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Archbishop Chaput’s response to Fukuyama and his ilk
Well, not explicitly.... In any event, our friend Gary Seaton sent along the text of this speech by Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver. There’s so much I’d love to quote, but I’ll restrict myself to a few snippets: I think the current American debate over religion and the public square has much deeper roots than the 2006 and 2004 elections, or John Kennedy’s 1960 election—or the Second Vatican Council, for that matter. A crisis of faith and action for Christians has been growing for many years in Western society. It’s taken longer to have an impact here in the United States because we’re younger as a nation than the countries in Europe, and we’ve escaped some of Europe’s wars and worst social and religious struggles.
But Americans now face the same growing spiritual illness that J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Romano Guardini, and C.S. Lewis all wrote about in the last century. It’s a loss of hope and purpose that comes from the loss of an interior life and a living faith. It’s a loss that we can only make bearable by creating a culture of material comfort that feeds—and feeds off of—personal selfishness. After an extensive discussion of Georges Bernanos, he offers this updated reflection on a passage from Frank Sheed:The tidal wave of our toys, from iPods to the Internet, is equally effective in getting us to ignore history and ignore our own emptiness. The struggle for real human freedom depends upon the struggle for human history. Unlike the ideologies that deny the importance of the past and the present and focus on the illusions of a perfect future, Christianity sees the most important moments of the human story to be the past event of the Incarnation and the present moment of my individual opportunity to love.
The Christian faith is grounded in what God has done. Our love is what we choose to do now, and our hope is founded in God’s past acts of love and our present ones. Without history, there is no Christianity. So the fundamental question, for Bernanos, is “whether history is the story of mankind or merely of technology.” Modern man must be convinced again that he is free, that he can really choose in this moment of time between very different paths to very different futures. In the act of choosing, we regain history as our own. Finally, there’s this: The “common good” is more than a political slogan. It’s more than what most people think they want right now. It’s not a matter of popular consensus or majority opinion. It can’t be reduced to economic justice or social equality or better laws or civil rights, although all these things are vitally important to a healthy society.
The common good is what best serves human happiness in the light of what is real and true. That’s the heart of the matter: What is real and true? If God exists, then the more man flees from God, the less true and real man becomes. If God exists, then a society that refuses to acknowledge or publicly talk about God is suffering from a peculiar kind of insanity. I actually addressed these issues much more lamely in a much narrower context in a class today. We/ve been reading Kent Greenawalt’s Religion and the Constitution: Free Exercise and Fairness, and I’ve been trying to find some big theoretical issues in a very nuanced and lawyerly book. The issue I was trying to flog today was the way in which the law tries to treat churches as just another species of voluntary associations, which obviously distorts the phenomenon somewhat. An example upon which I seized was Greenawalt’s discussion of the issue of clergy malpractice, where he, so to speak, privileges the "secular" view of a person’s crisis as psychological or physiological, as opposed to spiritual. Here’s a very small chunk of Greenawalt: Unless the [religious] counselor says, "Well, perhaps you should see a secular professional as well as me," or "You need to understand that I do not have all the training of a licensed psychotherapist," the client may be encouraged to put his problems into the counselor’s hands, unaware of the limits of the counselor’s competence....Perhaps someone representing herself as available for formal counseling relationships has a responsibility either to state very clearly the limits of her competence or to possess a minimal acquaintance with highly dangerous conditions and who should treat them. For Greenawalt, the authoritative position seems to be that of therapy and drugs, not prayer and religious discipline. We should be able to require pastoral counselors to be congnizant of their limits, but shouldn’t or couldn’t expect parallel admissions of spiritual humility from secular psychologists and psychotherapists: "Perhaps your problem is a spiritual one, for which my therapies and chemicals will not avail." I may in some respects be unfair to Greenawalt here, since he’s writing for people who wish to advise and guide judges and policymakers, but a law or policy that requires religion to acknowledge its inadequacy in the face of materialism but can’t compel materialism to acknowledge its inadequacy in the face of religion is not, in Chaput’s terms, realistic. Update: Over at Wheat & Weeds, RC2 has some very smart thoughts on the archbishop she is wont to call Chaput the Great.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 4/25/2007 3:13 PM
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Charming to the last
Apparently Rosie O’Donnell is leaving The View. I’ve never watched that program, but I can only assume that her absence will improve it.
Posted by John Moser | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 4/25/2007 1:52 PM
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America, Imre, and Martin Waldseemueller
This story from today’s USA Today reminded me of something semi-interesting:
"Centuries before it became a continent or country synonymous with wealth, power or democracy, ’America’ was coined by a Renaissance cartographer as the catchall designation for a world that Europeans had yet to name or explore.
The name stuck despite its humble history and unsure start at a backwater French court. It celebrates the 500th anniversary of its baptism in the remote town of St. Die today, exactly a half-millennium after its first use on a world map."
The cartrographer was Martin Waldseemueller and his map and accompanying 103-page book "Cosmographiae Introductio" caused the hemisphere to be named for explorer Amerigo Vespucci instead of Christopher Columbus (since Columbus thgought he was in Asia). He noted in his book (published in April 25, 1507) that Europe and Asia are named after women (I’m not sure about Asia, but Herodotus thought so), so he couldn’t understand why this new continent couldn’t be named after a man. That’s fine, but for my late father it got even better: Dad loved saying that America was named after a Hungarian. Here is how he reasoned: Amorigo is Italian for Emmerich in German, and Emmerich is the German form of Imre, a name otherwise not used but in Hungary. Therefore, America is a Hungarian name (if not actually Hungary itself!). O.K. you’re right, I have entirely too much time on my hands. I’ll try to get something done, like reading a thesis on Vaclac Havel, whose name, by the way, really means...oh, never mind.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 4/25/2007 11:56 AM
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Obama’s foreign policy
Sen. Barack Obama gave a speech on foreign policy to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Just file it for now, but note the important fact that there is nothing ground-breaking in it, no "come home" America, and such. Nice touch about hbis father at the end.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [4] | 4/25/2007 10:53 AM
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The American Prospect Goes Bats
Paul Beston has an article (not yet available online) in the latest City Journal criticizing the New York City Council for a new law that bans the use of metal bats in public high school baseball games. The logic of the ban is that metal bats cause more injuries to fielders, especially pitchers, because baseballs fly off metal bats harder and faster than off wooden ones, giving players in the field less time to react. Although a 12-year-old boy in New Jersey went into cardiac arrest after being struck in the chest by a ball hit by a metal bat, the case against forged bats is not open-and-shut. Little League baseball is opposed to the ban, and a study by American Legion Baseball found no proof that wooden bats are safer. John Franco, who was the Mets closer for many years, testified to the Council in support of the ban, while Mike Mussina of the Yankees testified against it. (If you haven’t spent much time at nonprofessional baseball games, you might not be aware that aluminum bats have almost completely driven wooden bats out of use. The change has come about because of economics, not sadism: metal bats almost never break, while wooden ones often do, so the savings for a college or high school program over the course of a few seasons are significant. Metal bats have their critics, apart from safety issues. Baseball purists like to hear the crack of the bat, not the ping. Pitching coaches worry that the greater bat speed of the aluminum bats prevents young pitchers from ever learning how to pitch inside, because every pitch there winds up an extra-base hit.) Beston’s article makes a more general, and more political point: this ordinance, like the city’s restrictions on smoking in bars and fatty foods, is another example of the metropolitan nanny-state. They are all expressions of the “underlying belief” that “too much liberty is hazardous to your health.” Ben Adler, who blogs for The American Prospect slid into Beston, spikes first: “This clearly expresses a fundamental tenet of conservative/libertarian thinking: that engaging in risky behavior with serious social costs is an entitlement. People who are injured by metal bats, or fall ill from smoking or fatty food, cost the rest of us money. We pay their emergency room bill, their Medicare bills or their Social Security disability insurance. Only someone willing to forgo those benefits should have the right to also opt out of public health laws like those passed by the New York City Council, or pre-existing ones requiring that motorcyclists wear helmets and drivers wear seat belts.” Adler clearly expresses a fundamental tenet of liberal thinking: the more the welfare and regulatory state grows, the more it needs to grow. Every step making social insurance more comprehensive provides a new justification for regulating what primitive peoples call “private” behavior. The elaboration of the welfare state means that there is no such thing. Because we all indemnify one another through the state, we all have the right to protect our investment in one another through state regulations. Given the financial burden imposed on our Spartan citizens by our Falstaffian ones, Adler’s argument can be put to all sorts of uplifting purposes. Nothing in his logic rules out governmentally mandated diets and exercise regimens. Adler mocks the hypocrisy of conservatives who deplore public health regulations but are unwilling to forgo public insurance protections. That’s strictly minor-league, however, compared to the Hall of Fame hypocrisy of liberals who insist that social insurance programs must be universal, then berate conservatives for never availing themselves of our welfare state’s non-existent opt-out provisions. The American Propsect furiously denounced Pres. Bush’s proposal to let people keep a portion of their Social Security taxes in private accounts, if and only if they chose to, as a barbaric move that would shred the social contract. Adler wants to have it both ways, to lock conservatives in the house and then criticize them for not leaving. Conservatives do not, in fact, think that engaging in risky behavior with serious social costs is an entitlement. They do, however, think that liberty is an inalienable right that government exists to secure, not a threat it exists to secure us from. In Adler’s formulation, there are no behaviors that are not risky, no costs that are not social, and no personal choices that cannot be regulated by a government that’s always there when you need it, and always there when you don’t.
Posted by William Voegeli | Link to this Entry | Comments [217] | 4/24/2007 10:22 PM
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Fukuyama Continues to Explain It All
Now he says the end of history is still to come, and the nearest thing to it around today is the transnational or apolitical European Union. The America that still believes in God, national sovereignty, and the military is way too historical to have a real future. But according to Nick Eberstadt, if we’re vulgar enough to look to demographic trends alone, ours is the only "advanced" country that seems to have much of a future. According to Alexandre Kojeve, the guy who understood that the end of history would have be the end of "man" properly so-called, the posthistorical world would be a wholly natural one. And how natural is it to have one species only unable to reproduce itself in a favorable environment? Surely Ratzinger/B16 is right that we have to stop thinking in terms of the nature-history dualism and achieve a genuinely "post-secular" understanding of the predicament of the contemporary European.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [48] | 4/24/2007 10:29 PM
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Skepticseye
Skepticseye is back, in case you haven’t noticed. Allison Hayward, a law prof at George Mason, is responsible. Her irresponsible half is Stephen. Nothing more needs to be said! Have alook at the site.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 4/24/2007 6:29 PM
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Higher ed assessment yet again
Richard H. Hersh, who is nothing if not a member of the higher education establishment, offers his version of its response to the the Bush Administration’s push for learning outcomes (or "value added") assessment in higher education. While he rightly refers to "a dangerous hollowing of an increasingly precarious ivory tower," I’m a little leery of the buzzwords he invokes to describe what higher education should be doing: "we need to significantly improve our undergraduate colleges — not only to compete globally, but equally importantly, to enrich an active democracy here at home, a public life marked by liberty, dissent, and robust civic engagement." On the surface, it’s hard to quarrel with the goals, but there’s nothing there about cultural depth, the transmission of a heritage, the good, the true, and the beautiful, or "the best that has been thought and said." Applying my hermeneutic of suspicion, I wonder if he’s in effect proposing an alliance of business and academic liberals, offering ways for each to use higher education to accomplish its agenda.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments | 4/24/2007 6:12 AM
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Dr. Pat’s Intervention
Deneen provides realistic therapy to a woman close to succumbing to the libertarian temptation.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [3] | 4/23/2007 11:27 PM
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While we’re on birthdays
Yesterday was Immanuel Kant’s birthday. He presided over nothing and wrote a (very) few passages that approached poetry, but apparently was quite charming in person. His fellow Koenigsbergers called him "der schoene Magister."
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [4] | 4/23/2007 9:59 PM
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San Francisco as a "sanctuary"
Even though I can’t resist this from Mark Krikorian about
San Francisco offering sanctuary for immigrants and thereby blocking enforcement of federal laws, I am not bringing it up because I want to debate John C. Calhoun and nullification. Still, interesting.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [7] | 4/23/2007 7:07 PM
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Happy Birthday President James Buchanan
...according to tradition and probably fact the worst president of the United States.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [254] | 4/23/2007 6:14 PM
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Happy Birthday Shakespeare!
...or at least it’s probably the birthday of the best poet of the English language.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [9] | 4/23/2007 6:13 PM
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The Newest Thing in Literary Theory: LITERARY DARWINISM
Well, I’m sort of rooting for it. It takes nature and especially manliness or the naturalness of status competition seriously. It’s not entirely untrue to say that Homer portrays naked apes competing over the scarce resource of women. And it’s pretty darn true that an author with a good knowledge of the natures of members of our species can manipulate with great success the responses of readers. Literary Darwinists, with or without their scientific content analysis, will score great victories against the unrealistic excesses of social constructionism. But they still need to explain why the non-human apes don’t write a lot of poetry.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [12] | 4/23/2007 6:04 PM
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John Adams Miniseries
We don’t have cable but now I’m glad my mom has it--as well as TIVO! I’ll have her save this HBO miniseries based on David McCullough’s biography of Adams for me so I can watch it on my upcoming visit this summer. I just finished listening to the McCullough biography last night and it was tremendous. I especially loved the quote with which McCullough chose to end the book--(and the disadvantage of listening as opposed to reading books is that I have to rely on memory here). But it had to do with Adams’ love of life--even with all the tragedy and the infirmities that old age had brought him. In all of that, he still thought it his greatest treasure that he could laugh--and at himself above all.
Posted by Julie Ponzi | Link to this Entry | Comments [4] | 4/23/2007 5:28 PM
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Nostalgia vs. Reality
Dean Barnett over at Hugh Hewitt’s blog, has some very thoughtful reflections on Peggy Noonan’s column from last week on the Virginia Tech shooting. He did not like it because he thinks that it demonstrates a kind of reflexive "things used to be better" sentiment that he finds distasteful. At the time that I saw Noonan’s column, I thought that it was very good--though I liked different things in it than the things Barnett emphasizes. (For example, I especially liked her description--and subsequent retraction of the adjective--of the campus mental health officials as "endearing losers.") I think Barnett raises a good point worthy of serious consideration, however. There is a tendency (and Barnett rightly points out that it is common on both the right and the left) for people to look at the past with a kind of nostalgia that is not productive. I do not deny that it can be helpful, by way of contrast, to examine the present in light of the past. But getting the past right requires more than nostalgia. When the past is considered with nostalgia only, it very often leads to hysteria in the present. Beyond that, heavy doses of nostalgia tend to have the effect of making one humorless and ungrateful and unmindful of the tragic/comic nature of our existence.
Posted by Julie Ponzi | Link to this Entry | Comments [10] | 4/23/2007 4:14 PM
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Hillary’s Housekeeping
"When I walk into the oval office in January, 2009, I’m afraid I’m gonna lift up the rug and I’m gonna see so much stuff under there!"-- Hillary Clinton. Uh . . . (awkward moment) no comment. Supply your own punchline. Hat tip: Laura Ingraham.
Posted by Julie Ponzi | Link to this Entry | Comments [26] | 4/23/2007 3:44 PM
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Zebulon Vance on the demoralization of the Confederacy
I have no wish to refight the Civil War for the umpteenth time, but in the course of working on a lesson plan for the NEH I encountered this fascinating document, a letter from Zebulon Vance, governor of North Carolina, which is relevant to some of our recent discussions. Writing to a friend in September 1864, as Sherman was smashing his way through Georgia, Vance drew the following conclusion: The signs which discourage me more than aught else are the utter demoralization of the people. With a base of communication five hundred miles in Sherman’s rear, through our own country, not a bridge has been burned, not a car thrown from its track, nor a man shot by the people whose country he has desolated. They seem everywhere to submit when our armies are withdrawn. What does this show, my dear sir? It shows what I have always believed, that the great popular heart is not now, and never has been in this war. It was a revolution of the Politicians, not the People; and was fought at first by the natural enthusiasm of our young men, and has been kept going by State and sectional pride, assisted by that bitterness of feeling produced by the cruelties and brutalities of the enemy.
Posted by John Moser | Link to this Entry | Comments [31] | 4/23/2007 11:34 AM
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Reflections on my hometown, immigration, and assimilation
I had the great pleasure this past weekend of taking a group of Ashland University students--all members of our chapter of Phi Alpha Theta--to my hometown of Pittsburgh for a tour of some of the city’s historic sites. Not only did we have a first-class walking tour of the downtown area, and a not-quite-gourmet-but-still-tasty meal at the original Primanti Bros. restaurant, but we spent Saturday afternoon at the Senator John Heinz History Center, a tremendous museum dedicatd to Pittsburgh’s past. The Heinz Center is quite simply the best history museum that I’ve ever visited--although that might be nothing more than my hometown pride talking. The exhibit on sports history, complete with film of such legendary episodes as Bill Mazeroski’s amazing home run in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, and Franco Harris’s "Immaculate Reception" in the 1972 division championship against Oakland, chokes me up every time I see it (and I’m not even that huge of a sports fan). But one can’t visit the Heinz Center without being reminded of the critical importance of immigration to the city’s development. Whether it be Russian Jews, Poles, Germans, Irish, Slovakians, Africans, or what have you, each group has left its indelible mark on Pittsburgh. What struck me most, however, was reading about the efforts made by Settlement Houses--most notably the Irene S. Kaufman House in the Hill District--to help immigrants to assimilate. Sure, these were run by liberals (progressives, to be more precise), who often advocated wrongheaded social policies, but the progressives of the early 20th century still believed in the basic goodness of America. They believed that in teaching recent immigrants English, and love for the flag and other American institutions, they were doing more than helping them to fit into a new society--they knew that they were making them into better people. Why, then, aren’t there similar efforts being made today? Where are the Settlement Houses of 2007? We can all come up with reasons why, I suppose. Today’s liberals are far less convinced of America’s basic goodness, and therefore seem uncomfortable suggesting that it might be the duty of new immigrants to learn English and to respect American ideals. On the other hand, too many of those who oppose immigration do so on the demonstrably false grounds that people from Latin America and East Asia are incapable of being assimilated; why, then, launch a project that is doomed to failure? Of course, there is also the fact that so many Latin American immigrants are here illegally, and would therefore be hesitant to participate in a program that might reveal their status. Nevertheless I find it a sad state of affairs, and hope that any legislative effort to deal with the country’s immigration problems will take into consideration the vital task of assimilation.
Posted by John Moser | Link to this Entry | Comments [253] | 4/23/2007 11:07 AM
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