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Paul Griffiths on Richard Rodriguez

Paul J. Griffiths is the Warren Chair of Catholic Theology at Duke University.  He has a wonderful review, here, of Richard Rodriguez's new book, Darling:  A Spiritual Autobiography.  An excerpt from Griffith's review:

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Among the impurities the Church might want to cleanse herself of is people like Rodriguez, he thinks, because he prefers to share his love and his bed and his life with a man rather than a woman.  He takes the Church to be wrong doctrinally about homosexual acts, and often wrong, too, in what it teaches about women.  He would like the Church to take instruction on these matters, as Jesus also did, from Mary, another darling in these pages.  And he thinks that if it did, the Church’s self-shrouding fear might grow less and its loving embrace of pain might show itself more clearly.

I don’t agree with every position taken in Darling, or with every argument offered.  On Islam, I suspect that what’s needed at the moment isn’t emphasis on the similarities among the three so-called Abrahamic religions as desert faiths, real though these are, but rather on difference and complementarity.  The recent work of Rémi Brague on this, especially On the God of the Christians (and on one or two others), is especially instructive.  On homosexuality and homosexual acts, by contrast, I think Rodriguez much closer to being right than not.  Insofar as such acts are motivated by and evoke love, they are good and to be loved; insofar as they do not, not. In this, they are no ­different from ­heterosexual acts.

There are other interesting differences between the two kinds of act.  But if you think, as Rodriguez seems to, and I do, and all Catholics should, that we live in a devastated world in which no sexual acts are undamaged, free from the taint of sin and death and the concomitant need for lament, then the fact that ­homosexual acts have their own characteristic disorder is no ground for blindness to the goods they enshrine.  Gay men should, of course, darling one ­another; those of us whose darlings are of the opposite sex should be glad that they do, and glad of instruction in love by the ways in which they do.  Love is hard enough to come by in a devastated world without encouraging blindness to its presence.

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Again, the entire review is here.

Hobby Lobby: It's Only Money

In the oral argument in the Hobby Lobby case the other day, Paul Clement argued for the corporation and characterized the central issue as “who’s going to pay for the government subsidy” of insurance for expensive contraceptives such as the IUD. The owners of Hobby Lobby are religiously opposed to paying for contraception. They argue someone else should pay. Of course, if they win, it is likely that Congress will not authorize payment at all, and thousands of Hobby Lobby employees will be denied the benefit.

It is unclear why Hobby Lobby’s objection should win the day. Millions of Americans pay taxes supporting activities they believe to be immoral including wars. Their compelled support is not unconstitutional. The government in Hobby Lobby could have structured the insurance contribution as a tax that would be used to buy insurance. Indeed, if Hobby Lobby does not purchase insurance, it is required to pay a tax.

In my view, many of those who object to this provision of the Affordable Care Act came to their religious position out of opposition to President Obama and the act altogether. The question of how much complicity with what is perceived to be wrong is exquisitely difficult. I do not question their sincerity and I have no knowledge of the views of Hobby Lobby’s employers though I think their insurance coverage once covered contraceptives. However one comes to a sincere religious objection should not matter even if the process was fueled by politics.

Nonetheless, assuming sincerity, as I do, the question of whether a substantial burden is present is a legal question, not a religious one. As the Solicitor General pointed out at oral argument, the parent in Bowen sincerely objected to the government’s use of a social security number for the child, but the government ruled that the burden was not legally substantial. Here too, in my view, the burden is not substantial. It’s only money. The form in which the government takes it doesn’t matter.

 

Robert Grosseteste -- yes, that Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), the medieval thinker and the bishop of Lincoln -- has made scientific headlines.  A collaboration between physicists and medievalists has found that "[i]n his treatise on light, written in about 1225, Robert Grosseteste describes a cosmological model in which the Universe is created in a big-bang like explosion and subsequent condensation."

No, Grosseteste had not secretly solved Einstein's theory of relativity or performed the other equations necessary to prove the Big Bang as scientists describe it today.  But Grosseteste was a keen observer of the world around him, a dedicated scientist, and a man fearless in exploring the frontiers of knowledge.  He had insightful and original things to say, particularly about the nature of light.  And, yes, he was a bishop of the Catholic Church, although (perhaps this comes as no surprise) he had frosty relations both with the popes of his day and the archbishop of Canterbury.

I am reminded of Grossetestes' contributions to scientific advancement when I see the reaction of biblical fundamentalists to the remake of Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  Three decades after Sagan first brought theorizing about the universe and all within it to the popular imagination, this new version of Cosmos means to present, in docu-drama format, the recent discoveries in the world of science.

The episodes that have aired so far might be subject to some mild criticism.  (I wish, for example, that Grosseteste might have been given equal time as that tragic episode in church history, the condemnation and burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno).  That said, I like Cosmos.  I like its commitment to curiosity, to imagination, to its cheerful admonition to always be daring in the pursuit of truth.  I like the story it has told so far, about how the universe assumed the shape it has today, and how life evolved from simple to complex.

However, I am dismayed (though perhaps I should not be surprised) by the request by Answers in Genesis for equal time in Cosmos for creationist viewpoints.  Answers in Genesis is the organization founded and managed by the Australian preacher Kenneth Ham and dedicated to a literal young-Earth creationism that declares that the Earth was created in six 24-hour days around 6,000 years ago.  Kenneth Ham is also the moving force behind the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky and Bill Nye's recent debating partner on the subject of evolution.  He is even now engaged in raising funds to build a large mockup of what he thinks Noah's Ark might have looked like.

As I wrote last May, Christians must confront scientific illiteracy.  And this is a good opportunity to do so.  Answers in Genesis should absolutely not receive any air time.  None.  They do not have a valid scientific viewpoint to present, and television networks should not humor them by pretending they have something valuable to say.

Let us consider the review of the Cosmos episode "Standing Up in the Milky Way" that appeared on the Answers in Genesis website on March 11, 2014.  Signed by Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, a Tennessee obstetrician, the review challenged the "cosmic calendar," which estimates the age of the observable universe to 13.8 billion years.  Dismissively placing quotation marks around "observational science," Mitchell attacks the 13.8-billion number as something that is based on "interpretations of scientific data."

Mitchell wields the term "interpretations" like a dirty word.  To her, there are "observations," that are pure and pristine, and "interpretations," which are flawed human suppositions about what the observations say.  Mitchell, of course, knows better.  She know. She must know. Her medical education would have taught her this much, that data, standing alone, cannot convey meaning.  Data is nothing more than meaningless trivia without an intelligent mind seeking to order it, arrange it, give it meaning -- in a word, interpret it.  Interpretation is essential to scientific inquiry, as, indeed, it is to all learning.

Unfortunately, the Answers in Genesis project rests on nothing more than insinuations meant to arouse suspicions in the unsophisticated or the unwary.  In brief, it does not seek to be scientific so much as to treat scientific inquiry as a conspiracy theory by secularists intending to undermine a good, old biblical worldview.

Mitchell, who seems to present herself as some kind of expert on the origins of life, has produced a whole stream of essays in the same vein as her review of Cosmos.  In an essay on March 15, 2014, she purports to debunk some recent findings about the "Cambrian explosion," that period of time, around 550 million years ago, that saw an explosion of multicellular life.  What caused this sudden explosion?  What role did oxygenation play?  And what led to the oxygenation?  Primitive sponges growing in shallow seas?  Small, unicellular animals?  Serious scientists are engaged in vigorous debate on these questions.

Mitchell, however, takes the existence of this debate as evidence of an irresolvable controversy that ought to be answered by recourse to the Bible:  "[I]f we accept God's eyewitness account in the Bible declaring that He created a habitable earth and all kinds of living things about 6,000 years ago," then this debate is put to rest.

Again, this is not science.  It is not even good theology, even assuming for the moment that the creation account was meant to be taken literally.  Mitchell describes God as giving an "eyewitness account."  But nothing in the creation account makes this claim.  The creation account is a third-person narrative, told by an unidentified third party, reciting stories of God's mighty deeds.  To say that it is an "eyewitness" account, in other words, is an interpretation not derivable from the words of the text.

For its success, Answers in Genesis depends on something very deep in the American folk consciousness: conspiracy theory.  You can go all the way back to the beginning of the Republic and find embedded in the American consciousness a suspicion that there were roomfuls of very intelligent men and women conspiring clandestinely to bring about wicked results. Taking Answers in Genesis' requests for equal air time would only contribute to rising scientific illiteracy in this country.  And in a competitive global marketplace, where science is the key to remaining an advanced society, Answers in Genesis must remain on the margins.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/cosmos-answers-in-genesis-and-science-as-conspiracy-theory_b_5021874.html

Tea Party Politics v. Collective Intelligence & Rule of the Many: The (elusive) Virtues of Democratic Reason

Grassroots Tea Partiers see themselves in a last-ditch effort to save “their country,” and big-money ideologues are determined to undercut Democrats and sabotage active government. They are in this fight for the long haul. Neither set of actors will stand down easily or very soon. [….] [I]t will take a long and dogged struggle to root out radical obstructionism on the right, and the years ahead could yet see Tea Partiers succeed by default. Unless non-Tea Party Republicans, independents, and Democrats learn both to defeat and to work around anti-government extremism—finding ways to do positive things for the majority of ordinary citizens along the way—Tea Party forces will still win in the end. They will triumph just by hanging on long enough to cause most Americans to give up in disgust on our blatantly manipulated democracy and our permanently hobbled government.—Theda Skocpol

In a liberal democratic polity, “[m]uch of what goes on in actual social and political bargaining…concern[s] the negotiation and renegotiation of beliefs.”[1] In a legislative assembly, we find bargaining alongside another form of communication or “speech act,” arguing. Both arguing and bargaining as speech acts occur in the context of the collective decision-making of legislative bodies that typically conclude with the act of voting (and ‘vote trading,’ as a form of bargaining, may be part of this aggregation of preferences). Robert Goodin notes that disputes over beliefs are occasionally resolved through persuasion, but more often they’re “resolved” through negotiation. In such cases, the parties retain belief in the truth of their respective beliefs, but seeing the need to “get on with it” (e.g., governing; doing something rather nothing; having some predictable and tangible effect on a problem rather than effectively ignoring it, and so forth), are willing to work toward decisions that allow them to retain their beliefs but act “as if” other propositions may be true (for the time being at least or until such time as they may prove otherwise). The propositions agreed to through such bargaining or negotiation are therefore treated “as if true” for the purposes at hand, so as to come to a resolution, arrive at a decision, determine this or that course of coordinated action. When the give-and-take of bargaining is successful, according to Goodin, it ends in an agreement, an agreement on “what we will do, and why.” As to arguing, those representing the Tea Party in the legislature believe such arguments should only end in consensus: in final agreement on their political views. Short of consensus, arguments are merely rhetorical formulations designed for mass media consumption, hence the voting of legislator is of little value (say, to identify the enemy) unless there’s assurance it will end in consensual agreement on their platform (or some component part thereof).

More could be said (and Goodin has much more to say) about such bargaining, but it suffices to demonstrate how Tea Party activists and politicians are conspicuous in their stubbornness with regard to acting as if they’ll succeed only through argument that ends in persuading or convincing those who disagree with them in the (absolute) truth of their political “agenda.” This helps explain their recalcitrant refusal to negotiate, which is couched in the rhetoric of political “principle” so as to appear to be taking the high road above the dark and dire world of conventional politics, the former possessing putative revolutionary resonance in the politics of the Founding Fathers and an ostensibly “popular originalist” reading of the Constitution. The ritual invocation of principle reflects rather a collective self-righteousness and an unwarranted confidence in the absolute veracity of their beliefs, in other words, an unwillingness to concede that it’s possible they may be mistaken or wrong, in addition to reckless disregard of the likely harmful socio-economic and political consequences of such arrogant confidence. It further reflects their belief that “no-governance” is a perfectly acceptable political outcome (a satisfactory default position as it were), a viable alternative to some-governance, real-world effects on people’s lives be damned. In turn, this unduly restricts (or insulates or diminishes) the scope and content of otherwise “public reasons” insofar as parties are assumed to (or should) be arguing and bargaining over reasons, values, and interests among a public (or publics). Why? Because it effectively ignores the fact that such political deliberation necessarily entails arguing and bargaining in recognition of differential perceptions of the most compelling public reasons about what is in the public interest, about what constitutes the common good. It is in that case, that the need to come to a political resolution among the parties, to act in one way or another, perforce must allow for a decision to be reached that may and usually does fall considerably short of anything close to the rational persuasion or conversion of one party by another party of the (absolute) truth of its agenda.

What makes for politics here, with regard to the common good at least, is a zero-sum game, and for the Tea Party itself, a winner-take-all game. For Tea Party members, second- or third-best scenarios do not exist: what is not at the top of their preference ranking is by definition at the bottom. Agreeing to joint action is not a sufficient reason to engage in give-and-take bargaining, to reach compromises of some sort, for to let another party—in the end, and this time ‘round at least—prevail, is out of the question, for that is to relativize absolute truth, to compromise on patriotic principle. Reasoning together in the legislature as a whole, on this account, can never improve the prospects for “just” legislation:

“I may think politically as the partisan of a particular conception of justice competing uncompromisingly with its rivals. But I cannot think responsibly about institutions if my thinking is dominated completely by my substantive political convictions. To think about institutions and politics, I must be willing at least part of the time to view even my own convictions about justice—however true or important I take them to be—as merely one set of convictions among others in society, and to address in a relatively neutral way the question of what we as a society are to do about the fact that people like me disagree with others in society about matters on which we need a common view. That is the logic of legislation. It is not an easy logic to live with, for it entails that much of the time one will be party to—or, at the very least, one’s name will be associated with—the sharing and implementation of a view about justice that is not one’s own.”[2]

The collective endeavors served by meeting the responsibilities intrinsic to democratic representation cannot trump the essentially libertarian agenda for Tea Party Republicans, for they must act merely, hence solely, as populist (i.e., direct and unreflective) representatives of a (neoliberal and extremist right-wing) political agenda, thus neither in the first instance or incidentally as guardians or trustees of a common good arrived at though (indirect and reflective) democratic processes of representation and deliberation that, in part, at least, must resort to bargaining and negotiation so as to responsibly govern in a liberal democratic fashion. In other words, Tea Party members let their commitment to largely libertarian and neo-conservative politics and values run roughshod over a possibly deeper or simply prior commitment to democratic decision-making and the institutional bodies designed to give voice to the sovereignty of “the people.” Tea Party members do not believe in the wisdom of “the people” as democratically constituted by legislative assemblies (one reason we refer so often to and well understand the meaning of ‘Tea Party obstructionism’). Put differently, they do not believe that “[t]he people acting as a body are capable of making better decisions by pooling their knowledge, experience, and insight, than any subset of the people acting as a body and pooling the knowledge, experience, and insight of the members of the subset.”[3] In short, the Tea Party “subset” of “the people” believes it has a monopoly on knowledge, experience, and insight. To subject this knowledge, experience, and insight to the terms and conditions of negotiation and bargaining is to break up its ideological monopoly on what makes for justice, to abandon its factional vision of the Good, to soil its patriotic convictions. Their politics is at odds with what Rawls identified as a defining feature of a democratic political culture, namely, a “diversity of conflicting and irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines.” Tea Party members can never concede that those not persuaded by or convinced of its political platform may nonetheless be capable of articulating the “wisdom of the multitude” in an Aristotelian sense, that those who disagree with them may turn out to be the better judges “not only of matters of fact, not only of social utility, but also and most importantly of matters of value, matters of principle and the nature of the good life….”[4]

For the Tea Party, the legislative product of political argument and bargaining—and thus anything short of incarnating belief in the truth of its political agenda—must be characterized, ironically, as the “tyranny of the majority.” The Tea Party is not committed to pluralist politics, to granting the likelihood let alone the virtues of persisting political disagreements, what Waldron argues “must be regarded…as one of the elementary conditions of modern politics,” such disagreement being part and parcel of the Humean-like (i.e., conducted within the constraints of scarcity and limited altruism) “circumstances of politics.” Tea Party aficionados can never concede that “our common basis for action in matters of justice has to be forged in the heat of our disagreements.”[5] Only legislative enactment of Tea Party principles and political goals would warrant their possibly speaking of the “dignity of legislation,” there being nothing whatsoever virtuous or accomplished in the mere “achievement of concerted, cooperative, coordinated or collective action” as such, whatever the circumstances of modern life.

Deliberative democratic politics, on this view, is valuable only to the extent we persuade or convert others to the truth of our political program: only their preferences are potentially subject to deliberative transformation, for ours has the sanctity of correct conviction, a salvific or messianic monopoly on truth. On this view, there can be no “epistemic” case for democracy, for there is no such thing as “democratic reason” if that is premised upon a sufficient degree of cognitive diversity and achieved through processes of deliberation (including arguing and bargaining) and majority rule, for democratic reason is “conditional on the existence of a social and cultural context.” The Tea Party seeks to overcome or transcend or subsume that context within its political “subset,” that is, it is dispositionally hostile to any social milieu that “nurtures and protects, among other differences, cognitive differences.”[6] The Tea Party enables us to see the vices of an illiberal or authoritarian democratic politics that seek, in the end, to “foster conformism of views and stifle dissent” (its dissent is nonetheless of strategic and contingent value). In doing so, its partisans cavalierly risk the distortion of “both deliberation and majority rule into dangerous mechanisms for collective unreason, depriving themselves in particular of the possibility to come up with efficient solutions to collective problems, accurate information aggregation, and reliable predictions.”[7]

Notes:

[1] Robert E. Goodin, Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003): 75. Cf.: “The upshot of bargaining over beliefs is…not any change in people’s beliefs. Nor is it simply an ‘agreement to disagree.’ The upshot of bargaining over beliefs is instead that bargainers settle on some course of action, together with some rationale as to how it is supposed to work to produce the desired results. In the course of that, they agree to treat certain beliefs ‘as if they were true.’ But they definitely do so in the subjunctive case—in the tentative and hypothetical way in which propositions being tested are treated in scientific experiments.” Goodin: 86-87.

[2] Jeremy Waldron, The Dignity of Legislation (Cambridge University Press, 1999): 91.

[3] Ibid., 94.

[4] Ibid., 105-106.

[5] Ibid., 155.

[6] Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2013).

[7] Ibid., 234.

The Abortion Cases, Revisited

I just posted a paper to SSRN that will be of interest, I think, to some RLL readers.  The paper is available here.  The abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the criminalization of abortion both as a human rights issue and, especially, as a constitutional issue.

Governments are free, insofar as internationally recognized human rights are concerned, not to ban abortion. The serious question, which I address in this paper, is whether governments are also free, insofar as international human rights are concerned, to ban abortion. In particular: Is it a violation of a woman’s human rights for a country to ban abortion? One of the world’s most important human rights NGOs—Human Rights Watch—has answered in the affirmative.

Whatever the answer to the preceding question, a different question remains, and it is one of the most perennially contested questions in American constitutional studies: Were the Abortion Cases correctly decided?

Of all the constitutional rulings by the Supreme Court since the end of the Second World War, none have been more persistently controversial than the Court’s rulings, in 1973, in the Abortion Cases: Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. In Roe, the Court invalidated a Texas law that banned all abortions except those necessary to save the life of the mother. The Georgia law at issue in Doe was more permissive; it exempted abortions necessary “because (1) a continuation of the pregnancy would endanger the life of the pregnant woman or would seriously and permanently injure her health; or (2) the fetus would very likely be born with a grave, permanent, and irremediable mental or physical defect; or (3) the pregnancy resulted from forcible or statutory rape.” Nonetheless, the Court invalidated the Georgia law. In 1992, four Supreme Court justices voted to overrule the Abortion Cases; a bare majority of the Court—five justices—refused to go along. In 2014, over forty years after the Court’s rulings in the Abortion Cases, four justices, given the opportunity, would almost certainly vote to overrule the Abortion Cases: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.

The conclusion I reach in this paper—that the Supreme Court’s ruling against the Texas law, but not its ruling against the Georgia law, was warranted—is, of course, controversial: Many insist that both rulings were warranted; many others, that neither ruling was warranted. Although controversial, the position at which I have arrived brings me into alignment—for me, comfortable alignment—with the position espoused by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1985, when she was a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit: In the Abortion Cases, then-Judge Ginsburg wrote, the Supreme Court should not have “gone beyond a ruling on the extreme [Texas] statute before the Court. . . . Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.”

This paper is one of a several connected papers that I have posted to SSRN in the last nine months, discussing “human rights in the constitutional law of the United States”—discussing, in particular, the implications of one or more constitutionally entrenched human rights for the divisive controversies over capital punishment, same-sex marriage, and, in this paper, abortion. A list of the papers is available here.

Eduardo Returns to Lead Cornell

Dear Friends, I am delighted to be able to report that our own Eduardo is to return to Cornell Law School this summer to serve as our new Dean.  The Law School's announcement is here. 

Toward the Recovery & Renewal of Philosophy

The Fight between Carnival and Lent, Pieter Bruegel (1559)

Individual understanding is…the primary aim of the activity thinking about life. Though you can indeed learn from those more experienced and wiser than yourself, you won’t count as learning at all if you can’t take on board what you hear from them. Understanding here is…manifest in what you can say only in the sense that your words are among your deeds. There must be some relationship between thinking well about life and living well, and the goal of the first is typically the second.

Here, then, is a parallel between thinking about life and thinking philosophically: the primary aim of each activity is individual understanding. [….] There is a sense in which a contemplative attitude is to be aimed at both in thinking about life and thinking philosophically, and a guiding principle of both activities is, or ought to be, to look to the bigger picture. [….]

The relevance of philosophy to real life, and to the ancient philosophical question ‘How should I live?’, has more than one aspect; but…one way in which philosophy is relevant to life would seem to be that thinking well about life and thinking well philosophically require similar traits of mind and character. Philosophy is not just something done by professional philosophers: any remotely reflective person philosophizes from time to time. And it is good for a society or a culture if the habit of philosophizing is generally valued.—Roger Teichmann in Nature, Reason, and the Good Life: Ethics for Human Beings (2011)

*           *           *

“’There is no time for playing around,’ says Seneca, attacking philosophers who devote their careers to logical puzzles. ‘…You have promised to bring help to the shipwrecked, the imprisoned, the sick, the needy, to those whose heads are under the poised axe. Where are you deflecting your attention? What are you doing?”—Seneca (Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, 48.8) quoted in Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994)

“Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.”—John Dewey (1917)

“… [Plato] speaks of a descending as well as an ascending dialectic and he speaks of a return to the cave.”—Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts” (1967)

“Philosophy involves us in the critical analysis of our beliefs, and of the presuppositions of our beliefs, and it’s a very striking fact that most people neither like doing this nor like having it done to them. If the assumptions on which their beliefs rest are questioned it makes them feel insecure, and they put up a strong resistance to it.”—Iris Murdoch in conversation with Bryan Magee (1978)

“… [It is no accident] that more and more philosophers are now being drawn into debates about environmental policy or medical ethics, judicial practice or nuclear politics. Some of them contribute to those debates happily: others look back at 300 years of professional tradition, and ask whether oral, particular, local, and timely issues are really their concern. They fear that engaging in ‘applied’ philosophy may prostitute their talents, and distract them from the technical questions of academic philosophy proper. Yet, one might argue, these practical debates are, by now, not ‘applied’ philosophy but philosophy itself. More precisely they are now (as Wittgenstein put it) the ‘legitimate heirs’ of the purely theoretical enterprise that used to be called philosophy; and, by pursuing them, we break down the 300-year old barriers between ‘practice’ and ‘theory’ and reenter the technical core of philosophy from a fresh and more productive direction.”—Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990)

“What, however, about philosophy? Here the subject-matter is the maps or structures by which thought works, and—as would probably be agreed today—thought is not something separate from life. Yet, from the first beginnings among the Greeks, there have always been some parts of philosophy which were fiercely technical. Is it possible both to handle these properly and do justice to the full richness of the questions as they arise in the life around us? Can anyone speak both as a fully instructed professional and as a whole human being? [….] For a long time, the English-speaking philosophical tradition mostly nailed its colours defiantly to the post of wholeness and life. Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill all emphatically meant their writings to be widely read and to affect people’s lives. Even Bertrand Russell still often did so. But William James and John Dewey were among the last influential figures to follow this track whole-heartedly. In the twentieth-century, philosophy has largely gone with the rest of the academic world in accepting thorough specialization.”—Mary Midgley, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers (1996)

“A good many academic philosophers, for much of our own century, have strenuously resisted the idea that philosophy can help us with how to live. And while others, particularly in more recent times, have addressed questions about happiness and well-being, for the most part they have shrunk from offering more direct guidance on these matters to their fellow citizens. This generalization, like most, is subject to notable exceptions, but it remains true that the bulk of work on philosophical ethics is now addressed to those within the specialist confines of the academy. As far as the educated public is concerned, philosophy may, in the growing field of applied ethics, be perceived as making an increasingly important contribution on matters of public policy (problems concerned with such issues as the distribution of resources, the justification of punishment, the morality of abortion, and so forth); but few probably now expect much help from philosophers in the task of trying to live fulfilled lives. If they are miserable, or find their lives in a mess, they much more likely to turn to psychotherapy than to philosophy for guidance. [….]

The aspiration of philosophical reason to lay down a blueprint for how we should live tends to run aground when trying to deal with that side of our human nature which is largely opaque to the deliverances of reason—that affective side which has to do with the origins and operation of the emotions or passions. It is here that the contributions of psychoanalytic theory play a vital role. Though largely ignored by most specialists in moral philosophy, the concept of the unconscious turns out to have profound implications for the traditional task of ethics to seek out the conditions for human fulfillment.—John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life (1998)

Imagination & Power

“The structures of power have an astonishing stability. In the large range of constructive imagining of options we turn again and again to archetypal patterns, to the Charismatic Leader, the of the Band of the Brotherhood Committee, to the Pure Young Hero, to the Good-Bad Earth Mother. Why are our imaginations of power structures so fixed? It is because we learn from experience; and our most formative experiences of power, and of power relations, are those we have during our prolonged and wholly dependent infancy. While this prolonged infancy makes empathy and psychological complexity possible, it exacts a cost. We are formed not only by what we have learned from experience, but by the ways we learn. [emphasis added] As long as we are in a complex and often highly benign compliance to those who nurtured and sustained us as infants, we associate security and well-being with dependence on power figures. It is to those beginnings that our imaginations return when we are discomforted, depleted, in need. Even though we eventually chafed at the restrictions of our nurturing figures, even though, if we were lucky, we developed sympathy and autonomy, we still have as part of our expectations our early experiences of childhood where reality meant dependency, being Subject to a Boss. If that relation was a benign one, we are all the more subject to gravitate to reconstructing it when we are troubled; but if it was a malign relation, then we are all the more incapacitated. For then a malign power relation is what we expect of the world. It is what defined normality. And of course if it was malign, then we are crippled in our abilities to envisage alternative structures.”—Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, from her essay, “Imagination and Power, Social Sciences Information 22 (New Delhi, 1983): 801-816, reprinted in Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988): 330-345.

Pope Francis: A Year in the Life

It has been a year since the white smoke poured forth from the chimney erected atop the Sistine Chapel signaling the election of Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis. His election has ushered in significant developments in the way the Papacy does business and how that influences the Church and the world. Let's review a few:

1. Pope Francis is not afraid to reveal his humanity.

In his interview with Corriere della Sera just a few days ago, he dropped revealing hints about the relationship he had with his girlfriend before seminary days.  But he has been upfront about his humanity from the very beginning. He paid his own hotel bill following his election. He lives not in the Apostolic Palace, but modestly in a guest house on Vatican grounds, surrounded by the comings and goings of people with every day concerns. He invites homeless people to dine with him.  He poses for a "selfie" with a group of visiting Italian teenagers. The self-imposed austerity and aloofness of prior popes is not part of his way of doing business.

2. He has invented new ways of talking.

Because the papacy represents the highest teaching authority in the Catholic Church, its modes of speech have been carefully circumscribed by tradition and law. Popes teach through encyclicals, or allocutions, or apostolic exhortations. These forms of speech have precisely graded values which allow Catholics to know how much solemnity should attach.

Pope Francis, however, speaks in new and bold ways. He gives newsmaker interviews, and big ones. He holds long press conferences on airplanes. He sits for interviews not just with the Catholic press but the Italian secular press -- even La Repubblica, owned and edited by one of Italy's foremost atheist public intellectuals. He gives off-the-cuff, down-to-earth sermons. He warns vividly against sins -- gluttony, greed, gossip -- and calls people to follow Christ by paying heed to the least among us. He even cold-calls people who write to him asking for prayers.

3. He is thereby demystifying the papal monarchy. 

He refers to himself, accurately, but modestly, as "Bishop of Rome." He means thereby to remind his brother bishops of their role as collegial governors of the Church. When it came time to renew his passport, he did so as an Argentinian. As a head of state, he is entitled to travel on a Vatican City passport. But it seems he wishes to reduce the earthly, secular side of the Catholic Church and this is a small step in that direction. The logic of the papal monarchy, after all, ran its course in the 1870's when Pope Pius IX lost the papal state to Garibaldi. And Pope Francis, in many respects, is completing that logical development as he deemphasizes all of the renaissance ritual that still surrounds the Holy See.

4. He is renewing our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus.

Jesus' central concern was service to the margins of society. He called tax collectors and prostitutes to be among his closest followers. He dined with sinners. He rescued a woman about to be stoned for adultery. He sat down with the Samaritan woman at the well, who had been married five times and was now living with a man who was not her husband, and he promised her the gift of eternal life. Time and again, Jesus emphasized that his followers had to put the poor first and foremost in their hearts and minds.

And in large ways and small, Pope Francis is trying to imitate Jesus.  African economic immigrants are shunned in Italy.  And so Pope Francis traveled to Lampedusa to welcome them and to mourn the many who die every year trying to cross the Mediterranean.  He washed the feet of a youthful Muslim woman confined in a Roman prison last Holy Thursday.  And over and over again, he calls attention to the plight of the poor.  An economy that mourns the loss of stock market valuation while ignoring the needs of the homeless, the destitute, the mentally and emotionally ill, is a dehumanizing economy, an economy in need of reformation.

5. Pope Francis has taken the Church's focus off of a single-minded obsession with theological correctness. 

In 1978, when Pope John Paul II was elected, the great preoccupation was the restoration of ecclesial discipline. And this became a major focus of his pontificate. Under the supervision of Joseph Ratzinger, his loyal prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, investigations were launched into dozens of Catholic writers. Hans Kung, Charles Curran, Leonardo Boff, and Gustavo Gutierrez were just a few of the better known names.

By 2013, the Church was suffocating in the grip of this boundary-police Catholicism. A search of the Catholic blogosphere would reveal dozens of websites dedicated to detailed and inward-looking analysis of correct practice and criticism and condemnation of anything that did not conform.

Pope Francis is not a border patrolman. He dismissed some of the more extreme aspects of this single-mindedness as "narcissism" and "pelagianism." He has recommended that Catholics "make a mess." In speaking with a group of Latin American nuns, he told them not to be afraid to make mistakes in the service of the Lord. Do not fear a letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he advised them. A living, growing Church is a Church that needs breathing room. It needs freedom. And Pope Francis is ready to let experiments flourish.

6. He has begun much-needed structural reform.

Realizing that the Curia has become sclerotic and dysfunctional, he has turned to a select group of eight cardinals, drawn from different corners of the world, to advise him on important matters confronting the Church. There is even speculation that he is planning to build a parallel Curia that can streamline and assume many of the old structure's duties.

Along these lines, perhaps the most important steps Francis has taken are with respect to Vatican finances. He named George Cardinal Pell as "Secretary for the Economy," tasking him with the administration of the Church's material wealth. He has also moved to reform the Vatican Bank, firing most of the old team and bringing in a new group of administrators. He has pledged transparency, and the early reports are good.

Still, the world waits for a more visible response on the matter of clerical sex abuse. The Pope's actions thus far have been timid. To be sure, Pope Benedict did more to remedy this grave injustice than he has received credit for, and the same may be true of Pope Francis. But the public must be reassured, and only visible, public action can provide the necessary reassurance.

7. Pope Francis has called a ceasefire in the culture wars.

As he revealed in his newspaper interviews, he is a man with a high regard for secular culture.  His favorite musicians, his favorite painters, his favorite movie directors, are all secular artists.  This is a man who does not see either himself or the Church as standing walled off from the world, a Fortress Ecclesia standing strong against  a secular tide. He is open to the good things that secular culture has to offer.

It is impossible to wage cultural war if you have an accepting view of the culture. And it is therefore not surprising that he wishes to deemphasize some of the hot button issues. He knows that the Church is crying out for internal reform, and that is where his energies must focus.

8.  "Who am I to judge?"

These five words may define Pope Francis' pontificate. He made this statement when asked about gays in the Church. "When God looks at a gay person does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?" So inquired Pope Francis. "We must always consider the person."

Pope Francis is a pastoral pope. And pastors always consider the person. His response to gays flows from his desire always to meet individuals in the circumstances of their lives.  Catholics believe that individuals are judged individually, on their merits, based on the particular realities of their lives.  What Pope Francis is doing is driving this point home. No categorical judgment is possible. Bloodless abstractions have no place. Only the person.

In his March 5 interview with Corriere della Sera, he said much the same thing about contraception. Paul VI's teaching on contraception was a beautiful statement, but it must be administered with "much mercy."  Its concrete application, in the lives of Catholics, is first and foremost a matter of conscience. This has always been Catholic teaching, of course, but it is an aspect of Catholic thought that was lost sight of amidst the grand theorizing of the last two pontificates.

The Jesuit Father John Langan, Professor of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown, has grasped this essential point in his essay on Pope Francis, "See the Person."  Coming from a pastoral perspective, Langan asserts that the Church must consider "a new stance on the subject of homosexuality."  Calling for "research ... across the fields of biology, medicine, social science, and ethics," Langan hopes for progress. He knows that the old way of doing business -- "we know what we know, what we don't know is not worth learning about" -- no longer works in the modern world. Pope Francis, with his "Who am I to judge?" has opened the door.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/pope-francis-a-year-in-th_b_4921732.html 

Giving Up Stress in Lent and Beyond

Saturday I observed in a post (here) that Taryn Mattice had sugggested her congregants might consider giving up stress for Lent. On Sunday, her bulletin contains a prayer adapted from an unfindable source that can be interpreted to develop that view. With the exception of the last line (asking Jesus to rescue us from darkness), the prayer should have nearly universal appeal:

We live in the darkness of worry, O God. We worry about so many things, and we even believe our worrying will make things better.

We live in the darkness of apathy, O God. When worry doesn’t work, we decide not to care anymore.

We live often in the darkness of gloom and despair. And we’re ashamed to admit that we find comfort in the darkness because at least it is familiar.

We live with forms of stress we do not need. As Mattice points out, giving them up, in Lent and beyond sure beats giving up chocolate.

Can non-human agents using computer language exemplify “knowing about the world?”

“To know something to be thus—and-so-is ability-like, hence more akin to a power or potentiality than to a state or actuality. To learn that something is so is to come to be able to do a wide range of things (to inform others, to answer certain questions, to correct others, to find, locate, identify, explain things, and so forth).”

“The information that things are thus-and-so may provide us with reasons, in the context of our projects, not only for acting, but also for thinking or feeling something or other (e.g. feeling pleased or angry).”

“One can learn how to do something by experience, trial and error, by being trained or taught, by being shown how to do it and, with human beings, by being told how to do it. What one knows how to do is something of which it makes sense to say that one has forgotten how to do, that one realized that one was doing it wrongly and that one tried to correct it oneself. For to know how to do something is to know the way to do it, and knowing the way to do it implies an ability to distinguish between doing it correctly and doing it incorrectly.”

“[O]ne may be able to do something although it would be wrong to say that one knows how to do it, and conversely, one may know how to do something but be unable to do it.” The aged tennis coach may no longer be able to play tennis, be he surely knows how to, and one may know perfectly well how to lose weight but be unable to [owing, say, to weakness of will].

“To know how to do something…is to know the way to do it, and to know the way to do something is often to know, and to be able to say or show, that it is done thus-and-so.”—M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003)

*    *    *

“But the general question of whether non-human agents using the Wolfram Language, or any other computer language, ‘know about the world’ in some suitable sense, that one still stands.” Please see “The Chinese Room all over again?” by Catarina Dutilh Novaes at the New APPS blog.

My response:

I understand knowledge, with Raymond Tallis, as fundamentally a mode of explicitness, of explicit-making consciousness. To elaborate a bit: after Grice, and in the words of Raymond Tallis, “linguistic meaning in the real world does not reside in the behavior of the symbols or expressions of which languages are composed—they are not located in ‘the system of symbols’ or its component terms—but in people who use languages to mean things, and the worlds they live in. This is because the specification of linguistic meanings requires that they are meant (by someone). What is more, in order that I should be able to determine what you mean, I have to intuit what you mean to mean.” This involves, as Searle shows, getting a listener to recognize my intention to communicate just those things I intended to say in the act of communication. One cannot ignore the speaking subject: “Our utterances are invested with, and exploit, an ‘implicature’ in virtue of which we can always imply more than we say. Verbal meaning, in short, resides in acts performed by human being who draw upon their knowledge of the world and make presuppositions about the knowledge possessed by their interlocutors.”

If one believes, as I do and again with Tallis (among others), and yet again after Grice (or Searle for that matter) that “[m]eaning cannot be separated from the psyche of the one who emits meaning, or from the psyche of the one who receives it,” and that our concept of knowledge is intimately tied to the various forms of memory (e.g., factual, experiential, and objectual), to emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and imagination, “the general question of whether non-human agents using the Wolfram Language, or any other computer language, ‘know about the world’ in some suitable sense” lacks any standing whatsoever. The question makes sense only if one thinks of meaning (which is, as Tallis says, ‘a quintessential feature of human consciousness’) “in purely linguistic terms and language being primarily a system of symbols.” One, it seems, has to have a (or something like a) “computational theory of mind” to imagine a computer language might exemplify having knowledge about the world (the relevant ‘knowledge’ here can only be metaphorical or secondary and derivative, parasitic in meaning on the knowledge possessed by those who program the computers, etc.). In short, knowledge requires “an enworlded self.” More explicitly:

“Knowledge begins with the sense of there being something beyond how things appear to us: it begins with the concept of an object that is other than the self who entertains the notion of an object. Implicit in the idea of the object is the intuition of the subject contrasted with the object; more precisely, the Existential Intuition ‘That I am this….’ [the nature and origin of which are discussed in Tallis’s 2004 volume, I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being] Object knowledge [even Kleinian ‘internal objects’!] is also permeated [as ‘Wittgensteinians’ remind us] by a sense of publicness—of a shared world—that is not available to asocial sentience or asocial neural activities [or an electronic device that performs high-speed arithmetical and logical operations].”

Intentionality is a feature of perceptions, of propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, and of utterances such as assertions. This necessarily implicates consciousness, consciousness of something…. Computers are without minds, the most conspicuous feature of which is consciousness. And consciousness cannot be reduced to material or biological or neurological properties: in other words, materialism cannot account for the “indexicality of human consciousness” in the sense of being “here”and “now” as Tallis says, similar to the Da-sein Heidegger identifies as the essence of the human being (Tallis provides compelling arguments against attempts to neurologize ‘here’ and indexicality in general). Computers by definition can’t have first-person experience: a “narrative center of gravity” requires the higher-order activities of a self.... 

Update: Professor Dutilh Novaes has replied to my comment as follows:

“But to stipulate that intentionality must be exclusively to humans from the start is to beg the question on precisely what is at stake, i.e. can non-human agents instantiate phenomena that are relevantly similar to human cognition? That's one of the points eloquently made by M. Boden in the paper I linked to above.”

My response:

Perhaps I’m obtuse, but I fail to see where Boden “eloquently makes that point.” A computer can only instantiate phenomena that are relevantly similar to human cognition to the extent that it is human beings who program computers, and “similar” is then only used rather loosely if not figuratively: For instance, we sometimes hear it said that computers “follow rules,” but computers

“cannot correctly be described as following rules any more than planets can correctly be described as complying with laws. The orbital motion of the planets is described by the Keplerian laws, but the planets do not comply with the laws. Computers were not built to ‘engage in rule-governed manipulation of symbols,’ they were built to produce results that will coincide with rule-governed, correct manipulation of symbols. For computers can no more follow a rule than a mechanical calculator can. A machine can execute operations that accord with a rule, provided all the causal links built into it function as designed and assuming that the design ensures the regularity in accordance with the chosen rule or rules. But for something to constitute following a rule, the mere production of a regularity in accordance with a rule, is not sufficient. A being can be said to be following a rule only in the context of a complex practice involving actual and potential activities of justifying, noticing mistakes and correcting them by reference to the rule, criticizing deviations from the rule, and if called upon, explaining an action as being in accordance with the rule and teaching others what counts as following a rule. The determination of an act as being  correct, in accordance with the rule, is not a causal determination but a logical one. Otherwise we should have to surrender to what results our computers produce.” (Bennett and Hacker)

The use of language that suggests, for instance, that computers instantiate phenomena “relevantly similar to human cognition” is fairly harmless until it is taken literally, leading us to suppose that it is a fact, or simply possible, that “computers really think, better and faster than we do, that they truly remember, and, unlike us, never forget, that they interpret [or understand] what we type in, and sometimes misinterpret [or misunderstand] it, taking what we wrote to mean something other than we meant. Then the [computer] engineers’ [or scientists’] otherwise harmless style of speech ceases to be an amusing shorthand and becomes a potentially pernicious conceptual confusion,” as is, I think, the case here.  

Dennett would have us speaking of Deep Blue as “playing” chess, just like Kasparov, but the computer only “’plays’ chess in the sense that the microwave ‘cooks’ soup, though the programming is vastly more complicated.” (Daniel Robinson) What’s “stipulative” is the “intentional stance,” fashioned, in part, so as to make it appear plausible that machines (among other things) are, like us, “intelligent systems.” In Robinson’s words, “[c]onsider the broad, various, cultural, and dispositional factors that need to be recruited in order to qualify an activity as ‘play,’ and then array these against whatever ‘process’ gets Deep Blue to have the Bishop move to QP3.” And then, relatedly and further, we might ask, “If Spassky and Kasparov are doubtful as to whether computers are ‘playing’ chess, is it not Dennett who must rethink the matter?”

It’s on the order of a category mistake to think intentionality applies to non-human agents (although it applies in some degree to at least some non-human animals), Dennett’s “intentional stance” and nonsense about the fictional character of folk psychology notwithstanding: the ascription of psychological attributes is not about an interpretative stance, heuristic overlays or theoretical posits (it’s not surprising that Boden uncritically cites Dennett on this score). One does not merely adopt an “intentional stance” in the use of psychological predicates.* But my point concerns consciousness (intentionality being one feature or property of consciousness) in the first instance and not intentionality, at least insofar as some mental phenomena are not obviously intentional in any conventional sense (e.g., moods or sensations). In any case, it would be more precise to say, after Bennett and Hacker, that what is intentional is “the psychological attribute that has an intentional object.” Therefore,

“[o]ne cannot intelligibly ascribe ‘intentionality’ to molecules, cells, parts of the brain, thermostats or computers. Not only is it a subclass of psychological attributes that are the appropriate bearers of intentionality and not animals or things, but, further, only animals, and fairly sophisticated animals at that, and not parts of animals, let alone molecules, thermostats or computers, are the subjects of such attributes. …[I]t makes no sense to ascribe belief, fear, hope, suspicion, etc. to molecules, [contra Searle] the brain or its parts, thermostats or computers.”

* For the full critique of Dennett on this score, see the first appendix to M. R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker’s Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003). I agree with Tallis who writes, “It is difficult to know why this argument has been taken seriously.” See too the debate in Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, and John Searle (with Daniel Robinson), Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (Columbia University Press, 2007).

Further Reading:

• Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
• Descombes, Vincent (trans. Stephen Adam Schwartz). The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Gillett, Grant. Subjectivity and Being Somebody: Human Identity and Neuroethics. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008.
• Gillett, Grant. The Mind and Its Discontents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Grice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
• Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
• Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Hutto, Daniel D. The Presence of Mind. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Beyond Physicalism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Hutto, Daniel D., ed. Narrative and Folk Psychology. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009.
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Robinson, Daniel N. Consciousness and Mental Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Searle, John R. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1983.
• Searle, John R. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.
• Tallis, Raymond. I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, England: Acumen, 2011.

The Highlander Folk School: A Civil Rights Movement Halfway House

Highlander Folk School (main building) Monteagle, Tennessee

In honor of Black History Month in February I had planned a series of posts on the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964. Well, we’re into March and I’m just getting around to fulfilling my plans, although the intervening period finds a modification in the original intent of the series. Having spent unexpected and considerable time reading afresh books I read not long ago because I’d lost the original notes, as well as discovering more recent scholarship on the subject, I decided to look a bit closer at what we might term (some of) the necessary historical and sociological conditions (being necessary, implies they may not have been sufficient) of Freedom Summer. Toward that end, this post will simply introduce the Highlander Folk School (HFS) as an exemplum of what Aldon Morris memorably termed a “movement halfway house” in his classic study, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change  (Free Press, 1984). Morris defines a movement halfway house as

“an established group or organization that is only partially integrated into the larger society because its participants are actively involved in efforts to bring about a desired change in society. The American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Highlander Folk School are examples of modern movement halfway houses.”[1]

Importantly, Morris soon adds the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) to this list. As Clayborne Carson points out in his definitive examination of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; pronounced as if an acronym, with an added vowel sound: ‘snick’): “SNCC’s relations with SCEF illustrated a growing willingness of SNCC workers to associate with leftist groups,”[2] in this instance, a comparatively small—in the sense of lacking a mass base—and predominantly white organization with goals close to, when not identical with, the civil rights movement. Although communists helped found this formally interracial organization in the 1930s, its ranks and supporters included non-communists as well. SCEF, for better and worse, attracted disproportionate attention given its fairly small size, while the steadfast and courageous efforts of its most active members speak to its equally disproportionate impact on other individuals and groups in the civil rights movement:

“During the late 1950s SCEF became a target of the southern press when one of its representatives, Carl Braden, refused to answer questions before HUAC [House Committee on Un-American Activities] and was later sentenced to a year in prison. Despite the controversy, SNCC leaders as early as the fall of 1960 developed close ties with Braden  and his wife Anne. SCEF’s newspaper, The Southern Patriot,  devoted considerable coverage to SNCC activists at a time when the organization received little attention elsewhere, and during 1960 and 1961 the paper contained essays written by Ella Baker  and James Lawson.

The Bradens had gained the trust of SNCC workers because they understood better than most white leftists the militant mood of black activists, and they respected the desire of those in SNCC to remain independent of all outside control.”[3]

Both Anne Braden and Ella Baker attended Highlander Folk School workshops  (in particular for our purposes, its ‘college workshops’). In fact, it was shortly after the HFS’s seventh annual college workshop on April 1, 1960 that sit-in leaders from the college ranks met to form SNCC under the initiative of Ella Baker, then serving as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The formal structure for SNCC was created in October 1960.

Ella Baker (Myles Horton at far left?)

HFS, like other movement halfway houses, provided an array of “social change resources such as skilled activists, tactical knowledge, media contacts, workshops, knowledge of past movements, and a vision of a future society”[4] for existing and future SNCC activists. The pedagogical, epistemic, and political functions performed so ably by HFS for SNCC and the civil rights movement generally, were strategically significant in (1) the coalescing and coordination of young black leaders, men and women; (2) in the provision of a mass education program that “was revolutionary from an educational, political, and social standpoint,” this being directly linked to mobilization outcomes; and (3) through its partial but no less exemplary instantiation of a “visible and successful model of a future integrated society.”[5] The second and third strategic functions illustrate dimensions of what Wini Breines describes as “prefigurative politics,”[6] at least insofar as we detect belief in and reliance on the theory and methods of participatory and deliberative democracy, as part of the greater attempt to embody here-and-now the future—socially integrated—society.

This society is not so much evidenced in direct action tactics and protests (although these are largely parasitic on the virtues of prefigurative community), but in the blurring and transcending of public and private boundaries that serve to privatize moral life on the one hand, and leave the work of politics to elites (politicians, bureaucrats, corporate lobbyists, professional experts…) on the other. This makes for the propitious emergence of moral if not “spiritual” communities whose members have devoted much of their lives to discerning—through thought and deed—the lineaments of the “good society,” of psychologically meaningful yet elusive notions of “happiness,” of the terms and conditions of human fulfillment. The interpersonal nature of these intimate communities is grounded in intrapersonal values, commitments, hopes and the like of self-defining and self-actualizing individuals who practice a revolutionary and eudaimonistic “politics of virtue.”[7] Such communities are not “communitarian” if by that one means individuals are constitutionally deferent to existing traditions and social norms but rather emblematic of a eudaimonistic individualism in which communities serve as fora for interdependent values realization of persons who have come to feel a compelling and urgent obligation (from the outside looking in, this may appear as supererogatory) to realize objective values in the world, each individual serving as a unique locus for such values realization. In the words of the late David L. Norton,

“For eudaimonism the common good is no more and no less than the particular good of individuals in complementary interrelationship. The requirement for complementary interrelationship is implicit in the fact that the good to be actualized, conserved, and defended—the good that represents the individual’s achieved identity—is an objective good, that is, it is of value to others no less than to the individual who realizes it. [….] [E]very well-lived life must utilize values produced by (some) other well-lived lives. And that is to say that within a society, every person has a legitimate interest in the personhood of every other. [….] In this form of community individual self-determination, self-direction and self-fulfillment are not sacrificed to the ‘common good’ but nurtured as the foundation of the common good.”[8]

In the civil society of capitalist democracies, such communities are fragile and evanescent, and being merely one form of associated living, must compete in a neo-Malthusian and socially Darwinian environment with larger and more impersonal forms of same that serve as vehicles for the regnant cultural ethos and dominant ideologies that shamelessly exhibit symptoms of what Erich Fromm diagnosed as a “fear of freedom” and a “pathology of normalcy.”

The prefigurative politics of virtue in the moral and spiritual communities nurtured by HFS and SNCC was revolutionary or radical to the degree that it went beyond the goals of the mainstream civil rights organizations and the conventional politics of constitutional Liberalism in seeking societal wide systemic change involving socio-cultural and economic spheres and institutions heretofore structurally resistant to the imperatives of egalitarian distributive justice and the extension of the principles and practices of participatory and deliberative democracy. This revolutionary politics involves the struggle to generalize the welfare and individual well-being of all members of society so as to collectively supply as a moral and political entitlement grounded in human dignity,[9] the conditions and opportunities of moral and psychological individuation and self-determination insofar as these cannot be self-supplied by individuals (alone or in community). SNCC’s Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 was a vivid and inspiring demonstration of the germination of seeds sown by earlier traditions of radical black activism (especially communists, and both here and abroad), civil rights organizations (e.g., NAACP, CORE, and SCLC), and movement halfway houses like HFS. It is no exaggeration to characterize HLS’s pivotal halfway house role here as “the educational center of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and early 1960s” (emphasis added) and, “until 1961…in the forefront of the drive to end racial segregation in the South.”[10]

Highlander Folk School Workshop (Myles Horton seated at center)

In our next post, we’ll examine in finer detail the pedagogical, epistemic, and political practices of the Highlander Folk School.

Notes:

[1] Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984): 39.

[2] Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 ed.): 51.

[3] Ibid., 51-52.

[4] Morris, 139-140.

[5] Ibid., 141.

[6] “Prefigurative politics” is discussed in the chapters 1 and (especially) 4 in Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

[7] See David L. Norton, Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). On “community” in SNCC, consider what James Forman wrote at the time of SNCC’s fourth general conference in April 1963. After first noting the group’s achievement of organizational security, in the sense that it was no longer insecure about its survival, he says, “The meeting was permeated by an intense comradeship, born out of sacrifice and suffering and a commitment to the future, and out of knowledge that we were indeed challenging the political structure of the country, and out of a feeling that our basic strength rested in the energy, love, and warmth of the group. The band of sisters and brothers, in a circle of trust, felt complete at last.” Quoted in Carson, 82.

[8] Ibid., 124.

[9] On how “dignity” might provide such a grounding: George Kateb, Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), and Jeremy Waldron, with comments by others (Meir Dan-Cohen, ed.) Dignity, Rank, and Rights, The Berkeley Tanner Lectures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[10] John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2nd ed., 1996): 3 and 154 respectively.

(The last post in the series will contain a select bibliography.)

Giving Up Criticism for Lent

I heard a wonderful sermon on Ash Wednesday by Taryn Mattice. She recognized that most Christians give up chocolate for Lent or Facebook or something comparable. This might be constructive, but for many it causes self-absorption, a false sense of pride, or an excessively guilty sense of failure. Lent is not about self-improvement; it is not a period designed to provide new challenges for the spiritually mature.

Lent began as a 40 day period designed to help those who had denied Jesus (in favor of Caesar) to bring themselves closer to God so they could be reconciled with the church on Easter. At some point, the church recognized that all Christians were sinners and should specially devote the 40 day period to coming closer to God.

It is not remotely clear that in deciding how to get closer to God that giving up chocolate or losing weight or abandoning Facebook would be the first idea out of the box. Mattice thought giving up stress (to the extent possible) might be a worthy ideal (albeit it not completely achievable) for her college student congregation.

I told a friend and colleague about this sermon who suggested that giving up criticism for Lent would be a worthy goal, and that makes sense to me. I am thinking not about social and political criticism, but our (my) tendency in thought or conversation to engage in unnecessary criticism (gossip or internal thoughts) of others around us.

If we recognize the point of Lent (we are all part of a community of sinners trying to come closer to God), we should stop casting stones and try to see the presence of God struggling to emerge in ourselves and others.

 

Gay Former Vice Principal Sues Eastside Catholic

Attorneys for Mark Zmuda, the former Vice Principal at Eastside Catholic High School in Sammamish, Washington, have filed a civil suit against the school and the archdiocese today in King County Superior Court. I have not seen the complaint yet, but it is certain to make claims under the state antidiscrimination statute (RCW 49.60). I understand that lawyers for the school and the archdiocese already have a motion to dismiss prepared.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/gay-vice-principal-sues-seattle-archdiocese

Śaṅkara: Philosopher or Theologian?

At the Indian Philosophy Blog, Jonathan Edelmann argues in his post, “Philosophy and Theology—let’s be clearer,” that we should think of the great Advaita Vedāntin, Śaṅkara, as a theologian, rather than a philosopher (my response follows):

“[I want] to raise an issue that has bothered me since the very first time I read Śaṅkara in a second year undergraduate Sanskrit course at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and about which I wrote an article for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

I think Indologists, philosophers and theologians who examine Indian texts, and religious studies scholars could more carefully distinguish philosophy from theology, even if the two are not mutually exclusive and have considerable overlap. This is especially true in a ‘Hindu’ context (I acknowledge the difficulty of that word). The differences between philosophy and theology are generally well known and respected in the larger worlds of Christian theology and Western philosophy, yet such distinctions are less frequently known and respected among those who work on Indian texts.

In brief, philosophy uses anumāna and tarka alone in the course of argumentation, whereas theology engages and interprets śabda-pramāṇa (conceived of as a revealed source of knowledge) in the course of argumentation.

Philosophers like Udayana, Gaṅgeśa or the early Yogasūtra commentator Vyāsa, use anumāna and tarka as the primary methods for establishing their point. Śabda, conceived as an unauthored or a divinely authored śāstra, is quoted only after a position was argued for by means of anumāna or tarka, if at all. Scripture may motivate their reasoning, but it does not form the basis of their reasoning. On the other hand theologians like Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, Kumārilabhaṭṭa, etc. see their roles as interpreting a revealed śāstra. Anumāna and tarka serve the purpose of illuminating a fault-free śāstra’s meaning, and using śabda to establish an interpretation of śabda is considered reasonable.

Whereas philosophy proceeds rationally, theology does so exegetically. In the West too (for at least 500 years), the word philosopher refers to people who use reason to think about epistemology, metaphysics, etc. and not to people who see their primary roles as that of a scriptural exegete. The words theology and theologian were reserved for that. These two very different approaches to the use of reason are often conflated by scholars work on Indian texts, and at great cost.

A disregard for the difference can mislead. While pursuing a BA in (Western) Philosophy I took Sanskrit as well. Śaṅkara had been discussed as one of the most important Hindu philosophers. I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what philosophers did, having taken specialized courses on Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Quine. When I started reading Śaṅkara, however, it clearly was not philosophy and he was clearly not a philosopher. If Śaṅkara was a philosopher, he was unlike every philosopher I had studied. The text we read was, I believe, from his Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad Bhāṣya. Śaṅkara was trying to illuminate the meaning of the root text in light of his Advaitavāda. None of the philosophers I read spent any time carefully interpreting Biblical texts. It wasn’t until later when I read that Śaṅkara was a theologian – a scholar who accepts apauruṣeya-śabda as pramāṇa – that his project began to make sense.

If we don’t adequately distinguish the philosophers from the theologians we run the risk of confusing newcomers to the subject who already know about Western intellectual history.”

My response (I tried to post this as a comment at the Indian Philosophy Blog but was unsuccessful):

I don’t think it’s accurate to call Śaṅkara a “theologian,” at least insofar as (nirguṇa) Brahman is not “God” in the theistic sense of the Abrahamic traditions. And why need our understanding of philosophy remain utterly dependent on the notion of philosophy as it developed in the West? Why cannot we modify our conception to embrace those like Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja, or Confucius, or Daoists (collectively, as represented for instance in the Daodejing, or individuals like Zhuangzi) as religious or spiritual philosophers, much in the manner that Plato might strike one as a spiritual philosopher (at the very least, his ‘metaphysics’ is rather different than the contemporary articulations of same). The significance of the distinction between theology and philosophy follows largely the modern professionalization of these intellectual enterprises and thus is not always essential to figures of Eastern provenance or even in the pre-modern West: is not the “therapy of desire” (after Nussbaum) of the Hellenistic philosophers closer to the soteriological and spiritual (emancipatory, therapeutic, developmental) aims of religious worldviews than the avowed subject matter of most contemporary professional philosophers? When eudaimonistic concerns and questions of human fulfillment provide the primary orientation of ancient Greek philosophers (after John M. Cooper), this strikes one as closer to the motivations of religious philosophers and theologians than what motivates the wide array of specialized topics found in “analytic” and “continental” traditions of philosophy (and to a lesser degree and in a different sense in the latter). In these cases we find ample reason to soften any hard and fast distinctions between “philosophy” and “theology.” The “spiritual exercises” of these philosophers resemble religious ascetic practices and is utterly foreign to contemporary professional philosophy. The relief of suffering, the change of heart, or transformation of one’s overall mental attitude or psyche is closer to religion and spiritual praxis than philosophy proper, yet we christen these remarkable thinkers—from Epictetus to Gaius Musonius Rufus among the Stoics for example—philosophers.

Consider too, Islamic philosophy: it certainly has a religious or spiritual framework or accepts premises pivotal to classical Islamicate culture. Islamic philosophers, with varying degrees of success, endeavored to reconcile Greek philosophy with traditional Islamic sciences. Ibn Rushd (Averroës), for example, distinguished between philosophy and theology (kalam) yet saw these as compatible and different routes to the same truth(s). He viewed philosophy as beyond the reach of the common man and thus the prerogative of an epistemic elite in possession of that rare combination of virtue and wisdom. And then we have Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, a theologian who argued against the views of the Islamic philosophers yet defended Aristotelian logic for such purposes. Indeed, and further, Oliver Leaman states that “his arguments against philosophy are themselves philosophical.” While it is true that kalam and falsafa developed, as they did in the West generally, fairly independent of each other, periods of fertile conflict and constructive engagement might find value in looking beyond the distinctions between philosophy and theology. For instance, Mu῾tazilah, the first truly doctrinal school of theology in Islam, is invariably defined as based on reason and rational thought!

In the case of Śaṅkara, and with Ram-Prasad, we could grant the primary role religious motivation plays in his writings while analyzing the sophisticated philosophizing which permits us to see how this monastic philosopher “place[d] Advaita on the map of Indian thought” and how, in fact, “philosophical inquiry plays a role in Advaita from the beginning.” The “urge” or motivation to do philosophy may not be among the sorts found among contemporary professional philosophers, but it is no less philosophy for all that. We may need to be acquainted with the “soteriological imperative of Advaita” in terms, say of cosmogony or metaphysics, so as to make sense of the philosophical arguments, but they’re no less philosophical arguments for being wedded to soteriological or emancipatory ends. I therefore find no compelling reason to label Śaṅkara a “theologian” as opposed to a philosopher: sometimes it helps to understand his preoccupation with spiritual aims, but this need not crowd out or trump our characterization of him (for several purposes) as a philosopher. The fact that you learned Śaṅkara was not a philosopher on the model of your training in Western philosophy speaks rather to the contingent and somewhat arbitrary circumscription of what “counts” as philosophy according to that tradition. An encounter with a wider world might prompt us to widen our criteria for what counts as philosophy, might compel us to embrace a more generous conception of philosophy, one that does justice to the range, depth, and creative contributions to “philosophy” from outside the canonical tradition of the West, a tradition that in any case itself does not always neatly demarcate the lines between philosophy and theology. I think it’s well worth the provisional risk of confusion among “newcomers to the subject who already know about Western intellectual history.”

A couple of other points: While it is true of course that Śaṅkara accepts apauruṣeya-śabda, that is only one of six of its accepted pramāṇas, it’s no less revealing that this religious worldview recognizes the traditional system of validating means of knowing or “knowledge-episodes.” The Advaita view on anirvacanīyakhyāti makes a philosophical argument that the “object-form” in cases of sensory illusion demonstrates a realm of objects neither existent nor non-existent, at least as a consequence of Brahman-awareness (the metaphysical ‘non-realism’ that is distinct from idealism on the one hand, and realism on the other, but appears to partake of epistemic insights from—or makes concessions to—both sides of this philosophical divide, although I agree with Matilal that the theory ‘in fact tends more toward realism than phenomenalism or idealism’). Whatever the aim, we have here a philosophical position that, in the words of Ram Prasad, “may be characterised as being realist from an idealist point of view, idealist from a realist point of view, and skeptical about both points of view.” Philosophically speaking, this is a novel philosophical argument involving both epistemology and metaphysics: what is gained in viewing this simply and solely as a piece of theology? So, while it is true that philosophical arguments are essential to, in the end, the philosophical goal of validating or proving the liberating role of apauruṣeya-śabda, it is for that very reason that Ram-Prasad can “bracket” what he calls the soteriology, believing Advaita philosophy to be therefore of “intrinsic” philosophical interest. So too with Śaṅkara’s use of the dream-analogy: intriguing philosophical arguments are crafted, albeit in keeping with the legitimacy of apauruṣeya-śabda with regard to Advaita exegesis of the Upaniṣadic doctrine of liberation.

POPE FRANCIS ON CIVIL UNIONS AND CONTRACEPTION

On March 5, 2014, Pope Francis sat for an interview with Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's major newspapers.  Once again, it was an interview that proved highly newsworthy for two reasons.

          First, where gay couples are concerned, the Pope endorsed the possibility of civil unions.  He recognized that such relationships may be necessary in order to meet the secular needs of gay couples (for example, the need for healthcare).  This development is newsworthy because it is the first time a Pope has publicly expressed support for even this limited form of accommodation.

          Much is entailed by this sort of concession which the Pope leaves unspoken.  One must ask:  How are Catholics to interpret the Catholic Catechism's denunciation of same-sex attraction as an intrinsic disorder that must in all cases be resisted?  Has Pope Francis, implicitly at least, opened the door to a more nuanced and scientifically valid approach to the question of sexual attraction and commitment?  It would seem that he has.

          Second, Pope Francis has introduced an element of discretion in the Church's teaching on contraception.  When asked about Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's teaching on birth control, he endorsed it and praised it for its counter-cultural beauty.  At the same time, however, he recognized that not all can live up to its demands.  "Pastoral ministry," he asserted, must "take into account the situations and that which it is possible for people to do."  The encyclical, the Pope indicated, was intended to be applied with "much mercy."

          In other words, Pope Francis is signalling that there is room for Catholics to engage in conscientious reasoning where the birth control encyclical is concerned.  Being a good pastor, Pope Francis does not wish to get involved in discussing particular cases or situations.  Such decisions are highly individual, and the Pope appreciates this.  That a Pope would send this sort of signal, however, is nothing short of remarkable.

The Son of God: Safe and Comfortable Middle Class Jesus

The beauty of the Gospels lies in the way they force us to interpret the life of Jesus. The stories look straightforward enough. A deity is born to humble parents. He gradually reveals himself through miracles. He attracts followers. He is unable to convince the appointed authorities of his godhood, his powers fail him at crucial moments, and he is put to death. Triumphantly, he rises from the dead and ascends to eternal life.

What gives the Gospels their power is that they are much more than this simple outline. Their complexity requires interpretive choice. The Jesus we encounter is a man who comes from utter obscurity. He demands that his followers behave in absolutely altruistic, self-sacrificial ways.  He sees his life's work as giving comfort to the afflicted. He travels among the poor, the lepers, the prisoners, the prostitutes and the outcasts. He says dangerous and subversive things. He realizes at his Last Supper that he may have pushed things too far. He is so anxious after dinner that when he withdraws to pray, he sweats blood. And, as he writhes in agony on the cross, he has the ultimate moment of self-doubt ("my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?")

We make our Jesus from the ways in which we assemble these elements. After all, that is the nature of great literature -- it forces us to make sense of ambiguity and conflicting layers of meaning. The stories of Jesus have survived over the millennia because they are much more than a simple story of triumph. Unfortunately, producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey fail in their newly-released film The Son of God, because their interpretation of Scripture is simplistic and triumphalist. Where there are choices to be made -- and with the Gospels, the choices abound -- Burnett and Downey have an unerring urge to favor the safe ones.

Consider the ways in which the producers portray the miracle stories. Since the days of St. Augustine, Christian writers have struggled with how to explain these texts. Must they be taken literally or are other explanations possible? St. Augustine himself found this a difficult question and finally concluded that Jesus' miracles, while real, could not have broken the laws of nature, but must have made use of other laws that we did not understand.

Burnett and Downey, on the other hand, give us a Jesus who might be described as a genial, polite, non-threatening superhero. In one of the movie's earliest scenes, we encounter Jesus walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He called out to a fisherman we later learn is Peter and convinced this hardened, skeptical man to cast off in search of fish. Suddenly, Peter's boat is swamped with fish. An underwater camera angle shows a smiling Jesus shepherding (if that is the right word) the fish into the incredulous Peter's nets.

And so go the miracle stories. We later see Jesus command a paralytic to rise and walk and find him multiplying loaves and fishes for the multitudes. And when the storm brewed up on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus came walking across the water towards the frail little boat filled with his earthly followers, we see a magnificent 10-foot tall Jesus proudly beckoning over the wind and the waves.

This whole set of scenes leads to what can be called an anti-climax -- Jesus' raising of Lazarus from the dead. The Gospel of John tells this story with real dramatic feel. Lazarus is a friend of Jesus and the brother of Mary, one of his followers. When he learned that Lazarus had taken ill, Jesus lingered where he was staying rather than hurrying his return to see him. Only after sensing inwardly that Lazarus had died does Jesus finally depart.

Drawing near, he is greeted by Martha and Mary and has it confirmed that Lazarus is dead.  Emotions run high. Everybody wept, Jesus along with the women. His feelings ran so deep, even his enemies marveled:  "See how he loved him!"

It is this back story that gives depth and humanity to John's account of the miracle, and it is this back story that is missing from the film. Instead, we are given Jesus, the God of easy triumphs, who walks confidently into the tomb where Lazarus has been laid, kisses him, breathes on the back of his head, and beckons him to arise. The scene is drained of the challenging emotional anguish of the Gospel account and becomes cliched and predictable.

In a movie a little more than two hours long, it is impossible to convey a complete account of Jesus' teachings. Indeed, one can exhaust weeks and months on such a project and never finish the task. Still, it is remarkable what is left out of the movie, including one of my own favorite biblical scenes.

This is the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, found in John, chapter four. It opens with a tired Jesus seated at a well when a woman walked up, bucket in hand, intending to draw some water. Jesus asked if he might have a drink and the two of them began to talk. Jesus revealed to her the secrets of her life, telling her that she had been married five times and was now living with a man outside of marriage. And then he promised to give her the gift of living water.

For me, this tale signifies the Jesus of the margins. Jesus is in a marginal community (a village in neighboring Samaria), and is speaking with a woman who is on the margins of her own society (given her deeply tangled marital history). And it is to her that he promises salvation. I wish I knew what Burnett and Downey thought of this passage, but they never told us.

Another remarkable omission from the movie is a core feature of Jesus' ministry -- and that is his consciousness of and service to the poor. The Jesus we encounter in the Gospels, especially in Luke but also in the other texts, has a keenly honed sense of class awareness.

Just consider the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-31) and how it begins:  "There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.  And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, full of sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table.  Moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores." By the end of Jesus' parable, it is the rich man who is consigned to hell and Lazarus who is rewarded with eternal life. This is the Jesus who knew and condemned economic sin. This whole side of Jesus' public witness is omitted from the film.

What is left in is the safe stuff: the "Our Father," bits from the Sermon on the Mount, a good deal about forgiveness of sins and the avoidance of hypocrisy. Jesus's teachings on marriage and divorce are left out, as is the miracle at the wedding feast at Cana. Those particular omissions puzzled me.

Around half of the film is focused on the events of Palm Sunday, the Last Supper and Jesus's Passion and Resurrection. One gets the sense that Burnett and Downey were stealing continuous backward glances at Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in editing this portion of the movie.  The violence in Son of God is carefully calibrated -- not as gross or as unhinged as Gibson's gory spectacle, but an excruciating level of blood and agony all the same.

While on the whole I am critical of the film, I must acknowledge that it does some things well. It injects Mary Magdalene unobtrusively, but insistently into Jesus' mission. A straightforward reading of the Gospels tells us that she was a crucial member of Jesus' company of disciples along with other women, and it is good to see her represented. The politics of Roman Judea are also portrayed with subtlety and sophistication. And, thanks to the decision to film on location in Morocco, the movie has a rich, Middle-Eastern texture to it. At times, you really do feel yourself transported back in time to first-century Judea.

And one finds some real character development. St. Peter, whom I have always understood as symbolic of fallen humanity, is depicted with the complexity that is due him -- he began as a man of uncertainty and doubt, struggled with understanding, experienced a crisis after denying Jesus, but emerged stronger at the end for the testing. Nicodemus, who is one of those mysterious followers of Jesus from within the Sanhedrin, is also endowed with a real flesh-and-blood personality. Still, Caiphas is portrayed as a one-dimensional villain from central casting and Pontius Pilate is not much better. Barabbas comes across as a barely articulate psychopath.

This is a movie, in other words, made for a comfortable, middle-brow, middle-class America. It is the Jesus of white picket fences and Readers' Digest. It is a world that is rapidly vanishing. Jesus will not go away, of course, but the world view that sustains the safe and sanitized superhero Jesus of Son of God is in increasing doubt.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/safe-and-comfortable-the-son-of-god_b_4882957.html 

The Aggressive Left Saps the Morale of the Country: Really?

In this weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, in a column entitled “America and the Aggressive Left,” Peggy Noonan writes that the “constant mischief of the progressive left is hurting the nation’s morale. What follows this topic sentence is a sarcasm loaded invective detailing a number of regulations Noonan finds problematic. Some of the regulations are problematic. Yet, the column reads as if a lunatic from Fox News had ghost written the column escalating a number of examples into a false overall picture of American politics and regulation instead of the more responsible line usually taken by Noonan.

Apart from the fact that it is doubtful a real left, aggressive or otherwise, has any real power in Washington, one would certainly find no clue in the column that government regulation might be necessary to protect the environment or worker safety. Even more serious, the column lacks any recognition that an aggressive Right in this country has done its level best to make it impossible for government to function or that the Republicans have used their power to protect a wealthy elite against the interests of the people. One would never guess that Americans are concerned that our democracy has been hijacked.