Category: Uncategorized

Camassia on her Mennonite church and the Real Presence.

Brandon on what it means to respect other people’s beliefs.

Malcin Horton on the “Caelum & Terra” vision.

John Allen has a piece in the National Catholic Reporter on the Taizé community in the aftermath of the murder of its leader Brother Roger Schutz. (via Amy Welborn)

There is still debate about Taizé, but Schutz and the community he founded are nevertheless seen by millions of Christians as prophets of the ecumenical dream, already living the full, visible unity that official structures struggle to realize.

Americans often assume that European-style welfare states are inherently unworkable and unstable and that they must lead in the long run to high unemployment and low economic growth.

This article disputes that view, saying that there are important differences between the generous welfare states of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland and their counterparts in countries like Germany and France. The former have managed to combine fairly lavish provisions for health and unemployment insurance, paid family leave and other amenities with farily robust economies.

The article suggests that the difference lies in the fact that the Nordic countries, unlike Germany and France, have maintained an economic climate that is more flexible and favorable to innovation:

The difference, analysts say, is in how the Nordic states spend the money, and how they structure their benefit programs.

While France, Italy and Germany are hamstrung by job-for-life cultures that erect myriad legal barriers to firing workers, the Nordic countries make it easier for companies to downsize. That in turn paves the way for new industries and new jobs.

The Nordic governments offer generous unemployment benefits and extensive government-funded retraining. But while Germans, French and Italians tend to linger on unemployment benefits for years, the Nordic states force people to take other jobs that come along.

Though their citizens take as much vacation as their European counterparts – two to three times as much as Americans do – the Nordic societies work more, because there is less early retirement and more women in their workforces.

Sweden and Finland also lead the world in research-and-development spending. The Swedes spent 4.3 percent of their gross domestic product on research last year, compared with about 2.6 percent for the United States and less than 2 percent for the European Union as a whole.

Another key factor: The Nordic states are widely perceived to have the world’s least corrupt, and the most efficient, governments and court systems. Foreign investors can count on fair and evenhanded treatment from regulators.

There are some problems on the horizon though:

This is not to say that the Nordic systems are problem-free. Sweden, for example, is grappling with huge abuse of its generous sick-leave policy. In recent years, it also has admitted large populations of poor, uneducated immigrants, many of whom are failing to assimilate and living on public aid.

I wonder if the success of these countries’ systems has something to do with the relative homogeneity of their population. This would seem to make a common ethos of solidarity and communal provision easier to maintain (i.e. strong ties of affection and identification with fellow-citizens combined with a sense of civic obligation). A welfare state can only last as long as most people choose not to become free riders.

Plus, such generous welfare provisions might be tempting for immigrants who don’t speak the language and find it difficult to find a good job and assimilate into the community. Could the U.S., for instance, have such a system and maintian its level of immigration?

And there’s the issue of freedom of choice. Even if one is able to rely on the state to ease the vicissitudes of living, some people no doubt prefer to have more control over their own lives and resources, the education of their children, etc. There is a trade-off between freedom and economic security.

Still, it’s good to be reminded that there are many possible social and political models. Americans in particular tend to think of our system as though it was delivered from on high and should be the model for the rest of the world.

“Fr. Jape” has a post on the need to inculcate habits of devotion and piety, not just an intellectual “world-view” (as seems to be popular now in some circles), in order to pass the faith on to the next generation.

As an adult convert (or adult “re-lapsed” Christian depending on how you look at it) I don’t think kids are the only ones who could benefit from training in such habits. Most of the churches I’ve attended in the last five or six years have been pretty deficient in this area.

Here’s the Lutheran World Relief page for donations of aid for victims of the earthquake in South Asia. No doubt all of your more reputable charities are doing similar things.

Can this be true?? Bono, lead singer of U2 and poster boy for vaguely Christian global do-goodism, is going to appear with his bandmates at a fundraiser for … Sen. Rick Santorum, poster boy of Christian Rightist eeeevil!

UPDATE: As I suspected, this isn’t true. See here.

Alexander Cockburn weighs in on the brouhaha in his usual iconoclastic fashion:

Every year or so, some right-winger in America lets fly in public with a ripe salvo of racism, and the liberal watchdogs come tearing out of their kennels, and the neighborhood echoes with the barks and shouts. The right-winger says he didn’t mean it, the president “distances himself,” and the liberals claim they’re shocked beyond all measure. Then, everyday life in racist America resumes its even course.

This past week it’s been the turn of that conservative public moraliser, William Bennett. He should have known better than to loose off a hypothetical on his radio show. Announce publicly that “if you wanted to reduce crime, you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down,” and many Americans reckon that’s no hypothesis, that’s a plan waiting to happen.

Of course that’s what Bennett did say, and he should have known better. Americans mostly don’t understand hypotheses, any more than they feel at ease with irony. Particularly in the age of the Internet, literalism is the order of the day. Qualifications such as Bennett added (to the effect that this would be “an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do”) are useless.

The deeper irony here is that liberals have pondered longer and deeper than conservatives on how exactly to carry out Bennett’s hypothetical plan, either by sterilization or compulsory contraception.

Read the rest here.

Paul Cella has an article in the New Atlantis that tackles some of the issues that have been preoccupying us here over the past couple of days. (via The Japery)

This is one of the sillier things I’ve read in a while. From an op-ed published in the Inquirer this weekend:

Physician-assisted suicide is one of the religious right’s signature issues, used mainly as a wedge in the battle against abortion rights. It lets foes of abortion claim that their commitment to life is absolute and has nothing to do with women’s rights. The administration is quite willing to throw over Republican principles about federalism and individual freedom to appease the religious right.

Riiiiight. ‘Cause no one could possibly oppose assisted suicide in good faith. It’s all part of the right-wing conspiracy to enslave women (itself an interesting reading of what the debate over abortion is about). For what it’s worth, I’m sympathetic to the federalism argument in this case, but this is just dumb.

As long as I’m getting my anti-capitalist groove on, let me mention a couple of other problems where I think critics of capitalism and modernity make some good points. What I have in mind are the problems of consumerism and the drive for technological mastery. We might actually see them as two aspects of a single problem, but it’s still helpful to distinguish them.

Consumerism, as I understand it, is not simply the enjoyment of material things for their own sake. The material world is good, and we’re supposed to enjoy its blessings. There are obviously limits to how much we should consume, limits imposed by social and environmental constaints for instance, but there’s nothing wrong with consumption as such.

My hunch is that the root problem of consumerism is a spiritual one. It’s what happens when we treat the things we consume as objects utterly at our disposal. I think the Christian theological tradition would say that our proper attitude toward material creation is to receive it as a gift and with thanksgiving. But the consumerist attitude is similar to the attitude of the Israelites in the desert hoarding the manna that came from God. They wanted to have it at their disposal, rather than as a gift received anew each day. In a similar fashion, we want things in our possession, at our disposal, and under our control. We turn them into commodities.*

This may be one manifestation of what many think is the signature feature of modernity, namely, the drive for technological mastery. In the ancient and medieval world people generally saw themselves as inhabiting a cosmos with a fixed order to which they had to orient themselves in order to flourish. With the rise of modern science and technology, though, we came to realize that the world could be adjusted to our needs and desires. Not that people haven’t always sought to modify their environment, but the scientific method offered a new and powerful tool that increased this ability exponentially.**

The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment philosophy that accompanied it recast the understanding of human rationality in an instrumental and pragmatic mold. In the ancient and medieval understanding reason at its highest was our ability to contemplate the divinely established order of the universe. Now reason came to be understood as a tool for unlocking and controlling the course of nature, including human nature. One well-known side effect of this was to relegate morality to the airy realm of “values,” ultimately reducing it to mere subjective preference in many people’s minds.

With rationality understood in a primarily instrumental fashion and morals reduced to subjective preference a modern view of society and politics emerged which saw the politcal task as engineering an environment that allowed people to pursue their own preferences with a minimal number of hindrances. This was in sharp contrast to the older notion of the goal of politics as fostering a community of virtue. Liberal democratic societies pride themselves on being “neutral” between competing moral outlooks or “value judgments.”

While liberal democracy has many advantages over older forms of political society in terms of personal freedom, privacy, and autonomy, it has certain weaknesses that some think could be its undoing. The expansion of the freedom to “pursue happiness” was thought to require greater and greater levels of material prosperity and technological progress. After all, these things would result in expanding the range of choices available to the citizens of liberal societies.

This is where I think critics of liberalism have their strongest argument. Since liberal society is dedicated, in principle, to expanding the range of human choice and opportunity, it has no resources for establishing limits on economic growth and technological mastery. We see this all the time in our political debates; it is assumed, virtually across the political spectrum, that increasing economic growth should be at or very near the top of our list of national priorities. It is virtually impossible for anyone to make a cogent argument against deploying new technologies since the only language available is one of “rights,” “consent,” and the like. Without an orienting vision of the good liberalism seems to have a hard time drawing limits.

What’s striking is how very anti-Christian this attitude is. In the Christian mythos pride, human beings’ quest to transcend their creaturely limits and “play God,” is the essence of sin. And the opposite of sin is faith, or trusting that God, in his loving providence, will care for us, and, therefore, we don’t need to try and run the world and engineer every outcome.

Here, almost at random, is a passage from Gerhard Forde’s Where God Meets Man that speaks to this:

Man’s relationship to God in paradise was comprehended entirely by faith. That is to say that even in paradise man lived from day to day by trusting God. He “knew” God, to be sure, but only as a creature knows his creator. He did not know God in any more immediate or direct sense. The “image of God,” Luther says, so far as we can now reconstruct it, consisted not in some spiritual faculty now lost, but rather in the fact that man, like God, lived in peace in his kingdom. In other words, when man lives by faith and trust in God, when he takes care of his “kingdom” as he is supposed to (has dominion over it) he is at peace. And in this very peace he images God. Just as God rules over, loves, and cares for his kingdom, so man is to have dominon over, love, and care for the kingdom God has given him. In that way he lives in the image of God–at peace with his maker, with himself and with his world. He lives “down to earth.”

As a creature man is to live, therefore, solely by faith. He is to trust God for the final outcome of things. He lives day by day, awaiting each day the new revelation of God’s will, not knowing necessarily how it will all end. He simply trusts God perfectly. That is his righteousness. He lives by faith, without fear, without anxiety. Luther surmised that had man remained in this state of “perfect righteousness and faith” God would at the end, have translated him to a new and perhaps immortal state. In other words, Adam did not possess inherently some kind of automatic immortality but would rather have had to await a further and final act of divine goodness. Man was to live by faith alone. (p. 54-5)

If we lived by faith in the way Forde describes, if we really trusted in God, would we feel the same need to possess things as commodities and to dominate our environement, each other and ourselves through techniques of technological mastery? Do we need a faith like this to avoid overruning important limits, limits that the ethos of liberalism seems incapable of providing?

This isn’t to say that we should, or even can, return to some pre-modern consciousness that sees the order of nature as unalterable. Technology and capitalism have brought undeniable benefits that no one in their right mind would want to surrender. And some critiques of capitalism do fall prey to a romantic technophobia. But we do, it seems to me, need some way of making communal judgments about how far is too far in the realms of consumerism and technology. Can we discover something like that while still preserving the acheivements of liberalism and liberal institutions?
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*I’ve been influenced here by the thought of Albert Borgmann. See his Power Failure and Crossing the Postmodern Divide.
**See Murray Jardine’s The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society