Gene C. Fant Jr.'s Blog, page 2

Also, They Will Need to Use Electric Typewriters

This is rather silly. Inside Higher Ed reports that the International Studies Association—according to its website, “the most respected and widely known scholarly association dedicated to international studies”—has proposed a ban on personal blogging by editors of its journals. The proposal would allow editors to blog only at official sites affiliated with their journals. The ISA’s President says the association is concerned about the lack of professionalism at many academic blogs and that it doesn’t want readers to confuse editors’ personal posts with the association’s official products.

Maybe international studies blogs tend to tackiness, I don’t know. But I can’t see how a scholarly association would think to ban personal blogging in the year 2014. Leave aside for the moment concerns about academic freedom. Blogs serve a useful academic function. Sure, blogs aren’t the same thing as long-form scholarship; a writer can’t fully develop ideas in the blogging format. But blogs allow scholars to carry on helpful conversations with colleagues across the world and to engage the wider public as well. They can highlight current issues that merit further study. And blogs can be equalizers for scholars from smaller and less-well known institutions. Scholars who would never be asked on PBS’s News Hour can use blogs as a way to get their ideas out and influence debate. It would be wrong to lose these benefits because of a vague concern about professionalism. If the ISA is having trouble with editors who post childish comments on personal blogs—apparently, this is one of the reasons the association has proposed the ban–it ought to speak to those editors directly, rather than adopt a blanket prohibition.

Christians and Circumcision

My post last week about a movement in Scandinavia to ban the non-therapeutic circumcision of boys drew many comments. I’d like to respond to one of them. At Patheos, Joel Willitts criticizes Christians, like me, who oppose such bans. Willitts suggests that we are being inconsistent, perhaps even hypocritical. “The Christian tradition has little high ground on which to stand when it comes to the issue of banning Jewish practices,” he writes. After all, the “Gentile church” has prohibited circumcision for millennia as part of its “supersessionistic theology.” Who are Christians to criticize others when they, too, seek to end the practice?

It’s not correct to say that Christianity bans circumcision. It’s true that Christianity rejects ritual circumcision. From the apostolic period until today, Christians have regarded baptism as the substitute for ritual circumcision, the sign of what Christians believe to be the New Covenant. Continuing to circumcise boys out of a sense of religious obligation, Christians believe, would be a category error. The Old Covenant has been fulfilled; why continue to observe its rituals? But circumcision for non-religious reasons is different. If, for example, the best medical learning is that boys should be circumcised for reasons of hygiene, Christianity does not oppose this. With respect to circumcisions carried out for non-religious reasons, Christianity is simply neutral.

Even if Christians reject ritual circumcision for themselves on theological grounds, they can still object in good faith to proposals that the state ban it for others. Christians do not build sukkot, either; but Christians can object to proposals that the state prohibit Jews from building them. Unlike the church, the liberal state is supposed to be neutral about such things. Christians who object to proposals to ban practices other religions hold sacred are not being inconsistent or hypocritical. They are holding liberalism to its deepest commitments, and showing respect for traditions other than their own.

First Links — 2.5.14

Bread of Sorrow

Nathaniel Peters,
America

We Must All Tell Lies

Clancy Martin, Bookforum

Atheism Is an Offshoot of Deism

Theo Hobson,
Guardian

Ten Years of Catholic Legal Theory: What’s Changed, What Hasn’t

Rob Vischer,
Mirror of Justice

Is “Sex Worker” a Legitimate Phrase?

Mary Rose Somarriba,
Public Discourse

Dr. Krauthammer’s Divided Soul

There are few more gifted conservative columnists working in journalism today than Charles Krauthammer. On so many issues, from executive power to foreign policy to limited government, Krauthammer is reliable, insightful, and employs a gleefully sharp pen to eviscerate his adversaries. But every now and then he delivers himself of frustratingly ill-informed opinions, and this happens most often on the “social” issues such as the sanctity of life and the preservation of marriage.

So it was in his latest weekly column. In the midst of giving generally good advice to conservative pro-lifers about how to play to their political strength—by emphasizing the issue of late-term abortion, where a consensus of public opinion is on their side—Krauthammer offered this:

Conservatives need to accept that no such consensus exists regarding early abortions. Unlike late-term abortions, where there are clearly two human beings involved, there is no such agreement regarding, say, a six-week-old embryo.

There remains profound disagreement as to whether at this early stage the fetus has acquired personhood or, to put it more theologically, ensoulment. The disagreement is understandable given that the question is a matter of faith.

This doesn’t mean that abortion opponents should give up. But regarding early abortions, the objective should be persuasion — creating some future majority —rather than legislative coercion in the absence of a current majority. These are the constraints of a democratic system.

The trouble appears in the second paragraph just quoted. It is true that in the early stages of pregnancy, there is “profound disagreement” whether or not to protect the unborn human being in the womb. But this is certainly not because of some “theological” dispute about whether something called “ensoulment” has taken place. On the side of leaving the unborn defenseless, it is true, there are sophisticated pseudo-arguments purporting to complicate the question whether, and when, we can call these human beings “persons” with a right not to be killed by others. But there are literally no pro-lifers—and to my knowledge there have been none in the four decades since Roe v. Wade was decided—who argue that the unborn deserve protection because some magical “ensoulment” has taken place. The Catholic Church, to take one prominent institution devoted to the defense of human life from conception until natural death, makes no “theological” argument about the nature of the life in the womb. The Church relies instead entirely on the scientific fact that every unborn human being is, from the moment of its conception, a member of our species. The Church offers no doctrines about “ensoulment,” and entertains no “leap of faith”about the status of the unborn. It observes a fact—that these tiny beings are just as we once were, each and every one of us—and then draws a moral conclusion: as each of us is entitled not to be killed without justification, so is each of them. Nothing mysteriously “theological” or shrouded in “a matter of faith.”

I wonder if Dr. Krauthammer could name one prominent pro-lifer in the last four decades who speaks of a theology of “ensoulment” and engages in the debate he imagines. I am sure he can’t. No pro-lifer speaks of these things, and on the pro-abortion side, talk of “souls” is decidedly déclassé. (This is not, for example, Peter-Singer-talk.)

More than a decade ago, when Dr. Krauthammer was on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, he served alongside staunch pro-lifers such as Robert George, Mary Ann Glendon, Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, William Hurlbut, Paul McHugh, and Gilbert Meilaender. In its first report, the Council took up the issue of cloning—whether for research or for reproduction. All the members except the chairman, Leon Kass, appended personal statements to the Council’s report. Only one member had anything to say about “ensoulment.” It was Charles Krauthammer, who mentioned it twice in just the way he does in his latest column, to suggest that some active debate is going on about the subject. No one else, conservative or liberal, pro-cloning or anti-, mentioned the subject, and in fact nowhere else in the entire report did the word “soul” even appear.

The debate about “ensoulment” is entirely in the mind of Charles Krauthammer. Perhaps one day he will decide which side of his own divided soul is victorious.

The Dance of Ordinary Time

We are currently in the midst of Ordinary Time on the church
calendar—the time between the times, or even “off season,” to borrow a sports
metaphor. Although not in this year’s cycle, Christians usually encounter a
gospel reading from John and the first miracle at the wedding in Cana of
Galilee. Filled with food and laughter, this wedding becomes the place where Jesus
fulfills his mother’s desire and turns water into wine. He chooses in this
moment to embrace the joy of the dance.

Eating, drinking, laughing, and dancing are earthy
activities that point toward the liturgical color of this “time between the
times.” It is a reminder that behind the great dance of creation stands the
Lord and Giver of Life. Hildegard of Bingen suggested as much when she
identified the Spirit’s activity with viriditas,
a challenging word to translate. Despite its archaic nature (or maybe because
of it), I prefer verdancy to the more mundane greenness because Hildegard
intends to underscore a lush and rich landscape teeming with life and
fragrance. It evokes ideas of freshness as when the dew first settles upon the
earth and all is alight with a sheen of radiance and glory; and fecundity as
the way in which fields once barren in winter’s snow can suddenly spring forth
into life, transforming a dormant world into a paradise of sights and smells.

It is through the Spirit’s verdant presence that Mary’s womb
becomes a source of life and that human lives once barren and broken can become
a habitation of divine beauty that is filled with virtue and power. In
Hildegard’s words, “the sweetness of the Spirit is boundless and swift to
encompass all creatures in grace, and no corruption can take away the fullness
of its just integrity. Its path is a torrent, and streams of sanctity flow from
it in its bright power, with never a stain of dirt in them; for the Holy Spirit
Itself is a burning and shining serenity, which cannot be nullified, and which
enkindles ardent virtue so as to put all darkness to flight.”

While the Spirit’s creative energy brings forth the
incarnation, the passion of the Son communicates to the church the gift of
fertility that she may bring forth sons and daughters of God. As persons turn
toward the life-giving flow of the Son, they themselves become a sweet
fragrance “like a garden filled with every kind of plant.” The fragrance of
life found in the Son and the Spirit is Hildegard’s way of saying what Julian
of Norwich would later declare in the face of the Black Death: All shall be
well. The pain and suffering of the crucified pronounces the verdict of
judgment upon death. To borrow a phrase from John Owen, it is the death of death
in the death of Christ. This divine verdancy symbolized in the liturgical color
of Ordinary Time gives hope in this “time between the times.” It signals that
the dance of creation ultimately will not succumb to the forces of darkness since the Lord
of the dance is always present to bring forth new life.

Hildegard’s vision of the verdancy given in the Son through
the Spirit suggests that the Twenty-Third Psalm is a pilgrim’s song in which
is expressed not so much a longing for another place as a longing for the
transformation of this place, especially as it is rendered in verse by John and
Charles Wesley.

1 THE Lord my pasture shall
prepare,                                

And feed me with a shepherd’s care;                          

His presence shall my wants
supply,

And guard me with a watchful eye;

My noon-day walks he shall
attend,

And all my midnight hours defend.

2 When in the sultry glebe I faint,

Or on the thirsty mountains pant;

To fertile vales and dewy meads

My weary, wandering steps he
leads;

Where peaceful rivers, soft and
slow

Amid the verdant landskip flow.

3 Though in the paths of death I
tread,

With gloomy horrors over-spread,

My steadfast heart shall fear no
ill,

For thou, O Lord, art with me
still:

Thy friendly crook shall give me
aid,

And guide me through the dreadful
shade.

4 Though in a bare and rugged
way,

Through devious lonely wilds I
stray;

Thy bounty shall my pains
beguile:

The barren wilderness shall
smile,

With sudden greens and herbage
crown’d,

And streams shall murmur all
around.

With its celebration of
earth-bound existence and its symbolism of final consummation, Jesus’ miracle
at the wedding in Cana of Galilee reminds us of C. S. Lewis’ proclamation that
“joy is the serious business of heaven.” It is both an affirmation of the
fundamental goodness of creation and its necessary transformation as it is
caught up into the dance of God’s own life. Lewis’ query about heaven puts the
matter before us succinctly: “for surely we must suppose the life of the
blessed to be an end in itself, indeed The End: to be utterly spontaneous; to
be the complete reconciliation of boundless freedom with order—with the most
delicately adjusted, supple, intricate, and beautiful order?” For now, the
frivolity of dance must be confined to the off hours of “ordinary time,” but
one day all creation will dance in the presence and power of the Triune God.

First Links — 2.4.14

Whose Pluralism?

George Marsden, Books & Culture

The Reading Habits of Theodore Roosevelt

Jeremy Anderberg, Art of Manliness

The Many Misunderstandings of Richard Hofstadter

Fred Siegel, New Criterion

Why Bach Moves Us

George B. Stauffer, New York Review of Books

Telling Stories: St. Augustine and Documentaries

Asher Gelzer-Govatos, Christianity Today

Reason and Revelation: Why Christians Need Philosophy

Today at Public Discourse, my brilliant co-author and former student Sherif Girgis begins an important three part series of articles on the need for philosophical reflection and analysis in thinking and arguing about moral questions, including morally-charged questions of law and public policy.

Against the view advanced by a number of prominent contemporary Christian writers, Sherif argues that we cannot get along simply by relying on scriptural revelation or the tradition of the Church. As the headnote to today’s article says “our natural moral knowledge in some ways precedes revelation and helps us to understand it.” It should go without saying that in no way is this to claim that revelation is irrelevant or redundant. It is to argue, rather, that faith and reason really are, as Pope John Paul II famously said, “like two wings on which the human spirit ascends to contemplation of truth.”

Sherif is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton, where he won prizes for the best senior thesis in philosophy and the best senior thesis in ethics, as well as the International Dante Prize. He earned a graduate degree at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and is currently completing a J.D. at Yale Law School, where he is an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and a Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/02/11978/

The Parthenon Enigma

[image error]“Athenians,” St. Paul begins his famous sermon in the Book of Acts, “I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” That basic fact about ancient Athens–that it was, in classicist Joan Breton Connelly’s words, an “intensely religious” society–mostly escapes us today. Since the Enlightenment, we are accustomed to see Athens as the prototype of rationalism and liberal democracy. That’s why so many civic buildings in America, like the Supreme Court in Washington and Federal Hall in lower Manhattan, take as their model the most famous Athenian structure of all: the Parthenon.

In a provocative new book, The Parthenon Enigma (Knopf), Connelly argues that the Enlightenment view is wrong, or at least crucially incomplete. One cannot understand the Parthenon, she says, without appreciating the central role religion had in Athenian life. Yes, the Parthenon was a political building. But in ancient Athens, politics, like everything else, was an extension of religion. To be an Athenian was to share an imagined identity as a descendant of Erechtheus, a legendary king born of a union (sort of) between the god Hephaistos and Mother Earth. Athenian citizenship, she writes, “was a concept whose sense extended far beyond our notions of politics, positing a mythic ‘deep time’ and a cosmic reality in which the citizen could not locate himself or understand his existence except through religious awareness and devotions.”

The centerpiece of Connelly’s book is a reinterpretation of the Parthenon’s frieze. Since the Enlightenment, conventional wisdom has held that the frieze commemorates a civic festival known as the Panathenaia. Connelly argues, however, based in part on a recently discovered manuscript of a lost work by the playwright Euripides, that the frieze in fact commemorates the myth of Erechtheus and his daughters, one of whom offers herself as a human sacrifice to save the city. (The word “Parthenon,” it turns out, means “place of the maidens”). This reading of the frieze, she argues, resolves some puzzling aspects of the conventional understanding–for example, other Greek temples, without exception, depict myths, not civic festivals–and better fits what we know of the history, legendary and otherwise, of the Acropolis, the famous hill on which the Parthenon sits.

Unless one is a classicist, it’s going to be very hard to evaluate her claim. Much depends on the correct interpretation of the section of the frieze in the photograph above. Is that Erechtheus on the right, giving his daughter a burial shroud? Connelly certainly provides a lot of detail. But, detail or not, this is a fun and worthwhile book, and its central argument about the overwhelming religiosity of Athens is compelling. Turns out St. Paul was right.

For Our Midwest Readers: The Edith Stein Project at Notre Dame

The Edith Stein Project of the University of Notre Dame
is an annual conference that seeks to articulate the authentic meaning of human
dignity and sexuality. This year’s conference is on “Relationships and the Call
to Love” and it’s keynote address will be given by Alasdair MacIntyre on “Edith
Stein on Empathy.”

Caroline Reuter, a senior at Notre Dame and one of the
Project’s chairs this year, explained the purpose of the
Edith Stein Project and this year’s conference theme:

The Edith Stein Project provides a venue for exploring issues that are
deeply relevant to college students, but which they may not frequently discuss.
This year, we will be looking at each person’s call to love in and through
relationships. How can the relationships that fill our lives be informed
by the Catholic perspective of the human person? How can we look at the
practical side of our relationships while remaining rooted in the truths of who
we are as men and women?

With a wide range of topics, from the problem of pornography and the
hook-up culture on college campuses to presentations on the through of Edith
Stein and John Paul II, Madeline Gillen, conference chair and senior
undergraduate student, recognizes Christ and his Resurrection,
in union with the teachings of the Church, to be at the heart of the
conference’s mission to provide students with an authentic understanding of the
human person.

Other conference presenters include First Thoughts and Spiritual
Friendship blogger Ron Belgau, Elise Italiano, a contributor to Breaking
Through: Catholic Women Speak For Themselves, and Gina Loehr, 2013 delegate for the Pontifical Council
for the Laity seminar on Mulieris
Dignitatemi, and myself, presenting a paper on “The Noble Vocation of Women:
Love and Friendship in Alice von Hildebrand.” Carmelite prioress and musician
Sr. Claire Sokol will also speak to honor the memory of Bishop John D’Arcy, bishop
of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend and enthusiastic supporter of the Edith
Stein Project since its founding, who passed away last year.

The Human Face of Religious Freedom

The Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby—whose religious freedom the Obama administration is attempting to violate with the HHS mandate—has posted a video where they speak for themselves, as business owners and Christians.  It’s worth watching to remind ourselves of the real issues at stake in the Greens’ Supreme Court case.