I suppose you can call this the “Great and Holy Council” edition.
Ways Toward Renewal
Reinhard Hutter, a professor at Duke Divinity School and a leading light of “ressourcement Thomism,” penned a piece for First Things several years ago entitled “The Ruins of Disconunity.” It is an essay I have returned to many times and recommended relentlessly to anyone interested in the state of Catholic theology following the Second Vatican Council.
Lewis Ayres, a professor of historical and Catholic theology at Durham, has since penned a lengthy response to Hutter, one which was only brought to my attention today. Entitled “The Memory of Tradition: Post-Conciliar Renewal and One Recent Thomism,” Ayres calls into question some of the critical points advanced in Hutter’s essay, particularly his commitment to a “ressourcement Thomism” which is inextricably linked to the high point of the Church’s Scholastic tradition. Various duties will likely keep me from commenting on Ayres’s reply in depth for some time, but out of fairness to those interested in the direction of Catholic theology and renewal in general (whether traditional or not), I wanted to bring it to your attention.
As always, combox thoughts are most welcome.
Weekly Reading – 6/3/16 (Late Edition)
Since I am taking a sabbatical from posting original content on Opus Publicum, I thought I would bring back the “Weekly Reading” segments with some (light) commentary. I will be doing more re-posts from my previous web-logs shortly.
“Law School Trilogy” Posts
Note: The following — lengthy — post is a collection of three separate posts dealing with law school which appeared on Opus Publicum‘s predecessor, Ius Honoarium, in late 2011/early 2012. Since the question of my experience in law school (and after) arises from time to time, I thought it may be of some service to re-post them. At the time I wrote them, I was a faculty fellow at DePaul University College of Law. Please remember that these posts are nearly five years old; my thinking has developed on some of the sub-issues addressed below.
Unimaginative Postscript to Blogging Fragments
Note: This post originally appeared on September 11, 2011 on Ius Honorarium, the predecessor web-log to the first Opus Publicum, where I mostly wrote about law and politics. I am posting it here as an example of how my thinking on liberalism generally and libertarianism specifically “evolved.” Given what I have written over the past few years, some of you may find this amusing — particularly my opening line about moving past the old days of watching hours of international professional wrestling.
Americanism?
Note: This post originally appeared on January 6, 2014 on the original Opus Publicum. It is being re-posted here with slight edits.
Announcements
Those who follow me on Facebook are already aware of this, but for those who do not I wanted to announce two things.
First, I have accepted an offer to become assistant editor at Angelus Press, the publishing arm of the Society of St. Pius X. In addition to my day-to-day editorial duties, I will also be concentrating more on contributing original pieces for their various publishing endeavors. (For those interested in my prior contributions to the Society’s English-language magazine, The Angelus, please consult the “Writings” section of this web-log.)
Second, in order to concentrate my energies on my new position, I am putting a moratorium on new writing for Opus Publicum with the caveat that I will begin re-posting pieces from earlier iterations of this blog which readers have been requesting for some time. I will also use the blog to keep people posted on my off-blog writings and other matters which may be of interest.
Please don’t misunderstand. This is not the end of Opus Publicum and certainly not the end of my online presence. Your prayers during this time of transition are most appreciated.
A Thought on Banning Pornography, And Other Things
Matthew Schmitz, literary editor at First Things, wants to ban pornography. Good for him. The problem, of course, is that it’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. Still, there is something to Schmitz’s argument which, unsurprisingly, is framed in largely utilitarian terms, perhaps because speaking of the divine and natural-law prohibitions on such garbage is not something the Washington Post (or its readers) is all that interested in. Fine. Schmitz wants to convince readers that pornography ought to be banned because it causes “social harm” without actually providing a working definition of what, in fact, constitutes a “social harm.” Granted, there is a healthy pile of research available linking pornography consumption to misogyny and violence against women, but so what? Why should any society be concerned with manufacturing an egalitarian view of the sexes? What is intrinsically wrong with one sex viewing the other as inferior and, from there, treating them so? Perhaps pornography feeds into that perception, or maybe it’s just a symptom of it. Either way, in a day and age where slaughtering babies and sending entire regions of the earth into political and moral chaos is commonplace, making pornography out to be a “social harm” that needed to be rectified yesterday is a hard, hard sell.
Now, lest anyone misunderstand what I am saying, let me be clear that I have no quarrel whatsoever with banning pornography — or a host of other forms of speech which have no place in a decent society. Late last year, over at Ethika Politika, I defended the practice of banning books while leaning heavily on St. Alphonsus’s moral theology. Moreover, when writing about the Charlie Hebdo murders, I (controversially) maintained that no man has a right to commit blasphemy. (For more on the fall-out over those comments, see this.) For what it’s worth, I am far more uncomfortable living in a society that allows — even encourages — God to be openly mocked, scorned, and belittled than one which has become so morally twisted that it cannot distinguish between obscenity and art. And might I go a bit further and say that there will always be something unsettling about a state which officially refuses to acknowledge the social rights of Christ the King and thus fails to conform its laws and regulations to His divine precepts.
As for Schmitz’s utilitarian case against pornography, it’s a mixed bag. While there is plenty of social-science research — and anecdotal evidence — to back up some of what Schmitz says, it stands to reason that there are plenty of individuals who “use porn” who do not develop any misogynistic tendencies nor have a disordered sex life (as judged by today’s lights). It is also quite possible to pitch a counter-case against Schmitz which, on the one hand, concedes that there are some types of pornography which ought to be banned (e.g., overt depictions of rape) while, on the other, holding that most other types are purely consensual in their depictions and therefore should be allowed. Then the question becomes, “Where do you draw the line?” Because legal jargon and judicial decisions are, more times than not, clumsy instruments of social control, it’s not terribly surprising that legal institutions have steadily steered clear of trying to define and enforce obscenity laws — something Schmitz wishes were enforced with greater vigor. The only way to avoid the difficulty of “marginal cases” is to be perfectly blunt what what should or should not be produced and displayed. St. Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity? Yes. Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus? Absolutely not.
A Remark on Traditionalists and Collegiality
Rorate Caeli ran an odd post (for a traditionalist website) on Saturday decrying “false collegiality.” Why? Because the Holy See is now demanding that it must be consulted in advance of bishops establishing new institutes of consecrated life with their respective dioceses. While this move—which could have negative consequences for conservative and traditional institutes—does indeed appear to be a slap in the face to the idea of collegiality in the Church, since when have traditional Latin Catholics cared about such a thing? For nearly fifty years traditionalists have been attacking the very idea of collegiality since the promulgation of Lumen Gentium at the Second Vatican Council. Generally stated, traditionalists worry that collegiality undermines the authority of the pope by disrupting its inherent monarchical structure (assuming the Church has ever truly had such a structure as many traditionalists conceive of it today). Even during the days of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, when my traditionalists felt alienated from the Church and unhappy with various decrees emanating from the Vatican, they continued to call for an end to collegiality, or at least a reformulation of the concept along papal-monarchical lines. So what has changed? Has Francis’s pontificate become so nauseating to their ecclesiastical tastes that they are now willing to flip on collegiality, desiring for its full return rather than suffer from the apparent horrors of centralization?
Granted, there is plenty of room offered up by this recent move concerning institutes of consecrated life to wonder about the intentions and motives of Pope Francis. Francis, who has never been shy about speaking on the need for great collegiality and doctrinal decentralization in the Church, doesn’t seem to be following his own mind, at least not on this matter. Moreover, there have been plenty of points during Francis’s pontificate where it appears that he wants his own personal form of piety and idiosyncratic understandings of Catholic teaching to become normative for the universal Church without regard to the Church’s rich history of diversity. And he has certainly had no problem preempting the heads of particular churches in dealing with non-Catholic Christians, such as failing to invite Patriarch Sviatoslav of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (or any official UGCC representatives) to his historic meeting with Moscow Patriarch Kirill.
As I have written about elsewhere, there is a concerning inconsistently among some traditional Catholics when it comes to how the Church should be organized and governed. During this period of crisis when it seems that many popes and bishops have failed in their duty toward Christ and the Church, traditionalists long for decentralization, autonomy, and the right to follow their own consciences. But assuming things take a turn for the traditional, then many of these Catholics will no doubt agitate for a return to a strict monarchical model where the pope behaves more like the President of the United States and less like the Supreme Court. If anything now is the time for traditionalists, in concert with other serious Catholic thinkers, to reflect long and hard about the nature of the papacy, particularly as that nature is distorted or enhanced by the era of the “celebrity pope” and the ubiquity of modern media. If traditionalists desire neither collegiality nor centralization
A Passing (Personal) Comment on “Academic Institutes”
After posting earlier about think tanks, a friend of mine messaged me to inquire whether the black-box nature of think tanks is also present in formal academic institutes, that is, subdivisions existing within university schools or departments which are dedicated to a particularized field of study. The reason he asked me this is because I spent nearly five years associated with one directed toward international aviation law and had up-close familiarity with numerous others covering, inter alia, human rights, intellectual property, and animal law (ugh). My frank answer was, “I don’t know. It depends.” I realize that’s not terribly helpful, but given the sheer size and diversity of academic institutes out there, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to color them all with a single bucket of paint. Besides, I know very little about the nature of institutes dedicated to, say, the physical sciences or the arts; my “realm” was always law. With that out of the way, I do think it is fair to say that legal-academic institutes which rely heavily on donor money, particularly corporate and special-interest donor money, are always at risk of being captured ideologically. For instance, here is an excerpt from the mission statement of my former institute, which appears on its website:
IALI [The International Aviation Law Institute] strives to be the premier source for research, analysis, and study of international aviation law and policy. To achieve this mission, IALI is engaged in educating the next generation of experts in aviation law and policy through both its journal, Issues in Aviation Law and Policy, and its academic programs; originating and disseminating groundbreaking research and analysis of timely issues in aviation law and policy for the benefit of academics, policymakers and industry stakeholders; and acting as a forum to inform, advocate and promote a liberal, free market approach to the transnational air transport industry.
Notice the last sentence: IALI exists to “act[] as a forum to inform, advocate and promote a liberal, free market approach to the transnational airport industry” (emphasis mine). (In the interest of full disclosure, dear readers, I had a direct hand in penning that line many moons ago.) It should come as no surprise that IALI receives direct support from several major international carriers, including United and FedEx, and regularly participates in conferences dedicated to air-transport liberalization. (Also in the interest of full disclosure, dear readers, I directly benefited from this donor money for most of my time with IALI.) I can say from personal experience that that there was little-to-no tolerance at IALI or among its allies for any research or writing suggesting that the air-transport industry and its workers may be better off through the introduction of more regulation or transnational oversight. Indeed, the only time regulation was ever mentioned with a positive ring is when it protected airlines colluding with each other under blanket grants of antitrust immunity. When I authored (eventually co-authored) an article published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, I was compelled to insert footnotes and qualifying language suggesting that not only should international air carriers not be subject to transnational emissions regulations, but that man-made climate change itself is possibly a myth. The donor base for IALI would have been unhappy otherwise.
How common this behavior is among legal-academic institutes is anyone’s guess, though very few exist without external support. There has been a longstanding suspicion that institutes dedicated to the so-called “Law & Economics” movement have been directed primarily by interests favoring free-market capitalism. Similarly, human-rights law institutes invariably favor Western, liberal-democratic responses to human-rights issues and act to promote an Enlightenment-era conception of “rights” rather than, say, study the efficacy of international human rights law (a far more defensible academic enterprise). Given how closely law is intertwined with policy and politics, I would not be the least bit surprised to find that a majority of legal-academic institutes directed by particular ideological orientations that favor the interests of their respective donors.