Mirror of Justice

"Is There a Culture War?"

That's the title of a new book edited by E.J. Dionne and Michael Cromartie and written by James Davison Hunter and Alan Wolfe.  Here's a description of the book:

In the wake of a bitter 2004 presidential campaign and in the face of numerous divisive policy questions, many Americans wonder if their country has split in two. People are passionately choosing sides on contentious issues such as the invasion of Iraq, gay marriage, stem-cell research, and the right to die, and the battle over abortion continues unabated. Social and political splits fascinate the media: we hear of Red States against Blue States and the "Religious Right" against "Secular America"; Fox News and Air America; NASCAR dads and soccer moms. Is America, in fact, divided so clearly? Does a moderate middle still exist? Is the national fabric fraying? To the extent that these divisions exist, are they simply the healthy and unavoidable products of a diverse, democratic nation? In Is There a Culture War? two of America's leading authorities on political culture lead a provocative and thoughtful investigation of this question and its ramifications.

James Davison Hunter and Alan Wolfe debate these questions with verve, insight, and a deep knowledge rooted in years of study and reflection. Long before most scholars and pundits addressed the issue, Hunter and Wolfe were identifying the fault lines in the debate. Hunter's 1992 book Culture Wars put the term in popular circulation, arguing that America was in the midst of a "culture war" over "our most fundamental and cherished assumptions about how to order our lives." Six years later, in One Nation After All, Wolfe challenged the idea of a culture war and argued that a majority of Americans were seeking a middle way, a blend of the traditional and the modern. For the first time, these two distinguished scholars join in dialogue to clarify their differences, update their arguments, and search for the truth about America's cultural condition.

James Davison Hunter is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where he is also executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Among his several books is The Death of Character: On Moral Education of America's Children (Basic Books, 2000).

Alan Wolfe is a professor of political science at Boston College, where he directs the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It (Princeton, 2005).

My own take on the "America divided" thing is set out here.

(Thanks to Melissa Rogers for the post.)

A blog of interest

You know what they say about television re-runs:  "If you haven't seen it, it's new to you."  On that note, here is a new blog that will be of interest to many MOJ readers, run by Melissa Rogers, who is visiting professor of religion and public policy at Wake Forest University Divinity School.  I've met Melissa several times at conferences, and we testified on the same panel a few years ago before a Senate subcommittee.  She is engaging, thoughtful, smart, and pleasant.  The blog looks to be a good law-and-religion-and-public-life resource.

Tenure? Easy. Sainthood? Quite Possibly.

That's the title of a short piece in today's Chronicle of Higher Education about the sainthood cause of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.  It begins:

The academic career of the man on track to be named the first American-born male saint got off to a less than divine start.

After earning a prestigious Agrege degree in 1923 — a sort of European superdoctorate in philosophy that guarantees a job at a European university — Fulton J. Sheen had offers to teach at both Columbia and Oxford. Excited but unsure, the young priest telegraphed his hometown bishop in Illinois to ask where he should go.

The answer? Back to Peoria, son. A local parish needed a priest. Bound by his vows, Father Sheen obeyed.

The article discusses allegations that he fabricated a Ph.D. from the Pontifical College Angilicum, but suggests that even if it's true, it wouldn't necessarily hinder the sainthood cause:

In the end it probably won't make a difference. Saints are human and have flaws, says Father Apostoli. He cites the postulator working on Mother Teresa's canonization, who advised the Sheen supporters: "Don't try to prove he was a saint all his life. Just prove he was a saint the last 15 years."

The article concludes with this list of "The Saints of Academe."  I understand why the patron saint of oversleepers is included in this category, but why the patron saints for lost causes and impossible situtations? 

THE SAINTS OF ACADEME

Patron saints have long watched over academe, its people, and its problems.

Colleges and universities:
Four patron saints share this turf, including St. Contardo Ferrini and St. Thomas Aquinas

Computer users:
St. Isidore of Seville

Learning:
Five, including St. Acca and St. Margaret of Scotland

Lecturers and speakers:
St. John Chrysostom, St. Justin Martyr

Liberal arts:
St. Catherine of Bologna

Lost causes/impossible situations:
Four, including St. Jude Thaddeus and St. Philomena

Mathematicians:
St. Barbara and St. Hubert of Liège

Natural sciences:
St. Albertus Magnus

Oversleepers:
St. Vitus

Students:
17, including St. Gabriel of the Sorrowful Mother and St. Ursula

Test takers:
St. Joseph of Cupertino

Lisa

Banning Abortion Without Exception

Today Nicaragua's legislature voted to ban all abortions, even when the mother's life is in danger.  Is this justified -- much less mandated -- under the Church's teaching?  My understanding is that an intentional abortion is never morally permissible, but a procedure intended to save the mother's life is permissible even if it is certain to result in the unborn child's death.  Unless I'm missing something, I assume that such procedures would be prohibited under a total ban (unlike South Dakota's law, which contains an exception for saving the mother's life).  What's the argument in favor of a total ban and why is the Church in Nicaragua reportedly calling for one?

Rob

drinan chairs: a comment

I guess I'll offer a comment about the Georgetown and BC chairs honoring Father Drinan. My first reaction is that these decsions are not a huge surprise but that the decisions are open to serious question. I am sure that Father Drinan has done a lot of good things in his long career. (One of my younger sisters was his research assistant a couple of decades ago and she had good things to say about his personal qualities.) But his public profile involves a long record of support for abortion rights. That record includes his scandalous New York Times op-ed in support of President Clinton's veto of a ban on partial-birth abortions. I understand that he recanted that op-ed but I don't think that recantation received much attention. Father Drinan also serves on the Boards of the ACLU and PFAW, groups that are not known for their strong support of Catholic social teaching. Given this record (and perhaps he has reformed on the issue of abortion), I don't think that a Catholic law school ought to have a chair in his honor. Maybe the theory is that his other work cancels out these lapses, but the message that is being sent is that the areas where he departs from the teachings of the Church must not be terribly important.

When we discussed the Rice honorary degree, I noted that a school defines itself in part by the people the school chooses to honor and to hold up as role models. These actions do not signal a whole-hearted embrace of Ex Corde.   

Richard M.   

"The Simpsons" on Heaven

Marge Simpson and Ned Flanders help us understand "Protestant Heaven" and "Catholic Heaven," here.

Drinan Chairs

As a brief follow-up to the postings of Michael P. and Richard regarding Georgetown, Boston College Law School has also established a Drinan Chair. Their recent announcement is HERE .    RJA sj

The Laboratory as Slippery Slope

Dale Carpenter has concerns about the New Jersey Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision:

It’s significant that no other gay-marriage case (with the possible and instructive exception of Vermont, where the court adopted similar reasoning) has been brought in a state with as favorable a public policy toward gays as this one was: a broad set of antidiscrimination laws, domestic partnerships, second-parent adoptions, a hate crimes law, and so on. In this environment – where the state was committed to protecting gay people, sustaining gay couples, and facilitating gay parenting – it was both logically and practically difficult to hold on to the procreation and child-rearing rationales. The state had nothing left in defense of the rights gap except an unadorned “tradition” that the state itself had steadily undermined in its public policy. . . .

[T]he New Jersey court’s quotation from Justice Brandeis’ famous dissenting opinion praising the states as “laboratories” to “try novel social and economic experiments” is a bit ironic. The New Jersey court now holds that once the state substantially experiments with gay equality it must go all the way, ending the experiment.

While the result in this case is surely a good one for gay families, it may chill experiments in other states where legislators might fear that they cannot move incrementally toward equality for gay couples without surrendering the judicial basis for any remaining distinctions. I doubt that’s really a great danger in most states, where courts tend to be less aggressive than New Jersey’s and where the standard rational-basis test should allow legislatures to proceed incrementally, but this opinion will surely be cited as a reason not to grant any rights to gay couples.

Rob

Catholics and Civil Unions for Gays and Lesbians

Why should we think that Catholics can't support civil unions for gays and lesbians, as distinct from civil marriages?  Consider the following piece by John Allen:

'Theo-dem', top Vatican hawk on family have meeting of minds

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York

An intriguing meeting took place in the Vatican today between a leading exponent of a political current known as the “theo-dems,” meaning center-left politicians inspired by Catholic values, and the Vatican’s leading hawk on issues of sexuality and the family. The encounter symbolizes two different visions of the church’s engagement in the Western “culture wars” – one moderate and dialogic, the other clear and uncompromising.

Indirectly, the session raises a crucial question, with implications far beyond Italy: To what extent can the more moderate tendency find a “right of citizenship” in a church that in many ways stresses a harder line?

Italy’s Minister of the Family, a 56-year-old devout Catholic politician named Rosy Bindi, met Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, 70, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, in Lopez Trujillo’s Vatican office.

Though no statement was issued after the session, the two almost certainly discussed Bindi’s willingness to entertain proposals for the civil registration of unmarried, “de facto” couples, including same-sex couples, a proposal Lopez and other church officials have strongly opposed.

On most other cultural issues, Bindi and Lopez are in near-perfect harmony. Bindi opposes gay marriage and adoption rights for homosexuals, and has made clear that the government of Romano Prodi has no intention of introducing legislation that would equate same-sex unions with marriage.

“The word ‘pacs’ does not appear in our agenda,” Bindi has said, referring to the French acronym which has become a shorthand reference for civil equivalents of marriage in European discourse. "We speak of civil unions, of guaranteeing rights."

“One can’t think of putting the family founded on marriage and other forms of living together on the same level,” Bindi said, “and not just because the pope says so.”

Yet the fracture between Bindi and Lopez Trujillo on civil unions reflects a wider divergence in Catholic opinion – between those who believe that the state has to make some concession to new social realities in order to protect individual rights, and those who insist that any concession to the dissolution of the traditional family unit invites a slippery slope.

More broadly, some Italian Catholics see figures such as Bindi as a God-send, a way of keeping Catholic values alive in political and cultural circles often hostile to the church. Others, however, see her attempt to reconcile Catholicism with the post-modern political left as an effort to merge matter and anti-matter which the church should reject.

It’s a quandry with which Catholic politicians elsewhere, including Democrats in the United States, can easily identify.

Few politicians anywhere in the world, of any ideological stripe, can stake a better personal claim to Catholic credentials than Bindi.

Born in 1951 in Sinalunga, Bindi attended the University of Siena and quickly became enrolled in Catholic Action, by far the largest and most influential lay organization in Italy. Catholic Action has long been seen as the moderate and “mainstream” lay group in Italian Catholicism, while Communion and Liberation, founded by Fr. Luigi Giussani, is the more conservative alternative.

Bindi says that her life changed on Feb. 19, 1980, when she witnessed the assassination of her mentor, Vittorio Bachelet, by a commander of the Red Brigade terrorist group. Bachelet was a former president of Catholic Action as well as a former vice-president of the Pontifical Council for the Family. Afterwards, Bindi dedicated herself to Bachelet’s project of bringing Catholic values to political life.

As a member of the opposition party under former conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Bindi was a strong opponent of the war in Iraq. After elections last May brought the center-left under Prime Minister Romano Prodi to power, Bindi was selected as Italy’s first-ever “Minister of the Family,” a position which has put her on the front lines of the culture wars.

Bindi has said that she sees the center-left as a “grand common home” for secularists and Catholics alike.

“Look, I appear sometimes as a Catholic of the center-left, which can take positions that are a little critical with regard to the church,” she said. “Now, my being a believer will be put to the test: I’ll have to find a synthesis between my values, and my respect for pluralism and the evolution of society, for different ideas and inclinations.”

Today's meeting suggests the search for that synthesis continues.

The Drinan Chair in Human Rights

To read the announcement about the new Drinan Chair in Human Rights, click here.