We are free so that we may love and do what is good. Because of this, I find assertions and arguments that healthcare reform measures will diminish our freedom and should therefore be opposed to be less than convincing. We uphold the value of a free society not because freedom is an end in itself – it isn’t – but because a free society affords us the best opportunity to achieve the common good. And even in a society with the greatest possible freedom, restrictions on freedom would still exist and be necessary for the common good.
The idea that our public servants would require us to participate in a health insurance plan seems especially outrageous to some people, but even this idea, while I’m uncertain as to its prudence, doesn’t cause me much concern. We, through the institution of our government and other social structures, require each other and ourselves to do certain things in order for society to function effectively and justly. Generally speaking, we have to pay taxes, find and maintain employment, converse on telephones, use some means of transportation, get an education, shop at grocery stores, and fill out paperwork. Society demands a lot from us, and these demands place limits on our freedom, but, if our power to do the good is not diminished, we are not really less free because of these limits.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
They that go forth and weep, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing their sheaves with them.
We all know that a big issue relates to the proposed subsidization of individual health insurance plans in the exchange, some of which might cover abortion. The debate resolves around how best to minimize the proximity of taxpayer funds to every occasion of abortion, with the proviso that the procedure will remain legal. It’s tricky. But when we get deeper into this issue, we can go far further than abortion (there is a curious tendency among some to begin and end every discussion of morality with abortion).
I’m talking here about the single largest item in the federal budget – defense and military spending. Even if you accept the premise that funding a military in itself is not immoral, you cannot get past the fact that you are most certainly funding activities that are indeed immoral. The Iraq war was immoral. The continued accumulation of nuclear weapons is immoral. Torture is intrinsically evil – and yet the taxpayer under the Bush administration at least was paying for the various CIA programs that tortured people. Where were the calls of conscientious Catholics to de-fund these activities at that time? And what about the $3 billion a year flowing from the American taxpayer to the Israeli military, as it commits war crimes in Gaza?
Yes, the funding of the abortion merely begins the debate, doesn’t it? And for that matter, let’s talk about conscience protections too. The church also supports selective conscientious objection in the military. How come we don’t hear about this so much?
Since I earlier posted on Vox-Nova Archbishop Dolan’s full, expanded Op-Ed to the NYT, I thought it would be only fair to give this response that NYT columnist Laurie Goodstein submitted on the archbishop’s blog.
A Response to Archbishop Dolan
I am the national religion correspondent at The New York Times, and sent this letter to Archbishop Dolan yesterday. I would like to share it with the readers of his blog. Dear Archbishop Dolan, I was very disturbed to read your blog post about The New York Times, and about my work and that of my colleagues as “anti-Catholic.” You write as though the Catholic Church is some sort of special target, when in fact any institution that is accused of wrongdoing receives critical coverage and commentary. As you know, the Catholic Church is the largest religious institution in the world, and a quarter of Americans are adherents. The Catholic Church is a hierarchical church with a clear chain of accountability. It is only natural that it receives such scrutiny. As you acknowledged in your blog, there are recent developments in the Church that are “well-worth discussing and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning.” Read the rest of this entry »
I try not to bring up current events unless I have something unique to add. In this case, I do have something to add, but you’ll have to trust my word. People join the military for any number of reasons. Many of them do not join to go to war. When time comes for them, they and people that have had a change of heart try to avoid it. One case I know was a man that threw himself down a staircase in an attempt to induce an injury and therefore not get deployed. I would hate to overgeneralize and claim that attempted self-mutilation was common, but it wasn’t grossly exceptional; in other words, my sources were no longer surprised at hearing stories as deployment dates closed for Gulf War II. I don’t know the numbers around suicides, but I do know they also happen as deployment dates approach.
Hearing the news last night and hearing the details, some of my first thoughts were that this was an extreme case of what I just described. The killer had been attempting to get out of his deployment for two years. He had go so far as to secure a lawyer to attempt to get out of his deployment. (See NY Times coverage.) This isn’t what is being discussed today. Today there is endless fascination that this killer was a Muslim. He was a Muslim that in his previous years of service had served our members’ mental health needs and hadn’t gone on a killing spree. Yes, he had voiced opposition, quite loudly, over our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that wasn’t an exceptionally Muslim position. Read the rest of this entry »
I suppose the good news is that the party of nihilism actually came up with an alternative healthcare plan. But that’s it for the good news. It’s all down here from there. The CBO has scored the GOP proposal, and the results are not good. See Jon Cohn and Ezra Klein for the gory details. In a nutshell, the plan would not deal with the problem of the uninsured at all – ten years into implementation, 52 million people would be uninsured.
OK, but it saves money by insuring fewer people, right? Wrong. The Republican plan will reduce the deficit by $68 billion over the next ten years. The Democratic plan will cut the deficit by $104 billion over this period. So, let’s sum up – the Democratic bill covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion extra!
Republicans are trumpeting that premiums are lower, and that’s true – but it’s barely significant for the vast majority on employer-based insurance (0-3 percent reduction for insurance through large employers). There is no comparison to make here, as the CBO’s estimates of the impact on premiums of the Democratic plan are not done yet. But I can probably guess the direction! Another point worth noting – one of the reasons premiums fall in the Republican plan is because there will be less medical care provided, not because the cost of provision is lower. Oh, I almost forgot – Republicans would still let insurance companies penalize people (refuse or drop coverage, charge exorbitant premiums) for pre-existing conditions.
Perhaps I absolved them of the charge of nihilism too soon…
Tonight, I am headed to Pittsburgh to give a paper entitled, “Compulsory Schooling and Preventative War: A Comparative Analysis” at the American Educational Studies Association annual conference. I originally wrote it for a summer seminar in ethics (in the analytic tradition of normative ethics) and, since then, I find it to be a fun side-project. Coming from a continental tradition of philosophy it amuses me to play at being an analytic philosopher. Maybe you will be amused too. I would post the whole paper, but, as I plan to publish it at some point, I can only post my abstract. If it interests you feel free to request a copy by providing your e-mail in comments.
Here is the abstract:
In this paper, I will be using the language and resources of analytic political philosophy to say something like the following: Forcing people to do things before you have present reasons to do so may or may not be a good idea, but it is most certainly not an innocent thing, to be sure. Since compulsory schooling does this non-innocent thing, we should always be aware of the guilt of the thing in question when we try to analyze it. This argument will be bolstered by an analogy to preventative war (in the abstract) and the Iraq War (in the concrete). I will claim that compulsory schooling is the moral equivalent to preventative war. In other words, that forcing custodians—who may or may not be parents or guardians, and may even be the students themselves—to relinquish custody in advance of an actual offense is the moral equivalent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003: It may be justified, all-things-considered, but it is certainly unjust.
Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.
�
With the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight.
� Read the rest of this entry »
Frost Illustrated has a short news article which points out that leading Anglican Bishops in Africa are not interested in moving from communion with Canterbury to communion with Rome. As is expected, theological differences are some of the reasons why they say they will not be crossing over.
But the other point they make is quite interesting. They just do not see the need to be a part of a large ecclesial community. They think they can do well enough on their own, in a smaller, more localized communion.
That reaction shows what happens when subsidiarity is left unbalanced by other (universal) principles in ecclesiology. The desire for Christian unity is lost and seen as unnecessary.
Not much. In fact, in everyday politics, the two are inseparable and mutually benefiting. As with most things, both sides are enjoying wringing their hands about what they seem to want us to think are major differences regarding healthcare. While the Right seems to be very upset about government healthcare, on the one hand, the Left seems to be worked up about corporate healthcare, on the other. It seems to me that we should try to discern the practical difference between the two and see what we are left with to root for, if anything.
Let me begin by dispelling two dangerous myths about this polemic: There is nothing “private” about private insurance and there is nothing “public” about a public option.
This is a tricky topic, and I’ve seen so many confusing and misleading statements on it. Much of it comes from not thinking carefully enough about how health insurance works. Let me try to describe the coverage of abortion in five hypothetical systems, all mirroring real world examples. Let us assume that the legal status of abortion is the same in each country. And let us assume that all countries have universal coverage.
Rome – Italians reacted with outrage on Tuesday after a European court ruled that displaying crucifixes in the country’s schools violated the principle of secular education.
Italy’s education minister condemned the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, saying that the Christian cross was a symbol of the country’s Roman Catholic religion and cultural identity.
This is exactly the kind of problem Pope Benedict has previously criticized: the desire many in Europe have to ignore and reject their cultural roots. What kind of right is it that is being enforced here? Religious liberty, not its elimination, is the human right which must be enforced. Obviously this does not mean one should be forced to adhere to a religious belief or practice. But by denying Italy its rights to display the cross in its schoolrooms, is not a different religious praxis, one which rejects the public display of religion, being enforced?
I’m finding that a lot of R&B singing grates on my nerves the last, oh, 15 years or so. Some of that, I’ll admit up front, is my middle-aged “these-kids-today…” sort of thing (if I could afford a lawn, I’d be shooing kids off of it.) But a lot has to do with the infuriating overuse of something that, properly used, can be a valuable part of a good singer’s tool chest; melisma.
Melisma is singing more than one note during one syllable of a lyric. For example, the first word of the National Anthem (“Oh…”) has two descending notes: that’s Melisma. The use of melisma in much of American pop music is due to the forms of music from which it is derived, especially black Gospel music.
Fr. Robert Imbelli provides this gem from the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger:
“The Body of Christ” means that all human beings are one organism, the destiny of the whole the proper destiny of each. True enough, the decisive outcome of each person’s life is settled in death, at the close of their earthly activity. Thus everyone is judged and reaches his or her definitive destiny after death. But their final place in the whole can be determined only when the total organism is complete, when the passio and actio of history have come to their end. And so the gathering together of the whole will be an act that leaves no person unaffected. Only at that juncture can the definitive general judgment take place, judging each one in terms of the whole and giving him or her that just place which they can receive only in conjunction with all the rest.
Deal Hudson from Inside Catholic has a good piece on the terrible situation surrounding a Bethlehem University Student, Berlanty (Betty) Azzam, who went on a job interview in Ramallah. On her way back to Bethlehem, she was stopped by the Israeli military, handcuffed, blindfolded, and shipped to Gaza. It’s the kind of thing which needs to stop — not just now, but yesterday.
No one is saying Israel does not have a right to exist. What people are saying is that the state of Israel needs to be reformed. This does not mean the Palestinians are doing good, either. They too need a reformation from within. But it is clear that Israel holds the blunt of the moral guilt because they also hold the majority of power within the region. To those who have been granted much, much is expected.
This morning I was happy to help organize a choir for the annual Artists’ Mass at Regis College at the Toronto School of Theology, which happened to fall on the feast of All Saints, the Christian “MemorialDay.” For the processional the choir created an adaptation of the traditional “Litany of the Saints” from the Roman Missal arranged for guitar, clawhammer banjo, two fiddles (a.k.a. violins), bass, and three cantors. We followed the Litany with “Alleluia! Sing to Jesus” for a gathering hymn.
Here is an mp3 of the Litany/”Allelluia! Sing to Jesus” Medley, as well as an mp3 of our version of “For All the Saints” which was used for the presentation of the gifts. Right-click on each of the links to download the track.
I am looking forward to this year’s annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion for a number of reasons. First, it will be my first time attending the conference and thus marks an important “first” in my theological life. Second, the schedule looks fantastic, and I am looking forward to hearing/seeing some scholars that have been important influences in my studies. Third, this will be my first trip to Montreal despite having lived in Canada for over three years now, and it will be nice to visit there a mere two weeks before we move back to the u.s. of a.
Finally, I am looking forward to a meeting there with some of the other participants in the Rock and Theology project that I’ve hooked up with in recent months. (My most recent post, on the inclusive Christian spirituality of the indie rock band Sunny Day Real Estate, is here.) The project’s blog has generated some interesting reactions, largely positive (“This is a very, very, very interesting project similar to a thousand and one conversations I’ve had over the years”) but also some negative, the latter usually along the lines of “This isn’t real theology” or “Rock music does not belong in the Mass.” The former complaint is usually the result of a very narrow definition of “theology” or a very narrow view of what sorts of culture-making are worthy of theological reflection. The latter, a quite common response to the blog, is simply the result of careless misreading or of superimposing one’s own pet liturgy-war interests onto the project. None of us, from what I can tell, have much interest in arguing for the use of rock music in the liturgy.
(I won’t be around to approve comments right away, but ask that my fellow contributors approve them for me or I’ll approve comments on Monday morning. Just don’t be discouraged if they are not appearing right away.)
To continue on the theme of political imagination:
What would your ideal presidential candidate be like?
What would their platform (not party) be?
And, do you have anyone in mind?
Please, try to think without the blinders of the Elephant and Donkey dualism. Try to answer from your hopes and dreams.
A musical treat for Halloween! Pinchas Steinberg conducts the NHK Symphony Orchestra.
Expanded: The symphony is a program piece about a desperate lover who finds his romantic situation hopeless and eventually drugs himself with opium. Its 5 movements depict such an artist-lover’s mental life. The work roused such controversy during its premiere that it was in some circles deemed as being Satanic. Today, it is a staple in the basic repertoire of programmed orchestral works.
From Berlioz’s original program notes (4th movement):
Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow. Read the rest of this entry »
Two of the most influential people in history, Constantine and Ashoka, are also the center of constant debate. Historians have to discern who they were, what they did, and what they truly believed.
While Constantine did not create Christianity, he certainly brought it to a place of prominence in the Roman Empire when he converted to it. And he increased its prestige when he gave bishops a level of authority which surprises many people to this day.[1] But he did much more. Perhaps the four things which he did that had the greatest impact on history are the proclamation of the Edit of Milan in 313, the calling of the Council of Nicea in 325, the creation of the Holy Sepulchre (a project begun around the time of Nicea), and the consecration of Constantinople in 330.
Ashoka, like Constantine, was a convert to a new faith, Buddhism. By his royal patronage, he gave it the kind of respect and resources it needed in order to become a major, world-spanning religion. Like Constantine, it appears Ashoka wanted the adherents of his new faith to come together and work out what it was they believed, and he did this by calling a Buddhist council. Read the rest of this entry »
Comments are now closed but are well worth reading. If you would like to chime in or would like to suggest that I open comments again, then, please feel free to contact me via e-mail at: rocha DOT 8 AT osu DOT edu
“Cardinal Rigali is one of my closest and dearest friends; for several years he even served as my Archbishop so I feel a particular loyalty to him. I know he has exquisite taste in most matters. I just wish he had better taste in baseball teams.”
–Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York City
“I have great esteem for Archbishop Dolan. He is a gifted spiritual leader who has been a true friend for many years. That is why I am so sorry he will be disappointed when the Phillies successfully defend their World Championship. We have the cream cheese ready for the bagels that I know will be arriving shortly after the Repeat in the City of Brotherly and Sisterly love.”
–Justin Cardinal Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia
I didn’t talk much about it at the time, but the Goldstone report issued a damning indictment of Israel’s behavior during the most recent Gaza war. As noted at the time by Catholic priests on the ground, Israel’s actions amounted to war crimes. Its policy of blockade amount to collective punishment and “a systematic policy of progressive isolation and deprivation”. During the war itself, “the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole, in furtherance of an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population, and in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population”. There was also a deliberate policy of denying Palestinians “means of subsistence, employment, housing and water”.
“You create a monster if you remove a finger from the hand and make it hang from a head, above the hand and on level with the arm.”
St Bernard of Clairvaux, Five Books on Consideration. trans. John D. Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1976), 101.
With the Obama administration’s cuts in federal monies, the hitherto popular and widely prevelant abstinence education in the public sphere is now in serious jeopardy. Read more about the situation in this Newsweek article:
Upon hearing the news that Pope Benedict would be allowing disaffected churches in the Anglican Communion to return to Rome while retaining their traditional liturgies and disciplines, I thought briefly about doing a post on the subject. Thankfully, I didn’t have to, because so many mainstream media pundits have done such a great job of very intelligently expressing their own highly original and clearly very carefully thought-out opinions. So, here is a compendium of these opinions, with a special thanks to Maureen Dowd:
Bigot…intolerant…Vatican II…Inquisition…poaching…Catholic Church declining…get with the times…WHAT ABOUT ECUMENISM???…wanted their collection plates……Inquisition…homophobe…the modern world…sexist…Vatican II…altar boys…condoms…Dark Ages…Pope…Nazi…genocide in Africa…God’s Rottweiler…Hitler Youth…Vatican II…WHORE OF BABYLON!!!!!!
Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in E major (WAB 107) is one of his best-known symphonies and rightly so. It was written between 1881 and 1883 and as revised 1885. It is dedicated to Ludwig II of Bavaria. The premiere, given under Arthur Nikisch in the opera house at Leipzig in 1884 brought Bruckner the greatest success he had known in his lifetime.
His symphonies are often considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, complex polyphony, and considerable length.
Bruckner the man, a devout Catholic, was a church organist, conversatory instructor and ever-revising composer.
Here is Mariss Jansons conducting a segment of the opening Allegro moderato in E major. Enjoy particularly the beginning tremolo strings and the cellos as they present a complete, seemingly divinely given melodic whole.
On a personal note, this is one of my favorite moments/passages in the entire symphonic repertoire.
After listing my five non-Catholic heroes from the twentieth century, I thought it was important to bring out my five Catholic heroes. It’s a difficult list to create, because there are many who are worthy of recognition. There might be on my list that will surprise some readers, but probably the biggest surprise will be the omissions of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The same could be said for my leaving off Blessed Theodore Romzha from my list (he was one of many Eastern Catholic bishops martyred under the communists, and his feast day is coming up on November 1). This is not because I do not value their input; if I had to do a list of the top ten Catholics, they would probably make it. But I rather wanted to point to those who have had the most influence on my own development, and here I find Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI to be less significant than those mentioned here.
William Brafford over at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen remarks that “if you advocate for a political philosophy, taking responsibility means that you ask yourself: ‘what does it look like when this philosophy goes wrong?”’ I’d add that responsibility for one’s political philosophy also means recognizing that it was constructed by people in history and in response to particular political events and problems.
Political philosophers, like all philosophers, are distinguishable by not only the answers they give, but the questions they ask. As much as they responded to each other, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, for example, were exploring different questions and responding to different issues; they were not just giving their own answers to the same timeless questions or the unique questions of the age.
No political philosophy is the True Political Philosophy. None can be applied in all times, places, and circumstances. Even the best possible political philosophy will fail in its application. Even if pure, committed adherents to it get exactly what they want and the philosophy “goes right,” the philosophy will fall short, will exclude, will reach its limits, and will in some ways fail.
Responsibility here means taking responsibility — appropriately responding to — the limitations and consequences of one’s philosophy. Irresponsibility, then, means acting as though one’s political philosophy, if only applied rightly and by the right people, would be free of failure, limitations, or negative consequences.
His latest stunt is to call for the burning of effigies of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi on Halloween. He claims this is in the great American tradition. That’s good, because it goes completely against the Christian tradition. Besides, being a Catholic for only five minutes, he clearly would not understand the profound anti-Catholic undertones of burning effigies around this date. Honestly, is Terry really trying to push more and more people into the pro-choice column? It would seem so. And it makes a certain amount of sense – his political grandstanding depends on it. Terry and NARAL need each other in the same way as Bush and Bin Laden needed each other.
Because the U.S. has never had a poor president, she has never known a president who was truly rich. While poverty can be a distracting concept because it too-easily renders itself into dollars and cents, richness seems to accomplish what its supposed opposite cannot. What does it mean to have a rich president?
One of the things I like to highlight are the ideas, issues, and people which often get overlooked by the general Catholic public, and bring them into the open as a means to address contemporary issues. In this piece here I want to bring out here are the five non-Catholic people who lived in the 20th century and have influenced me the most. I believe if more people came to know them as I do, studied their works or lives, and followed through with the insights they offered, the world would be a better place.
The first is Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890 – 1988). He is the man, more than any other, I think the modern world needs to get to know. Read the rest of this entry »
We who prayed and wept
for liberty from kings
and the yoke of liberty
accept the tyranny of things
we do not need.
In plenitude too free,
we have become adept
beneath the yoke of greed.
Those who will not learn
in plenty to keep their place
must learn it by their need
when they have had their way
and the fields spurn their seed.
We have failed Thy grace.
Lord, I flinch and pray,
send thy necessity.
…hit up St. John Cantius Parish. Every year on November 2, they offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the Extraordinary Form, set to Mozart’s Requiem. As far as I know, it’s the only Catholic church in the United States that performs this masterpiece of sacred music in the context of an actual liturgy.
I have written recently on the lack of political imagination and how we need to begin anew to imagine politics, but what are sorely lacking in these exhortations are specific examples of what I imagine as a bi-product of taking my own medicine. So, in this post, I would like to introduce a radical (im)possibility: The First Poor U.S. President.
“The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate” (Proverbs 8:13).
Pride is one of the eight deadly sins; it is, according to the witness of tradition, pride that was the foundation for Satan’s fall from grace. Pride, it is also said, was behind humanity’s desire to take Godhood for itself – to try to become, by nature, what was to be a gift of grace (hence, false theosis). Pride, indeed, always comes before a fall, because pride assumes a nature which is non-existent, and therefore, creates the conditions by which the fall will happen.
“The beginning of man’s pride is to depart from the Lord; his heart has forsaken his Maker. For the beginning of pride is sin, and the man who clings to it pours out abominations. Therefore the Lord brought upon them extraordinary afflictions, and destroyed them utterly” (Sirach 10:12-13).
It ain’t over til it’s over, as Yogi Berra would say, but it looks like the chances are now very good for Health Care Reform, real health care reform, to pass Congress and be signed by the President. Personally, I can say that it is not even close to everything I could have wanted — I would have preferred single payer or something along the lines of what the Germans do — but it has a reasonably robust “Public Option” and is a huge, HUGE step forward. My congratulations to President Obama and the Congressional Democrats for what is shaping up to be a significant victory for social justice. We will soon live in a country that no longer bankrupts the sick, and that deserves a prayer of thanks.
"In their patriotism and in their fidelity to their civic duties Catholics will feel themselves bound to promote the true common good; they will make the weight of their convictions so influential that as a result civil authority will be justly exercised and laws will accord with moral precepts and the common good."
Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam actuositatem 14
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