Making Men Moral, 15th Anniversary Conference

When I read Robert P. George's _Making Men Moral_ in college I thought it was one of the best intellectual challenges to the superficial libertarian spirit of our time.

Now his work is 15 years old and has won for itself a retrospective conference.

Micah Watson summarizes the gathering, while audio files of the lectures are available at the conference web site.

Andrew Bacevich to speak in Denver tonight

According to the 5280 blog, Andrew Bacevich will speak at the Tattered Cover in LoDo tonight at 7:30.

See also the Downtown Denver Examiner.

Upcoming poetry and politics events around Denver

America's Future Foundation's Denver affiliate is sponsoring a panel discussion on the topic Is Capitalism Dead?.

Panelists include Conor Friedersdorf, of the late Culture11, Gene Healy of the Cato Institute and Ross Kaminsky.

The discussion will begin at 7 pm at the Denver Art Museum on March 26, after an hour of drinks. I have yet to attend an AFF event.

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Also on March 26, novelist and Catholic deacon Ron Hansen will speak at Regis University on the Catholic literary imagination. Details are incomplete, but apparently the lecture begins at 7 pm. I would guess it takes place in the Science Building's amphitheater.

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After a hiatus of one year, the Denver Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference returns to Regis University this March 27 – 29.

(UPDATE)

The schedule is now available here, with more information available here. The poet's collected works are reproduced here.

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On April 3 at 7 pm libertarian writer Thomas E. Woods will be speaking at CU-Boulder. Details here

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And let's not forget the Thomas Aquinas Center's upcoming lectures on the CU-Boulder campus.

Prof. Janet Smith's April 6 talk is titled "The Sexual Mess That We Are In and How We Got Here."

Prof. Christopher Tollefsen, co-author with Robert P. George of _Embryo: A Defense of Human Life_, will speak on April 23. His lecture is "Embryo-Destructive Research and Abortion: Are They Different Moral Issues?"

Hitchens and D'Souza to debate religion at CU-Boulder

CNA reports:

Two influential speakers will face off at the University of Colorado in a debate titled: "What’s so Great About God? – Atheism vs. Religion." The debate, organized by the school’s Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought, will feature Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens presenting their cases for and against organized religion, its influence on world history and impact on current events.

The debate is scheduled to take place on Monday, January 26 at 7 p.m. at the University of Colorado – Boulder. Organizers are expecting a crowd of 2,000 to hear Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; and Dinesh D'Souza, author of What's So Great About Christianity to debate the impact of religion on society.

Tickets are required and are available at Tickets West. For more information, see the sponsoring St. Thomas Aquinas Center, which hopes to fill CU-Boulder's massive Macky Auditorium.

"Atheism vs. Religion" isn't a promising subtitle. The varieties of religion are such that defining, let alone defending, the category is difficult.

These kinds of debates are best focused on specific religious traditions.


(To read my reaction to the debate, Click Here)

'Critical Thinking' is making us stupid

Back in September, Creighton University’s Prof. R.R. Reno lectured at the University of Colorado at Boulder, discussing how “critical thinking” can actually corrupt intellectual life.

Of course, this is counterintuitive on its face. What intelligent person doesn’t want to be a critic in some area of expertise?

But Reno, with depth and insight, subjected critical thinking itself to criticism.

He began his lecture by asking whether relativism is truly an affliction of academic life. Obviously not all standards are rejected. Excellence in sports and a modicum of ethical standards are widely acknowledged among all. The faculty judge and rank both students and peers by the standards of their specialty.

Yet these standards are not shared between disciplines. In part, this is because few generalists are capable of truly inter-disciplinary work. Further, the standards of one field of inquiry by nature cannot be the same in another.

This lack of communication helps to fracture intellectual life. This sometimes results in relativism, and other times in scientism.

In Reno’s telling, scientism is the order of the day. While the methods of science are fantastically powerful within its own domain, mistaken efforts at duplicating its success in other fields results in the decline of wisdom and any other integrating intellectual force.

One specialty of scientific reasoning is analysis—which we should remember literally means “breaking-up.” In applied science, nature is analyzed in order to be manipulated for the advancement of both research and economic profit.

“Critical thinking,” in Reno’s understanding, treats societies, persons and artistic works also as something to be analyzed and understood in terms of cultural, psychological, economic, and even biological processes. This places the student in a position of being a critical “master” of all cultures, rather than a participant in and beneficiary of a culture.

This position dovetails with globalist or careerist goals of emancipating people from economic poverty and common social restrictions by displacing indigenous cultures, including our own.

As Reno wrote in an earlier essay on the First Things web site:

"The basic existential thrust of postmodern cultural study is to relax the power of any particular culture over the minds of students. The goal is obvious. A Harvard man or woman is not to be a member of a culture. He or she navigates cultures. With a critical grasp of the factory of meaning, he or she sets about to oversee production...

“Will a person in a position of power who ‘reads’ his fellow man, rather than listening to what he actually says, end up manipulating rather than serving?"

(Worrisomely, this sounds like descriptions of President-elect Obama and many another politician: while appearing considerate towards an interlocutor’s objections, he will size her up and make conciliatory comments meant to please but also to silence, after which he will proceed to do what he already had planned.)

In his remarks at CU-Boulder, Reno said the poor state of critical thinking is a result of rejecting or twisting the virtue of docility, that is, the virtue of being easily taught.

If Reno’s critique is accurate, our system of education actually hinders people from being touched and enlightened by people, cultures, and works they wrongly presume already to understand.

While Churchill and Lincoln, to take two examples, are overly revered, too many students arrogantly act like the great men’s intellectual and political superiors simply because they can tell a story in which both figures are products of processes and biases beyond their own control.

This presumption extends to whole fields of academic study.

Under a malign form of critical thinking, ethics is re-envisioned as merely an evolutionary survival strategy, religion is discarded as a psychological eruption, and great art is sidelined as a product of oppressive, pre-critical societies.

For “critical thinking,” reverence is an obstacle to thinking. (Note the renaming of theology departments as departments of religious studies.)

Students of such a method, which is better called a style, find themselves sealed off from wisdom.

“Nearly two centuries ago, John Henry Newman saw that it was a conceit of the modern age that truth may be approached without homage,” Reno writes at First Things. “The mechanisms of critique destroy piety and in so doing diminish our capacity to love and obey truth once found. Moreover, as John Paul II pointed out again and again, responsible human freedom is not possible outside a more basic loyalty to the commands that can come to us only in and through culture.”

Can critical thinking be saved from itself? Perhaps not.

But the best form of inquiry begins with taking reality as a given, that is, as a gift. And as Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us, one never receives a gift in a critical spirit.

Such an intellectual life is perhaps not an exercise in critical thinking, but so much the worse for critical thinking.

Docility in studies is far more compatible with thanksgiving, a word which some Christians will recognize in its Greek form: Eucharist.

In this confluence, we see how religion does not oppose but assists intellectual inquiry. Rightly practiced, the worshiper’s docile openness to God can reveal self, man and the world to him.

Recall Jesus’ words in John 8: “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”


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While Reno’s advocacy for reviving the virtue of docility is certainly necessary, there are a few curricular changes which may better instill and nourish rational capabilities in students than our present system does.

First, students should be educated in grammar and language to increase their ability to express themselves and to understand others. Second, they ought to be educated both in recognizing logical fallacies and in correcting or rejecting bad logic. Third, they should be schooled in making and analyzing arguments, instead of learning how to dissect societies which they cannot yet understand.

Students must abdicate any presumptive position as a “master of culture” and become students of an actual tradition, rather than devotees of a cultural analysis of that tradition.

By an unintended coincidence, these curricular recommendations mirror the Trivium of the early European university. But this allows us happy clarity about in which actual tradition students ought to receive their education.


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Reno’s CU-Boulder lecture was followed by some memorable interactions with the audience, a largely Catholic one which had gathered under the auspices of the Thomas Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought.

One young co-ed, self-professedly ill-equipped to wrestle with the content of his speech, asked Reno a general question about how students might bring passion to their indifferent campus.

“I think there is far too much passion as it is,” was the wry gist of Reno’s reply. “Aren’t you sick of people being in your face about everything?”

Another student question depicted the local Catholic parish as being a welcome outpost of certitude in the wilderness of college confusion. With gentle and sympathetic mockery, Reno rebuked this sentiment for its pretense.

Ridiculing the image of The Lone Torchbearer of Truth in a Cave of Darkness (while also confessing his desire to be such a torchbearer himself) Reno reminded the student questioner that he should acknowledge his own inner doubts and be wary of false certitude.

Reno brought students and others in the audience to recognize some flaws in the modern university while also guiding the youngest to shed their more naïve opinions. For an inaugural lecture, it is hard to ask more.

Stanley Hauerwas to lecture in Denver

For Denver locals:

Professor-Author Stanley Hauerwas will deliver his lecture “Discipleship as a Craft: the Church as Disciplined Community” at 7 p.m. on Monday, November 17 at Bonfils Hall at the John Paul II Center, 1300 S. Steele St.

Tim Gray, president of Denver ’s Augustine Institute, says:

“This is a rare opportunity to listen to one today’s most influential Christian thinkers!

"There is no Christian speaker more exciting, in my mind, than Stanley Hauerwas.

You won’t be disappointed!”

Open learning courtesy of Yale

Yale, putting a fraction of its endowment to good use, has launched the Open Yale Courses web site.

Containing free video and audio files of professors' lectures, the site is the answer to a technologist's dream of cheap, high-quality education for everyone with an internet connection.

Right now I am working my way through Prof. Stephen B. Smith's Introduction to Political Philosophy. Like my PoliSci professor at CU-Boulder Thad Tecza, Smith earned his doctorate at Chicago University and displays all sorts of crypto-Straussian habits.

Other promising offerings in the Liberal Arts include Prof. Donald Kagan's Introduction to Ancient Greek History and Prof. Amy Hungerford's The American Novel Since 1945, which presents two lectures on Flannery O'Connor's disturbing novel Wise Blood.

Unfortunately the science classes are of more limited availability.

But it's ungrateful to complain now that anyone can audit a semester of Ivy League courses.

Addendum:

OnlineUniversities.com provides links to 100 other open lectures at Harvard, MIT, and other prominent universities.

Weigel Summarizes Benedict on Islam, Enlightenment, Freedom

George Weigel's speech in Boulder last week was more momentous than I had expected it to be.

As Catholic News Agency reports, Weigel vigorously argued that Pope Benedict XVI has provided in his Regensberg lecture and other writings a "public grammar" for global understanding between Christianity, Western secularism and Islam. In arguments over religious freedom, secularism, Islam, and human rights, Weigel said the Pope has given the world political community “a grammar for addressing these questions, a genuinely transcultural grammar of rationality and irrationality.” He cited Pope Benedict's recommendation that Christianity's own crises and encounters involving religious freedom could be a starting point for Christian-Muslim dialogue.

Weigel's categorization of Pope Benedict's approach was rigorous, novel and, I thought, generally convincing.

However, his commentary sometimes seemed lacking. At one point Weigel described relations with Islam as a matter of reconciling the religion with "Enlightenment values" of religious freedom and human rights(he specifically excluded scientific positivism from consideration).

There seem to be deep problems in this framing of the program for religious reform. To my mind Weigel's clear contention that the path to world peace and reform lies in Muslims reconciliation with the Enlightenment is overly political. While the Pope's theological emphasis escapes merely political polemics, Weigel too quicky turns from theological controversy to Liberal political philosophy. While this makes Weigel's program appealing to Americans of various religious beliefs, I think this move both turns theology into a blunt political tool and whitewashes the ideologies of the Enlightenment.

As I observed in the post-lecture question period, the Enlightenment was not only the sweetness and illumination of religious freedom and human rights. Arguably, Islamic nations have in fact absorbed the most murderous aspects of the Enlightenment: nationalism, pan-racialism, Marxism, and so on, in methods if not necessarily in ideas. One could even argue that fundamentalism is an Enlightenment product in its quest to overturn existing tradition and authority in favor of some foundational period, as interpreted through the understanding of the individual believer.

Weigel thought this point about the influence of the West in Islam was a good one. Making sure to add that fascism had also influenced Islamic socieites, he said it was one of the "great tragedies of history" that the "worst of the West" was exported to the region. He further speculated on a great "What-If?" scenario: What if the United States had not accepted in acquiescence the Islamic revolution in Iran in favor of a liberal regime? (Weigel also called Ahmadinejad "possibly one of the most dangerous people on earth," though I tend to think Daniel Larison is correct in dismissing the man)

All praise must be selective, but Weigel's advocacy of "Enlightenment values" was perhaps more selective than consistency can bear. He took care to exclude scientific positivism from the list of worthy Enlightenment ideals, but like scientific inquiry, human rights and religious freedom are also tragically double-edged.

Rights-language often generates simplistic, fanatical politics. The same regime that composed the Declaration on the Rights of Man ended in the Terror and the first modern genocide. "Human rights" rhetoric is seen in some circles as American cant cynically used to justify control of other countries. The same rhetoric is appropriated by advocacy programs of which Weigel would not approve.

Let us note that even respect for religious freedom could unduly hinder nations' abilities to suppress Islamic radicals in the United States, Europe, and in the Muslim world.

Further, one can argue that even the beneficient aspects of the Enlightement spirit have demoralized Europe and rendered it more vulnerable to Islamic radicalism. If "Enlightenment values" really end in decadence after only two centuries of influence, a culture would have to be suicidal to embrace them willingly.

Weigel at one point underscored the Regensberg address' distinction between rationalist and voluntarist views of God. The former, more characteristic of Christian thought, sees God as a reasonable Being to be freely loved, while the latter view, prominent among Islamic radicals, sees God primarily as a willful Being to be obeyed.

Perhaps rationalist theology does engender religious freedom. But judging from the period of time it took to emerge in its present form, this freedom is likely an end result of other more foundational characteristics.

Other features of Western life that have produced religious liberty, such as reverent trust in providence or simple political prudence, could be the more fruitful habits in the development of religious freedom. These habits are, I think, far less obviously polemical topics than Liberal categories explicitly involving freedom, oppression, and slavery. As such, they are congenial to interreligious dialogue without eliminating controversy altogether.

While the concepts of providence and prudence are obviously shaped by the relative rationalism of the predominant theology, seriously examining them can clarify and shift that theology in a positive manner.

Can one leave to Providence the punishment of apostate believers, infidels, and political enemies? Is the expansion of God's religion prudently served by political coercion?

These are some of the questions that helped the West. Perhaps these are the questions that can help Islam.

God willing.

The Peter Kreeft v. David Boonin CU-Boulder Abortion Debate

Judging from the turnout, the debate last Friday was a great success. The 288-seat basement auditorium was filled past capacity. The audience overflowed into the hall, where about forty chairs were set up. I’m told that spectators even crowded the stairs leading up from the basement. Not having left the auditorium until well after the debate had ended, I didn’t see the overflow. I conservatively estimated the turnout at over 400, others estimated it at 600. One fellow estimated 1,000, but that seems on the far side to me. More people arrived, but left because of the crowd.

Not bad for a cold Friday night in a college town.

The event was well-publicized. As I noted earlier, the event’s Facebook page numbered 95 RSVPs and over forty possibles. The archdiocese plugged the debate in the last Denver Catholic Register, and also posted a notice at its website.

Since Thursday, at least 25 people have come to this blog searching for information on the Kreeft-Boonin debates, which are a traveling show. Many of those visitors were local. The debate has certainly energized interest.

Peter Kreeft answered the debate question “Is abortion ever morally justifed?” in the negative, taking the pro-life side. He argued that for personhood is coextensive with human nature, enjoying all the rights thereof. He also argued that people cannot rationally deny the right to life of the unborn without denying the right to life of newborns.
Catholic News Agency summarizes:

He recounted how he once discussed abortion with "some very intelligent feminists," claiming that they had no argument justifying abortion that would not also justify infanticide. "After the argument they came up to me and said 'Congratulations, professor, you changed our mind. We didn't think you could do that'"

"'Oh, good,' I said, 'you're pro-life now?'"

"'No, we're pro-infanticide'," Kreeft finished, prompting surprised laughter from the audience. "So logical consistency can be a two-edged sword," he noted.

Kreeft presented a version of his argument that those who are uncertain about the personal state of the unborn child must refrain from abortion. Again, from the CNA summary:

Even someone unsure if the unborn child were a person, Kreeft argued, would in the absence of certainty have to refrain from an abortion. To kill someone without knowing if they are human is still homicide. To act in a rash manner that could kill someone, such as poisonously fumigating a room without being sure it was empty of people, would amount to criminal negligence. Barring certain knowledge that an unborn human is not a person, abortion similarly would be blameworthy even if the human fetus were not a person with the right to life.

Boonin noted that Kreeft's argument that any moral uncertainty about moral status of the unborn child meant all abortions were at minimum morally blameworthy could have radical implications if applied consistently. This "appeal to uncertainty," as he called it, could require one or more controversial stands: pacifism, since some soldiers are innocent conscripts and other innocents are killed in collateral damage in war; vegetarianism, since there can be doubt about whether killing an animal is blameworthy; opposition to capital punishment, because there was a possibility innocents would be executed; and finally it could require people to give all of their excess income to charity, since there was uncertainty whether spending money on luxuries deprived hungry or sick people from necessary resources.

I thought this was one of Boonin’s stronger points. Elsewhere he characterized some of Kreeft’s arguments as the often-fallacious slippery slope arguments. I believe he meant Kreeft’s allusions to the dehumanization of slaves or Jews in recent centuries. However, I think he dodged Kreeft’s postulate that justifying abortion also justified infanticide, which arguably is also a slippery slope argument.

Boonin himself proposed a thought experiment, a modified version of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist needs a blood transfusion” scenario: “Suppose you walked out in the park yesterday and a doctor caught you and conked you on the head and knocked you unconscious. You wake up, and the doctor has hooked you up to a bone marrow extraction device. The bone marrow is extracted from you and pumped into me. You ask 'What's going on?' The doctor says 'Don't worry, stay hooked into Professor Boonin for the next nine months, he'll be fine. Disconnect yourself now, because of a bone marrow disease, he's going to die.'”

Boonin thought most people agreed disconnecting oneself from the ill person was morally justified.

To the objection that this situation only applies to victims of rape, and that a woman consents to a pregnancy by consenting to sexual relations, Boonin modified his example: "Before you went walking in the park yesterday, you knew for a fact that my doctor was going to come looking in the park for a bone marrow donor. Your friends warn you 'Don't go in the park, lock your door! If you go into the park, there's a chance you're going to end up getting hooked up to this crazy philosopher, and you'll have to stick around for nine months." Escaping from this modified situation, Boonin thought, was similarly morally blameless.

But here I think he exposed the flaws of this thought experiment. It entails treating all pregnancies as kidnap-rescue scenarios. I don’t know about you, but no woman I know says “Bob and I are trying to force myself to carry a fetus for nine months.” Something so ordinary and universal as pregnancy, from which all men originated, cannot find a good analogy in such an extravagant hypothetical.

The thought experiment’s treatment of pregnancy as a disease, while certainly appealing to college students, also cannot form a consistent ethic. Think of the performance contradictions involved in an obstetrics ward that delivers babies, performs lifesaving surgeries in utero, and also commits abortions.

I also wonder: What would Boonin say are the duties of the father to a fetus considered parasitic?

Further, there is rhetorical manipulation latent in Boonin’s example.

In Thomson’s version of the scenario, a “famous violinist” suffers from some unspecified fatal ailment, the treatment of which requires someone to hook up to him for nine months. Boonin replaces the unspecified treatment with a bone marrow transfer, which is invasive and very uncomfortable.

Boonin also puts himself in the place of the ailing violinist. Whatever his other physical endowments, Boonin is not the handsomest of men. Further, both he and the hypothetical violinist are a few decades removed from their fetal stage.

Describe the person needing treatment as a gurgling infant, a cute four-year-old, or an ugly autistic teenager, and I think the audience reaction, and the philosopher’s intuitional response, would change depending on their sympathies with such persons. Make the ailing patient a blood relation, a pedophile, or a doctor nearly done with the cure for that bone marrow cancer from which he suffers, and our conflicted emotions cloud the argument that is meant to dissolve pro-life objections with revulsion towards imprisonment.

Boonin made some concessions to the pro-life cause, saying that if pregnancy were less burdensome an abortion could be an immoral act. I believe I heard him after the debate endorse the typical “viability” pro-choice criterion. I wished he had included this position in his public remarks, because it means that in his ethic, at the time when pregnancy is most burdensome upon the woman, it is least permissible.

Kreeft’s response to Boonin’s arguments seemed passive. A friend in attendance called his performance “understated,” which is perhaps the better word. Since I was more interested in recording the debate than in considering its truth, I initially thought Boonin did well against Kreeft. Only upon reflection, Kreeft’s position endured while Boonin’s shrank in stature.

At one point Kreeft suggested shifting the ground from “rights” to “responsibilities.” This was a bit inconsistent, since Kreeft’s arguments from the beginning used rights-language.

However, I think that shedding “rights talk” is the correct path to take. Rights-language is often antagonistic and conflict-based. Nobody talks about a right to be hugged, or a right to hug, because those actions have not been politicized. The conflict between mother(and father) and child is precisely what needs to be abated. Rights disputes suppose human equality, rather than human unity as the more important consideration.

In an egalitarian climate, the right to life must be universalized in distortive fashion. That is why Boonin can try to separate the right to life from the right to life support. While everybody can in theory live(insofar as anyone can theoretically live), the ability to sustain that life varies from person to person. Often such variety cannot be described in terms of equality.

“Rights-talk” is a political shorthand, a second-order description of the good in question. When talking about the right to life distracts from talking about life, something has gone awry.

The aftermath of the debate, and my excitement over what is happening in Boulder’s Catholic campus ministry, will have to fill another post.

For now a few references:
Update: I have published the detailed account made from my audio recording at Google Docs, it's ~2,000 words.

A recording of the debate is available on the ArchDen website

Francis Beckwith on Boonin’s book, “A Defense of Abortion,” a review excerpted at Mirror of Justice

Peter Kreeft's essay Human Personhood begins at Conception

Ivy Catholic reports a Kreeft-Boonin debate at Yale, the video of which is viewable at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Francis Beckwith on Secular Reason

Francis Beckwith, professor and Right Reason blogger, lectured at CU-Boulder to a surprisingly large Friday night audience. His speech, "Bioethics and the Pluralist Game," examined the failings of some of the commonplace arguments used to shut down ethical and legal objections to secular liberal policies. Though his inaugurating speech was more academic than the typical undergradate could handle, it bodes well for the new lecture series sponsored by the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute.

Beckwith's arguments were solid, and I particularly enjoyed his analysis of the oft-claimed need for political reasoning to be secular:

[Robert] Audi offers another principle that may be employed, the "secular reason requirement." It goes like this: one has a prima facie obligation not to advocate or support any law or public policy that restricts conduct unless one has and is willing to offer adequate secular reasons for advocacy or support.

...this principle requires, without argument, that the citizen's reason be secular. But "secular" is not a relevant property of a reason that is offered in support of a conclusion that an advocate is advancing. For instance, the terms "true, false, plausible, implausible" are adjectives that we apply to reasons to test the property relevant to its purpose as part of an argument. A property is characteristic had by something. So for example one can say "the dog is brown," which means the dog has the property of brownness. However, if one were to say "the set of all even numbers is brown," one would be saying nonsense. Numerical sense cannot have the property of color.

But reasons, like dogs or numerical sets, are things that can only have certain types of properties. Just as a dog cannot have the property of a rational number, and a numerical set cannot have the property of "blue," "valid," or "tall," a reason cannot be secular. For "secular," like "tall," "fast," "stinky," or "sexy," has no bearing on the quality of the reason one may offer in an argument to advance a particular public policy or point of view.

Suppose one believes the conclusion that unjust killing is morally wrong, and offers two reasons for it. The first reason is "the Bible prohibits unjust killing," and the second reason is "the philosopher Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative prohibits unjust killing." Most people would call the first a religious reason and the second a secular reason, because the first contains the name of a religious book, the Bible, and the second contains a non-religious principle, the Categorical Imperative. But how do the terms religious and secular add or subtract to our assessment of the quality of the reasoning?

If one, for example, has good reason to reject the authority of the Bible, then that good reason about the nature of the Bible is the good reason for rejecting that reason. On the other hand, if one has good reasons to believe the Bible is a better guide to moral philosophy than Kant's Categorical Imperative, in that case one ought to conclude that the first is a better reason than the second.

But again, how do the properties of "religious" and "secular" affect such a judgement? At the end of the day, reasons are weak, strong, true, or false, but "religious" and "secular" are not relevant properties when assessing the qualities of reasons a person may offer as part of her argument.

In practice, this requirement of secular reason functions as a hindrance for properly understanding the bioethical issues addressed and the positions held by Christian citizens.

To label an argument "religious" or "secular" is not to speak the language of logic but the language of anthropology or sociology. This tactic, widespread and often unconscious in use, tries to change the topic of the discussion from the argument itself to the category of person who is making the argument.

When this rhetorical shift takes place in jurisprudence, it suggests an implicit assumption that a certain type of people is in charge. Arguments are judged not on their merits but on whether they cater to this ruling type. The need to justify the rule of the secular tribe doubtless partially motivates the fervid insistence that the United States is a secular state.

Alasdair MacIntyre on Video

The video archives at Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture is another fine resource. I was happy to see MacIntyre lecture, especially since he is a better speaker than he is a prose stylist. He discusses the compartmentalization of life required by so-called pluralism, wherein standards of action in one area of life simply do not translate into other areas of life.

Other videos look very promising.

Worthy Lectures from ISI

Browsing the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Videos I came across two of note. Christendom College's William Fahey introduces Hillaire Belloc to a new audience, including a good summary of the origin and habits of Modernity.

Reactionary Radical Bill Kauffmann sings the praises of localism. He recounts one visit to Columbus, Mississippi:

We entered the eatery and were seated behind four ladies with lovely, mellifluous Southern accents. They spent the next half hour recounting the plot of the previous night's episode of Friends, that smuttily witless show by which archaeologists of the twenty-third century will condemn our civilization.

I wanted to confront them, to plead with them:

"Look, here you are, daughters of a poor, reviled state, which is nevertheless one of the culturally richest states in the union. Your home gave us the Delta Blues, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote,

And yet you consume the commercial products of cocaine-addled greedheads in Manhattan and Hollywood, people who hate your guts, who despise you as ignorant crackers and stupid rednecks. Get off your knees, Mississippi! There are new Robert Johnsons and Eudora Weltys in your midst. Support them. Look inward, look homeward! With a little water, the flowers in your own backyard will bloom a thousand times more brilliantly than anything on your high definition TV set."

Joseph Bottum Lectures in Denver

One week ago today, First Things editor Joseph Bottum delivered an energetic follow-up to his essay on Catholics in America, When The Swallows Return to Capistrano. (MP3 available here)

He believes America has always had a public church. When the Old Mainline "public churches" collapsed, Catholics and Evangelicals filled the gap in moral and spiritual influence. Yet with the decline of bishops, and ethnic communities' need for representation, there have been no clear spokesmen for Catholics as a whole. At a peak of Catholic intellectual influence, Catholic institutional influence is staggering from wounds inflicted from without and within.

Further, Catholics are now involved in a generational split. Even younger practicing Catholics are uninvolved in local parish life, often hopping to distant parishes more sympathetic to their personal ideals. Bottum thinks these youngsters' faith is highly intellectual, which I think neglects the more emotionalistic Evangelical influence in certain younger quarters. He noted youthful suspicion and dismissal of the old guard in a summary of his time with a few California college students:

"Sure, they agreed, pretty Masses are better than ugly ones, and they all preferred high-churchy smells and bells to guitar services and liturgical dance: the things their parents’ generation, poor souls, fondly imagined would “engage today’s youth.” But the radical traditionalists seemed cut from the same cloth as the radical revisionists-and the students dismissed all that kind of 1970s stuff as simultaneously boring and infuriating: the self-obsession and self-glorification of the two sides that, between them, had wrecked Catholic culture in this country. We live with a million aborted babies a year, daily scandals of corruption in the Church, millions of uncatechized Catholic children, and this is what those tired old biddies are still squabbling over?"

[...]

“You can see it clearly out here in California. That whole generation of Catholics in America, basically everybody formed before 1978, is screwed up. Left, Right, whatever....The best of them were failures, and the worst of them were monsters.”

Bottum sees the Oakes-Pickstick debate over von Balthasar as a reflection of this inter-generational mistrust. This particularly hit home for me, since before I first entered Father Oakes' religious studies classes as a transfer student I was still unsure exactly what kind of Jesuit he would be. I worried when a reputedly substandard, even heretical text showed up on my required books list that he would turn out to be just another outdated dissenter. Fortunately, it was the book list that was out of date.

Yet even such disdain for recent dead and living theological greats might have a potential upside:

"Father Oakes remembers when your choice was heresy or Hans Urs von Balthasar. Hans Urs von Balthasar felt like a lifeline in 1975 to a conservative, serious orthodox theologian. So he can't understand some young woman coming along and saying, 'but he's not orthodox!' We're going to see a lot more of this. You'll see it in Thomism as well. There's going to be a rebirth--if you look at the scholarly journals, the medieval philosophy magaines--you'll look at a rebirth of Suarezianism, for instance, and Banez, the kind of school manual versions of Thomism. Because the victory of the neo-Thomists and existential thomism was so complete, that these young scholars don't even know what the battle was anymore. And they think "Wait a minute! I just picked up from 1732 this great manual in Thomistic philosophy, and nobody's read it--except me!" We'll see a lot more of this, and it's going to be very interesting to watch it develop over the course of the church.

I believe Ben Naasko asked a question relating to the anti-parochial life of practicing Catholics today, though I didn't have the chance to introduce myself to the man.

Another man, Leo B., asked with penetrating concern how the First Things crowd could survive the looming collapse of support for the Iraqi War and the conservative coalition that instigated it. Bottum responded that he will be discussing this question in a forthcoming issue, piggypacking on his advocacy of the "New Fusionism." He will address the hypothetical question: if the Iraq War is going south, how can both moralistic interventionism and pro-life activism survive as political forces?

Michael Novak will respond, reportedly to claim all is well anyway so no worries. Oh, for a paleocon of fire...

I wish I had probed Bottum's views on the rise of anti-clericalism among American Catholics, and how it might compare to European or Latin varieties.

I also think another whole lecture can be delivered on how the disputes in the American "public church" can recapitulate old divisions: high church versus low church Protestantism, or traditions of pietism versus liturgicalism seem fruitful avenues to explore the political ramifications of American religion. Since Catholics have come into their own, intra-Catholic disputes now also manifest themselves in secular political debates(and vice-versa).

All in all this was a very nice lecture reflecting the mental powers at work at First Things. But such powers on display suggested how malign the influence of such persuasive men when they tie their abilities and reputations to defending the wrong cause.

(Any local ROFTERS, please note the discussion group run by Mr. Dennis Floyd. We have a fun time.)

Gerard Bradley on the Common Goods of Common Concepts

The Notre Dame School of Law's Professor Gerard V. Bradley spoke at the Archdiocese of Denver's Respect Life Conference on October 28, 2006. Alas, I'm only now getting around to recording my notes. Bradley discussed the interplay between law and culture, especially the legal regime instituted by Roe v. Wade.

He said that two of the most vital questions of law and life are: "Who is my neighbor"? To whom do I owe justice?

The idea of equality goes out the window if one manipulates who counts as equal. everyone gets treated equally, but we get to decide who "everyone" is.

Bradley spoke of Roe "cutting people off from society" because they inhibit the flourishing of the community. With consistency, he also noted that Thomas Aquinas made a similar argument for the death penalty, saying

For this reason we observe that if the health of the whole body demands the excision of a member, through its being decayed or infectious to the other members, it will be both praiseworthy and advantageous to have it cut away. Now every individual person is compared to the whole community, as part to whole. Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since "a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump"

Bradley also noted the necessity of abortion to the success of feminism in the workplace. He pointed out that the Supreme Court reasoned against overturning Roe v. Wade precisely because it would hinder women's equaltiy:

The Roe rule's limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.
-Planned Parenthood vs. Casey

Bradley held that the question "when do people begin?" should be same question as "When do people begin for purposes of legal protection?" The dualism between legal persons and real persons is ultimately pernicious, enabling the subjection of the weak to the strong.

His most insightful commentary came, I believe, when he examined how common conceptions can be common goods. He concentrated on marriage and the impact of its changing definition over time:

Think, for example, of what happened about forty years ago, about '65-'70. If you can remember that long ago, you know that there was a revolution in American law. It was called the "No Fault Divorce" revolution. In the space of literally about six years, we went from a national pattern of divorce only for fault(abandonment, adultery, cruelty mental or physical). It probably was true that you had what amounts to a mutually agreeable divorce, where one or the other party, probably the husband, would lie in court and admit some abuse that didn't really happen.

Be that as it may, the law was divorce only for fault. Within about seven years or so, that was just gone.
Now think about that.

Even those people after this revolution--if you have kids or grandkids who are twenty today, how hard is it for them to come to actually believe and stand with the proposition of the faith "Marriage is permanent." The law changes rapidly, divorce becomes more common, divorce is nobody's fault, and it's OK for the kids too, we told ourselves.
Now it's a pattern. It's not as if the law is making anyone get a divorce, but the understanding that marriage is not permanent, not unconditional, that understanding is now our common property.

The debate about same-sex marriage is a similar kind of thing. People who are advocates of same-sex marriage say, "you don't have to marry the same sex, just let others."

What's at stake in that debate is whether marriage will have a definitional standing in our legal culture, of having any necessary relationship with kids. When you say men can marry men, women can marry women, a man can marry a woman too, but they'll all be married. That means they'll all get involved with marriage, and given what we do know, that a lesbian couple and a gay couple can't have children of their own, that means marriage is no longer intrinsically, that is, necessarily, about children. That's what's at stake in the same-sex marriage debate. That's the part of it that affects all of us.
I fear that I give this same presentation twenty years from now, my example won't be divorce, but kids and marriage. I'll say to you then, think about your kids or grandkids who are twenty-two. Do they understand that marriage is a procreative relationship? A conjugal union?

They might grow up in a society in which people grow up and get married, and it's clear that not only because of same-sex marriage but for other reasons too, that kids really are optional. Some parents do it, some don't, it's for them to judge, it's what they want.

Now that's what affects all of us. Make the legal change, you change the definition of marriage in law--divorce, kids, same-sex marriage--that becomes a common cultural property before long.

Bradley also critiqued a few strategies for reducing abortion.

First is the school which says "Change the culture; then the law, educate, then legislate." This attitude, as well as the view adovcating the opposite order, suffers from a chicken-egg problem, thinking it has to be one first, then the other.

"We have to educate, change the culture, and attack the root causes of abortion" goes a pro-choice, and even some pro-life arguments.

But what are the root cause of unwanted pregnancies?

Not fornication, nor even a lack of personal responsibility

Rather, the root cause of abortion demand is people who have sexual relations, but nonetheless have no interest in having children.

Bradley also held that the idea that pregnancies, as things go, are either wanted or unwanted, is also a root cause. To think that pregnancies are called into being, and a pregnancy not consciously called into being is therefore terminable, is at last to think against humanity. Children are "begotten, not made," unexpected and undesigned gifts rather than simply extensions of adult plans.

Bradley, himself a father, referred to his own life: "I have eight kids. Let's put it this way: I'm not so sure the kids I have are the kids I wanted." The habit of pregnancy at-will cannot be sustained without compromising the nature of parenthood and unconditional love.

Jean Duchesne on Christian Cultural Renewal

I've already recorded Jean Duchesne's remarks on European Muslim Demographics. He also spoke eloquently about cultural penetration and the paucity of Christian creativity:

The problem for us, if we take for a moment a more realistic view, is not that what we believe is not said, because we [do] say it. The problem is rather why it is not heard. Is it not heard because, I would say, not enough people repeat it. And when I say people, this is absolutely accurate, because everything is not repeated enough. In other words, we do not have enough media power. When I say media, that does not mean television programs. That does not mean shouting[?] in the blogosphere. That means what can we do for other people, and under the cross, to reflect, to reclaim, what we know is the truth and the mystery of Christ.

...in my opinion, the real question is how to make sure that the Christian vision of the world, the Christian ideals, are not only expressed directly, as a matter of personal testimony, but is really present, even if it half-explicit, even if it is downright implicit, in the works of art, the cinema, music, museums, etc. In other words, the culture has changed a lot, and my question is, what are we doing to use that culture?

We know already that our testimonies are both necessary and insufficient, and we also know that our traditional specific media, the Catholic media, are necessary and insufficient. The problem for us is to get out. This is not a question of good will, it is not a question of money, even, it is a question of creativity. And I think that praying for a renewing and the refining of the presence of the Christian mystery in today's culture, taking on the means it currently uses, prayers for that intention are perhaps a priority.

Duchesne's speculation that a lack of repetition might impede the progress of Christian belief reveals that in some sense Christian conversion and aedification is often the result of a habit. If true, the Christian message is being blocked out not only by willful sin, but also the white noise of commerical society, its Hericlitean flux of words, imagery, and ideas. When the phrase "Jesus saves" is outnumbered by phrases like "Jesus was a New Age hippie," "Jesus was a fine teacher," and "Jesus was killed for being a political revolutionary," the static obscures the signal. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The iconography en masse of our age induces habits at once hyperactive and superficial. It creates an antipathy towards contemplation and, in spite of the intense regimentation of modern life, renders ordered living most difficult. A habitual consideration of the person of Christ becomes even more arduous than it was in less saturated times.

Duchesne's analysis also suggests plenty of problems in the Evangelical Ghetto and its would-be Catholic imitations(this means you, LifeTeen). Rather than having, for instance, a coffee shop where Christian claims are implicit and taken for granted in the atmosphere, the current trend is to put up a microphone for the born-again yesterday, play subtlety-impaired Christian music, and tarnish the Lord's name by using it in your shop name and logo. Such derivative ventures suggest that the Christian imagination has been usurped by mere imitation.

Call it the mimetic captivity of the church. As Hank Hill noted, "Can't you see you're not making Christianity better, you're just making ________ worse?"

Don't start up a new coffee-shop or a rock band. Invent the next coffee-shop phenomenon or the newest innovative musical style. Create something beautiful for God and, like a good Catholic, baptize it in its infancy. Make secular people(like the megachurch-coveting Daily Kos) look enviously upon your cultural works and institutions. Render secular art the domain of inauthentic knock-off artists. Make certain non-Christians prissily sniff at the Christian subtexts, as some Christians now sniff at subtexts in the secular media even while admiring that media's artistic prowess.

Most of all, forget the Next Big Thing of the Moment. You should be too busy generating good ideas to notice.

Jean Duchesne Speaks Against Steynian Panicmongering

Jean Duchesne, French theologian and religious thinker, recently lectured at the Archdiocese of Denver. An advisor to cardinals and a significant force behind the theological journal Communio, his opinions are most worthy of consideration. Duchesne's lecture(now available in .MP3) is supposed to be posted soon on the ArchDen website, so I will discuss more about his excellent and lively speech later.

In the Q & A period, one audience member asked about the future of a Muslim-controlled France. Obviously, she was a reader of Mark Steyn whose prognostications of demographic implosion enjoy popularity in conservative circles.

Monsieur Duchesne replied:

Let us be serious. One of the greatest disservices we can do to ourselves is to overestimate Islam in every respect. Currently, since Marxism was easier to define, it was easier to know. Approximately eight percent of the European population is of Muslim origin. If you go by the same standards, eighty percent now are Christians. So there is a great variety within the muslim world. And so please, don't forget one thing: What does Islam mean? Islam means war!

If two Muslims get together, you can call the ambulance. In Iraq, anywhere, there is no unity. So the idea, you cannot, it is wrong, it is simply to panic, to consider that Islam is the global[?] unity with Osama Bin Laden sitting as chairman of their political bureau.. No, absolutely not. But still a number of Muslims are being integrated, and that is not always good news. They're just simply secularizing.

On the other hand, on many issues, we Catholics find ourselves hard to acknowledge we find ourselves saying the same things as the Imams concerning [jobs?] abortions, euthanasia, and other things. So there are things, not everything and anything, that are progressing. And if simply becoming an observant Muslim can save a young man from the French suburbs from yielding to the temptations of violence, drugs or pornography or both, where is the problem?

Once more, there is no such thing as organized Islam coming to take power in Europe. What many see, of course, is demographics. Well, you know, it will take time before eight percent of the population becomes forty percent.

And then, again, to cite another number out there, Islam, in the majority if we look at the current trends, will, fortunately or unfortunately I don't know, have been integrated with the secularized, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Though his accent and the quality of the recording prevented me from recording the rest of the answer verbatim, its gist was that Islamic countries usually require police states simply to avoid anarchy, and that police state, not Sharia, would be the threat of a large, activist, strife-ridden Islamic population in Europe.

Gawronski on Polish and Polish-American Catholicism

Last Thursday Rev. Raymond Gawronski, S.J., wrapped up the excellent Church, Politics, and Society lecture series at St. Elizabeth of Hungary. He spoke on Polish Catholicism in both the Old Country and America. His points in brief:

-Polish spirituality is Franciscan, not Benedictine. The Benedictines were associated with the Germans and aristocracy, whereas the Franciscans were more popular in the sense of being of the people.

-Poland's cultural touchstone was neither Gothic nor Modern, but Renaissance, which era coincided with Poland's peak as a world power.

-John Paul II's apparent failures as an administrator might derive in part from habitual Polish antipathy towards Prussian and Russian authoritarian bureaucracies. The locals' reaction instilled a careless near-anarchism, an almost quietist devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and a cult of suffering.

Certain parts of Father Gawronski's reflections on the Polish experience in America were especially noteworthy, and I reproduce parts below:

From the very start, Poles were excluded from church governance... the Polish traditions of devotion and family religious practice did not find a place in the emerging American Catholic Church. Though there were ethnic monsignors, auxillary bishops in cities with a large Polish population, it would be possible to say that the rich Polish liturgical, theological, and intellectual tradition has had any real impact on the wider American Church. New York has St. Patrick's Cathedral, I don't think any city has St. Stanislaus' Cathedral.

Beginning in the early sixties, the Poles in America were the object of a strong campaign of vilification. Identified as a Catholic working people, the Poles became symbols of that which had to be destroyed to make way for the new America.

As the dominant culture began to turn against both Catholicism and European culture, it displayed contempt for working class mores. Polish-American resistance to "ethnic cleansing" in urban neighborhoods met the combined, crushing force of state and church power and brute economic realities. Moreover Polish resistance to leftist agendas both in Europe and America made the Poles objects of derision, especially among elites in the academy and in the national media. I've long wondered if those attacks against the Polish community and the polack jokes in the American media were not the forerunners to the attacks on the Catholic Church she was experiencing, in Poland most strongly.

[...]

Ethnic groups in this country have tended to continue the trajectory of the Mother Country. Poland has not had a history of a Germany or modern Ireland, nor did Polish history share all significant Polish values with Polish Jews. Poland, a stateless nation, was formed in a crucible of powerlessness. Character and culture came to matter more than glory or power. Success in politics was often the way of collaborators. ...to be a lawyer was seen to be a disgrace.

...the Slavic countries possessed a tendency unknown to most Western countries, wedded to a dignity and freedom based on the freedom of independent farmers. And that's the heart of this experience--everyone had his own piece of land. The poles as a group had a long-term experience in the USA that was different from some other groups who have enjoyed greater success while fostering a strong public image. For example, I would say that the Polish experience encourages the opposite of the Irish experience in America. Where persecution in America occurred in the context of possible access to power, a shared language and public culture allowed the Irish, in the end, to even dominate their Anglo-Saxon persecutors and tutors.

[I couldn't help but silently cheer here]

Speaking as a somewhat separated Polish-American, this success has come at a great price. The story of the Irish in America is in a large part the story of a transformation from a despised and landless minority to the highest seats of power in the state and the church. In the process, many lost their ancestral Catholic faith. You know, Eamon de Valera when he came to America described Catholics as Protestants who go to mass.

Something similar may well be happening in Ireland itself. So you see the current state of the Catholic Church in America is largely the state of the descendants of those once-oppressed immigrants who, as Don Corleone famously said, "found paradise in America." But the heavenly paradise seems to have dimmed in its appeal.

Coming in numbers three generations later, with a very different language, no cultural experience with Anglo-Saxons whatsoever, this has not helped--and could not have helped--the Polish experience.

Some people would say that Poland has returned to normalcy, that joining the EU will be joining normal states. Pardon my views, but nations that countenance abortion and seek to legitimize homosexual unions are not normal, in any possible religious imagination, not only Christian. Perhaps the Polish experience is the experience of anyone consecrated to God. And to the extend that they are consecrated to God, it is to be scarred, and wounded, the certain sufferings, and the glory of the Cross.

Christian Charity and Austerity: Evangelical Witnesses to the Pagans

Robert Royal of the Faith and Reason Institute gave a nice lecture last night at the Archdiocese of Denver. (recording available in .MP3)

Springboarding off of his new book, The God That Did Not Fail, he gave a pretty typical lecture about faith and politics. For the most part, it was right out of George Washington's Farewell Address. Secular order requires and presupposes transcendent, indispensable religious support. Natural Law ethics allow us to make rational arguments within this secular order while remaining energized by the spiritual life. Plus the theory helps us Catholics shmooze with Evangelicals!

I was concerned about Royal's near-complete focus on philosophy and political matters, so in the Q&A period I noted that music and movies have far more influence than explicit philosophical systems and laws in the state or national capitols. He missed the point of my question, and made a few weak suggestions about censorship, so I endorsed supporting artistic movements in addition to, or even rather than, political ones.

I have been worried about what Claes Ryn pegged as political philistinism, political intellectuals who draw "attention and respect away from efforts whose relevance to politics [is] not immediately obvious." A lecture on Christian arts--the non-ghettoized forms, especially--would likely attract a much smaller audience. For us, alas, ethical speechifying and politics seem a broader, more common activity than other forms of cultural engagement. Both rest upon the use and abuse of the written word. Yet Christianity, being an incarnational faith, cannot thrive on such disincarnated verbiage. The vision is lacking and, well, you know the rest.

But like many a tiresome questioner, I am critical about the lecture Robert Royal did not give.

To return to focus, the best part of Royal's speech came when he referred to antiquity and the rise of Christianity. He cited the witness of the pagans:

"The impious Gallileans support not only their poor, but ours as well. Everyone can see that our poor lack aid from us."
-Julian the Apostate

"We now see the people called Christians drawing their faith from parables and miracles, and yet sometimes acting in the same way as those who practice philosophy. With their contempt of death and of its sequel is patent to us every day, and likewise their restraint in cohabitation. For they include not only men but also women who refrain from cohabiting all through their lives; and they also number individuals who, in self-discipline and self-control in matters of food and drink, and in their keen pursuit of justice, have attained a pitch not inferior to that of genuine philosophers."
-Galen

Just yesterday Amy Welborn was talking about the decline of fasting. Its capacity for Christian witness should not be overestimated.

Robert Royal expands on these ancient authors and the evangelical life which attracted their remarks:

"...I mention this because I am distressed. I was at a conference at a Catholic university a couple weeks ago and the sociologists who do these surveys about what the church is going to look like in the future say that one of the developments in the world is that young Catholics don't believe there is any difference between Catholicism and other religions, that everybody is pretty much the same. And if that's true, that's really unfortunate. It means that we don't have that kind of witness, either by charity or by our philosophical self-control. I think if we had either of those, better both but even either, the New Evangelization would be a lot easier."

Amen.

(I have a relatively high quality digital recording of this speech, interested parties can e-mail me)

The "See No Evil" Oblivion of the Boomers

We forget, those of us at middle age, that we grew up in a saner time. I'm in no way saying that the world I grew up in was perfect; however, it wasn't like it was today. For instance, the culture of free sex, abortion, pornography, only began to explode in the '70s. We have lived in it for over thirty years, but most of us have turned out okay. So we think our children will be fine, too. But they have never had a normal culture against which to balance this newer, sicker one. They have no references which point to the old, boring normality.

We assume that they know what we know, which is "this is not right!" But why would they know that? This is the only world they have ever known.
-Terry Polakvic, St. Elizabeth of Hungary Lecture Series

Of course, this statement provoked a well-meaning but naive audience member to claim Mrs. Polakvic was painting with too broad a brush. I thought the objection was reminiscent of those in a crisis who say "Problem? What problem?" Those of my parents' generation, like this doubter, often presume their mores were passed along relatively unaffected by the turmoils of the recent decades. They correctly claim that there were always wild kids. Yet they never even suspect that such adolescent dissolution now has very considerable cultural, economic and political forces promoting the moral haze of libertine sloth. They seem utterly oblivious to debauchery and violence, believing it safely confined to late night television.

With such nigh-ubiquitous polyannas, I have to say that I am grateful to Mrs. Polakvic for her realization that something momentous has indeed actually happened. The ability to state the obvious shouldn't be so uncommon.

Christians and Modernity: A More Optimistic View

The St. Elizabeth of Hungary Theology Lecture Series is proceeding nicely. Here are some somewhat messy notes on Father Chrysostom Frank's lecture "The Politics of Liberty in a Postmodern Era":

Pre-moderns: trusted in authority passed down through tradition
Moderns: lost confidence in authority, confident in human reason
Post-moderns: maintain diffidence towards authority, but also have lost confidence in human reason.

Crisis of meaning: how do we ground meaning if transcendence removed? Father Chrysostom related a shocking story describing how some of his students at Regis U outright admitted that the only difference they saw between Mother Theresa's hospices for the dying and the concentration camps was personal preference.

At present, it is difficult to defend politics of liberty other than maintaining it is simply a personal preference.

Meaning is a problem only because we already have an intuitive sense of the fullness of the reality towards which we are being pulled. By searching for the infinite in the finite(as in the modernist project) we set ourselves up for failure and despair.

The death of the modern project is reawakening us to eternity; meaning can only be found in its relationship with the transcendent.

The central illumination of the modern age, what has emerged as a viable social and political order, is grounded on conviction that individual human being has inviolable liberty and dignity. That conviction is the spark of transcendent meaning on which Christianity and modernity can make common cause against the cynicism of postmodernity and the barbarities of political Islam. While only Christianity can best ground that meaning, Liberalism still having immanentist temptations, Christians nonetheless dismiss Liberalism at our peril.

Father Chrysostom expresses nervousness when Catholics on rare occasion bad-mouth liberty and the individual. From having lived in South Africa, and having spent time in post-Soviet Russia, his opinion is very understandable.

By way of further reading Father Chrysostom recommended the works of David Walsh, who has flown under my radar.

On the whole, the lecture was a very good summary of the history and philosophies involved. I don't think there was anything particularly new to me, yet its delivery was compact and far more hopeful than other examinations of the postmodern condition.