Published in Religion

Ross Douthat sees that the Pope understands the world stakes in his opening to the Anglicans:  It's about standing up to Islam.

Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam's compatibility with the Western way of reason -- and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.

By contrast, the Church of England's leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict's approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

"The fact that the prophets knew less about physics than we do does not imply that we know more than the prophets about the meaning of existence and the nature of man."  Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1956

From philosophy professor Hans Jonas's wonderful memoir, an episode about Leo Strauss to ponder: 

On a fall day--it must have been in 1934--we went for a walk in Hyde Park.  We'd walked along in silence for quite a while.  Suddenly he turned to me and said, "I feel terrible."  I said, "Me too."  And why?  It was Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, and both of us were not in the synagogue but were walking through Hyde Park.  That was telling.  For him much more than for me....  But for Strauss it was a source of torment.  "I've done the equivalent of committing murder or breaking a loyalty oath or a sinning against something."  This "I feel terrible" came straight from his soul. [p. 49]

With more on Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and intellectual life during Weimar, WW II, and the post-war U.S.

Much ink has already been spilled over Yale University Press's descision not to publish the now famous Danish Cartoons.  In the latest commentary on the affiar, James Kirchick notes that Yale's decision grew from fear of violence:

I believe deeply in the principles of the First Amendment and academic freedom," said Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and a member of Yale's governing board, in which capacity he advised the Press not to publish the cartoons. "But in this instance Yale Press was confronted with a clear threat of violence and loss of life."

Zakaria's comment raises a question that ought to be addressed head on.  It seems to me that Zakaria gets it backward.  In normal circumstances, a responsible member of Yale's board ought to make safety a central concern.  But protecting the free press is precisly the kind of thing for which it is worth taking risks.

When this controversy started, one commentator at National Review (I cannot recall who it was) pointed out that, as a general rule, in polite society one ought not to mock another's religion, and one should shun those who do.  Similarly, newspapers ought not to publish such cartoons, as a rule. The trouble with this controversy, is that it creates the case that is the exception to the general rule.  When the right to mock someone's belief is the issue, the right thing to do changes.  In this case, in other words, courage meets prudence.

(It might be this piece by Andrew Stuttaford that I am recalling. Stuttaford also gives some background into the origns of the controversy. The cartoons were done deliberately, to prove a point about free speech, and not simply to anger Muslims).

Yesterday, President Obama apparently said that there is a "core ethical and moral obligation" to provide health care for all. He was speaking to liberal religious activists affiliated with this group. For the way they'd like to talk about the health care debate, go here. For more coverage, go here.

I note that the issue guide to which I linked above is careful about avoiding public funding for abortion and accommodating the conscientious scruples of health care providers. This is good, but I wonder whether the President has this in mind when he thinks about the moral dimensions of health care. The guide also points out that there's a gap between morality and policy. I may feel called to care for the hungry and sick and not regard government as the best vehicle for my concern. (See here for more on this point.)

I'll have more to say when I can lay my hands on a transcript of the President's remarks. (I note in passing that the White House website provided transcripts both more reliably and in a more timely fashion during the last Administration. So much for a new era of transparency.)

...according to Putnam. Robert thinks that's because they've identified religion with the vices of the "far right." This trend isn't good for social capital and citizen participation. Putnam's hope is for religious innovation that will address the needs of the young. I do think there's been a fairly rapid increase in religious indifference and disbelief, although one that's not unprecedented in our country's history. I also think that social or cultural libertarianism is becoming more pronounced among many or most of the young, and the spiritual reaction against the excesses associated with the Sixties seems, in general, to be ebbing. Still, the study doesn't pick up the fact that the young who remain religious are often more serious about it than their parents, and unsatisfied relational and spiritual longings remain. Not only that, the young remain more pro-life than their parents. The always good advice is to detach religion from the political agenda of both the left and the right, but that's hard to do in a time where everything seems politicized. The idea that the problem the churches face with the young could be solved by becoming more politically progressive and culturally permissive is as ridiculous as ever. If the problem the churches are having with the young has any connection with similar problems the Republicans are having, it would be along the lines of quality of leadership and moral and intellectual self-discipline.

That is, against same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia. The former Mayor and current Councilman suggests a "civil war" may break out.

After the [DC Council] vote, enraged African American ministers stormed the hallway outside the council chambers and vowed that they will work to oust the members who supported the bill.... They caused such an uproar that security officers and D.C. police were called in to clear the hallway....

"All hell is going to break lose," Barry said. "We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this."

At least some of this rage is racial--blacks who feel that (white) gay activists exploit civil rights for the sake of their personal satisfaction.

And speaking of Catholics and politics: It just occurred to me that Joe Biden is the first Catholic Vice President. Surely his faith was a factor in favor as the VP selection. But will the temptation to appoint a (likely Catholic) Latina to replace Justice Souter meet the challenge of having six Catholics on the high court?

This is not to endorse ethnic/racial/religious/sex quotas. But the Court has become a highly politicized body, subject to many of the representational assumptions of elected bodies, universities, and corporations. How do we unscramble this egg? The bootless Republican strategy has been to appoint appeals court judges.

My only good political predictions have been of Supreme Court picks, so let my prudence expose itself as luck: Given Obama's opportunities and expresssion on behalf of "empathy," I might have predicted Governor Granholm of Michigan, because she is a pro-abortion Catholic. Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano (Methodist) may have survived the swine flu scare to secure the nomination. Solicitor Elena Kagan for down the road, though the "fierce urgency of now" may get her the nomination this time.

Granholm has a more interesting story, but I know nothing of Michigan politics. Any ethics problems (other than having appeared on "The Dating Game")? But in the end he may go with one of his Chicago friends . No need to rush this, as he did with some Cabinet nominations.

UPDATE: The astute Jan Crawford Greenburg coauthors this piece on pros and cons of the most frequently mentioned possibilities. Example of a con: the black female Chief Justice of Georgia is a "Longtime friend of Justice Clarence Thomas."

From Ann Althouse: "Am I the only one who thinks a big wedding is inappropriate for two people who have been living together"?

An interesting discussion:

The average age of American men marrying for the first time is now 28. That's up five full years since 1970 and the oldest average since the Census Bureau started keeping track. If men weren't pulling women along with them on this upward swing, I wouldn't be complaining. But women are now taking that first plunge into matrimony at an older age as well. The age gap between spouses is narrowing: Marrying men and women were separated by an average of more than four years in 1890 and about 2.5 years in 1960. Now that figure stands at less than two years. . . .

Interesting reflections follow. Read the whole thing.  

As long-time readers of this blog know, I'm the local faith-based initiative maven, having written much about it for the Ashbrook Center and and elsewhere.

By now, you've probably heard about the President's attempt to tweak the initiative, renaming the office and expanding somewhat its mandate. If you leave aside the breathless media accounts of his efforts, the most measured response I've seen is this one, written by two prominent evangelicals long involved in these issues.

Candidate Obama called for an "all hands on deck" approach to our social problems, with government as the senior partner and the payer of the piper. He said much about the evils of religious discrimination and not much about the wonders of religious freedom. That was disheartening and led me to fear that he would follow the lead of his erstwhile Congressional colleagues and sacrifice religious hiring rights on the altar of equality. He may still do that, but not in one swell foop. Instead, we're told, the new Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (so different from the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives!) will consult with the Department of Justice about the law and these rights on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps, then, the Obama Administration will nibble away at religious hiring rights somewhat out of the limelight, avoiding the public repudiation of them embraced by candidate Obama. And I have a hard time believing that the President will spend any political chips resisting the efforts of Congressional Democrats to promote equality and non-discrimination at the expense of religious liberty.

In other words, I think that the President is trying to extend his honeymoon a bit, but that, in the end, the only deckhands he'll really welcome are those who are willing to serve secular governmental ends in a secular governmental way.

One last point: the new head of the OFBNP, Joshua DuBois, seems to get high marks from everyone. I can't speak from any experience of him, up close or at a distance, which is only to say that he wasn't involved in the substance of these issues during the Bush Administration. I will note that he comes to this position from the political side of Obama's life (is there any other?) and that he lacks the stature and long-standing experience with faith-based social services that all those associated with the Bush Administration efforts had. Perhaps this is a good thing, on some level, for if this version of the faith-based initiative is closer to the political heart of the Obama Administration, perhaps folks outside the OBNP will take it seriously, which seemed always to be the problem in the Bush Administration.

But then let's not delude ourselves about the nature of this initiative: its goal is above all to keep the religious Left engaged (as opposed to enraged) and to charm those theologically and socially conservative evangelicals who are charmable.

Update: I slightly revise and extend my remarks here. I'm ultimately working toward some sort of op-ed, so feedback is welcome.

As we continue this discussion of Obama's religion, is it worth turning to the founders as a basis for comparison. Most of the best known of the Founding Fathers were more around their churches than in them. The skepticism of Jefferson and Madison is well known. President Washington doesn't seem to have been an orthodox Episcopalian. Even John Adams was a Unitarian, and had rather harsh things to say about Puritan orthodoxy. They all seem to have believed that religion could be a positive good, and that revelation was possible. But they had trouble being certain about any particular revelation, or any particular interpretation of it.

Obama might believe rather more than they. There's nothing wrong with that, but the contrast is interesting. Obama's religion also has rather more of the social gospel than did theirs.

Joseph Knippenberg blogged recently in praise of an article by Michael Novak and Christopher Levenick on "Religion and the Founders." At the beginning of the article Novak and Levenick criticize someone for having said that "[o]ur nation was founded not on Christian principles, but on Enlightenment ones." In response they write:

"What a strange distinction! It certainly would have been foreign to the Founders, who thought the moral precepts of Christian faith indispensable to the survival of the infant republic. And it's a distinction that remains foreign to the vast majority of Americans today."

This claim is insupportable. Most of the founders believed that a reasonable or civil religion was necessary for good government but this was not revealed religion and certainly not "the moral precepts of Christian Faith." The civil religion most Founders thought important for politics did without the first four of the ten commandments.

Toward the end of their article, Novak and Levenick return to this point:

"Every single one of the Founders believed that, at the level of both individual morality and public policy, the demands of reason and of revelation powerfully reinforce one another. They understood that with respect to the ultimate questions -- the creation of the universe, the purpose of human existence, and the hope of life after death -- faith and philosophy might differ. In the practical world they inhabited, however, the Founders believed that both Socrates and Jesus enjoined their followers to accord all persons truth, justice, and charity."

It is true that on the surface some of the dictates of reason and some of the dictates of revealed religion overlap but this does not mean that the United States was founded on the dictates of revealed religion or Christianity. On the contrary, Washington appears to have been indifferent to revealed religion and Jefferson and Franklin were hostile to it. But we can look beyond the Founders to judge the religious character of the founding. At the time of the Founding perhaps no more than 20% of Americans belonged to a Church. America became a Christian nation and religious after the Founding. Church membership increased throughout the nineteenth-century. The figure for Church membership today is several times higher than it was at the Founding.

This last point is worth pondering. It leads one to suspect that, precisely because America is now more Christian and religious than it was at its founding, some people feel the need to make the Founding appear more Christian and religious than it was.

Finally, I would like to note that on the profound difference between reason and revelation with regard to questions of morality and the foundations of politics, a wonderful guide is Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics by Harry Jaffa. The epigraph of the book is a quote from Winston Churchill: "It is baffling to reflect that what men call honour does not correspond always to Christian ethics."

Here, via Carol Platt Liebau, is Christopher Levenick's and Michael Novak's response to Brooke Allen's Nation article, on which I animadverted here.

Hat tip: The Conservative Philosopher, who also call our attention to this post on secular universities and the secular Left. It is a sad state of affairs when anyone actually has to say things like this:

University dialogue and debate on ethical and political issues in and out of classrooms should include faculty members who proceed from theistic and non-theistic perspectives. For example, theologians have thought deeply about issues of war and peace. Some are pacifists; other believe in the just war doctrine (with varying views about the conditions for a just war). In the Christian tradition, such theologians would point to scripture, but scripture is only the beginning of the inquiry for most of them. Moreover, to the extent, the debate is confined to scripture, it would be helpful for the secular left (or any informed citizen) to understand the nature of the debate. Obviously, the war and peace example could be multiplied across a broad range of issues. It is hard to imagine why university dialogue would not be enhanced by discussion from theistic and non-theistic perspectives.

But clearly, as the example of Brooke Allen indicates, even simple truths need to be reiterated from time to time.

Update: For a "balanced" view of religion and the founding, see this NYT article.