Mirror of Justice

Interesting New Work on Christian-Muslim Relations

The most recent issue of Commonweal has a fascinating article on the interaction between St. Francis of Assisi and Sultan Malik al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade.  The piece is an adaptation of Paul Moses' The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace, to be published September 29 by Doubleday Religion. For more information, go to www.saintandthesultan.com.

Catholicity of Sotomayor Comment

So far, the most controversial revelation regarding the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor is her comment in a 2001 speech at Berkeley which included the following statement:

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life."

Although the statement may raise legitimate political and jurisprudential questions related to her confirmation, it could be construed as consistent with the Catholic principle of the preferential option for the poor.  Both Sotomayor's statement and the preferential option imply that privilege can result in lacunae requiring a "view from below" in order to identify injustice.  The preferential option as a principle of Catholic social thought has its origin in the work of liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez.  In a 1980 sermon, Pope John Paul II articulated it as...

"a call to a special solidarity with the humble and the weak, those who are suffering and weeping, who are humiliated and left on the fringes of life and society, in order to help them to realize ever more fully their own dignity as human persons and children of God."

Opening of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality

Today is the kick-off event for the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law.  The presentations this morning focused on the Japanese internment, the initial Supreme Court decisions, and the later coram nobis decisions (nearly the entire legal team was present).  Speakers this afternoon will focus on the role of academics in advocacy for justice more generally.  The entire event was framed by Seattle University School of Law Dean Kellye Testy in the context of the obligations to love and do justice in Catholic tradition.  Please follow the link below for more information.

Korematsu Center Launch

Credit Default Swaps and Speculation

Thanks to those who have have responded to my original inquiry regarding the financial crisis.  Fractional reserve banking, questionable mortgage lending practices, stewardship, and the role of regulation were some of the topics I was hoping we would address.  One issue that has not been mentioned but is perhaps the elephant in the room is the role of derivatives, and credit default swaps in particular.  Mortgage defaults and bank failures are terrible problems, but I don't believe that these alone motivated President Bush to responded with such urgency.  Credit default swaps and similar instruments have allowed corporate debt to be leveraged (perhaps ten fold), so that as corporations are unable to make payments on debt, the impact is amplified throughout the ecomony. 

A credit default swap is an agreement to exchange periodic payments for a promise to make a payout upon a specified default of payment on corporate debt.  It functions as a form of insurance except that the party promising payout is not regulated as an insurer and the purchasing party does not necessarily have an interest in the underlying debt instrument.  The result is an unregulated tradable contract that is structured like insurance but is often entered into for purely speculative purposes.  Some current estimates place the notional value of these contracts at between 50 and 60 trillion dollars (perhaps ten times the value of the corporate debt market and four times the US GDP).  While such contracts serve a valuable hedging purpose for holders of debt, they have also magnified the potential severity of the housing bubble and its effects.  A number of analysts have likened credit default swaps to gambling, something which Catholic teaching certainly speaks to.  At the very least, this problem invites discussion regarding appropriate regulation of these types of financial instruments.

A Catholic Approach to the Financial Crisis?

Today the Dow dropped the most it ever has in a single day.  The administration argues that our financial system is on the verge of collapse.  Despite lobbying by the President and senior cabinet members, the House did not approve the bailout plan today.  I am curious what members of our blog community believe is an authentically Catholic approach to these critical issues, particularly in formulating legal solutions.  Recent events have prompted me to reflect on my own assumptions about our economic system, and I am deeply concerned that the most vulnerable members of our community are likely to suffer the most significant harms in the short term.  In the long term, I have deep misgivings regarding the debilitating debt we are leaving for future generations.  Although I am not certain what our response should be, failure to act is an option that carries great potential costs if Secretary Paulson is to be believed.  How can we best serve the common good here?  What is an appropriate level of government intervention?  How will our policy choices impact the poor?

Catholicism and Libertarianism

There is an interesting article by Daniel Finn (Professor of Theology and Economics at St. John's MN) on the tension between secular libertarianism and Catholic moral theology called "Libertarian Heresy: The Fundamentalism of Free-Market Theology" in the most recent issue of Commonweal.  Finn is particularly concerned with the argument that using law to compel a particular action deprives that action of its voluntariness, and thus of its moral significance.

[T]his is a thoroughly un-Catholic view of law and morality, directly contrary, for example, to longstanding Thomistic tradition. Aquinas taught that virtue entails a constant will to act rightly, and that those who don’t learn virtue from their parents need the “discipline of laws” to keep them “restrained from evil by force and fear.” Significantly, Thomas adds that unvirtuous men, “by being habituated in this way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and thus become virtuous.” If law can “habituate” even the unvirtuous to act out of virtue, then surely the virtuous individual can act voluntarily and virtuously in spite of a law that would constrain him if he needed it.

Bellah on Taylor and Authentic Christianity in a Secular Age

The newest issue of Commonweal, in addition to our own Mark Sargent's insightful review of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (which takes on even greater relevance given the most recent bank and insurance failures), contains a provocative article by Robert Bellah in which he engages key ideas from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.  Instead of emphasizing the historical fact of secularism, he focuses on Taylor's vision of authentic religion that engages those formed in a culture of secularism.  According to Taylor, this authenticity is found in communion rooted in love.

At the heart of orthodox Christianity, seen in terms of communion, is the coming of God through Christ into a personal relation with disciples, and beyond them others, eventually ramifying through the church to humanity as a whole. God establishes the new relation with us by loving us, in a way we cannot unaided love one another. [We love because he first loved us, 1 John 4:19.] The lifeblood of this new relation is agape [the biblical Greek word for love], which can’t ever be understood simply in terms of a set of rules, but rather as the extension of a certain kind of relation, spreading outward in a network. The church is in this sense a quintessentially network society, even though of an utterly unparalleled kind, in that the relations are not mediated by any historical forms of relatedness: kinship, fealty to a chief, or whatever. It transcends all these, but [is rather] a network of ever different relations of agape.

Rich's Question Regarding the Role of History in Catholic Social Thought

There are numerous ways to understand the development of Catholic social thought within its historical context, and the materials listed by Rich are quite helpful. I tend to emphasize the following...

The Industrial Revolution

            Increasing wealth for many (particularly in the US and Europe), widening disparity between rich and poor, colonialism, urbanization, the rise of labor movements, the influence of socialist thought, and the emerging role of technology

The Great Wars of the 20^th Century

            Massive mobilization of resources for violence and the disproportionate impact on the poor and vulnerable

The Great Depression

            Profound increases in global poverty, the call for principled responses, challenges to unbridled capitalism, and tensions between emerging economic models (e.g., Keynes, Hayek, and critical scholarship)

The Proliferation of Technology in the 20^th Century and Beyond

            Shrinking of the world via advances in communication and transportation, homogenizing of the world via the media, increased possibilities for wealth and prosperity, consumerism, and technology as threat (e.g., nuclear weapons, unemployment, and environmental degradation)

The Transition of the Catholic Church from a Largely European Institution to a World Institution

            Rising importance of local language and practice, challenges to universality, massive wealth gap within the Church, searching for prophetic voices, and engagement with difference in culture, religion, and class

Wisdom from the New Jesuit Superior General

As many of our readers know, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, a Spanish priest who has served in East Asia for much of his adut life, was chosen as the new Superior General for the Society of Jesus.  At the end of the gathering of Jesuits in Rome for the 35th General Congregation, which has generated a number of important documents regarding Jesuit mission, Fr. Nicolas gave an inspiring homily aimed at Jesuits but with relevance for those of us committed to mission in our schools.

If we do not love, we really do not have anything to say. Here we discover, I think, the root and source of our identity and our mission. Here is our raison d’être. Why do we want to love the poor, to help the lonely, to console the sad, to heal the sick and to bring freedom to the oppressed? Simply because this is what God does. Nothing else. As the Holy Father told us, love for the poor does not have an ideological but a Christological basis. It is the very essence of Christ.

For the full text see here

Reflections after the Conference on Catholic Legal Thought

Now that it is been a few weeks since a number of us gathered in Seattle for the Conference on Catholic Legal Thought, I have had some time to reflect on the experience.  Most of the programming looked like any other academic conference.  We spent the first day with Fr. Frank Sullivan, S.J. considering Church authority and its implications for us as law professors and Catholics.  This discussion became a backdrop for subsequent conversations regarding pedagogy, legal theory and scholarship.  What made this conference different for me was the sense of solidarity.  It was clear that each of us struggled to engage Church teaching with meekness and respect.  Although, we represented a diversity of cultural and policy perspectives, we agreed on the importance of the Gospel message and the Magisterium's role in our community.  This was clearest to me in our times of prayer, worship and reflection.  It gave me hope that meaningful understanding, solidarity and unity are still possible in this fragmented world.  I would like to offer warm thanks to all those who attended or participated in the conference.  I hope that many more of you will be able to join us next year when we will meet back on the East Coast.