religion within the limits of morality alone."
For instance, he again and again excoriates Ellis for thinking it a good
thing that the Catholic bishops did not collectively take sides in the
Civil War. Thus, says Ellis, they preserved the unity of the Catholic Church,
rather than dividing along political lines as happened in major Protestant
denominations. Catholics fought on both sides, sometimes in positions of
high command.
Baxter does not think that a good thing. "What kind of ecclesiology
is it," he asks, "that allows Ellis to suggest that the Church
is united even as its members are arrayed against each other in battle?"
At another point, he notes scornfully that in 1784 John Carroll reported
that there were 15,800 Catholics in Maryland, of whom 3,000 were slaves.
What kind of Church is it, Baxter taunts, where people could buy and sell
their brothers and sisters in Christ?
What kind of Church is it, indeed? Forget the way in which Baxter egregiously
and, I am afraid, smugly imposes contemporary moral criteria upon the past.
Should the bishops in 1860, in the manner of today's NCCB, have taken sides
or employed "watered-down natural law principles" in the form
of policy recommendations? And should they have taken the side of the North
or the South? Given that history is written by the victors, most would
say they should have sided with the North. But if doing ethics for Caesar
is such a bad thing-and I think it a deeply problematic thing-it shouldn't
matter whether the Caesar in question wins or loses. Should the Catholic
Church have declared with magisterial authority that the cause of the North
was legitimate and the cause of the South illegitimate, and therefore no
Catholic could fight for the South? I very much doubt it.
"What kind of ecclesiology is it that allows Ellis to suggest
that the Church is united even as its members are arrayed against each
other in battle." It is, quite simply, an ecclesiology that is not
"within the limits of morality alone." It is an understanding
of Christ and the Church that is constituted by revealed truth, dogma,
sacramental bonds, ordered ministry, and diverse traditions of discipleship.
What kind of ecclesiology is it, Baxter wants to know, that suggests that
the Church is united even as some members are free and others are slaves?
For an answer to that question, one might read again St. Paul's letter
to Philemon. Obviously, I am not making an argument for slavery or for
the cause of the South. Rather, it is an argument for a doctrine of the
Church that rests on more than the one pillar of ethics. The Church is
constituted more by mystery than by morality.
There are many dimensions of Christian existence and of living ecclesially-doctrinal,
sacramental, liturgical, institutional, affective. It is a thin and fragile
ecclesiology that cannot survive the tragic circumstance in which brothers
in Christ-arriving at different positions in moral dispute-find themselves
arrayed against one another in battle. Finally, Baxter, like Elizabeth
Johnson and Rosemary Radford Ruether, is a child of Kant, a modern theologian
who critiques the entirety of the tradition by a criterion of his choosing.
His criterion is pacifism, joined to a cluster of moral sensibilities on
other issues. To be fair, he would say that pacifism is not a criterion
of his choice but is made imperative by the gospel. This is the argument
that is so powerfully, if unconvincingly, advanced in The Politics of
Jesus by John Howard Yoder, whom Baxter thanks for help with his essay.
To be fair again, Johnson, Ruether, and their feminist colleagues would
also claim that their understanding of the emancipation of women is made
imperative by the gospel.
Unlike Johnson and Ruether, Baxter would no doubt deny that he is part
of the modern theology project. And on most questions of theological substance
I am sure he is right to deny it. But there is the formal similarity that
he and those of like mind take a piece of the Christian reality through
time, and by that piece they critique the whole. There are, of course,
points of reference by which the tradition can and should be held accountable.
These points of reference-Scripture, councils, the sense of the faithful-are
themselves part of the tradition and their use, which makes possible the
development of the tradition, is defined by the tradition. It is all very
complex, and how it works is set forth by, for instance, John Henry Newman
on "the development of doctrine," an argument that has been formally
embraced by the Catholic Church. This is not the place to go into the details
of that argument, except to note that-pace Johnson, Ruether, Baxter,
and Kant-it is in no way reducible to "religion within the limits
of morality alone." (Father Baxter is currently engaged in a mighty
battle with the theology department at Notre Dame. The above criticisms
notwithstanding, I'm on his side. More on that next month.)
Friends of the Court, Friends of
the Vulnerable
Thirty-nine organizations and coalitions filed amicus curiae briefs
urging the Supreme Court to reverse lower-court rulings bestowing constitutional
status on physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Here are excerpts you might
want to keep handy when the topic comes up for discussion.
"American Geriatrics Society: 'Proponents of a constitutional
right to PAS expect the practice to be limited to persons who are acting
voluntarily, without undue influence or coercion. The image is that of
an independent, capable person thoughtfully evaluating his or her options,
unaffected by biased third parties or other circumstances. This is so far
from the experience of dying as to be fanciful. Dying persons are often
very weak, prone to strong emotions, and vulnerable to the suggestions,
expectations, and guidance of others.' Sen. Orrin Hatch, Chairman of
U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, et al.: 'Giving choices to the vulnerable
is not always liberating. A young woman is not more "free" if
the law allows her to contract with a pimp; a young man is not more "free"
if a pusher can sell him crack cocaine; a child is not more "free"
if he or she can "consent" to sexual advances by adults; people
are not more "free" if they can voluntarily sell themselves into
slavery. Nor is an ill person necessarily more "free" if he can
agree to kill himself. Indeed, the mere availability of assisted suicide
as a socially legitimated alternative may impel some who would prefer to
live to accept this course out of feelings of guilt or shame about the
burdens (financial and otherwise) that the choice of continued living would
impose on their families.' American Medical Association et al.:
'Patients come to physicians and nurses at times of greatest need and vulnerability,
depending upon these professionals to respond to their needs capably and
faithfully. The rule against physician-assisted suicide is an extraordinarily
valuable protection against temptation to seek an immediate solution to
a burdensome problem that health care professionals, no less than any other
human being, can feel. Many patients may understandably wonder, finding
themselves badly injured and in the care of a physician they do not know
but who is licensed to assist in taking the lives of patients, whether
that physician will truly act only to preserve their lives.' U.S. Catholic
Conference et al.: 'Any notion that the state has less interest in
protecting a person's life against a lethal intervention when that person
is very sick would itself do violence to the principle of equal justice
under the law. . . . This is simply another way of saying that (a) the
state may decide in the first place whose life warrants greater or lesser
protection (a dangerous proposition by any standard), and (b) as a matter
of constitutional law, sick people, in particular, have lives less worth
protecting than others. Such a governmental determination would be a direct
assault on the fundamental equality and dignity of each and every person.'
Agudath Israel of America: 'We do not mean to suggest that constitutionalizing
a right to assisted suicide is likely to lead to the type of moral collapse
that occurred in the German medical profession earlier this century. .
. . However, we may not ignore the lessons of that dark era: "What
makes the administrative mass killings so outstanding is not their numbers,
their efficiency, or their cruelty, but the fact that they occurred in
an epoch when nobody thought it was humanly or socially possible. Therein
lies their deepest lesson. If it was possible then, why not again? What
has fundamentally changed? The curtain may have gone down-but only for
the intermission." F. Wertham, The German Euthanasia Program 31
(1980). In the decisions below, we detect-ever so faintly, ever so benignly,
but ever so ominously-the rustling of the curtain once again.'"
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
The redoubtable Harvey Mansfield of Harvard comments on the new book
by the incorrigible Ronald Dworkin of Oxford and New York University, Freedom's
Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (Oxford University
Press). Now you would expect a journal such as this to be wholeheartedly
in favor of a moral reading of the Constitution, wouldn't you? After all,
injecting clear moral argument into public discourse is part of the raison
d'etre of our mission. Yes, but . . . The Constitution is the specified
framework within which that discourse is conducted. The Constitution institutionalizes
the rules by which democratic deliberation and decision-making can take
place. That such decisions are democratic means that they are decisions
of the majority, with constitutionally specified and democratically supported
protections for minorities. In elections, legislation, referenda, and other
decision-making, the people are free to make whatever moral (or immoral)
arguments they wish, always within the framework of the Constitution.
Professor Dworkin, along with the putatively progressive judiciary
of our time, has moved well beyond such old-fashioned ways of understanding
the American order. Their "moral reading" of the Constitution
is a wondrously pliable hermeneutic in which judges, lawyers, and legal
scholars make the Constitution say whatever they think it should say. In
this way, the moral judgments of the mandarins of the knowledge class are
not only "privileged"-to use the favored term of critical scholars-
but in fact are declared to be what the Constitution actually says (with
a wink and nudge to the knowing who understand that texts cannot really
"say" anything). As Dworkin has so memorably put it, judges are
like novelists collectively writing an open-ended story and making it up
as they go along. The great task in preserving "Freedom's Law"
is to make sure that the people-as in dreaded "majoritarianism"-do
not interfere with the important work of the small minority of privileged
storytellers.
Mansfield recalls the familiar story in which a lady asked Benjamin
Franklin whether the American constitutional convention had produced a
republic or a monarchy. Franklin replied: "A republic-if you can keep
it." Ronald Dworkin, says Mansfield, would have replied: "A moral
system, madam, if you can argue." Mansfield notes, "He would
have added quickly that any implication of sexism in his response would
be corrected by a future generation arguing more morally than his."
Mansfield sums up his critique of Dworkin this way: "The American
Founders, whom Dworkin ignores, had a concern for the risk of majoritarianism
similar to his. But their remedy was different. They did not reject majoritarianism,
because they knew that popular government is necessarily majority rule.
They did make it difficult to collect a majority by compelling it to show
both determination towards its goal and flexibility in the means. This
they did through federalism and separation of powers, two obvious features
of the American form of government not discussed by Dworkin. The Founders
thus imposed a formal necessity of compromise on the people, not regrettable,
as Dworkin says, but moral because done with respect for the right of consent.
The rights of a minority are better protected by the right of consent fixed
in separated powers, they thought, than by 'parchment barriers'-let alone
extreme principles constructed of professors' arguments."
That summary warrants a careful second reading. A surprising number
of Americans, including readers of this journal, are uneasy about the notion
of democracy. Don't we know that the American order is republican and not
democratic? they ask. The question reflects the simplistic distinction
indicated in the names of our two major parties, partisan distinctions
necessarily being simplistic. The American constitutional order, however,
is democracy exercised through republican means. That is to say, political
sovereignty is vested in the People, and the People are free to indicate
any higher sovereignty to which they hold themselves and the political
order itself accountable (as in "one nation under God").
So also with the protection of minorities. It is only the majority
itself that can protect against the dangers of majoritarianism. Can a majority
exercise such self-limitation? Most of the political history of the United
States provides a resounding answer in the affirmative. Certainly the majority
has demonstrated itself much more capable of self-limitation than have
the judicial and academic elites that have usurped political power in the
name of protecting against majoritarianism. The Founders understood, and
the American people understand, the need for compromise. The same cannot
be said of the Dworkins who would impose their smug certitudes in the name
of "the moral reading of the Constitution."
Critical scholarship of our time is much enamored of the ironic, and
quite blind to the ironies in its own presumption of a right to govern.
In claiming to protect minorities against the dangers of raw majoritarianism,
the aristocracy of the articulate appeals to what the Founders called the
"parchment barriers" of the Constitution, thus turning the Constitution
against the People who alone give it legitimate authority. Turning democratic
theory on its head, they assume that legitimate authority is derived from
the minority rather than the majority. Further, they assume they have a
monopoly on defining which minority has political and legal standing. In
the case of abortion, they declare that the minority to be protected is
not the children who are aborted but the women who want abortions. In the
case of affirmative action, whites, males, and heterosexuals who are discriminated
against cannot be a minority unfairly treated, for, after all, whites,
males, and heterosexuals, when counted together, are part of the majority,
and the Constitution is designed to protect only minorities. We must not,
however, lose sight of the fact that the chief minority protected by "the
moral reading of the Constitution" championed by Dworkin & Co.
is the minority of Dworkin & Co. who are so touchingly solicitous in
protecting the majority from the perils of self-government.
By such definitional tricks, the champions of "extreme principles
constructed of professors' arguments" present themselves as the defenders
of threatened minorities, disguising in moral pretension their raw ambition
to rule. They have kept the game going for some time and played it with
remarkable success over the last thirty years and more. But now the people,
so amazingly patient and forbearing, have caught on and the jig is up.
The great irony and the great mistake of the self- appointed aristocracy
was to pit the "parchment barriers" of the Constitution against
the People while, simultaneously, deconstructing those same parchment barriers
by the hermeneutics of the aristocracy's will to rule. Dworkin and his
ilk on the bench and in the law schools are in the process of discovering
that they have taken on the impossible task of convincing the American
people that they are bound by a Constitution that means whatever their
certified betters say it means, and the one thing their betters say it
means for sure is that the majority must not rule.
Faced with this implausible argument for despotism, some Americans came
to believe it and have, as a result, rejected the Constitution. Many more,
we hope, their patience run thin at last, will let Professor Dworkin and
his judicial courtiers have their say before politely, or perhaps not so
politely, inviting them to desist from trying to undemocratically impose
on the majority what they so naively call "the moral reading of the
Constitution," thus permitting a self-governing people to resume the
difficult work of keeping the republic bequeathed them by the Founders.
Here Comes the Future, Maybe
Faced with another of the humongous volumes coming out of The Fundamentalism
Project that is generously funded by the MacArthur Foundation and edited
by Martin E. Marty, Peter Berger got to wondering about this intense interest
in fundamentalism. Of course, Marty and the MacArthur people might reply
that fundamentalism is obviously an important and strange phenomenon, and
academics are obliged to try to understand the alien worlds from which
it arises.
Berger writes: "But here came another question: Who finds
this world strange, and to whom must it be made understandable?
The answer to that question was easy: people to whom the officials of the
MacArthur Foundation normally talk, such as professors at American elite
universities. And with this came the Aha! experience: The concern
that must have led to this Project was based on an upside-down perception
of the world. The notion here was that so-called fundamentalism (which,
when all is said and done, usually refers to any sort of passionate religious
movement) is a rare, hard-to-explain thing. But in fact it is not rare
at all, neither if one looks at history, nor if one looks around the contemporary
world. On the contrary, what is rare is people who think otherwise. Put
simply: The difficult-to- understand phenomenon is not Iranian mullahs
but American university professors. (Would it, perhaps, be worth a multimillion-
dollar project to try to explain the latter group?)"
Berger confesses that ages and ages ago he played a part-a very considerable
part, we would add-in the development of the "secularization theory"
that has now been shattered by reality. Although there are complexities
and apparent exceptions, it would seem that the great development of our
time is not the secularization but the desecularization of the world. His
earlier confidence in secularization theory has made Berger chary of grand
generalizations and more open to surprises. He writes: "Finally, in
religion as in every other area of human endeavor, individual personalities
play a much larger role than most social scientists and historians are
willing to concede. Thus there might have been an Islamic revolution in
Iran without the Ayatollah Khomeini, but it would probably have looked
quite different. No one can predict the appearance of charismatic figures
who will launch powerful religious movements in places where no one expects
them. Who knows- perhaps the next religious upsurge in America will occur
among disenchanted postmodernist academics!"
The Berger essay appears in the National Interest, an excellent
journal that I took to task some time back for editorially declaring that
at the end of the twentieth century religion is largely irrelevant to an
understanding of international affairs. Without presuming to take credit,
one notes with satisfaction that the editors have since been making up
for it. The same issue includes two long discussions of Samuel Huntington's
important new book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (Simon & Schuster). Huntington is one of the seminal thinkers
of our time, and his book will be receiving major attention in these pages.
I note here only that Berger's essay, "The Decline of Secularism,"
is closely related to Huntington's chief argument that world affairs-chiefly
determined by the nation-state in the nineteenth century and by ideology
in the twentieth-will in the next century be dominated by the conflict
of civilizations, with civilizations typically being defined by religion.
This is Big Think of a very large order that might easily be dismissed
coming from a thinker less manifestly capable than Samuel Huntington. As
its first commentator, the National Interest has Pierre Hassner,
a French analyst, who dislikes the book intensely and, one suspects, intently.
He is understandably troubled by Huntington's suggestion that the West
will have to give up its pretensions to being the universal, and universalizing,
civilization. (As Huntington affirms international multiculturalism, he
also calls us to resist the domestic multiculturalism that undermines the
West in the new world of civilizations in conflict.) Really big theories
are terribly vulnerable to nit-picking on the details, and Hassner makes
the most of the opportunity. The French, having long since lost their once
eminent role in world affairs, do not take kindly to being told that even
the West, in which they still have a not unimportant place, may be marginalized.
More interesting is the discussion by Wang Gungwu of the Institute
of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. In the coming world of clashing
Confucian, Islamic, Buddhist, and Christian Civilizational Powers that
Huntington foresees, Gungwu detects similarities with the impact of Machiavelli.
He writes: "At the end of my second reading of this engrossing book,
I was reminded of Machiavelli. What Machiavelli did for the world of princely
states, Huntington may well be doing for the multi-civilizational world
order. The old political rules remain for the most part, but the protagonists
of larger polities, or groups of polities, have been provided with a new
logic and language of behavior. I reflected, too, on what Machiavelli's
contemporaries thought of The Prince when it was first published.
The Church authorities who represented the universalism of the day were
appalled, but was it because he had elevated the princely states above
God's plan, or for some other reason? Did his secular contemporaries think
otherwise, that his image of the prince and his princely state represented
the real world? Were they puzzled and a little frightened by the new paradigm
that accepted the princes for what they were?
"By analogy, the Western powers today might respond to Huntington
like the Universal Church and reaffirm that universalism is an absolute
good. But less powerful civilizations may be encouraged by Huntington to
believe that they might become new princes, with greatly enlarged and elevated
parts to play. In the end, this is what is so stunning about The Clash
of Civilizations: It is not just about the future, but may actually
help to shape it."
Needless to say, these are questions of the greatest moment for the
world of the future, which, all unsuspecting, may already be the world
of the present. Again, you will be hearing more about the Huntington thesis
in these pages. For the moment, I note the connection with the desecularization
of world history, and with the emergence of the Catholic Church, especially
in this pontificate, as the chief voice of a universalist reading of the
future of the human project. Not so incidentally, the Ramsey Colloquium
sponsored by our institute is embarked upon a major study of human rights
aimed at the observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1998.
Is the idea of a common human project, and of universal human rights
in particular, an outdated vestige of a temporary Western hegemony? Is
it possible that secular intellectuals in the West will in the future ally
themselves, however uneasily, with the Catholic Church as the world's chief
institutional champion of the idea of the universal? Might the church of
Enlightenment universalism, which has reigned so confidently over these
last two centuries, enter into restored communion with the Church from
which it broke? Can the Christian proposal comprehend, without threatening,
the universalist aspirations within other religio- cultural forms of what
Huntington calls Civilizational Powers? Big questions all. But then, what's
the point of reading a journal called First Things if one doesn't want
to take on the big ones?
While We're At It
- Q: How do we reach new subscribers? A: Through old subscribers. That's
not the only way, but it's a very important way. Please send us a list
of family members, friends, and associates who should be reading FT. We'll
send them a sample issue in your name. They will be grateful. Or at least
they will be impressed that you thought of them-and thought them to be
the kind of people who are up for such high-class reading. Why not do it
today?
- The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reports that
45 percent of adult Americans have a favorable view of the Christian Coalition
and 35 percent an unfavorable. The favorable rating is remarkable when
one considers that in the general media the Christian Coalition is synonymous
with a "religious right" that is routinely depicted in terms
ranging from controversial to dangerously fanatical. Sixty-four percent
of white evangelical Protestants rate the Coalition favorably. The same
survey found that 47 percent of black Christians say their pastor publicly
endorses political candidates, as do 20 percent of white evangelical Protestants.
As for white Catholics and mainline Protestants, only 12 percent report
such political activity by their clergy. A regular complaint by conservative
Catholics is that black clergy are given a free ride for their open politicking,
whereas any hint of partisanship by Catholic clergy immediately triggers
an outcry against the alleged violation of church and state. There is something
to the complaint, but it is not so hard to explain. Given America's racial
history and the mix of white guilt and condescension, blacks are granted
many exemptions from what is expected of others. Whether or not that is
just, it is a fact of life. Second, Catholic social teaching is not an
ideology, and certainly not a party platform. With few exceptions, the
translation from moral truth to electoral imperative is not and should
not be easy. Third, a political endorsement from the pulpit would, in most
Catholic parishes, be criticized as divisive and create major pastoral
headaches, whereas black congregations tend to be politically homogeneous
and any conservative dissenters stay in their place, which is to sit quietly
at the back of the bus. A further difference is that liberal Catholics
are generally not interested in their clergy being more politically specific.
They know that, if they were, they might more often than not be specific
about a candidate's position on questions such as abortion and euthanasia
where the Church's teaching is unmistakable. As a result, any political
endorsements might generally tilt to the conservative side. Better, from
the liberal viewpoint, that political specificity be muffled under the
seamless blanket of the parish family's huddled togetherness. In all the
churches, however, best of all is when the clergy lucidly set forth what
is clear Christian teaching, refrain from presenting their opinions or
the opinions of their congregants as the Word of God, and challenge people
to cast an informed and conscientious ballot.
- "Science Debunks Shroud." Those were the headlines in 1988
when Carbon-14 testing of the Shroud of Turin, alleged to be the burial
cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, "established" that it was a pious
forgery from the twelfth or thirteenth century. But science marches on,
and now John Ray, an Egyptologist at Cambridge University, writes in the
Times Literary Supplement that the dispute over the shroud is wide
open again. A big problem is that nobody has come up with a plausible scientific
explanation of how the forgery, if it is a forgery, was actually done.
It has been pretty firmly established that the shroud is not a painting
in any known sense of that term, and fresh questions have been raised about
the reliability of the Carbon-14 dating. Ray writes: "If the Shroud
is not a painting and its date is uncertain, what is it, and who is the
figure represented? The shortest answer, which is also the most difficult
to assess, is the traditional one: the man is Jesus of Nazareth, who has
photographed himself in some unknown way on to the cloth. If the process
that produced the Shroud is miraculous, it is most unlikely that it can
be explained, although the physical effects upon the linen can presumably
still be analyzed. There seems to be no way that science can prove this
theory, which is why it is better to leave it out of the debate. It may
be true, in which case all other attempts to explain the Shroud will come
to nothing, and we will be left with a sense of incomprehension. But, at
a scientific level, this would be all that could be said about it."
Several "radiation" theories have been proposed, suggesting that
a life-size statue somehow left the impression on the shroud. "The
best which can be said about this," writes Ray, "would be to
reserve judgment until it is demonstrated that anatomically accurate life-sized
naked statues capable of singeing clothes were being produced in the Middle
Ages." "At the moment the question of the Shroud is open, and
it is likely to remain so in the absence of new testing or techniques.
Those who believe that the Shroud is a miraculous portrait of Jesus of
Nazareth, or those who would like in their hearts to think so, can comfort
themselves by the fact that the object in Turin is behaving in exactly
the way it would do if it were inexplicable." Yet Ray allows that
it is possible that some unknown artist in some unknown way at some unknown
date created an artifact "that is both baffling and awe-inspiring."
"He may have done it out of piety, or for quick profit, or even out
of mischief. But he created a masterpiece; and, if the resemblances to
the Christ of the Gospels are deliberate, he created a religious masterpiece.
If artists can be divinely guided, who is to say that he was not?"
- Well, he's writing for the Christian Century, and how else do
you get into a liberal magazine a long and fervent appreciation of a conservative
such as Russell Kirk except by repeatedly saying that he's not like those
other "bad" conservatives? In a review essay on Kirk's autobiographical
The Sword of Imagination, Ralph Wood of Wake Forest University complains
that Malcolm Muggeridge, Paul Johnson, and Walker Percy, among others,
reflect "the sourness that afflicts so many critics of modernity."
Not so with Kirk, who displayed "a gladness of heart that was rooted
in an ardent love for European culture in both its particularity and impermanence."
Wood is as right about Kirk as he is wrong about the others. He writes
that Kirk identified with the historical circumstance of St. Augustine,
who reflected on "the community of souls that endures when the cities
of this world have been given up to fire and sword." Wood ends with
this: "Such faith enabled Kirk to transcend the limits of his cultural
conservatism, and thus to wield his sword of the imagination with a cheerful
countenance." That, one may be permitted to suggest, is to get things
exactly backward. Kirk's faith made possible and necessary his cultural
conservatism by pointing him toward that which transcends all cultural
moments. But then, a little conservative-bashing and a liberally correct
spin in the concluding paragraph is perhaps a small price to pay for getting
such a generous appreciation of Russell Kirk published in the Christian
Century.
- Is there too much or too little economic inequality in the U.S.? And
by what criteria could one come up with an answer to that? The idea that
there could be too little inequality strikes many people as absurd. But
it depends on how one measures economic status-by income, consumption,
or wealth-and on the voluntary choices people make about how much to work
and how much time to devote to other activities. In addition, there are
changing sources of wealth, such as "physical" capital and "human"
capital. Of course there are some people, too many people, who are poor
because they are outside the circle of economic activity and productivity
altogether. But also for those inside the circle the question of economic
inequality is a fascinating one, and it is fascinatingly explored in two
recent booklets from the American Enterprise Institute: The Distribution
of Wealth by John Weicher and Wage Inequality by Francine Blau
and Lawrence Kahn (write 1150 Seventeenth Street, NW, Washington D.C. 20036).
- Head, heart, hands, and health. Put them together and you've got 4-H.
Recently the leaders in Iowa lost their head and succumbed to advanced
thinkers who believe competition is a bad thing. Instead of awarding the
traditional blue, red, and white ribbons for first, second, and third place
at the Iowa State Fair, all 3,500 entrants in various competitions received
the same multicolored ribbon. A great uproar ensued and 4-H leaders promised
to go back to the old way. Our leading parish paper was amused by the behavior
of the rubes, mockingly observing that some folk in Iowa called the new
scheme "socialistic." The Times did not note that the
new rules prevented what it calls the "3,500 competitors" from
competing. It did report, showing just how benighted those Iowans are,
the complaint that a recent 4-H conference for hundreds of high school
students had a session on tolerance for homosexuals. A Mrs. Mohning is
reported as saying, "Usually [the conference] deals with hog diseases
and horticulture, but this time it dealt with homosexuality." One
is reminded of the Iowa Congressman who, opposing the Defense of Marriage
Act in the last session, declared that same-sex marriage "is not a
big deal in Iowa." Just wait. If the progressive 4-H leaders get their
way, Iowans will quickly learn that there are worse things than hog diseases.
In fact, I expect they already know that, which is why they are demanding
that the head be rejoined to the other h's in 4-H.
- The disappointment is more than usual when the content of a book flatly
contradicts the promise of its title. That is the case with Mark Graber's
Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the Constitution, and Reproductive
Politics (Princeton University Press). According to Professor Steven
D. Smith at the University of Colorado Law School, Graber's chief point
is that anyone who wants to rethink the current abortion license is either
ignorant or a hypocrite. Graber insists on pro-choice orthodoxy down the
line. Smith writes: "At some point the sociological and jurisprudential
questions converge. Law by its nature claims authority, and authority has
both a sociological and jurisprudential dimension. A government without
justice, as Augustine observed long ago, is not much more than a group
of bandits operating on a large scale. So citizens might decline to ascribe
authority to a government that officially endorses practices they regard
as deeply immoral, even if they also realize that in a pervasively imperfect
world such practices are likely to-and perhaps even, in some tragic sense,
need to-flourish anyway. And indeed, people are sometimes heard
to say that a law, or a government, that officially refuses to honor the
sacred value of life is unworthy of respect. In a complicated and obscure
way, something like this concept seems to have been in the background of
largely unenforced prohibitions on abortion. Similar sensibilities may
be at work in the repugnance felt by many towards Roe even if the
prospects for actually eradicating abortion seem next to nil." He
adds that a book that really helps people "rethink abortion"
would be a very good idea.
- Most everybody is impressed by Peter J. Gomes, minister of Harvard's
Memorial Church. Even those put off by the somewhat affected Anglophiliac
ways (he sometimes calls himself an Afro-Saxon-American) admit that he's
quite a piece of work. He is also a black Republican, a declared conservative
theologically, and a fierce opponent of the multicultural enemies of Western
culture. Not surprisingly, Gomes was for a long time a favorite of conservative
Christians at Harvard. Until November 1991, that is, when he declared himself
to be gay. Gomes' effort to combat biblical illiteracy, The Good Book
(Morrow), recently appeared and the New Yorker has this admiring,
indeed adulatory, profile of the author. Robert Boynton says the book "is
offering a bold theological argument." Gomes contends, for instance,
"The place for creative hope that arises out of suffering is most
likely now to be found among blacks, women, and homosexuals." Presumably
it takes courage to say that at Harvard. Gomes embraces the standard gay
line on homosexuality and the Bible: Paul and others only knew the debauched,
idolatrous, pagan expressions of homosexuality. "All they knew of
homosexuality," writes Gomes, "was prostitution, pederasty, lasciviousness,
and exploitation." While calling himself gay, Gomes declares he is
and always has been sexually chaste, holding himself aloof from all that
"gay" connotes in today's world. Boynton writes: "Though
Gomes has occasionally visited a gay bar, he hasn't really explored the
culture of homosexuality. Indeed, he is skeptical about whether such a
thing exists." It is no doubt a great deal easier to chatter about
loving, committed human relationships if one does not know about a subculture
ravaged by loneliness, alcoholism, suicide, drugs, and deadly disease,
and whose denizens have an average life expectancy of forty-two years.
Gomes is much taken with Augustine's City of God. "Harvard is my City
of God. We are different from the rest of the world, and we ought to be."
If I read St. Augustine aright, that is what he calls idolatry. One gets
the impression that, for all his display of sangfroid, Peter J. Gomes is
a deeply conflicted man. On the realities of homosexuality, where he has
alienated former admirers and gained fawning celebrity from new admirers,
the conflict seems to be contained by studiously cultivated ignorance.
A gay subculture? Really, my dear, it is all so sordid. Who wants to know
about it?
- Last November, in the coronation hall of Prague Castle, President Vaclav
Havel of the Czech Republic bestowed posthumously the Order of T. G. Masaryk
on the Rev. Blahoslav Hruby (1911-1990). The award is richly deserved.
During the long years of the Cold War, Blaho and his wife Olga labored
unstintingly to inform the West about the persecution of believers behind
the Iron Curtain. Working out of a small office at the National Council
of Churches, they were shunned and scorned by anti- anti-Communist mainline
church leadership for being "cold warriors," which was the most
unfashionable of things to be. Olga continues to run the Research Center
for Religion and Human Rights in Closed Societies (475 Riverside Drive,
New York, NY 10027). It is gratifying that President Havel had the decency
to honor the heroism of a labor by which we have all been blessed.
- "I had a dream: to be able to accompany the poor, the excluded,
the ignored, without having to explain myself or justify myself to the
rich, the secure, or the comfortable. . . . I dreamed of the freedom to
think and express myself, to debate and criticize, without fear of the
guillotine." So Bishop Jacques Gaillot goes on in his little book
Voice from the Desert: A Bishop's Cry for a New Church (Crossroad).
For thirteen years, until 1995, he was bishop of Evreux in France and much
celebrated by "the rich, the secure, and the comfortable" of
the secular media for his public defiance of Catholic teaching until Rome,
in the absence of a "guillotine," simply transferred him to a
nonfunctioning diocese in North Africa. Readers who feel nauseated by the
self-righteous grandstanding of putatively prophetic proponents of "a
new church" might find this book the perfect emetic.
- One reason some observers think that the Supreme Court will not uphold
the Ninth and Second Circuits on physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is that
the Court, a thoroughly political institution, knows that euthanasia has
very spotty support even on the left. Witness the review of Herbert Hendin's
Seduced by Death: Doctors, Patients, and the Dutch Cure, by David
Rothman of Columbia, writing in the premier journal of the left, the Nation:
"Is there any reconciling the demand for control with the fear of
coercion? Not really. PAS is not the first time a measure that seems to
fit the needs of some proves incompatible with the interests of others.
The debate over sterilization policies in the seventies is an apt case.
Since many low-income black women were undergoing coerced sterilization
immediately after delivery (with some hospitals making sterilization a
precondition for delivery in their facility), civil libertarians proposed
a compulsory waiting period for the procedure. Some middle-class women
objected to having their rights infringed. They did not want to wait a
month and return for a separate operation. Nevertheless, their autonomy
had to be circumscribed because the potential coercive effects upon others
was too great. The situation in PAS is similar. Even if one has no fear
of physician or family coercion, the prospect of it occurring for others
should be determinative. A so-called right may have to be abridged in order
to protect others less well-situated." It's not the best or most important
argument against euthanasia, but when it comes to moral wisdom we should
take what we can get, especially from the Nation.
- Here is an odd thing about professional scribblers. They fanatically
resist an idea for years. Then, when the idea is vindicated beyond believable
challenge, they pretend that they knew it all along. For instance, they
insisted that communism is a permanent fixture on the world scene and our
task is to reconcile ourselves to that fact of life by peaceful coexistence.
Later: Why, of course, we knew all along that communism would collapse.
For another instance, they insisted that mainline Protestantism is the
religio-moral baseline of American life, and only a few carping conservatives
don't like it because they disagree with its liberal politics. Later: Why,
of course, it has been evident for years that the mainline churches were
in theological, moral, and institutional free fall. Why do I mention this
odd thing? Because of the almost total non-attention paid Thomas Reeves'
fine book, The Empty Church (Free Press). We published an excerpt
("Not So Christian America," October 1996), but the book doesn't
exist so far as other publications are concerned. Well, to be fair, the
Philadelphia Enquirer did have a lady minister of the United Church
of Christ review it. She thought it was really bad, going so far as to
declare that it is (gasp) conservative. The sadness is that people who
preen themselves on being tolerant and open-minded are so unwilling to
do what intellectuals are supposed to do, namely, engage arguments. What?
you say. At his age, Neuhaus is still surprised by that? No, not surprised,
but saddened, and convinced that it needs to be pointed out again and again.
In any event, The Empty Church is a book that should be engaged.
It is more than a catalogue of the familiar woes of the mainline/oldline/sideline.
It is an effort to figure out what happened and what might be done about
it, and that is an effort very much worth making. About a third of the
Christians in this country belong to those churches. They and their denominations
must not be written off.
- Slavery in Africa, tragically, is not a thing of the past. The Muslim
government of Sudan, for instance, is reliably reported to have enslaved
thousands of Christian children who are subjected to sexual abuse, torture,
and forced conversion to Islam (see Joseph Gregory's report, "African
Slavery 1996," First Things, May 1996). Now, Christian Solidarity
International (CSI) has gone into Sudan to buy back slaves at a price per
slave equivalent to $2,000 or the cost of three cows. A representative
of Anti-Slavery International protests that, however noble its intentions,
CSI is in fact contributing to the trade in slaves. The only long-term
solution, he says, is to pressure the Sudanese government to stop the practice.
CSI responds that its policy both publicizes the situation in Sudan and
helps individual slaves. One can understand both arguments, but I have
to come down on the side of CSI on this one. In the uncertain choice between
long-term and short- term, between political strategy and rescuing a few,
the better policy is to do what you can to help whom you can when you can.
Moreover, an international appeal for funds to buy people out of slavery
is an excellent way to focus attention and increase pressure on the government
of Sudan.
- We pointed out that, contra many press reports, the ten points of a
"Catholic Framework for Economic Life," recently issued by the
bishops conference, is not just a rehash of the 1986 pastoral, "Economic
Justice for All." We are glad to have the agreement of the National
Catholic Reporter, which, precisely for that reason, very much dislikes
the ten points. The framework is "just words" because, unlike
the 1986 pastoral, it doesn't presume to offer sweeping prescriptions for
overhauling the economic system. In the words of the NCR, it doesn't
"spell out how the country and the world moves (sic) into a post-capitalistic,
economically just, new world." Exactly right, thank God.
- Theological insight is cropping up all over. This from the Today
show on NBC: "Bryant Gumbel: 'You write that you prayed more during
your four years in office than basically at any time in your life and yet
I think it's fair to say, and I hope this doesn't sound harsh, I think
it's fair to say, you are consistently viewed as one of the more ineffective
Presidents of modern times.' Jimmy Carter: 'Well, I think that's harsh
and unfair, but you have a right to your opinion.' Gumbel: 'It's not mine.
It's what I perceive as a general view. What do you think, if anything,
that says about the power of prayer?'"
- You may have seen Sister Wendy Beckett on public television. She is
the nun whom the BBC has explaining the great, and not so great, art of
Western civilization, and she does it very winsomely indeed. She is in
the long tradition of nuns examined by Jo Ann Kay McNamara in a remarkable
new book, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (Harvard
University Press). Reviewing the book, Fiona MacCarthy writes: "Sister
Wendy is a powerful example of the practical uses nuns have made of their
apartness. Through history the cloistered life, the retreat from the world,
has actually opened out the opportunities available to individual women,
to scholars and mystics, teachers and healers, political activists, artists
and writers, whose creative energies have been focused by the spiritual
stillness and repetitive rhythms of communal religious life. The possibilities
for expression endemic in lives of dedicated chastity is one of the most
interesting themes of Professor McNamara's ambitious and energetic book."
Of these nuns, McNamara says: "They served their god and their church
and in doing so they fulfilled themselves and laid a foundation for all
women. Without the daring and sacrifice of these nuns, it is impossible
to imagine the feminist movements of modern times finding any purchase
in the public world." Sisters in Arms is a marvelous story
of the leadership of women in education, health care, social work, the
arts, and the spiritual life over many centuries, and continuing to this
day. It is not just arguably the case, it is manifestly the case, that
women in the Catholic Church exercised much more effective leadership,
in the Church and in the world, before the last several decades' excitements
about liberation and empowerment. Liberated from the traditional disciplines
so well described by Ms. McNamara, blue- jeaned Sister Trixy mouthing the
tripe of feminist protest seems more pathetic than empowered.
- On December 3, 1996, the feast of St. Francis Xavier, John Paul II
called on the Chinese regime to stop persecuting underground Catholics
and to allow the hierarchy and members of the "patriotic church"
to regularize their relationship with Rome. There are reportedly about
four million in the patriotic church, which is controlled by the government,
and more than twice that number in the underground church. "Even today,"
the Pope said in a broadcast beamed to China, "all Chinese Catholics
are called to remain constant to the faith received and communicated, not
giving in to concepts of a church which respond neither to the will of
the Lord Jesus, nor to the Catholic faith, nor to the sentiment and conviction
of the great majority of Chinese Catholics." The next day the Chinese
government responded that "the Vatican should stop using religion
to interfere in our internal affairs." But what else does the Vatican
have?
- Returning yet again to his obsession, Andrew Sullivan of The
New Republic celebrates the Hawaii court ruling in favor of same-sex
marriage as "a perfect example of federalism." "We are,
in other words, at the beginning of a protracted and elaborate struggle,"
he writes. "Good. This is surely how the system is supposed to work-in
cases, legislation, speeches, debates, and votes." Uh huh. The American
Founders, one expects, would have been surprised by the suggestion that
the way of democratic deliberation and decision-making is to get a court
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to make an unpopular ruling that can
then be imposed upon the country by higher courts, thus provoking legislation,
speeches, debates, and votes in resistance to the imposition. It is noteworthy
that Mr. Sullivan's notion of "how the system is supposed to work"
begins with cases and courts. He studied political science in another country,
and it shows, although the form of government he favors is even less compatible
with that of Britain. On the other hand, the system he describes is, in
fact, the way this country is increasingly ruled. There is a nice irony
in having a Brit compliment the colonies on having devised a system that
rises above that earlier nonsense about self-government.
- It says here the bishops of England and Wales are planning to cut back
on holy days of obligation, leaving only Christmas and one feast of Our
Lady (January 1 or August 15). SS. Peter and Paul, All Saints, Epiphany,
Ascension, and Corpus Christi will be folded into the nearest Sunday, which
means that they will, in terms of the practiced piety of the faithful,
disappear. The proposal is as unsurprising as it is wrongheaded. Even the
bishops' liturgy office seems embarrassed, but it is as though they just
can't help themselves from continuing on a misguided course of modernization
embraced decades ago. A spokesman says the intention is not to make life
easier for Catholics but to avoid "confusion." The "confusion"
is now caused by the fact that some days of obligation are already transferred
to Sunday while others are not. So who caused the confusion to begin with
if not the same liturgists who, whatever their intentions, have systematically
been eliminating the distinctives of being Catholic? Unless one wants to
count as a Catholic distinctive the burden of confusion about what is required
to be a good Catholic. The same spokesman mumbles something about many
Catholics going to Mass on Good Friday and Ash Wednesday, even though they
are not days of obligation. Pastoral sense, which is mainly common sense,
plus every bit of sociological insight tell us that, if consistency is
required, maybe the answer is to make Good Friday and Ash Wednesday days
of obligation. The Tablet cites another churchman who points out
"that it [is] now almost impossible to celebrate feasts properly in
short lunch-time Masses designed for working people." Oh dear, we
are so very, very busy. "It could be argued that transferring those
feasts to Sunday would afford them the solemnity they deserved." Yes,
it could be but it wouldn't be by anyone who knows what happens to feasts
that are not celebrated on their proper day. What a startling and reinvigorating
thing it would be were a bishops conference to move in the other direction
after these decades of dispiriting "reforms," and actually increase
rather than decrease the demands of ecclesial fidelity. It was, for instance,
a matter of slight theological but enormous sociological consequence when
it was decided that the Friday abstinence from meat should be optional.
As an item of Catholic piety and identity, the practice has virtually disappeared,
with no conceivable gain and a very palpable loss in the sense of being
Catholic. But the bishops and their liturgical apparatchiks stumble along
in the weary path of aggiornamento, "updating" the Church
to conform with an exhausted culture that yearns for an alternative to
itself. It is a great consolation to know that belief in the infallibility
of the Church does not require denying the capacity of its leaders for
doing things that are really dumb.
- Richard Sanders, a justice on the Supreme Court of Washington state,
spoke briefly at a pro-life rally in January. Here, in its entirety, is
what he said: "I want to give all of you my best wishes in this celebration
of human life. Nothing is, or should be, more fundamental in our legal
system than the preservation and protection of innocent human life. By
coincidence, or perhaps by providence, my formal induction to the Washington
State Supreme Court occurred about an hour ago. I owe my election to many
of the people who are here today and I'm here to say thank you very much
and good luck. Our mutual pursuit of justice requires a lifetime of dedication
and courage. Keep up the good work." The state Commission on Judicial
Conduct promptly filed charges against him. The indictment includes the
assertion that "Respondent [Sanders] appeared at the event carrying
a red rose, a symbol identified with the 'March for Life.'" Michelle
Malkin, a Seattle Times columnist, wrote, "Carrying a red rose?
How scandalous! Thank heavens the state commission has stepped forward
to protect the public and the judiciary from such corrupt behavior."
The ACLU, to its credit, has come to Sanders' defense. Not so the Washington
chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), whose spokesman
said that judges "do have a right to their personal opinions, but
I don't think it's appropriate for sitting judges to come out [on abortion]."
The Times notes that maybe NARAL should then refrain from issuing
its questionnaire to candidates for the Supreme Court. The questionnaire
asks, "What life experiences have you had that you believe would enable
you to judge reproductive rights cases with empathy and compassion?"
Justice James Dolliver went public with his answer: "A member of my
family has had an abortion which I both encouraged and paid for."
There is no record of NARAL having objected to Dolliver's "coming
out." The charges against Sanders are the first time in the sixteen-year
history of the commission that it has considered disciplining a Supreme
Court justice.
- When in 1984 the U.S. established diplomatic relations with the Holy
See, President Reagan appointed his friend William Wilson as ambassador.
He was followed by Frank Shakespeare and Thomas Melady, while President
Clinton's man is Raymond Flynn, former mayor of Boston. The three former
ambassadors have now written a letter urging Clinton to place the ambassadorship
within the traditional-and diplomatically more serious-context of foreign
service appointments and thus avoid "the appearance that the post
is a political toy." Not surprisingly, Ambassador Flynn disagrees
with his predecessors, but our sources in the Vatican strongly support
the letter, indicating that the Holy See has a hard time setting much store
by an office that is viewed as a presidential pay-off. The 1984 Senate
resolution said the office would have "no appearance of involvement
in partisan political or sectarian religious affairs." Unfortunately,
that has become very much its appearance under Ambassador Flynn, who says
he is operating by an expanded mandate given him by the President. It is
reported that Ambassador Flynn will be leaving his post this summer.
- Outside premillennial dispensationalist circles of apocalyptic excitements-and
if you don't know what those terms mean, be assured you are safely distanced
from such circles-the book would have received slight attention. But then
somebody noticed that it carries a blurb by Ralph Reed of the Christian
Coalition saying that the book "is a compelling look at the controversial
subject of the end times." The book is Earth's Two-Minute Warning:
Today's Bible-Predicted Signs of the End Times by John Wheeler, who
served as the first editor of the Coalition's paper, Christian America.
In the course of his propounding eschatological scenarios involving the
Mark of the Beast and whether "the rapture" is pre-, post-, or
mid- the "great tribulation," Wheeler gets off some conventional
(for his religious world) speculations about the possibly nefarious role
of the Catholic Church in history's wind-up, and some Catholic publications
pounced on what they took to be Ralph Reed's endorsement of Catholic-bashing.
That's going a bit overboard. We asked Ralph Reed about it and he wrote
us this: "I provided the blurb without reading the book due to my
busy schedule during the recent elections. That was a mistake, one that
I very much regret. Had I read through the entire book I would not have
provided a cover comment. Mr. Wheeler is a former employee and I provided
my statement as a personal favor. The blurb in its entirety stated that
'many will disagree' with the book's conclusions. Those words were edited
by the publisher and did not appear on the book, thus changing the meaning
of my statement. This has been a valuable learning experience. Anyone who
has attempted to assist a former employee or even a family member can understand
my intentions."
- In reviewing one of his books, a New York Times critic called
Joseph Epstein one of the leading practitioners of the "familiar essay."
Epstein says jokingly that he was taken aback; he thought he was the only
one. After twenty-two years of editing the American Scholar, the
quarterly of the Phi Beta Kappa society, and turning it into one of the
most intelligent and engaging publications in the country, Mr. Epstein
has been dismissed. The problem, it seems, is that he didn't run enough
articles on feminist and ethnic studies. A Wall Street Journal editorial
says: "The prime complaint against Mr. Epstein, his adversaries explain,
is that the American Scholar failed under his editorship to reflect
the scholarly world as it is today. Circumstances being what they are,
a great many readers of the American Scholar, of course, are grateful
to Mr. Epstein for precisely that reason." Reports are that Phi Beta
Kappa has lost its cachet in recent years, with more and more top students
declining the invitation to join. It seems unlikely that the action against
Joseph Epstein will enhance the standing of the society.
- Prescind, if you will, from the question of what ought to be U.S. policy
toward Cuba. I have to sympathize with a friend, a foreign affairs expert,
who is near apoplectic about what the Canadians are doing. Not so much
because he thinks Canada's policies are wrong but because they are decked
out in such smarmy tones of moral superiority. He is the one who brought
to my attention the Anglican pronouncement urging Canadians to winter in
Cuba rather than Florida, thereby striking a blow for the oppressed of
the world. Now he comes into the office brandishing a news story that features
a photo of beaming Canadian officials, including Foreign Minister Lloyd
Axworthy, fawning all over the Maximum Leader. "Cuba comes up on our
radar scope as a much higher priority than before," effuses Mr. Axworthy.
"Canadians are discovering a whole new world south of our southern
neighbor." A whole new world in a little island of eleven million
people oppressed and impoverished by a brutal dictator for almost forty
years. I can understand my friend's distress. Far from championing justice,
the Canadians are apologists for injustice and are making a very tidy profit
from it. With Cuba closed to American companies, Canadians can be very
competitive in building hotels and selling machinery. Last year, trade
between Canada and Cuba exceeded $430 million and was growing by more than
10 percent a year, which includes 156,000 Canadian tourists, a 10 percent
increase over 1995. Canada, in turn, buys lobsters, sugar, and nickel from
Cuba. This relationship, needless to say, is not one of imperialism, as
in the bad old days of the U.S. and Fulgencio Batista, but of enlightened
cooperation. Batista, after all, was a dictator. What my friend the expert
does not properly appreciate is that Canadian politicians and entrepreneurs
are much like others; they seen their opportunities and they took 'em.
Moreover, there is a poignancy in the case of Canadians, for whom it often
seems that the entire world is the U.S. The Canadian identity kit is almost
emptied these days. The vaunted health care system is on the brink of bankruptcy,
hockey leagues are riddled with sex scandals, bilingualism slides into
secession and national dissolution, and it seems nobody loves the now ubiquitously
littering Canada goose. Canadian identity needs the discovery of "a
whole new world," even if it is a small and morally sleazy one. Consorting
with Fidel is a defiant statement to Americans that Canada is not just
the little kid that lives on the northside of reality. Then, too, there
is that easy money, and not a few U.S. businesses stolen by Fidel and now
used to bribe the bribable. All this my friend should more sympathetically
appreciate, although he should be careful about saying it out loud. It
gets the famously phlegmatic Canadians going something fierce. (And now
I await the usual undiplomatic protest from my diplomat cousin in Ottawa.)
- The headline of a Reuters story, "An Early Mass Celebrated by
Mother Teresa." The story continues, "Mother Teresa, who returned
home last week to continue recovering from heart surgery, led a Christmas
Mass yesterday at her Calcutta mission." I hope nobody tells the Pope.
- Here is a hard case, persuasively depicted by five psychiatrists in
the Wall Street Journal: "Suppose that a young man, seeking
help for a psychological condition that was associated with serious health
risks and made him desperately unhappy, were to be told by the professional
he consulted that no treatment is available, that his condition is permanent
and genetically based, and that he must learn to live with it. Perhaps
this young man, unwilling to give up hope, sought out other specialists
only to receive the same message: 'Nothing can be done for you. Accept
your condition.' How would this man and his family feel when they discovered
years later that numerous therapeutic approaches have been available for
his specific problem for more than sixty years? What would be his reaction
when informed that, although none of these approaches guaranteed results
and most required a long period of treatment, a patient who was willing
to follow a proven treatment regime had a good chance of being free from
the condition? How would this man feel if he discovered that the reason
he was not informed that treatment for his condition was available was
that certain groups were, for political reasons, pressuring professionals
to deny that effective treatment existed?" As they say, there is no
guarantee, but psychiatrists who treat homosexuality say that there is
a 25 percent to 50 percent chance of "significant improvement,"
and "many find the freedom they are seeking and are able to have normal
relationsips with women." For more information, write: The National
Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality, 16542 Ventura
Boulevard, Suite 416, Encino, CA 91436; phone: (818) 789-4440.
- The sleeping giant of populist outrage is roused by Ronnie Dugger,
a Texas writer, and his angry friends. "The divine right of kings
has been replaced by the divine right of CEOs," Dugger thundered,
to the applause of 250 leftist activists from thirty-two states gathered
at a conference center in Hunt, Texas. Jim Hightower, former Texas Agriculture
Commissioner, was brought in to rabble the assemblage against Clinton's
sellout of the progressive cause. While the oratory was perhaps not as
memorable as William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech
in 1896, the group had lots of good ideas. Double the minimum wage, said
some. Nationalize the oil industry, said others. Abolish Congress, said
yet others. Not that radicalism was permitted to get in the way of political
propriety. The group fretted that there were almost no African Americans,
Hispanics, or other minorities present, and you may be sure that all were
careful to use gender-inclusive language. But this I found especially piquant
in the report on a meeting aimed at arousing the populist passions of down-to-earth
Joe-six-pack workers and farmers against their corporate and cultural overlords:
"Those at the conference were asked, in deference to the fragrance-sensitive,
to refrain from wearing hair spray, perfume, or cologne." Designer
populism.
- No, no, there has been no "falling out" at all. Some of you
have worried that Father Avery Dulles' letter about my comments on the
Society of Jesus indicates a parting of the ways. On the contrary, we are
the closest of friends, typically talk to one another at least once a week,
and regularly have dinner together. In addition, he is the keystone of
the "Dulles Colloquium," an ongoing conversation we sponsor on
theology and public philosophy. His letter indicates nothing more than
that he wanted it on the record that he thought some of my criticism of
the Jesuits was excessive. Fair enough.
- It turns out that Leonardo Boff of Brazil, former Franciscan priest
and famed liberation theologian, was for years carrying on with his secretary,
Marcia Monteiro Miranda. Although not married, they are now living together.
Says his mistress, "When priests start living in intimacy with a woman
as a couple, they cannot easily overcome their priestly formation and have
a hard time until they get used to it." Yet another challenge posed
to the reform of seminary education.
- Such self-discipline. It has been I don't know how many months since
I've remarked on Father Richard McBrien of Notre Dame. In part because
what he calls his "self-syndicated" column is hard to find these
days. But dedicated readers send me one from time to time, and some are
hard to resist. In this column, for instance, Fr. McBrien is taken with
a writer who argues that "celibacy for Catholic clergy is fundamentally
incorrect from a genetic perspective." "Genetically," Yamil
Lara writes, "Catholics cannot afford to continue to practice institutionally
mandated celibacy." "It is the extinction of our finest and the
opposite of what our knowledge of genetics dictates." Fr. McBrien
clinches the argument by citing a long list of high-achieving politicians,
actors, and Protestant clergy who have given the world high-achieving children.
So why aren't priests doing their duty to improve the race? Theologians
and other ponderous types might object that viewing the priesthood in terms
of genetic perpetuation is the very antithesis of the Catholic idea of
the priest as an icon of eschatological disposability. Readers unaccustomed
to such elevated reflections, however, might simply give a moment's thought
to a world filled with little McBriens. Not that I believe terminal silliness
is genetically transmitted.
- Chief Ita Bassey Etuk of Nung Udoe, Nigeria, has appealed to the Lutheran
Church of Nigeria to give up its opposition to polygamy. The church, he
said, should review doctrines that have "outlived their usefulness,
especially in a traditional African society." He added that his whole
village would have turned Lutheran long ago "if the church had discarded
some of the dogmas enacted almost 500 years ago and moved along with society."
It gives one a whole new take on historical progress.
- Here's something you likely missed. The Portuguese Evangelical Methodist
Church has received its autonomy from the British Methodist Church, 125
years after the first British Methodist missionary was sent to Portugal.
Harold Macmillan's decolonizing "winds of change" blow slowly
but exceedingly fine.
- Resolved: I'm going to compose that list of potential subscribers as
soon as I've finished reading "The Public Square." Good for you.
Please don't forget.
Sources: Correspondence between
Christian Legal Society and Yale Law School in "Civility, Politics,
and Civil Society" by Thomas C. Berg, Cumberland Law Review, Vol.
26, No. 3. William F. Buckley on judicial usurpation and issues raised
in the First Things symposium, National Review, December 31, 1996. R. R.
Reno's "Feminist Theology as Modern Project," Pro Ecclesia, Fall
1996. Excerpts from amici curiae urging Supreme Court to reverse lower
courts on euthanasia, Life at Risk, November 1996. Ronald Dworkin's Freedom's
Law reviewed by Harvey Mansfield, Times Literary Supplement, December 6,
1996. Peter L. Berger on "Secularism in Retreat," National Interest,
Winter 1996/97. While We're At It: On Pew research, Christian Century,
October 16, 1996. On Shroud of Turin, Times Literary Supplement, October
18, 1996. Ralph Wood on Russell Kirk and various other conservative writers,
Christian Century, October 23, 1996. On Iowa 4-H, New York Times, November
7, 1996. Robert Boynton review of The Good Book by Peter Gomes, New Yorker,
November 11, 1996. Mark Graber's Rethinking Abortion reviewed by Steven
D. Smith, Constitutional Commentary, vol. 13, no. 3, 1996. Herbert Hendin's
Seduced by Death reviewed by David Rothman, Nation, November 18, 1996.
On enslavement of Sudanese Christians, Tablet, November 23, 1996. On the
"Catholic Framework for Economic Life," National Catholic Reporter,
November 22, 1996. Exchange between Bryant Gumbel and Jimmy Carter, Today
show, November 18, 1996 (cited in Notable Quotables, December 2, 1996).
Jo Ann Kay McNamara's Sisters in Arms reviewed by Fiona MacCarthy, New
York Review of Books, December 19, 1996. Pope John Paul II on Chinese Catholics,
Vatican Information Service, December 3, 1996 and New York Times, December
5, 1996. Andrew Sullivan on Hawaii court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage,
New Republic, December 30, 1996. On reduction of holy days of obligation
in England and Wales, Tablet, December 21-28, 1996. On Washington State
Justice Richard Sanders, Seattle Times, December 10, 1996. On U.S. Ambassadorship
to the Vatican, Catholic Trends, December 28, 1996. On Joseph Epstein,
Wall Street Journal, January 23, 1997. Canadian officials quoted on Cuba,
New York Times, January 23, 1997. On Mother Teresa, Reuters, December 27,
1996. "Don't Forsake Homosexuals Who Want Help" by Socaraides
et al., Wall Street Journal, January 9, 1997. On populist outrage, New
York Times, November 25, 1996. On Leonardo Boff, Catholic World Report,
December 1996. Father Richard McBrien on priestly celibacy, Catholic Northwest
Progress, January 2, 1997. On Nigerian chief's plea for polygamy, Christian
Century, November 20-27, 1996. On Portuguese Evangelical Methodist Church,
Ecumenical News International, November 6, 1996.
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Updated: 13 July 2002
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