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When it comes to choices for housing and neighborhoods and communities, I very agree with Eduardo Peñalver on the virtues of diversity, but I suggest a more expansive understanding of neighborhood diversity. In my mind, true diversity must include a multiplicity of choices of neighborhood styles and residential options, urban, suburban, and rural. Preserving the liberty of hard-working Americans to pursue their own dreams should be very high on the list of values important to Catholics.
If some of my friends find greater satisfaction in daily life and a deeper sense of community by choosing to live in high-density urban neighborhoods consisting primarily of multiple-unit residential buildings and with a high mix of commercial uses as well, I certainly understand and respect their right to make that choice. If looking out of the window in the morning to see the sun rise over a towering skyline of buildings makes one’s heart beat a little faster with pride and hearing the hum and buzz of the city streets brings a tear of joy to one’s eyes, I say “God bless you!” I am delighted that you have found the place where you belong.
If I choose instead to live in a suburban neighborhood with a mix of housing choices that emphasizes single-family residences (while also including low-rise apartment complexes) and a lower level of density that allows me to escape the hustle and bustle of the city center at the end of the day, I insist that my choice too is worthy of respect. Although my city council is debating whether to adopt zoning changes that might obstruct my horizon (but only over my strongly stated objection), I prefer to look out from my back-yard deck at towering trees, green lawns, and the peaceful waters of the small neighborhood lake that laps up against the playground of the neighborhood elementary school. I too have found my home.
When it comes to neighborhoods, to each their own, I say, including the freedom to choose where and how to build a home for their families. To be sure, national polls confirm that well more than three-quarters of Americans prefer a single-family house in the suburbs to a town house or condominium in the city. But I strongly defend Eduardo’s right to be among the minority that dream instead of an apartment in the city.
Eduardo is not so generous, however, about my choice of a neighborhood. He characterizes the American Dream of owning one’s own house in the suburbs as nothing less than the evil of “sprawl,” to which he says that “the end can come none too soon.” Fortunately, the end of the dream is probably not near at all, as I do think Eduardo greatly exaggerates the supposed “wreckage” of the American Dream that has been caused by the relatively small adjustment in housing prices over the past several months — which hardly amounts to a “collapse” — and a jump in gas prices — an increase that is by no means huge in historical terms. Families with children will not be flocking from the suburbs into the cities because gas prices — even assuming the worst — might be $15 to $20 a week more for a suburban commute.
While Eduardo may choose to label my suburban neighborhood and others like it as “sprawl” (i.e., neighborhoods that were not carefully designed by urban social engineers), it all sounds more like “freedom” to me. Indeed, what he describes as a socially destructive trend is instead evidence of the tremendous success of our economy and society in enhancing home ownership for an ever-greater number of Americans.
Nor should I need to apologize for my suburban neighborhood. Given that less than 5 percent of the land mass of the United States is developed as urban or suburban areas, laying the blame for environmental degradation upon the suburban homeowner is over-the-top. That problems may occur in some areas or that some mistakes were made in some locales is no basis to generalize about suburban communities as negative forces. And having lived in a variety of metropolitan settings over the years, I have found the social isolation that Eduardo rightly deprecates to be much less common in the suburban neighborhoods where I have resided than in the generally cold and unfeeling urban skyscrapers in which I previously dwelled. The cultural forces that have created social isolation are not geographically confined.
I definitely do agree that we suburbanites should take responsibility for the social health of our own communities (and an examination of our comparative rate of contributions to charity, volunteer activity, and voting in local elections suggests we’re doing pretty well). I know that my friends who are urban dwellers assume the same responsibilities to create healthy and safe communities, especially for children. There is ample work for all of us.
If as Eduardo argues, people will thrive by “living closer to work, in transit- and pedestrian-friendly, diverse neighborhoods where we run into friends and neighbors as we walk to the store, school or the office,” then people will be drawn to his New Urban vision. Hey, I may even be one of them some day (when my wife and I become empty-nesters). But while pursuing our own dream, shouldn't we cherish the freedom of others to choose differently about where and how to build a neighborhood?
I just returned from a wedding in Austin. While there, I ventured over to the Apple Store in a new development called the Domain, which was written up in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago. Although I was attracted to this mixed used urban environment, I left with a certain discomfort. In his excellent essay in yesterday's Post, Eduardo says: "We may discover that it's not so bad living closer to work, in transit- and pedestrian-friendly, diverse neighborhoods where we run into friends and neighbors as we walk to the store, school or the office."
Although the Domain is a mixed use (office, retail, and housing), pedestrian-friendly place where one could run into friends and neighbors on the street it was strikingly not diverse, at least from a socio-economic standpoint. And, my sense is that many of New Urbanism projects are not socio-economically diverse. An article in USA Today on upscale urban living in Texas said: "As baby boomers became empty nesters, their desire for convenience and fun suddenly merged with those of young professionals. Both groups are flocking to urban settings."
This raises several questions in my mind. Will affluent people want to live in proximity with less affluent people? If not, will the New Urbanism create new types of economic segregation, in some cases even displacing the less affluent to make way for new or refurbished development? Or, will market realities force a socio-economic mixing? Any thoughts?
Yesterday’s British press contained an article entitled “MPs challenge ‘doctrinaire’ bishops”—it was subtitled “Catholic church under fire for promoting a hard line on ‘immoral’ teaching in schools.” [HERE] Over the past several years, a number of MOJ contributors have addressed public policy developments in primary and secondary education in public schools as well as private schools that must comply with certain educational standards established by the state. Of course, the state’s efforts to regulate moral education that private Catholic schools provide raise fundamental questions about libertas ecclesiae. In the United States, legislative and judicial challenges have arisen over the last couple of years which have pressured Catholic schools or threatened pressure if compliance with programs that conflict with Catholic moral teachings is not adopted to the satisfaction of the state—and those interests to which the state is willing to advance. This attached article from the British press indicates that similar issues are surfacing in England.
It appears from this report that a number of Catholic bishops are supportive of rights guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights regarding the rights of parents and families concerning the education of their children about moral and religious matters. However, these important guarantees seem to have little effect on some officials in England.
Two points found in the article merit attention today. The first is the statement attributed to the MP who chairs a cross-party committee on children, schools, and families. He was quoted by the press as saying, “It seems to me that faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith. But as soon as there is a more doctrinaire attitude questions have to be asked. It does become worrying when you get a new push from more fundamentalist bishops. This is taxpayers’ money after all.” I think the bishops aren’t “indoctrinating,” but they are “teaching” and this is a major responsibility that they shoulder. Moreover, the bishops’ actions seem to be quite compatible with juridical protection of religious liberty, but some MPs object to this; after all, according to them, people should not be “that serious about their faith.”
The second point I’ll raise today on this matter involves the symbiotic relation between some secularists and Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC). It comes as no surprise that the National Secularist Society’s protest on the bishops’ stand in this matter is “supported” by “research” collected from a CFFC “poll.” But of course, what the CFFC does to advance its most curious agendae is not viewed as indoctrination, and I am sure there are those who consider their work splendidly moral.RJA sj
Congrats to Eduardo on the publication of his excellent opinion piece, in The Washington Post, on sprawl, gas prices, etc. I've been droning on for years now, on this blog, about urbanism (new and the original), and so I'm entirely on board with most of what Eduardo has to say.
That said, one minor quibble. Eduardo writes:
Although the end of sprawl will require painful changes, it will also provide a badly needed opportunity to take stock of the car-dependent, privatized society that has evolved over the past 60 years and to begin imagining different ways of living and governing. We may discover that it's not so bad living closer to work, in transit- and pedestrian-friendly, diverse neighborhoods where we run into friends and neighbors as we walk to the store, school or the office. We may even find that we don't miss our cars and commutes, and the culture they created, nearly as much as we feared we would.
In my view, it might be a mistake -- or, at least, it is too quick -- to connect too closely the land-use patterns and transportation we call "sprawl" with our "privatized" society. Sure, there's something to the idea -- again, I'm sure I've endorsed it on this blog -- that urbanism is more authentically human, civic, public, and political than much of what goes on in "sprawl." That said, "sprawl" can also be blamed, it seems to me, on the failure of our land-use policy to respect "private" ordering enough. The zoning rules, which facilitate -- indeed, require -- the dysfunctional patterns Eduardo and I criticize are, after all, often government-imposed. They interfere with -- indeed, they often prohibit -- land-uses and developments that Eduardo and I would like, and that private parties would be willing to construct, invest in, live in, etc.
We might also wonder whether a greater reliance by cities on "privatized" service-delivery might have slowed the flight to suburban gated communities. After all, it seems that at least part of the sprawl story is the entirely reasonable frustration of many people with the inability of many cities to do their basic civic, service-delivery jobs.
And finally, as Eduardo notes, there's education . . . . Until we tame the education blob, and break the teacher-unions' lock on education-policy, and allow for genuine, religious-freedom-friendly choice in education, we will not get the "urban thing" right. (I can live "in town", and feel smug about my front porch, sidewalks, walkable neighborhood, minimal commute, etc., but only because my neighborhood parish has a wonderful school.)
By Eduardo M. Peñalver Sunday, December 30, 2007; B07
The
collapse in the housing market and high gasoline prices are bad news
for middle-class homeowners left to sift through the wreckage. But if
there is consolation to be found amid the rubble, it may be that the
inexorable spreading out that has characterized American life since
World War II might finally be coming to an end. Given the connections
between car-dependent suburban development and social ills from climate
change and the destruction of wetlands to obesity and social isolation,
the end can come none too soon.
American sprawl was built on the
twin pillars of low gas prices and a relentless demand for housing
that, combined with the effects of restrictive zoning in existing
suburbs, pushed new development outward toward cheap rural land.
Middle-class Americans, not able to find housing they could afford in
existing suburbs, kept driving farther out into the countryside until
they did. Gridlock in the suburbs and the expense of providing
municipal services to sparsely populated communities imposed their own
limits on how far we could spread. As a result, the density of
metropolitan areas, which fell steadily in the postwar years, had begun
to creep back up in the 1990s. Despite these infrastructural
restraints, however, the now-defunct housing boom and cheap gas kept
exerting centrifugal pressure on living patterns, pushing the edge of
new development farther out into rural America.
Over the past
year or so, both of these forces have dramatically weakened. With
credit tight and the demand for housing drying up (sales of new homes
fell last month to the lowest level in 12 years) new construction in
the exurbs is grinding to a halt. The result is a decline in the
building industry's appetite for rural land on the urban edge. The
question now is whether that decline will last. In the past, a sudden
drop-off in demand for housing in the exurbs would have represented
merely a hiatus. Builders would have bided their time until the housing
market recovered, and the outward push would soon have begun again. But
persistently high gas prices may mean that the next building boom will
take place not at the edges of metropolitan areas but far closer to
their cores. People are more willing to drive 20 miles each way to work
every day, burning a couple of gallons of gas in the process, when gas
costs less than milk. But as gas prices climb, long car commutes become
a rising tax on exurban homeownership, and the price people are willing
to pay for homes in remote areas will fall.
Increasing gas prices
may not be enough to cause people to move, which is why demand for gas
proves so inelastic in the short term, but it can influence where
people choose to live when they are forced to relocate for other
reasons. The evidence that this is already occurring is, at this point,
still somewhat anecdotal, but it is very suggestive. As the New
Urbanist News reported this fall, during the present downturn,
accompanied as it has been by high gas prices, homes close to urban
centers or that have convenient access to transit seem to be holding
their value better than houses in car-dependent communities at the
urban edge. A recent story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune blamed
flagging growth in the Twin Cities' outer suburbs on rising gas prices.
If prices at the pump continue to increase, as many analysts expect,
the eventual recovery of demand for new housing may not be accompanied
by a resumption of America's relentless march into the cornfields.
The
death of sprawl will present enormous challenges, chief among them the
need to provide affordable middle-class housing in areas that are
already built up. Accommodating a growing population in the era of high
gas prices will mean increasing density and mixing land uses to enhance
walkability and public transit. And this must happen not just in urban
centers but in existing suburbs, where growth is stymied by parochial
and exclusionary zoning laws. Overcoming low-density, single-use zoning
mandates so as to fairly allocate the costs of increased density will
require coordination at regional levels. This in turn will require
overcoming the balkanization of America's metropolitan areas. This
shift toward a more regional outlook will force broad rethinking of how
we fund and deliver services provided by local governments, most
obviously (and explosively) public education.
Although the end of
sprawl will require painful changes, it will also provide a badly
needed opportunity to take stock of the car-dependent, privatized
society that has evolved over the past 60 years and to begin imagining
different ways of living and governing. We may discover that it's not
so bad living closer to work, in transit- and pedestrian-friendly,
diverse neighborhoods where we run into friends and neighbors as we
walk to the store, school or the office. We may even find that we don't
miss our cars and commutes, and the culture they created, nearly as
much as we feared we would.
The writer is an associate professor at Cornell Law School, where he teaches property and land-use law.
The Times Adds an Op-Ed Columnist By THE NEW YORK TIMES
William Kristol,
one of the nation’s leading conservative writers and a vigorous
supporter of the Iraq war, will become an Op-Ed page columnist for The
New York Times, the newspaper announced Saturday
Mr. Kristol will write a weekly column for The Times beginning Jan.
7, the newspaper said. He is editor and co-founder of The Weekly
Standard, an influential conservative political magazine, and appears
regularly on Fox News Sunday and the Fox News Channel. He was a
columnist for Time magazine until that relationship was severed this
month.
Mr. Kristol, 55, has been a fierce critic of The Times. In 2006, he
said that the government should consider prosecuting The Times for
disclosing a secret government program to track international banking
transactions.
In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the
downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not “a first-rate
newspaper of record,” adding, “The Times is irredeemable.”
In the mid-1990s, Mr. Kristol led the Project for the Republican
Future, an influential policy study group. Before that, he was chief of
staff to Vice President Dan Quayle.
A native of New York City, he holds a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate from Harvard.
His father is Irving Kristol, one of the founding intellectual forces behind modern conservatism.
My first reaction to Michael's call for higher taxes on beer and wine was to knock off a witty post to the effect that my good and Catholic friend Michael had been kidnapped by aliens from the Planet Puritron, from the galaxy of Prohibitia, and is now part of a plot to use the resources of Catholic Social Thought to advance decidedly non-Catholic (i.e., tee-totalling) aims.
But I decided against that. More seriously, folks . . .
I agree with Michael that, as a rule, it seems the costs (broadly understood) of behavior should fall on those who engage in the behavior. Of course, we'd also want to ask whether the benefits of the behavior in question are similarly internalized; if someone is dispensing benefits (for which she is not being compensated) through her behavior, she might have a decent argument against bearing the full costs of that behavior. This might be a relevant distinction between tobacco -- which benefits no one besides the immediate user -- and alcohol, which does. (I take it that sociability, conviviality, and well run dinner-parties are good things. Second-hand smoke is not.)
Beyond that -- and I'll defer to tax-policy jocks on this one -- it is my understanding that many tax-experts question the wisdom and utility of using targeted taxes -- as opposed to other means -- to raise the costs of particular behaviors, in the hopes of changing those behaviors. But -- to be clear -- I don't know enough about the issue to make me confident that using targeted taxes in this way is, generally, unwise.
I'm grateful to Tom Berg for correctingmy mis-understanding about Vision America, and its relationship with the so-called "Christian Reconstruction" movement. It seems to me that there is a line -- a very important one -- between the "Reconstruction" vision and the (to me, entirely appropriate) call of many politically engaged Christians for a restructuring of American policy in accord (to the extent possible, given the messiness of politics) with morality (and the virtue of prudence). If, as Tom suggests, I put Vision America on the wrong side of that line, then I apologize.
For the next few weeks, when I’m not grading exams, I will likely be on the road. But, even though it's not very relevant to legal theory, I felt like I had to share this story with those who missed it. From the Times of London (HT — once again — BoingBoing):
The cradle of Christianity was rocked by an unholy
punch-up when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a
dispute over how to clean Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. The
ancient place of worship, built over the site where Jesus Christ is
said to have been born in a stable more than 2,000 years ago, is shared
by various branches of Christianity, each of which controls and
jealously guards a part of the holy site.
The brawl apparently began when Greek Orthodox priests set up
ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church
after the Christmas Day celebrations. Armenian priests claimed that the
ladders encroached on their portion of the church, which led the two
sects to exchange angry words which quickly turned to blows.
Posted by Eduardo Penalver on December 28, 2007 at 07:37 PM | Permalink
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"[I]mpossible for a Catholic to be a Conscientious Objector ..."?
On December 9, Gordon Zahn--an alumnus of the institution at which four (!) MOJ bloggers teach--died. "After World War II ended, Gordon enrolled at St. John’s University
in Collegeville, Minn., where his pacifism provoked arguments with monks who
had served as military chaplains and with veterans among the students.
Transferring after his freshman year, he graduated from the University of St.
Thomas in St. Paul. Is it mere coincidence that his alma mater now harbors one
of the best programs in peace and conflict studies in the United States?"
Gordon Zahn, a Catholic pacifist, is one of the most influential Catholics of the 20th century. Unlike Zahn, most of us are not pacifists. Nonetheless, each of us have reason to be grateful to Zahn.
This is from a piece on Zahn in the December 21st issue of NCR:
“My subject is war -- and the immorality of war.”
Gordon Zahn wrote that, with acknowledgement that he was paraphrasing
“the great war poet Wilfred Owen,” in the forward to a 1967 book,
War, Conscience and Dissent.
Although other writers are better known, Zahn is among the most
important figures in Catholic social thought in recent history. And for most of
his life, his subject was war and the immorality of war. Two early books,
German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control
(1962) and In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz
Jägerstätter (1964), confirm his place among major influences,
including Dorothy Day, Michael Harrington and Thomas Merton. In a preface to
the 1969 paperback edition of German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars,
Jesuit Fr. Daniel Berrigan wrote, “In the formation of our will to resist
legitimized murder, Gordon Zahn’s book had a major influence.”
Had it not been for him, we might never have known about Franz
Jägerstätter, a martyr to his faith for refusing to participate in
Hitler’s war. Jägerstätter was beatified in a ceremony in Linz,
Austria, in October (NCR, Nov. 9). Without Zahn’s work, one can
hardly imagine the publication of the American bishops, “The Challenge of
Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response” in 1983. There, for the first
time in Catholic history, nonviolence received equal billing with the just war
tradition. The pastoral letter’s foundation, acknowledged in its
footnotes, was the scholarship and research by Zahn.
Other writings important to many of us are his characteristically
thoughtful 50-page introduction to Thomas Merton’s The Nonviolent
Alternative (1974), a major text in the history of nonviolence ...
To read the rest of this tribute to Zahn, click here.
[Thanks to Larry Joseph of St. John's University School of Law, poet extraordinaire, for calling this piece to my attention.]
. . . Since the early 1990s, the federal tax on wine — $1.07 a gallon — hasn’t budged. The taxes on beer and liquor haven’t changed either, which means that, in inflation-adjusted terms, alcohol taxes have been steadily falling.
Each of the three taxes is now effectively 33 percent lower than it
was in 1992. Since 1970, the federal beer tax has plummeted 63 percent.
Many states taxes have also been falling.
At first blush, this sounds like good news: who likes to pay taxes,
right? But taxes serve a purpose beyond merely raising general
government revenue. Taxes on a given activity are also supposed to pay
the costs that activity imposes on society. And for all that is
wonderful about wine, beer and liquor, they clearly bring some heavy
costs.
Right now, the patchwork of alcohol taxes isn’t coming close to
covering those costs — the costs of drunken-driving checkpoints, of
hospital bills for alcohol-related accidents and child abuse, and of
the economic loss caused by death and injury. Last year, some 17,000
Americans, or almost 50 a day, died in alcohol-related car accidents.
An additional 65,000 people a year die from other accidents, assaults
or illnesses in which alcohol plays a major role.
Mr. Cook,
besides being a wine lover, has been thinking about the costs and
benefits of alcohol for much of his career, and he has come up with a
blunt way of describing the problem. “Do you think we should be
subsidizing alcohol?” he asks. “Because that’s what we’re doing.”
What’s especially unfortunate is that several states are now
considering raising their general sales tax, the one that applies to
most retail items, to deal with budget problems. Last month, Maryland increased its sales tax to 6 percent, from 5 percent. Georgia and Indiana are also looking at increases.
These tax increases would raise the price of a huge array of items — winter coats, dictionaries, Ella Fitzgerald CDs, you name it — that leave no social costs in their wake. Relative to alcohol, they are already overtaxed.
There’s a better way to go, and it’s staring us right in the face.
At the same time that the Maryland Legislature raised the state sales
tax, it also doubled its tobacco tax, to $2 a pack. Across the country,
tobacco taxes have been soaring in recent years.
The argument for higher tobacco taxes is simple enough. They help pay Medicare and Medicaid bills for tobacco-related illnesses and also lead to a decline in smoking. On average, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes
causes about a 5 percent drop in smoking, studies show. Not even
addiction, it turns out, can overcome the laws of supply and demand.
If anything, the argument for higher alcohol taxes is even
stronger. Tobacco kills many more people than alcohol, but it mainly
kills those who use the product. Many alcohol victims are simply
driving on the wrong road at the wrong time. Many are also quite young.
Politically, though, the case for alcohol taxes is harder to make,
because drinking is so much more socially acceptable than smoking. In
many places — like Mr. Cook’s house and mine — a glass of wine or a
beer is a standard part of dinner. Nationally, about 25 percent of
people have at least one drink a day, and 40 percent drink occasionally.
Those of us in this drinking majority tend to assume that we’re
not the ones who will create problems. As Jeff Becker, the president of
the Beer Institute, an industry group, told me, “Most people — the vast
majority of consumers — don’t impose any additional costs on anyone.”
Which may well be true. And if it were somehow possible to tax only
those people who were going to drive drunk in the future, it would be a
wonderful idea. (Then again, we might just want to take away their
driver’s licenses.) Barring clairvoyance, though, raising alcohol taxes
from their current lows seems to be the fairest solution.
Mr. Cook has written a wonderful little book, “Paying the Tab,”
making this case. In it, he draws on history, political philosophy and
straight economics to point out that higher alcohol taxes would fit
squarely in the American tradition.
Unlike Prohibition — or stricter minimum-age drinking laws — a
reasonable tax would still allow people to make their own choices about
drinking. They would simply be asked to pay the true cost of the
product they’re buying.
At a minimum Mr. Cook suggests raising beer and wine taxes (which
are now about 7 to 10 cents a drink) to the level of liquor taxes (more
than 20 cents a drink) and then indexing them all to inflation. This
would be an especially good time for the change, because
drunken-driving deaths — which fell rapidly after the start of
public-service campaigns in the 1980’s — have plateaued.
History shows that even a modest price increase will lead to a
decline in drinking. When drinking has fallen in the past, drunken
driving and the incidence of cirrhosis and sexually transmitted diseases have declined, too. So a tax increase would probably save thousands of lives.
The companies making wine, beer and liquor would fight this, of
course. They would argue that higher taxes would destroy jobs in their
industry. That’s just a scare tactic — the money that was no longer
being spent on alcohol would instead be spent on other products.
Opponents might also point out that alcohol taxes fall more heavily on
the poor and middle class. That’s correct, but saving lives is more
important.
In any event, people who have studied the issue and don’t have a
financial stake in it tend to agree with Mr. Cook. “Taxes are way too
low on alcohol,” Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says. “It’s a public-policy failure.”
That sounds like grist for a 2008 resolution: I hope everyone has a
happy New Year and gets a chance to drink something good Monday night,
whether it’s Champagne, Prosecco or a sparkling wine from Spain, South
Africa or even New Mexico. And sometime soon, I hope none of them come
with such an artificial discount.
For the reasons Rick mentioned a few days ago, I have a bit of a soft spot for Mike Huckabee: he appears to combine a willingness to regulate abortion out of compassion for unborn life with some compassionate attitudes on other issues from immigration to criminal punishment. But I'm not seriously tempted to vote for him either, in significant part for a reason similar to Peggy Noonan's criticism: Huckabee's version of "compassionate conservatism" seems totally episodic and haphazard, far short of a governing philosophy. Jonathan Chait has these comments on Huckabee's book From Hope to Higher Ground:
The reason Huckabee can so easily break from conservative ideology is that he sees everything in personal terms. He chastises conservatives: "For a kid with asthma, who is sitting on the steps of a hospital--let them have an economic policy that doesn't care about that kid." Even though his book is purportedly a public-policy blueprint, it is written in the style of a self-help book. Political manifestos are typically built around a series of policy positions. Huckabee's is built around personal advice. Every chapter ends with recommendations for what the reader can do to make America a better place, most of which have nothing to do with politics. ("Keep receipts for tax-deductible items"; "Attend ethnic festivals"; "Make a to-do list every day.") As grist for a Sunday sermon, this is perfectly nice. As the basis for a presidential campaign, it's appalling.
Second, with respect to Rick's concerns about who Huckabee is keeping company with: I appreciate and would second many of those concerns, but some of the people Rick references are the kind who have been mainstays of the Republican coalition. It's true, as the Robert Novak column says, that Dr. Steven Hotze is associated with the Christian Reconstruction movement, whose views on applying Biblical laws, including the penal laws of ancient Israel, to America would indeed be, as Rick puts it, "deeply creepy and troubling to most Americans." But Rick includes the Rev. Scarborough's Vision America in the same boat with the Reconstructionists, even though Vision America appears to me to be a pretty standard evangelical-Right activist group. It has endorsements from Dr. James Dobson, the late Rev. D. James Kennedy, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, as well as (it appears) the involvement of longtime conservative activist Paul Weyrich and the American Family Association's Donald Wildmon. I know little about Vision America, but I assume that it differs from the Reconstructionists in that it is not willing to pursue to the logical extreme the idea of literally applying Biblical law and sanctions to modern America (e.g. death or other harsh penalties for adultery, sodomy, etc.). I gather that Vision America just calls more fuzzily for a return to "Biblical" or "Judeo-Christian" or "Christian nation" values on abortion, homosexuality, marriage, etc. -- which is a standard Religious-Right position and one to which Republicans have been appealing for many years. Similarly, the 1986 "Manifesto for the Christian Church," which Rick cited as an example of troubling views, included among its signers only a few Reconstructionists and a large group of quite mainstream evangelical leaders, including a top official of the National Association of Evangelicals and the theologian (now a member of Evangelicals and Catholics Together) J.I. Packer. (Follow the link in Rick's post for the signers' list.)
So I'd guess there are some substantial differences between these groups. But if the distinctions between them are hard to see -- in other words, if there's such proximity between conservative evangelical stalwarts and views that most Americans would find "deeply creepy and troubling" -- then that dramatizes the Republicans' electoral dilemma concerning the evangelical Right. Rick (or others), I wonder if you would end up drawing the line in between these groups -- or would you still find Vision America deeply troubling even though it's different from the Reconstructionists? And if the Republicans should so firmly disavow a group like Vision America, do you think that Neuhaus- and Murray-like arguments and coalitions can make up for the loss of conservative evangelical energy that such a disavowal would cause?
To read a transcript of a terrific conversation (held at Fordham three weeks ago) between Peter Steinfels and Jose Casanova, one of the preeminent sociologists of religion in the world today, click here.
"Modern-day Essenes living on the Upper West Side ..."
There is a trenchant commentary on Mark Lilla's much-commented-on The Stillborn Godhere. Here's a passage: ... Lilla turns aside to the small cadre of the Enlightened who see the
story for what it is: “Those of us who have accepted the heritage of
the Great Separation must do so soberly. Time and again we must remind
ourselves that we are living an experiment, that we are the
exceptions.” Wavering between insider code and an invitation to join
this inner circle of the exceptional, Lilla ends with a manifesto of
inverse gnosticism: “We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated
by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely
on our own lucidity.” “We” turns out to be the sect of modern-day
Essenes living on the upper West Side, who have vowed to abstain from
the illusions of the masses and consigned themselves to the cold, hard
desert “reality” disclosed by reason. Lilla and his exceptionalist
monastic brotherhood of enlightened “us” have girded their loins in
order to make their way in the world without the comforts of faith and
revelation (I’m guessing one would bump into Hitchens and Harris in the
same rationalist desert after all).
Where does that leave the rest of us—the us not included in Lilla’s enlightened “us?”
THREE hundred and fifty
years ago today, religious freedom was born on this continent. Yes, 350
years. Religious tolerance did not begin with the Bill of Rights or
with Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786. With
due respect to Roger Williams and his early experiment with “liberty of
conscience” in Rhode Island, this republic really owes its enduring
strength to a fragile, scorched and little-known document that was
signed by some 30 ordinary citizens on Dec. 27, 1657.
“Whatever
issue may come before me as President . . . I will make my decision . .
. in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictate.” -- Senator John F. Kennedy, speaking to Houston ministers, Sept.12, 1960
For
almost fifty years, President John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Greater
Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960 has been a key reference
point for American debates about church-state relations and the place
of religion in presidential campaigns. In January 2008, amid news
about early primaries, a distinguished panel will reexamine the speech,
its political and cultural context, its argument and rhetoric—and its relevance for the 2008 presidential election.
The
Houston speech, a response of a Catholic presidential candidate to
suspicions about his faith, has been widely praised as a brilliant defense
of the separation of church and state and a careful delimiting of
religion’s role in American politics. But the speech has been no less vigorously
criticized as a politically expedient argument for quarantining
personal religious and moral principles from public service and
official responsibilities. To read JFK's speech, click here. To watch JFK's speech on C-Span, click here.
Both
partisans and critics of the speech frequently quote it selectively or
out of context. Bringing together publicly engaged scholars of
different perspectives, this Headline Forum will explore what the Houston speech meant in 1960 and what it might mean today.
Moderator:
Peter Quinn, novelist essayist, author of Banished Children of Eve and Looking for Jimmy. He served as a speech writer for New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo.
Panelists:
Shaun Casey, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C. He is completing a book on the role of religion in the 1960 presidential election, including archival material on the Kennedy speech.
William Galston, Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland. He served in the Clinton administration and as an advisor in the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Albert Gore, Jr.
Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program, Princeton University. A member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, he has advised the administration on abortion and embryonic stem-cell research.
J. Bryan Hehir, Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard. His research and writing focus on ethics and the role of religion in American society and world politics.
. . . We do not know enough yet to say whether, or to what degree, Bush’s refusal to allow federal funding to create new embryonic stem-cell lines played a role in compelling scientists to find a different approach to the issue. We do know that, in the aftermath of last November’s announcement, several leading scientists have suddenly testified in public to having harbored the very same moral doubts that led Bush to his 2001 decision. James Thomson, the foremost stem-cell researcher in the United States, put it plainly: “If human embryonic stem-cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.”
This was not, to put it mildly, a view openly expressed by the scientific community in the years between Bush’s decision and the discovery of the new method. But remarks like Thomson’s, and the fact that a scientific advance unthinkable in 2001 has rendered one of the ugliest controversies of the decade all but moot, suggest that it is time to revisit Bush’s decision to see what lessons can be drawn from it. . . .
Now that the debate seems to be over, what can we say about Bush’s policy and the long months it took for him to devise it? I think it is fair to look upon it as a model of how to deal with the complicated scientific and ethical dilemmas that will continue to confront political leaders in the age of biotechnology. Bush refused to accept the notion that we must choose between medical research and the principle of the dignity of life at every stage. He sought both to advance biomedical science and at the same time to respect the sanctity of human life. In the end he came to a moderate, balanced decision that drew a prudent and principled line. The decision was both informed and reasoned, based on lengthy study and consultation with people of widely divergent viewpoints. It was consciously not guided by public-opinion polls.
As I write these last words, I am aware that they may sound like political spin. That is far from the case. There were many other contentious issues on which I advised the President—affirmative action, gay marriage, contraception, offshore oil and gas exploration, international trade, patent protection, even veterans’ benefits. In each of these, political considerations and calculations played at least some role in the development of policy, as they always have and always will. What made our deliberations on the stem-cell issue unique was, precisely, the absence of that element. Bush knew that whatever his decision, it was bound to alienate millions of Americans. Their ranks would include both political supporters and many who, if the decision went another way, might be drawn to reconsider their aversion to him. Our discussions were focused throughout on reaching a coherent and consistent position where the President could stand with honor for as long as the facts on the ground remained as they were. We did not dwell at all on how that position would play politically.
In the coming decades, scientific advances will compel Presidents and politicians to confront vexing choices on subjects that were once solely the province of dystopian science fiction: human cloning, fetal farming, human-animal hybrid embryos, and situations as yet unimagined and unimaginable. If we are to benefit from the great promise of the age of biotechnology while preventing grave ethical abuses, we can only hope that future Presidents will be guided by the same seriousness with which George W. Bush pursued the question of stem-cell research, as well as by his stout refusal to be seduced by the siren song of political expediency.
Several of us have been discussing the teaching of Christian Ethics in a Catholic context over the past several days. In particular, I would like to thank our two Michaels, i.e., Perry and Scaperlanda, for providing spirited catalysts to these exchanges. As I mentioned previously, I do not share Michael P.’s enthusiasm for Sr. Margaret Farley’s take on important issues of the day. Like Michael P., I realize she is “dissenting,” but I do not see how her positions or arguments in support thereof are “compelling.” I would like to offer readers some insight into the position I stake and the ground on which I rely.
Like Sr. Farley, I, too, have taught Christian Ethics, but unlike her, I did not teach at a prestigious Ivy League university but a Pontifical university in Rome, which carried certain responsibilities for me regarding the content of my classes and the nature of my publications. Unlike Sr. Farley who held a prestigious endowed professorship in Christian ethics, I simply was an Ordinary Professor of a Pontifical faculty, meaning that I held the rank of full professor in an ecclesiastical faculty with the approval not only of the university and my religious order, the Society of Jesus, but also of the Congregation for Catholic Education. Considering my rights and responsibilities that I have freely accepted in my capacity as an Ordinary Professor, I am obliged to conduct myself, my teaching, my research, and my writing in accordance with norms of the Church. One of the most pertinent sources would be Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor (1993)—the Splendor of Truth, [HERE].
It is relevant to note that John Paul prefaced his writing of this encyclical noting that circumstances existed, which demonstrate “the lack of harmony between the traditional response of the Church and certain theological positions, encountered even in Seminaries and in Faculties of Theology, with regard to questions of the greatest importancefor the Church and for the life of faith of Christians, as well as for the life of society itself.” John Paul was also concerned about challenges to “the intrinsic and unbreakable bond between faith and morality, as if membership in the Church and her internal unity were to be decided on the basis of faith alone.” He concluded that it was necessary to write an Encyclical with the aim of treating “more fully and more deeply the issues regarding the very foundations of moral theology” that were and are “being undermined by certain present day tendencies.” (NN. 4-5)
It was his intention to identify clearly “certain aspects of doctrine which are of crucial importance in facing what is certainly a genuine crisis, since the difficulties which it engenders have most serious implications for the moral life of the faithful and for communion in the Church.” John Paul specified that these “certain aspects” include areas contested by some who teach “Christian ethics”, e.g., abortion, marriage, and bioethical matters including research destructive of human life. (NN. 4, 13, 47-49, 80) The Pope’s further objective was to assist those entrusted with teaching moral theology and Christian ethics “with regard to which new tendencies and theories have developed.” John Paul emphasized the role of the Magisterium, fidelity to Jesus Christ, and continuity with the Church’s tradition, which are needed to help everyone in his “journey towards truth and freedom.” (N. 27, italics mine)
John Paul realized that certain tendencies had evolved in contemporary moral theology influenced by “the currents of subjectivism and individualism” that relied on “novel interpretations of the relationship of freedom to the moral law, human nature and conscience, and propose novel criteria for the moral evaluation of acts.” (N. 34) He also understood that these tendencies either minimized or denied the relation between an individual’s freedom and the truth taught by God and knowable by the human person. This discussion introduces the problem of an exaggerated and erroneous autonomy in which some moral theologians and ethicists have made an improper distinction between an ethical order based exclusively on human resources and limited to the material world and the order of God’s salvation. As the Pope asserted, “autonomy conceived in this way also involves the denial of a specific doctrinal competence on the part of the Church and her Magisterium with regard to particular moral norms which deal with the so-called ‘human good’.” (N.37)
For John Paul II, it became necessary for the Church’s Magisterium to intervene in the sphere of faith and in the sphere of actions that bear moral concerns. It is the duty of all Catholics to be mindful of this (for we are all called to the task of salvation and evangelization), but it is the special responsibility of those who teach Christian ethics and moral theology. (N. 110) The person who exercises his or her life in a manner that conflicts with the Church, its Magisterium, and its teaching authority on these matters separates one’s self from right relation in the ecclesial communion. When this occurs, the Church has an obligation to warn the faithful of “the presence of possible errors, even merely implicit ones, when their consciences fail to acknowledge the correctness and the truth of the moral norms which the Magisterium teaches.” (Id.) The teacher of Christian ethics and moral theology has an obligation to teach with and in assent to the Magisterium’s teachings in the realms of dogma and morality in cooperation with the “hierarchical Magisterium.” (Id.)
As a man of the times, John Paul understood the importance and relevance of behavioral sciences in assisting the Church in its teaching responsibilities. However, he also understood the limitations of investigations that relied solely on the approach of behavioral science. As he indicated, “the relevance of the behavioral sciences for moral theology must always be measured against the primordial question: What is good or evil? What must be done to have eternal life?” (N. 111, italics are those of John Paul II) Should the teacher of Christian ethics and moral theology forget this, he or she has failed to comply with one’s professional and ecclesial responsibilities.
John Paul concludes his letter with these important points:
Teaching moral doctrine involves the conscious acceptance of these intellectual, spiritual and pastoral responsibilities. Moral theologians, who have accepted the charge of teaching the Church's doctrine, thus have a grave duty to train the faithful to make this moral discernment, to be committed to the true good and to have confident recourse to God’s grace. While exchanges and conflicts of opinion may constitute normal expressions of public life in a representative democracy, moral teaching certainly cannot depend simply upon respect for a process: indeed, it is in no way established by following the rules and deliberative procedures typical of a democracy. Dissent, in the form of carefully orchestrated protests and polemics carried on in the media, is opposed to ecclesial communion and to a correct understanding of the hierarchical constitution of the People of God. Opposition to the teaching of the Church’s Pastors cannot be seen as a legitimate expression either of Christian freedom or of the diversity of the Spirit’s gifts. When this happens, the Church’s Pastors have the duty to act in conformity with their apostolic mission, insisting that the right of the faithful to receive Catholic doctrine in its purity and integrity must always be respected. “Never forgetting that he too is a member of the People of God, the theologian must be respectful of them, and be committed to offering them a teaching which in no way does harm to the doctrine of the faith”.(N. 113, italics are those of John Paul II)
I, for one, labor to be faithful to the Splendor of Truth and the need to keep together the questions, on the one hand, that address good and evil and those, on the other hand, that have to do with eternal life.RJA sj
Obama at Newman Catholic High School, Mason City, Iowa
According to the New York Times,
Flying in from Chicago, Mr. Obama arrived here [Iowa] on Wednesday morning,
where about 500 people were waiting in the gymnasium of the Newman
Catholic High School in Mason City. His remarks conveyed a fresh moment
of urgency in the race . . .
Who is Obama, you ask? Check out this (seasonal) YouTube feature to find out:
“Pope Benedict XVI reinforced the Vatican’s growing concern with protecting the environment
in the traditional midnight Christmas Mass on Tuesday, bemoaning an
‘ill-treated world’ in a homily given to thousands of pilgrims here in
the seat of the world’s billion Roman Catholics, reports The Times’s
Ian Fisher from Rome.
The gang at Truthdig was impressed,
adding that “He’s not just all talk: it turns out the Vatican bought
carbon credits this holiday season to offset emissions. It’s just a
little present to the world from the biggest little city in Italy.”
Frank Pasquale at Concurring Opinions feels the address built on the recent encyclical on hope
that stated, “It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing
from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves
the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we
drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain,
but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the
greater.”
“These may seem rather dark ideas for an encyclical on hope,” notes
Pasquale. “But an idea of redemption is a common thread throughout the
document; ‘It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by
love.’ Here is to hoping that ‘progress in man’s ethical formation’ can
begin approaching our technical prowess in 2008.”
... is one of the most important American religious figures of the last fifty years. "[N]o modern Jewish thinker has had as profound an effect on other
faiths as Heschel has; the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said
he was 'an authoritative voice not only in the Jewish community but in
the religious life of America.' Nor has any Jewish theologian since
Heschel succeeded in speaking to such a wide range of readers while
rigorously attending to the nuances of Judaism."
New York Times December 24, 2007
A Rabbi of His Time, With a Charisma That Transcends It By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
In 1965, after walking in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil-rights march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was at the Montgomery, Ala., airport,
trying to find something to eat. A surly woman behind the snack-bar
counter glared at Heschel — his yarmulke and white beard making him
look like an ancient Hebrew prophet — and mockingly proclaimed: “Well,
I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I
didn’t believe her, until now.” She told Heschel that there was no food
to be had.
In response, according to a new biography, “Spiritual Radical:
Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972” by Edward K. Kaplan (Yale),
Heschel simply smiled. He gently asked, “Is it possible that in the
kitchen there might be some water?” Yes, she acknowledged. “Is it
possible that in the refrigerator you might find a couple of eggs?”
Perhaps, she admitted. Well, then, Heschel said, if you boiled the eggs
in the water, “that would be just fine.”
She shot back, “And why should I?”
“Why should you?” Heschel said. “Well, after all, I did you a favor.”
“What favor did you ever do me?”
“I proved,” he said, “there was a Santa Claus.”
And after the woman’s burst of laughter, food was quickly served.
Of course Heschel, with his rabbinic features, could not have looked
too much like the jolly gentleman expected to visit homes late
Christmas Eve. But the spirit evident in this anecdote must have served
him well over the years as he taught aspiring rabbis, met with Pope
Paul VI and became a leader in the civil-rights, anti-Vietnam War and
interfaith movements. At his death in 1972 he was one of this country’s
best-known Jewish figures.
This year’s centennial of Heschel’s birth, commemorated by the new
biography and a conference this month at the Center for Jewish History
in Manhattan, takes place in a very different world. Surely no one
today could write, as he did in his landmark 1955 book, “God in Search
of Man,” that there is an “eclipse of religion in modern society.” If
anything, there is no escape from talk about faith. Nor is the
relationship between religious convictions and political activism as
simple as it might have once seemed.
Executions Decline Elsewhere, but Texas Holds Steady By ADAM LIPTAK
This year’s death-penalty
bombshells — a federal moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest
number of executions in more than a decade — have masked what may be
the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the
modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all
American executions took place in Texas.
Over the past three decades, the proportion of executions nationwide
performed in Texas has held relatively steady, averaging 37 percent.
Only once before, in 1986, has the state accounted for even a slight
majority of the executions, and that was in a year with only 18
executions nationwide.
But this year, enthusiasm for executions outside of Texas dropped
sharply. Of last year’s 42 executions, 26 were in Texas. The remaining
16 were spread across nine other states, none of which executed more
than three people. Many legal experts say that trend is likely to
continue.
Indeed, said David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston
who has represented death row inmates, the day is not far off when
essentially all executions in the United States will take place in
Texas.
“The reason that Texas will end up monopolizing executions,” he
said, “is because every other state will eliminate it de jure, as New
Jersey did, or de facto, as other states have.”
Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., the district attorney of Harris County,
which includes Houston and has accounted for 100 executions since 1976,
said the Texas capital justice system is working properly. The pace of
executions in Texas, he said, “has to do with how many people are in
the pipeline when certain rulings come down.”
Asked why Texas’s share of executions nationwide is rising, he said, “I frankly don’t know.”
The rate at which Texas sentences people to death is not especially
high given its murder rate. But once a death sentence is imposed there,
said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty
Information Center, prosecutors, state and federal courts, the pardon
board and the governor are united in moving the process along. “There’s
almost an aggressiveness about carrying out executions,” said Mr.
Dieter, whose organization opposes capital punishment.
Outside of Texas, even supporters of the death penalty say they
detect a change in public attitudes about executions in light of the
time and expense of capital litigation, the possibility of wrongful
convictions and the remote chance that someone sent to death row will
actually be executed.