tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-142479422024-03-07T08:58:50.909-05:00An Examined LifeMeandering thoughts about life, philosophy, science, religion, morality, politics, history, Greek and Latin literature, and whatever else I can think about to avoid doing any real work.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.comBlogger660125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-1599447131481284092022-01-26T16:21:00.000-05:002022-01-26T16:21:53.453-05:00Homily for Requiem Mass of Michael Carson, 20 November 2021<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Readings</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">OT: Wisdom 3:1-6,
9 [2, short form]<br />
Ps: 25 [2]<br />
NT: Romans 8:31b-35, 37-39 [6]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Alleluia verse:
John 6:39 [4]<br />
Gospel: John 11:17-27 [14]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Those
of you who knew Michael know that he was larger than life in many ways. Nine
pounds, eight and a half ounces at birth—the mothers here will know that that
is one big baby! More recently he was six foot-four, 220 pounds, a loud,
booming voice, wild and unpredictable gesticulations. So it will come as no
surprise to you to learn that he was large to the end: I was told by the
funeral home on Tuesday that the container we got for him—well, he didn’t fit
into it. So we had to get the super-sized one for him that you see here today.
But although all of his material remains are in there, <i>he</i> isn’t in
there—he’s out here, with us in spirit, because wherever his friends were,
that’s where he wanted to be.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Michael
was a man of deep and abiding commitments—to his friends, to his principles,
and most importantly, to life lived fully and well. But he was no angel, and sometimes
his choices made in the heat of the moment worked against his deepest commitments,
most tragically his commitment to life, but sometimes also his other
commitments as well. But although I feel certain he sometimes hurt even his
friends—and I can attest that he also sometimes hurt his family—I know from the
past two weeks of testimony from witness after witness after witness, that what
his friends remember about him is not the hurt but the love.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Michael
loved his friends with intensity and passion, and his loyalty to them and his
willingness to reach out to them and be there for them is the form that his
love took. One of his childhood friends told me, through his tears, that
Michael was the only one who seemed always to answer his phone if you called
him in distress, regardless of the time of day or night. Other friends—we went
to a remembrance of Michael’s life at The Skull—The Smiling Skull, Michael’s
“home away from home” (or maybe it was his home, I don’t know)—but I talked to
so many people there about Michael, and they all told me the same thing:
Michael was our anchor; Michael was our center; Michael was the glue that held
us all together; Michael was the guy who wanted to help you with your problems,
but Michael was also some kind of wild and crazy guy who helped us to laugh at
our problems and at each other.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Love,
of course, is the principle Christian virtue. St. Paul, in his first letter to
the Church at Corinth, writes movingly of the attributes of love: love is
patient, love is kind, love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or
rude. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking that Michael
could be plenty rude and arrogant, boastful and jealous. Well, nobody’s
perfect. We all fall short of perfection, so how could we love perfectly? God
literally <i>is</i> love, and it is the perfect form of love made manifest by
God that St. Paul is talking about. As for those of us who fall short of that
perfection, St. Paul consoles us in the reading we heard earlier from his
letter to the Church at Rome. In spite of everything, regardless of who we are,
where we are in life, what mistakes we have made, nothing—absolutely nothing at
all—can separate us from the love of God. God loves each and every one of us
with an intense, unlimited, unconditional, and personal love, a thirst for our
good that nothing can quench. Even when we turn away from him, he reaches out
to us in love, wanting nothing but our wellbeing and our happiness.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">So
even though Michael could indeed be rude and arrogant, he was still capable of
turning towards God by loving his friends, even if imperfectly. And your
willingness to forgive him when he failed you is also an act of love, because in
forgiving him you were putting aside your own pride and hurt feelings in favor
of your relationship with the one who hurt you. Whenever you reached out to
Michael for help or consolation, that, too, was an act of love, because it was
an act of trust and hope that invited an act of love in return.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Love
as an invitation is very important in this context. God’s love is by its very
nature selfless—what could God hope to gain from loving us? God loves us simply
for our own sake. That sort of love will naturally evoke a loving response: how
can we fail to be grateful and loving towards one who loves us in that way? But
what should our own loving response be? Because we can do nothing to benefit
God, his act of loving us is not a <i>request</i> for anything from us, it is,
rather, an <i>invitation</i>—an invitation to us to share what we have
experienced with others. So our own love is most perfect when it is most
selfless. When you reached out to Michael for anything, you may indeed have
been asking for something from him—something you needed, something he could
give you. But even so you were still at the same time loving him in a selfless
way—in God’s way—by <i>inviting</i> him to do good on your behalf. If he
sometimes failed to respond in love himself, that does not diminish the grace
and beauty of your love for him. But when he did respond in love, it was a
movement towards the good, a movement towards God. Your need and your pain
offered Michael the chances he so desperately needed to redeem himself, to
respond to pain and suffering with help and comfort—with love. This is God’s
providence: the ability to bring good out of evil through our free choice to
act for the good of others. In this way, no suffering need be meaningless,
every instance of pain is an <i>opportunity</i> for someone to manifest love to
another. This is how we make God’s own love present to one another: by
ministering to one another in a selfless way.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">When
Michael was eight years old we took a family trip to southern Florida. While
swimming in the ocean one day I noticed that Michael had been caught in a rip
tide about 15 meters offshore. He was struggling against the waves and I called
out to him to swim out of it parallel to shore, but he couldn’t hear me and
didn’t understand my wild gesticulations, so I dashed into the water to help
him out. Michael was a pretty big guy even then, and it was very difficult to
pull him in against the force of the water. I was a little worried that I
wouldn’t be able to do it, and that may have been the first time that I was
seriously worried about his safety and my ability to protect it—and it would
not be the last time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">In
the last ten years the rip tide that was Michael’s life was more like a
tsunami, and although he had many more lifeguards to watch out for him—some of
whom are here today—we were not able to haul him out of the waters of
destruction into which he had strayed. But whatever his flaws, whatever the
rough edges he showed us on occasion, we have faith that, deep inside, Michael
had a yearning for truth and beauty and goodness. We have this faith because we
experienced truth and beauty and goodness in those acts of kindness and
generosity that he was able, somehow, to summon up for others even in the midst
of his own pain and suffering. And our faith gives us hope that his love will
live on.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">But
you may ask: where is that love now? Where is <i>God’s</i> love in all this?
Well, I know exactly where it is. I’m looking at it right now. The light of
God’s love and mercy are made manifest today by your love for Michael. Your
grief is no disproof of that, because you would not grieve if you did not love,
and you would not love what is not good, and God is the source of all goodness,
including whatever goodness was in Michael. And there was plenty of goodness in
Michael for those who had the eyes to see it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif;">Many
of you know that Michael had his name tattooed on his side—in Hebrew letters,
because the name “Michael” is a Hebrew name. The name literally means “Who is
like God”. The answer is: We all are, when we love one another as God always
loves us and yearns for our good. So I urge you today to accept <i>this</i>
invitation. The invitation that the loss of your friend, your brother—your
son—offers to all of us. Let us preserve Michael and our love for him by
ministering to one another in love, not just now, in this time of need, but
always—Michael was always there for us. We should reach out to one another,
consoling one another, being there for one another, redeeming and saving one
another by acting as agents of God’s infinite mercy.</span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-38305702850008602832017-08-14T14:57:00.000-04:002017-08-14T14:57:18.728-04:00Is There a "Lay Diaconate"?In one sense, the Permanent Diaconate is one of the oldest institutions in the church, dating to Apostolic Times (Acts 6). With the rise of the presbyterate it became ever more common for those ordained to the diaconate to move on to the priesthood. By the 8th century the practice of ordaining "permanent" deacons, that is, men who would remain deacons without moving on to the priesthood, had virtually disappeared.<br />
<br />
The Council of Trent called for a restoration of a Permanent Diaconate that would be open also to men who were already married. The Council did not intend to "reduce" the diaconate to a kind of "lay order"--there is no <i>ontological</i> impediment to Holy Orders if a man is married, only a disciplinary one. Indeed, married priests (though not bishops) are not uncommon in the Eastern Churches, and the Latin Rite also has married priests in some areas.<br />
<br />
As it happens this desire of the Council was not immediately met. It was not until the Second Vatican Council renewed the call for a restoration of the Permanent Diaconate that this desire of Trent was finally fulfilled. Even today, however, fifty years after the Council, not every diocese has the Permanent Diaconate. My own diocese, Steubenville, only instituted the Permanent Diaconate in 2009.<br />
<br />
Now Archbishop Kieran O'Reilly of Cashel and Emly, Ireland, has set up a commission to investigate the Permanent Diaconate for his archdiocese. A group of Irish priests calling themselves the Association of Catholic Priests has objected to this move on the grounds that it is "insensitive, disrespectful of women, and counter-productive". They wrote, in part,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;">Currently the Church confines the lay diaconate to men, even though </span><a class="search" href="https://www.irishtimes.com/search/search-7.1213540?tag_person=Pope%20Francis&article=true" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-color: white; color: #23517a; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; outline: none !important; text-decoration-line: none;">Pope Francis</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;"> has a commission working on the history of women deacons in the early church, with a view to possibly opening the diaconate to women also.</span></span></blockquote>
These references to a "lay diaconate" and to the "opening" of the diaconate to women reveal that the Association does not really know what it is talking about. The diaconate is part of Holy Orders, it is not an association of laymen. And because of the unity of Holy Orders, only men can be ordained to the diaconate. What Pope Francis is investigating is not whether women may be ordained, either to the diaconate or to anything else, but whether there isn't a form of diaconal service to which women may be admitted.<br />
<br />
The women who are named as "deaconesses" in the earliest documents regarding the diaconate were not ordained with the laying on of hands, the mark of Holy Orders. Rather, they were serving the Church in a form of ministry that is, in fact, not only open to, but already conferred upon all Baptized persons. The Greek word διακονία simply means "service", and a person who is engaged in service to the Church is, by definition, a διάκονος, a "servant" of Christ's church. All men and women who have been baptized are called to serve the Church, but we no longer use the word "deacon" to describe their service since the term has come to be bound up with Holy Orders and it would be confusing to use the same word to refer both to Ordained and to non-Ordained forms of ministry.<br />
<br />
But in the sense that Baptized persons are indeed called to a special form of service there is, after all, a kind of "lay diaconate"--just not the kind that the Association of Catholic Priests thinks there is.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-8238983675603925242017-08-11T17:29:00.001-04:002017-08-11T17:29:19.118-04:00Converts, Commentators, and Communion"Austen Ivereigh" sounds like a great name for a snarky character in an Evelyn Waugh novel, but in reality he's just a journalist. Seven years ago he and Jack Valero (a writer for The Guardian and a member of Opus Dei) founded a media group called Catholic Voices, which seeks to provide knowledgeable representatives for media interviews regarding topics of interest to Catholics. Recently Ivereigh has come under fire from a few Catholics in this country, including Robert George and Ed Peters, among others, for <a href="https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2017/08/09/pope-francis-convert-problem/" target="_blank">some remarks he made in Crux</a> regarding certain high-profile American Catholic writers who have been critical of Pope Francis, namely Ross Douthat, Daniel Hitchens, Carl Olson, Edward Pentin, R. R. Reno, Matthew Schmit, and John-Henry Westen.<br />
<br />
Robert George was referring to Ivereigh when he Tweeted:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "San Francisco", -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: -0.24px;">Some inside Catholic baseball now. Question: What is more ridiculous than a Catholic writer launching a crusade against Catholic-Evangelical cooperation? Answer: Cradle Catholics waging a war against converts to the faith.</span></blockquote>
He followed this up a day later with:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "San Francisco", -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: -0.24px;">A little more inside Catholic baseball. My colleague RJ Snell and I are doing a book about intellectuals (whether or not they are professors or professional scholars) who are converts to the Catholic faith. (We have in mind, people who are still living, not deceased figures such as John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, Elizabeth Anscombe, Jacques Maritain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Richard John Neuhaus, and Jean Bethke Elshtain.) If there are living Catholic converts whose lives, intellectual work, and witness you find especially interesting and noteworthy, please let me know. You can post a comment in reply to this message or PM me. Thanks.</span></blockquote>
And <a href="https://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/11/come-over-here-and-say-that/" target="_blank">Ed Peters took issue with Ivereigh's use of the word "convert"</a> to describe the seven writers:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15.99px;">According to the (US) </span><em style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15.99px;">National Statutes for the Catechumenate</em><span style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15.99px;">(November, 1986) no. 2 (my emphasis), “the term ‘convert’ should be reserved strictly for those converted from unbelief to Christian belief and </span><strong style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15.99px;">never used of those baptized Christians </strong><span style="background-color: #f9f7f5; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15.99px;">who are received into the full communion of the Catholic Church.” Number 3 reiterates that this “holds true even … [for] baptized Catholic Christians … whose Christian initiation has not been completed by confirmation and Eucharist” (Westen) and [for] “baptized Christians who have been members of another Church or ecclesial community and seek to be received into the full Communion of the Catholic Church” (the other six authors).</span></blockquote>
This is an interesting argument. It reminds me of the times I've tried to correct people who use a singular verb form with the word "data": you can point out all you like that the use is incorrect, but it will have little effect on actual practice. This is because, in spite of what many prescriptivists might like to believe, <a href="https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/meaning-is-use-wittgenstein-on-the-limits-of-language/" target="_blank">meaning is use</a>. The simple fact of the matter is that everyone in the world, with the possible exception of the authors of the <i>National Statutes for the Catechumenate</i> and Ed Peters (who is, after all, a lawyer; but so is Robert George who, apparently, uses the word the way the rest of us do), when speaking of Catholicism in particular, uses the word "convert" to mean "someone who became a Roman Catholic as a matter of intentional choice from having been something--anything--other than Roman Catholic". Are they correct to do so? Well, not according to the authors of the National Statutes or, apparently, Ed Peters, but do we know what they <i>mean</i> when they use the word? If someone says "I'm a convert to Catholicism" do we <i>always</i> think to ourselves that they were <i>necessarily</i>, i.e., <i>by definition</i>, unbelievers previously, or do we sometimes wonder whether they "converted" <i>from</i>, say, Episcopalianism, or Lutheranism?<br />
<br />
The National Statutes are, clearly, giving a technical meaning for the term "convert" and, hence, the word has become, at least within Catholic administrative circles, a technical term. Outside of those circles, however, there is little we can do about the way people use the word, and it's not clear to me that this is a bad thing. For one thing, it seems useful to have some term or other to describe the person who is not a "cradle Catholic". (I wonder whether the authors of the National Statutes have a technical definition for that, too? Is one a "cradle Catholic" if and only if one was once placed in a cradle and was also a Catholic at the time?) Why is "convert" not a good candidate for that use? I suppose the thought is supposed to be that it incorrectly lumps together the unwashed heathen and the merely heretical and schismatic. I'm not unsympathetic to the worry that this is not "ecumenical" enough--one certainly does not want to suggest that non-Catholic Christians are not, in some real sense, Christians at all, in the way that some used to interpret the whole <i>extra ecclesiam nulla salus</i> thing. We sometimes speak of "lapsed Catholics"; should we now speak, not of "converts", but of "lapsed Presbyterians"?<br />
<br />
I suspect that a better reason to be annoyed by Ivereigh's essay is his characterization of the converts as suffering from what he calls "convert neurosis". Peters rightly castigates him for this, as I think any reasonable person would, but at the heart of this clearly non-technical use of the word "neurosis" lies Ivereigh's rejection of some of the very real worries expressed by these writers regarding certain key issues in the Catholic Church, primarily but not exclusively the admission of divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion. As it happens, the one thing that seems to be common to these seven writers in particular, is their concern over the way in which Amoris Laetitia has been interpreted in some quarters, and it is probably no accident that Ivereigh himself interprets it very differently than these seven writers. He is not immune from such tactics as referring to his opponents not only as neurotics, but as "youthful" and "frozen at some point prior to the [Second Vatican] Council". More insidiously, his description of the Church as "missionary", clearly engaged in "spreading the Gospel", bringing "new things" under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, while true enough taken in the abstract, is clearly intended as a contrast with the attitude he finds among his opponents. This sort of rhetorical maneuver--trying to make an opponent seem worse not by attacking him directly but by describing in a positive way something else with which you wish to contrast him--can sometimes backfire. In the present case it makes Ivereigh come off sounding like he is attacking straw men: none of the writers would disagree with his characterization of the Church or its Magisterium. What they are distressed about is not the ecclesiology defended by Ivereigh but by the way in which Amoris Laetitia has been used by some to take that ecclesiology in a direction in which it simply cannot go.<br />
<br />
Do some critics of Amoris Laetitia go too far in suggesting that Pope Francis acted deliberately in wording it in such a way as to invite such interpretations? This is a charge that Ivereigh lays at the feet of Douthat in particular, whom Ivereigh criticizes for characterizing Pope Francis as the "chief plotter" in a plan to admit to Holy Communion those divorced and remarried Catholics whose first marriage has not been declared null. While there's no denying that Douthat used that expression, a careful reading of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/the-plot-to-change-catholicism.html" target="_blank">his whole essay</a> shows how unfair is Ivereigh's characterization of it. Sadly, the demonization of one's opponents is not something all that unusual in our current cultural climate, but engaging in armchair speculation about their mental state seems to be going a bit too far. It would be better, as well as more respectable and consistent with Christian virtue, to assess the actual arguments of those who read Amoris Laetitia in disparate ways and evaluate them on their merits as arguments rather than on one's <i>a priori</i> assumptions about the sort of mental state that might lead to one interpretation as opposed to the other.<br />
<br />
Regardless of how one happens to read Amoris Laetitia, both sides seem to agree on one thing: the Church cannot change substantive teachings. Even those who say that substantive teachings have to be understood in light of the development of doctrine agree that the substance itself of a teaching cannot be changed. This is important because the substance that is involved in this particular dispute is the requirement that those who present themselves for reception of Holy Communion be free from mortal sin taken together with the doctrine that marriage is a permanent and indissoluble bond. Neither side disputes either one of these points.<br />
<br />
At this point a rascal might like to invoke "meaning is use" and claim that some people simply use the expression "mortal sin" in a different way than some other people. Here, if anywhere, however, is the place to invoke prescriptivism. If one does not happen to use the expression "mortal sin" in the way in which the Catholic Church uses it, then one need not join the "Catholic Church Language Game". One may remain an unconverted heathen or an unlapsed Presbyterian or whatever else one happens to not have come into the Church from, and the dispute will no longer be relevant.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-66900379517229461032015-09-29T16:38:00.003-04:002015-09-29T16:38:51.088-04:00Reasons, Explanations, OrdersAn explanation consists of a set of reasons, but not all sets of reasons amount to an explanation. This fact was brought home to me yesterday by a discussion of a recent statement by Pope Francis in which he re-iterated the Church's claim that it has no authority to admit women to Holy Orders. The discussion took place on the Internet, so of course it was both pointless and virtually interminable, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to be gained from looking more closely at the question.<br />
<br />
On his flight back to Rome, Pope Francis was asked, by Maria Sagrarios Ruiz de Apodaca, "will we one day see women priests in the Catholic church", to which <a href="http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/09/28/pope_francis_i%E2%80%99m_not_a_star,_but_the_servant_of_servants_o/1175317" target="_blank">Pope Francis replied</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...on women priests, that cannot be done. Pope St. John Paul II after long, long intense discussions, long reflection said so clearly. Not because women don't have the capacity. Look, in the Church women are more important than men, because the Church is a woman. It is "la" church, not "il" church. The Church is the bride of Jesus Christ. And the Madonna is more important than popes and bishops and priests. I must admit we are a bit late in the elaboration of a theology of women. We have to move ahead with that theology. Yes, that's true.</blockquote>
Here Pope Francis is referring to the apostolic letter <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19940522_ordinatio-sacerdotalis.html" target="_blank">Ordinatio sacerdotalis</a>, issued by Pope St. John Paul II in 1994 and further explicated by the <a href="http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19951028_dubium-ordinatio-sac_en.html" target="_blank">Responsum</a> of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of 1995, in which it is declared with absolute finality that the Church lacks the authority to admit women to Holy Orders. Here is the specific wording of OS (§4):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.</span></span></blockquote>
Note that nothing is said here about women <i>per se</i> that would indicate the reason <i>why</i> they could not, even in principle, be admitted to Holy Orders should the requisite authority exist in the Church to confer Ordination on whomever the Church should please to confer it. Earlier in the same letter JPII mentions the teaching of Paul VI, who said virtually the same thing and grounded his position on the Tradition of the Magisterium. JPII also mentions, without quoting any of them, "other theological reasons which illustrate the <i>appropriateness</i> [my emphasis] of the divine provision".<br />
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Ultimately, then, the reason given for the continuing (and unalterable) ban on admitting women to Holy Orders is an ecclesiological one: the Church lacks the authority to act otherwise. This may appear to be a minor point, but that would be <i>merely</i> an appearance: in fact it is quite important, and you're about to find out why.<br />
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The alternative would be to give an ontological reason, to say what it is about <i>being a female</i> that bars one from being admitted to Holy Orders. Some theologians have, indeed, speculated about such ontological reasons, but all such speculation is not only speculative, it is also dangerously misguided. To argue that there is something about being a female that is essentially different from being a male is to move dangerously towards maintaining that there is some specific difference between the two sexes. But the Church has never taught <i>de fide</i> that there is any such difference, and that's a good thing because such a teaching would fly in the face of what the Church says about the essence of humankind more generally. God created man (<i>hominem</i>) in his own image; male and female he created them. There is one kind of thing (<i>homo</i>) existing in two sexes, not two kinds of things. There cannot be any specific difference between male and female—the differences that distinguish them are material, not formal, and material differences, however great, do not add up to essential differences.<br />
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To make the ecclesiological claim is not to make any particular ontological claim about women, but some have claimed that it does either entail or else "suggest" ontological claims about women. This is incorrect, and it is important to see why. The ecclesiological claim, as stated in OS, is an instance of the <i>via negativa</i>:<i> </i>it is a declaration of what is <i>not possible</i>, rather than a positive declaration of something that is the case. Theologically this is a much safer position to take, since it avoids possible empirical refutations of what one might claim to be the case were one to take the positive declaration route.<br />
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However, suppose someone were to suggest "Even though the Church lacks the authority to ordain women now, it might be given the authority to ordain women later." This, after all, would appear to be consistent with the claim that the teaching is ecclesiological rather than ontological, that it is about the nature of the Church rather than about the nature of women. But again this would be a <i>mere</i> appearance, for this possibility is excluded by the fact that Revelation is closed: it is an unchangeable matter of <i>de fide</i> doctrine that everything that was to be revealed about the Sacraments was already revealed in the life of Christ. So if the Church lacks such authority today, it will always lack such authority. Nice try, heretics.<br />
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As I mentioned above, the fact that the teaching is essentially ecclesiological has not stopped some pundits from finding ontological claims in the, shall we say, <i>penumbra</i>, of the teaching. John Zuhlsdorf, for example, a rather flamboyant blogger, began <a href="http://wdtprs.com/blog/2015/09/pope-francis-women-priests-no/" target="_blank">his post on this matter</a> with the claim "women don't have the capacity to receive the sacrament of holy orders because they lack maleness". Now, I didn't actually laugh out loud at that when I read it, but only because I wasn't altogether sure whether he saw himself as offering an explanation or a reason, and in this case his intentions would make a difference to how laughable the statement is. If we focus on the word "because" it begins to appear that he sees himself as offering at least a reason, if not an explanation. It can't be an explanation, because of course all he is really saying is that women cannot be ordained because they are not men, and that cannot be an explanation because to offer it up in that capacity would be to beg the question. "Women cannot be ordained to the priesthood." "Why not?" "Because they're not men." "But why can men be ordained to the priesthood?" "Because they're men." That's obviously not going anywhere explanatorily, but could it at least count as a reason?<br />
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If "not being a man" were an actual property, it might go some ways towards counting as a reason, but "not being a man" is not an actual property, it is a linguistic model for the privation of a specific property. Lots of things fit that description: women are non-men; pieces of chalk are non-men; the oak tree outside my office window is a non-man, etc. Some might object that this is to confuse contraries and contradictories. Being female is not the same thing as the general contradictory "not being a man", it is in fact a specific contrary property—being female, which is opposed to "being a man" as a contrary. But this cannot be either a reason or an explanation, for the reasons given above: if it is to count as a difference maker in this case, it would have to be a marker of a specific difference, something formal rather than material.<br />
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So to say "women don't have the capacity to receive the sacrament of holy orders because they lack maleness" is at best to utter a tautology. It is neither controversial nor, in this case, informative, which is to say it is neither a reason nor an explanation, it is simply a statement of the principle under discussion. So he should have left out the word "because": "women don't have the capacity to receive the sacrament of holy orders, only men have that capacity." But that wouldn't be nearly as flamboyant, nor would it satisfy the person who wants to know <i>why</i> women don't have the capacity to receive the sacrament of holy orders. If someone asks you, "Why doesn't this medicine make my headache go away?" it would not be much of an explanation to say "Because it doesn't". Saying "Because it can't" isn't a lot better, but it's a step in the right direction; for whatever reason Zuhlsdorf prefers the first to the second, the vapid to the tepid.<br />
<br />
Ed Peters is not at all flamboyant, but he is a lawyer, which tempts him to say things like<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 19.32px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Ordinatio sacerdotalis, AS IT IS PHRASED in the operative no. 4, is not a statement about women, it is not a statement about sacraments, it is, by the PLAIN TEXT OF THE DOCUMENT, a statement about ecclesiology. [CAPS in the original--maybe he's more flamboyant than I give him credit for!]</span></span></blockquote>
So we have a kind of legal version of <i>sola Scriptura</i>, if you will, a claim that the "plain text of the document" ought to settle all disputes among reasonable people. Good luck with that, my friend. As we have seen, the putative plainness of the text belies the difficulty of its interpretation. He's right, of course, that the statement is an ecclesiological one and that, perhaps, is all that a lawyer really cares about—what do I need to prove my case? But as a hermeneutical principle the <i>solus textus</i> approach can lead one into troubled waters. In particular, when Peters goes on to say "OS does not exclude ontological reasons, or sacramental ones; indeed it seems to suggest both in places" he makes the very mistake I have drawn attention to above, looking for the ontological in all the wrong places, possibly for all the wrong reasons.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-82658465269341779002015-09-20T16:30:00.001-04:002015-09-20T16:30:10.772-04:00New Head of Vatican Observatory A Welcome SignPope Francis has named Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno to be the new director of the <a href="http://www.vaticanobservatory.va/content/specolavaticana/en.html" target="_blank">Vatican Observatory</a> (<a href="http://cnstopstories.com/2015/09/18/pope-names-u-s-jesuit-planetary-scientist-to-head-vatican-observatory/" target="_blank">CNS story here</a>). This is important because Brother Consolmagno has been outspoken in his support for "authentic science", science that is neither contrary to religious faith nor beholden to any particular political interests. It can be difficult to find either one of these properties in a lot of current scientific <i>talk</i>, especially in the popular scientific media, though in point of actual practice it can be equally difficult to find fault with the work of any one particular scientist regarding these points. The difficulty, in my opinion, lies rather in science <i>reporting</i> and in the trash-talk, for lack of a better term, that comes from certain quarters of the blogosphere (on both sides of the issue).<br />
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The dialogue between science and religion has not always been helped by dialogue, either from scientists who are religious or from religious writers who admire science, because it can be difficult to play both sides of this street in today's overwrought ideological climate--this is a climate one can fervently hope will change very drastically in the near future, but so far there's not much hope for that, since this climate and its potential for change are very much matters of anthropogenesis. In most cases there is never any genuine need "to play both sides of the street", but in many cases no matter what one says, there will be some audience or other somewhere accusing you of playing just one side of the street, namely the Wrong Side, the politically motivated side or the ignorant side.<br />
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I think a great deal of the blame for this situation lies at the feet of science education, though not necessarily science educators. That might seem an extraordinary thing to say: isn't it the job of the science educator, after all, to see to it that students of science are properly educated? In one sense yes, of course, but in another sense no. Every student has an obligation to learn from those who have greater expertise, but not all students approach education with this frame of mind. Many have been taught already to ignore what seems foreign to them or appears to them to contradict their deeply help shibboleths. Thus it is that we find high school and college age students already taking positions with respect to scientific controversies with social implications, even when they have virtually no education or background in the necessary science.<br />
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I'm not sure what the solution is to this problem--by the time I see students in college many of them have become rather set in their ways. The appointment of an advocate like Brother Consolmagno, however, can only be seen as a positive move forward.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-66996953054484465162015-09-18T14:51:00.001-04:002015-09-18T16:20:58.162-04:00A Tale of Two LinguistsThe Second Vatican Council declared the Latin language to be one of the treasures of the Western Church, and decreed that it would remain the official language of the Church's liturgies, even while permitting local Ordinaries to permit the use of vernacular languages. My regular readers will remember that I am myself something of a fan of the Latin language, but my own view is that aesthetic preferences about languages should not be--indeed, cannot be--normative for everyone.<br />
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The truth of this was brought into higher relief for me this past week, when I had occasion to hear from two different amateur linguists regarding the use of Latin by the Western Church. One of them, a professor of Old Testament at the Pontifical College Josephinum and something of an all-around genius, told me that he thinks there is no future for the Latin language in the Church's liturgy and that, at least since the time of St. John Paul II, it has been declining as the <i>de facto</i> language in other official Church circles as well. His opinion was that this is a good thing, and he is frustrated that there are still some young students at the Josephinum who continue to cling to hopes that it will enjoy a renaissance along with the Extraordinary Form.<br />
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The other is a professor of canon law at Sacred Heart Major Seminar in Detroit, who recently wrote <a href="https://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2015/09/12/a-linguistic-concern-occasioned-by-an-important-debate-over-synodal-proposals/" target="_blank">the following</a> in connection with Pope Francis' recent Motu proprio, Mitis iudex:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I can't help noticing, with regret, that both sides [in the discussion of the import of Mitis iudex] are debating points being made (or not?) in an English translation (accurately rendered?) of an Italian original (is it 'the original'?). And I wonder, since when has Italian become the international language of Catholic doctrine? </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is one thing to accept the practical necessity of Italian for running the Vatican bureaucracy (or not running it, as the case may be). But it is quite another to have Italian serve as the vehicle for proposals officially expressing Catholic doctrine, doctrines that are, by their very nature, not national or ethnic but Catholic and therefore, to recall the etymology of the very word "Catholic", universal. If the relationship between conscience and moral norms really ranks near the top of topics to be taught correctly in and by and to the Church, then should debates about the written expressions of such a topic turn on appreciating the Italian way of phrasing such teachings? I trust the answer to that question is self-evident. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Without getting into whether Latin is the "official language" of the Church..., Latin is unquestionably the primary language of the Catholic Church and, for well over a millennium, it has been the international language of formal Church teaching. The doctrinal clarity and ecclesiastical stability that comes with the use of Latin must never be surrendered. Fundamental assertions about fundamental aspects of Church teaching should be made solely in the one language that is fundamental to the Catholic Church, Latin, on which assertions, I say, let vernacular debates blossom with fruitful abandon.</blockquote>
I think both of these amateur linguists are wrong, but each for different reasons. The Old Testament scholar has confused an aesthetic preference for a normative one, while the canonist has confused, well, a lot of things, but mostly he is confused about the Latin language's ability to do the job he wants it to do. So here are my thoughts on these issues and, even though I am actually a professional and not an amateur, I'm not going to pretend that my opinions on matters of language have any real normative force beyond the confines of my own <i>Weltanschauung</i>.<br />
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To start with the Old Testament scholar: I agree with him that the demand for Latin in the liturgy has been on the decline among the faithful, and I also agree with him that affection for the Extraordinary Form is also in the decline. I suspect, though we did not discuss this, that he and I would also agree that such affection is misplaced. However, there are some parishes (St. Agnes in St. Paul MN comes to mind) where very effective use of Latin in the Ordinary Form makes for some magnificently beautiful liturgical experiences. My own view is that this is a great thing, but mainly for those who happen to have aesthetic preferences leaning in that direction. I don't really see any compelling reason to make it the norm for all parishes everywhere, since it is simply a fact (sadly) that Latin is not understood by very many people--including many priests--and if the proponents of the Extraordinary Form did not like it when the Ordinary Form was imposed on them everywhere then they should have no reason to think that they ought to impose anything on anyone either. So my own view is, and has long been, that making Latin liturgies <i>available</i> is better than making them <i>mandatory</i>, whether in the Extraordinary or the Ordinary Form. They should at least be available where sufficient numbers of people desire them, because this is an aesthetic preference just like the desire for hymnody at Mass (something not mandated by the GIRM).<br />
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That issue, then, is a strictly aesthetic one, as far as I'm concerned. But the issue of Latin as the language of canon law or doctrinal teaching is not a strictly aesthetic one, and there is more philosophical bite to this problem.<br />
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I agree that the Church has no "official language" in the contemporary sense of that expression, but having said that there is no mistaking the fact that Latin has long been, and will continue to be, the most important of the languages in which the Church chooses to express herself, if only for reasons of historical continuity, a methodological principle that clearly guides many of the Church's policy-making decisions. Canon law is almost always promulgated in Latin, but not because Latin is the official language of the church nor because Latin has any special claim to superiority in the expression of legal norms. Our canonist suggests that there are two principle reasons why Latin should, nevertheless, continue to be used "to make fundamental assertions about fundamental aspects of church teaching": (1) Latin [preserves] "doctrinal clarity"; (2) Latin [preserves] "ecclesiastical stability". I put "preserves" in square brackets because our canonist does not use that term, instead he says that "with Latin comes" these things, which is ambiguous between the idea that Latin brings these things along with it (where they might not have existed) and the slightly different idea that Latin keeps these things in place (where they have always been). I think "preserves" will work well enough for both, though it is also somewhat unclear.<br />
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With regard to "doctrinal clarity", one must immediately point out the paucity of the Latin vocabulary when it comes to matters of doctrine. It was, for example, the lack of a well-worked out vocabulary of procession in Latin that caused the controversy over the <i>Filioque</i>. The Greeks had at least four different words conveying different shades of meaning that Latin tried to compress into the single verb <i>procedere</i>. The resulting schism was undoubtedly grounded in many other issues, mostly political, but there is no denying that the theological differences between East and West that had been accumulating over the centuries were at least in part due to the inability of Latin to provide the "doctrinal clarity" that was already present in Greek. As a matter of fact, what most admirers of the Latin language seem to be most drawn to is not its clarity, but its ambiguity--this is what makes Vergil the greatest poet in the Western canon, according to many of his interpreters: his ability to express a wide variety of ideas in a very small number of words.<br />
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The <i>Filioque</i> is only the tip of the iceberg in this regard, but the notorious ambiguity of Latin, combined with its meagre philosophical and theological vocabulary, is only half the problem with our canonist's (1). The flip-side of this question is the simple fact that, if what one wants is "doctrinal clarity" there is no reason why Latin in particular ought to be the default language, because once you decide that there is to be a "default language" then any language will do, especially a language like English, which continues to evolve in a natural way via the use of native speakers who are able to deliver whatever clarity is required simply by explaining, in their native tongue, what they mean by a given expression. There are no native speakers of Latin, so there is no one who has the sort of linguistic authority to say "this is how I am using the term because this is how it is used in the course of natural usage"--all that can be said is "this is how I think previous users of the term meant to use it, and so that is how I am going to use it." But that does not deliver any kind of special "doctrinal clarity" that is proprietary to the Latin language <i>per se</i>. There remains, however, the idea that <i>keeping</i> things in Latin will mean that, at the very least, we're all still talking about the same <i>terms</i> that were being used in the previous centuries and, hopefully, the same <i>concepts</i> as well, concepts that we don't want to mess up by trying to translated them into <i>our</i> modes of expression.<br />
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This may be what our canonist was hoping to get at with his (2). This issue of "ecclesiastical stability" is rather interesting, because it can be taken in either an aesthetic or a doctrinal sense. Certainly the use of Latin throughout the Latin rite would make for some stability with respect to liturgical practice, but that is an aesthetic issue and not one that our canonist is trying to address. Rather I think he has in mind the sort of doctrinal stability that is alleged to come along with clarity and the <i>continuity</i> that I was just discussing. There are a number of objections that could be raised to this point. On the one hand, if we are talking about church polity, it is not clear that either clarity of language or continuity of use will be guaranteed by Latin any more than by any other language, since I have already suggested that Latin is not <i>sui generis</i> in the clarity department and even when there is great clarity of meaning people in general still find ways to get into disputes about normative matters. This disagreement will not be eliminated by continuing the use of Latin, since our canonist himself has already complained about the fact that discussing issues at two or three removes from the original is a dangerous way to proceed, and all discussions about the meaning of Latin terms are by their very nature already at a remove from the original, since there are no native Latin speakers. Everyone, even the fluent Latin scholar, has a different language template in place through which his understanding of Latin is filtered.<br />
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Our canonist softens his view, somewhat, at the end, by suggesting that his proposal is really only that, since Latin is the <i>historically</i> most important language of the Latin church, it should remain so, and <i>debates</i> can be in any language you like. This reduces Latin to a kind of antiquarian curiosity, and seems to me to vitiate any claims about its inherent clarity and ability to create stability, but I'm happy to agree that it's nice to still be able to buy books written in Latin, if that's what one likes to read, and I do. So if our canonist is admitting that, after all, it's really an aesthetic question, then perhaps we aren't so far apart after all, and <i>de gustibus non disputandum est</i>.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-91822600875164145492015-06-16T18:28:00.001-04:002015-06-16T18:29:15.708-04:00Oh, It's A Heap, All RightI recently came across a discussion essay in the <i>International Journal of Philosophical Studies</i> called "Hyperheaps" (15.1 [2007] pp. 121-123), in which the author, W. D. Hart, argues that "There is a least heap," by which he means there is an argument that can prove that there is a minimum number of elements that can compose the smallest possible heap of elements. His argument shows that the least heap is a heap of four spherical elements.<br />
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So let's put a stop to all this foolishness about philosophy being a waste of time.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-85270910469919658472015-01-25T15:37:00.001-05:002015-01-25T15:40:31.764-05:00Pararationality: Climate Science Edition<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0.$end:0:$0:0">"Pararationality" is a term I coined for use in a new course that focuses on arguments that appear to be rational in some sense but that are in fact unsound at best or, what is more typical, invalid at worst. Typically the sorts of arguments that I have in mind have to do with the public reception of scientific work (for example, unreasonable skepticism regarding either the explanatory power of or even scientific status of evolutionary theory, or equally unreasonable attempts to argue for a causal connection between vaccinations and childhood autism), though this is not a necessary condition on the sort of reasoning I have in mind (for example, uninformed views about the nature of probability often lie behind acceptance of certain hypotheses even outside the domain of the sciences). Pararationality is, in some ways, just fallacious reasoning, but with it I intend to pick out those instances of fallacious reasoning that are particularly embedded in our culture in ways that have become remarkable as a social phenomenon.</span></span><br />
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0.$end:0:$0:0"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">Lately I've been thinking about the sorts of cases to look at closely in the course, and Facebook, unsurprisingly, has offered some striking examples. Climate science is in the news a lot as well as in Facebook threads not because the research is of poor quality but because the suggestions of some climate scientists regarding public policy have been found unsavory in various political quarters. What is interesting about the case of climate science, however, is the vehemence with which these political sectors have denied that their objections are political. Indeed, almost to a man, they insist that it is not <i>they</i> who are being political about the science, but the <i>researchers</i>, and they go on to argue that the science is flawed and that climate scientists defend their work for political rather than scientific reasons.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">I have found a couple of examples of this phenomenon from my own Facebook feed and an examination of them is instructive. Now, Aristotle once remarked (<i>Nicomachean Ethics</i> I.6 1096a14-16) that it is better, indeed our duty, for the sake of maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely, for, while both are dear, piety requires us to honor truth above our friends. With that sentiment in view, therefore, I will not identify the authors of these remarks even while showing the ways in which they stand as illustrative examples of pararationality.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">The first example is a remark whose author was so proud of it that he copied it and posted it in more than one place on Facebook, each time in reply to a posting of a graph showing 2014 to be the warmest year on record:</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0.$end:0:$0:0">And yet not nearly as warm as it was between the years 1000 and 1300, a period during which human population and prosperity boomed. This was then followed by the Little Ice Age, during which temperatures plummeted, major rivers froze over for months a</span></span><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">t a time, crops failed, famine raged, and the Black Death killed off a third of the world's population. The Little Ice Age ended only in the middle of the 19th century, so one might say not that we face catastrophic warming, but that we are just getting back to where we ought to be.</span><br data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$1:0" /><br data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$3:0" /><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$4:0">Because, morons, climate changes--sometimes quite drastically in a short timespan. It has ALWAYS done this, and it has NOTHING to do with us. We do not cause it, neither can we stop it.</span><br data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$5:0" /><br data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$7:0" /><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0">You're puny, humans! Get over yourselves.</span></span></span><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><br data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$3:0" /></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">The person who wrote this, while not uneducated, is basically an autodidact and, while I admire autodidacticism in general, in this particular instance it highlights the dangers of trying to educate oneself in the absence of anything analogous to peer review. So if we put aside, for a moment, the question of the advisability of referring to genuine experts as "morons" when one has only an undergraduate degree in public policy on which to ground one's own views, there is still plenty here to examine closely.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">Let us begin where our author begins, with the claim that it was warmer between the years 1000 and 1300 than in 2014. The first thing to note about this claim is that, to the extent that there is any evidence for it at all, the evidence shows it to be false. By the year 2004 the average global temperature was already much higher than in the 1000-1300 period, and by 2014 the average global temperature was higher still.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">As interesting as the mistake about the empirical data is, however, what is even more interesting is the assumption that lies behind the assertion. In order to make comparative claims of the sort that our author wants to make, one would need data collected in relevantly similar ways. But in fact there are no reliable temperature data from the period 1000-1300: what we have instead are estimates based on indirect evidence such as ice cores, tree ring data, and subjective personal reports, none of which are very well documented nor, in the case of the ice cores or the tree ring data, are they collected from analogously relevant locations from around the globe.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">Now, it is true that cooling of average temperatures <i>in Europe</i> during the period from roughly 1350 to 1850 has been called the "Little Ice Age", but these effects were not as pronounced around the globe. However, it is fair to say that the evidence for global cooling patterns either during this same time period or shortly thereafter is not nil, so suppose we grant that the temperatures cooled globally during this period. While it is tempting to point out that even today rivers still freeze over for months at a time and crops continue to disappoint, that would be fun but beside the point, since there is a more important claim on the table here. </span></span><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">Notice the inference our author wishes to draw from the temperature differential from 1000-1850:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">climate changes--sometimes drastically in a short timespan. It has ALWAYS done this, and it has NOTHING to do with us.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">This is where the reasoning becomes very bad indeed: our author is asserting the following argument:</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">In the past, phenomenon X was caused by non-human activity. Therefore, any appearance of phenomenon X will also be caused by non-human activity.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8;"><span style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">Or, to put it another way, if we were to ask our author, "How do you know that today's changing climate is not due to human activity," his answer would appear to be nothing stronger than "Well, in the past it wasn't due to human activity, so it's not due to human activity now." This is obviously invalid, as Hume famously showed, but it is not even a strong induction. It is worth noting that we actually do have some very good candidates for causal mechanisms involved in both the warm period of 1000-1300 and in the so-called "Little Ice Age", just as we have some very good candidates for the causal mechanisms involved in our own contemporary warming trend. What our author is doing, with something like the appearance of rationality, is suggesting that because climate change in the past was clearly not caused by human activity, we have no rational reason to think that the present climate changes are due to human activity. This ignores the evidence of the causal mechanisms involved in the various climate changes being discussed, and simply assumes that they must always be similar.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">Pointing out that it is not a good argument to claim that different causal mechanisms cannot bring about similar effects may seem like shooting fish in a bucket, but this argument is not at all rare, and one finds all sorts of variations on the theme of "the climate has always been changing, it was never due to human activity before, therefore it isn't due to human activity now". To the extent that the proponents of this view bother to address the empirical data regarding causation at all, they do so incompetently, because, of course, they are not experts in climate science themselves, they are simply annoyed at those climate scientists who are trying to tell us what to do about this situation.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">A slightly different approach is taken by those who, knowing they are not experts in climate science, nevertheless see themselves as experts in history and, thus, qualified to make assertions about science on the basis of their interpretation of the history of it. This leads to a different sort of pararationality. The following quotation comes from someone who is responding to a story from New York Magazine in which Jonathan Chait, in something of a snit, argued that "climate science denialism" ought to exclude someone from holding pubic office. Putting aside, for a moment, the foot-shooting aspects of that suggestion, let's take a look at what my friend said about it:</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">So whenever there is a scientific consensus on issues like eugenics (or say abortion where the medical community assures us that the fetus in no way merits protection) then that should just trump democracy? Why even hold elections at all ... just have examinations that scan for right thinking?</span></span></span></span><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">Oh - and the scientific consensus in psychology used to be that homosexuality was a sickness (and might one day be that religious belief is also a kind of illness).... </span></span></span></span><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">One of the things I found fascinating when doing research on eugenics was the degree to which so many people were so absolutely certain of the scientific consensus that they did all sorts of horrible things AND labeled as dogmatic religiously inspired sentimentality any opposition to their policies.</span></span></span></span></blockquote>
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">The author of this bit is not directly challenging the claims of climate science in this particular quotation, but I use it as an example for two reasons. First, it is a good example of pararationality. Second, the very same author has, on numerous occasions, expressed deep skepticism about the claims of climate science, so perhaps our author makes these comments partly for personal reasons in reaction to Chait's ridiculous suggestion.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">The principle argument here has to do with the notion of a "scientific consensus", which our author contrasts with democratic ideals regarding social policy. There are two principle flaws with this, both of which bear examining. One is the mistaken notion of science involved in comparing the present state of climate science with that of eugenics in the early 20th century, the other is the attempt to suggest an inference based on an analogical comparison of the scientific community and the democratic polity.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">First, regarding the scientific question. While it is often tempting to point out the arrogance of scientists who think they know everything and are happy to tell you so, one must avoid conflating this feature of the scientific community with the actual work they do. So while it is true that some contemporary climate scientists are, indeed, just as big assholes as early 20th century eugenicists, this is irrelevant to the question of the comparable worth of the work being done by contemporary climate scientists and early 20th century eugenicists. For one thing, in the 1920s and 1930s genetics in general was still in its infancy, but climate science is well established and is not at all controversial among scientists generally, which is not something that could be said about eugenics as an offshoot of genetics. There was never any consensus about causal connections between genetics and human worth or behavior, but there is a consensus about a very well understood set of causal mechanisms regarding climate change, so comparison of the two cases is at best a false analogy but at worst, and sadly more likely, a kind of <i>ignoratio elenchi</i>.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">One might add that, while there are certainly plenty of medical professionals who do not oppose abortion, the claim that "the medical community assures us that the fetus in no way merits protection" is simply false, and indeed is something of an insult to the many medical professionals who oppose abortion in the strongest possible terms. To treat the "medical community" as something monolithic and easily described in a slogan or two is not even pararational, it is simply <i>ad hominem</i> and fallacious.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">Second, when one accepts democratic ideals as the best sort of social polity one is making a very different sort of normative move than one makes when one accepts a scientific consensus about a scientific problem. In a democracy, everyone is treated as though capable of governing, whether or not they are so in reality. But in science, not everyone is endowed with the same expertise regarding scientific questions. While it is true that, in a democracy, we cannot force the general public to act in any specific way on a particular finding of the scientific community, it does not follow from this that the general public is in any position to reject those findings as "not good science". Granted, our present author does not say precisely that in this particular quote, I only mention it because he has made similar suggestions elsewhere, and indeed it is not an uncommon version of this very same argument to point out that as long as there are one or two people who work in scientific areas who do not accept the general consensus, then there isn't really any consensus at all. The desire seems to be to excuse one's refusal for taking a particular course of action not by saying that one does not wish to act in that way but rather by accusing the scientific community of trying to put one over on us and force us to act in a way contrary to what we desire. It almost seems that, in arguing this way, the proponents of this view are admitting that, if the science is right, we really ought to do something. So let's pretend that the people who are doing the science don't know what they're doing, or are politically biased, or are morons.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3" style="background-color: #f6f7f8; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15.3599996566772px;"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".4s.1:3:1:$comment873542609363486_873560079361739:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$8:0"><span style="line-height: 15.3599996566772px;">I once had an argument with a very well-educated woman about evolutionary theory. Her education, however, was in English literature, not biology, so I was perplexed when, to my query as to why she rejected it, her answer was "I just don't buy it." In short, she didn't have anything to propose in its place, nor did she have any particular argument against it--she just didn't "buy it", as though scientific evidence is some sort of commodity that we may either buy or leave on the shelf for some other poor sap to fall for and take home. While I don't agree with Chait's proposal, I do think there is a problem with scientific literacy in our country, and that is unfortunate.</span></span></span></span>Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-82703385449113782702014-03-01T12:39:00.000-05:002014-03-01T12:39:15.756-05:00Those Pinheads Still TantalizeMost of my close friends know that I'm pretty good at making mountains out of molehills, but I'm beginning to think that I'm something of an amateur in that department when compared to some. When I was a history major in college (yes, they did have colleges as long ago as all that, though we had to write our notes in the sand with sticks) my medieval history professor was fond of saying that most medieval theological speculation amounted to disputations about "how many angels could dance on the head of a pin". Although I'm not going to ask my <i>alma mater</i> for a refund of my tuition money, I found out later that the question was not about pin heads but about needle points, nor was it a genuine medieval debating point at all but a lampoon of such debates invented by Isaac D'Israeli in the 19th century (though based, no doubt, on the genuine question, posed by Saint Thomas Aquinas, whether several angels could occupy the same space at once). This is not to deny that some medieval scholars worried about some rather bizarre things. Whether Christ was a hermaphrodite, for example, or whether there be excrement in paradise, were both genuine "talking points" among medieval theologians. I am not a medieval theologian (though some who deny that I am a theologian might not be so quick to deny that I am certainly close to being medieval) but I have certainly wondered about some extremely finial details in my own line of work. In spite of some small training in languages, however, I find that grammatical questions have lost some of their luster for me. This lackluster state was brought into higher relief for me recently when I read the following comment on a friend's blog:<br />
<blockquote>
In Luke 18:14 we read, “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.” (From the parable of the publican and the pharisee.) Now what has happened here? Is the “justification” of the publican—a type for all sinners—a definitive act, or has he only entered into a process which is less than complete? If it is the latter, how do you account for the perfect tense of the participle “justified,” and indeed, what would be the point of the parable?</blockquote>
The question seems to be about justification: does it happen all at once, or is it a process? That is indeed an interesting question, in my opinion. Does the text from Luke, however, really support the assumption that one or the other possibility can be ruled out by means of an appeal to the grammar of the sentence used in the story? The author of Luke is a slightly better stylist than the authors of the other Gospels, but his attention to grammatical detail has never struck me as something to make a Really Big Fuss about. This question seems to make a rather bold claim about what the author of Luke might mean by employing a perfect tense rather than the imperfect. I'm not sure whether an aorist would have made things any clearer (in the sense of making the question less pressing, since the aorist would be pretty ambiguous by comparison, but see below), but the whole thing seems rather like claiming that an undergraduate is intentionally exploring new depths of existential angst by purposely employing both present and past tenses in a five page essay on the writings of Swift.<br />
<br />
Well, OK, that was a dumb comparison, because the person who wrote the question is not an undergraduate and is indeed asking a good question. I'm just not convinced that the <i>written</i> Gospel narratives, which are arguably drawn from an oral tradition, make their <i>theological</i> claims in such delicate, if not cryptic, ways. Funky parables are bad enough--why complicate things with subtle points of grammar as well? Is there meant to be some kind of <i>gnosis</i> here that I'm missing?<br />
<br />
The same Inquisitor posted another question to the same blog, along the same lines, about a passage drawn from Saint Paul:<br />
<blockquote>
In Romans 5:1-2, we read “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand…” The Greek participle is not perfect but only aorist, I admit; but the results are clearly perfect: we have peace, we have obtained access, we stand. How do you interpret this verse?</blockquote>
I certainly do not dispute the fact that "How do you interpret this verse" could be an interesting question, but to make the point of the question hang upon this kind of point (get it? Point? Pin point? Come <i>on</i>, it's funny!) of grammar is, well, pointless--though it has helped untold numbers of academics earn their tenure in departments of religious studies I suppose, and that's no infinitesimal point these days.<br />
<br />
These sorts of questions, to me, sound like <span style="font-style: italic;">sola scriptura</span> on steroids--we must make careful sense out of every jot and tittle in the text, the question seems to say, else we utterly fail to make the case for our interpretation. My own experience with the Scriptures has been rather different. It seems to me that doing justice to the text must always move forward in the context of the tradition and the magisterial authority of the Church. This does not mean that we cannot pay close attention to textual questions, of course, but it does mean that <i>sola grammatica</i> is not a good interpretive principle. If it really is one: I don't want to attack a straw man here, and questions on blogs are not necessarily reflective of entire hermeneutic communities. But they might help to explain how at least some people approach their questions about things other than religion, and that could prove rather unfortunate, it seems to me.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-29775075396281293332014-02-27T10:42:00.002-05:002014-02-27T11:19:50.828-05:00Grumpy Conservative or Progressive Feminist--You Make the Call!My daughter has been given an assignment in her physical education class (7th grade) that involves working out something called a "jump routine" with three other girls. A jump routine seems to be something like a cheerleading routine for people who don't like the connotations associated with the word "cheerleading". There is a very complicated set of scoring criteria. I can't remember how many categories of 1-10 point grades are to be awarded for this two minute drill, but they filled an entire page and gave me the impression that visitors from the Olympic Selection Committee will be secreted away in the audience somewhere. The girls must choose some music and work out the choreography of the routine as a group, and they will perform it in front of their class and their teacher.<br />
<br />
"Choose some music". Seems benign enough, you say to yourself. I will be the first to admit that I have been a lazy, though not, I think, negligent, father in this case, because I did not know anything about this assignment until my daughter asked me to burn a CD for her with her group's dance music on it. That was when I first discovered that the tune to which they would be jumping around and giggling is Jason Derulo's "Talk Dirty to Me". Although the title did not inspire much confidence in me, I have already downloaded enough music for her on iTunes to know that titles often--if not usually, these days--bear little or no relation to the actual content of the song. If it can really be said that songs these days have any content. But some spark of Divine Illumination prompted me to check out the lyrics to this song before burning the CD. So I went to the website A-Z Lyrics, and after reading through the words to the song it was not surprising to me when I finally noticed that the way they were laid out on the screen made them look like a large erect phallus, because the song is mostly about phalluses. Erect phalluses. Erect phalluses being used in a variety of different ways, but mostly ways that are not really appropriate for 12 and 13 year old girls to be dancing to. Here is a sample of some of the lyrics:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Dos Cadenas, closed the genius<br />
Sold out arenas, you can suck my penis<br />
Gilbert Arenas, guns on deck<br />
Chest to chest, tongue on neck<br />
International oral sex<br />
Every picture I take, I pose a threat<br />
Boat or jet, what do you expect?<br />
Her pussy so good I bought her a pet<br />
Anyway, every day I'm trying to get to it<br />
Got her saved in my phone under "Big Booty"</blockquote>
And so on, and so forth. When I asked my daughter what she liked about this song, she said "It's catchy, and I like the chorus." I wasn't really sure what the "chorus" of this song was supposed to be--there is a section where he says "Talk dirty to me" over and over again (hence the title, I suppose), but it didn't really stand out very much, and even if it did, well there's a song called "Hey Jude", but not one called "Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah".<br />
<br />
So to make this short story even longer, I told my daughter that she could not use this song, and she complained that it is a group project and the choice is not up to her. "And besides", she pointed out, "The teacher approved it already."<br />
<br />
What?<br />
<br />
The teacher <i>approved</i> it?<br />
<br />
I confess that my visage betrayed, somewhat, my skeptical attitude.<br />
<br />
"Don't lie to me with that mouth," I said.<br />
<br />
"She did, and anyway we have to do it on Thursday. It's all decided!"<br />
<br />
I found it inconceivable that any teacher would approve this song for use in the classroom, so I decided to write to the teacher myself and let her know how I felt about the piece. In my email to her I pointed out that my daughter had told me that the song had been approved by a teacher, and that I thought this could only mean that the teacher had not noticed the lyrics, so I reproduced for her the ones you can read above. I then ranted for a while about the image this presents of women and young girls serving as mere instruments of male pleasure and that I did not think it salutary to have the public schools turn a blind eye to the degradation and objectification of women. The teacher wrote back to me, and I reproduce for you here the full text of her reply, completely unexpurgated:<br />
<br />
Please just have her change it.<br />
<br />
That's it. No "Dear Mr. Scrutator", no "Hi,", no name signed at the bottom. Just that one line exactly as you see it above. In response to my 603 word email (which I will happily make available to any interested party) explaining why I found it important that she intervene in this situation. (Well I'm Mr. Scrutator not Mr. Pithy.)<br />
<br />
Now I'm sure gym teachers are very busy and can't be bothered with minor administrative decisions like keeping pornography out of their classrooms, so I wrote back and pointed out that my daughter had expressed the opinion that she didn't really need my approval because the teacher had already said it was OK. Kids can be so charming when they are in the grip of adolescent hormones. I also took the liberty of pointing out that, at least in my own opinion, it was hard to see why a teacher would approve of this song. I speculated a little: the teacher might not have known the lyrics and omitted to vet them, which is not very good oversight, but at least it's not as bad as knowing about the lyrics and not giving a shit, either because you don't think they're pornographic or you don't care that they are. That's much more worrisome, and I said so. Which prompted her to write to me and say:<br />
<br />
Those are some serious accusations please feel free to come in anytime.<br />
<br />
So I guess I'm supposed to chaperone my daughter's gym class if I want some reassurance that they're not dancing around to pornographic music. I guess the teacher's job ends once the lesson plan is finished.<br />
<br />
In the end my daughter's group picked a different song. She could not remember either the name of the song or any of its lyrics, interestingly, but she did say that it was something by Justin Timberlake. I suppose there's some small consolation in that--his songs are disgusting too but for different reasons.<br />
<br />
So here I am wondering whether I overreacted. For what it's worth, my wife did not think that I overreacted, and she even likes Robin Thick's "Blurred Lines" INCLUDING the video. But it's difficult for me to escape the worry that I'm just being an old conservative fuddy-duddy. I took up the matter with one of my colleagues who is both a woman and a progressive, and she also thought I was fully within bounds to react the way I did. But I'm still wondering about this.<br />
<br />
When I was 12 (in <i>MY</i> day...) I was listening to music by such groups as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and the like. The Stones are probably the edgiest of the three, but they're arguably not very edgy. But they were certainly edgier than, say, Elvis Presley. When I compare<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Wise men say<br />
Only fools rush in<br />
But I can't help<br />
Falling in love with you</blockquote>
to<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I met a gin-soaked bar room queen in Memphis<br />
She tried to take me upstairs for a ride<br />
She had to heave me right across her shoulder<br />
Cause I just can't seem to drink you off my mind</blockquote>
I'm left with a feeling that, although things had "moved on", as it were, they were still arguably in the same ball park. But I can't help thinking that some sort of line has been crossed, that we're not only not in the same ball park any more, we're not even playing the same kind of game. I've been looking around at lyrics for a while now and "Talk Dirty To Me" is just the tip of a very disgusting and vile iceberg, an iceberg in which women and young girls are treated as literally nothing more than blowjob machines for young men who want lots of money and lots of visceral pleasure in their nether regions or they won't be satisfied. (They can't get no satisfaction, it seems.) And their lyrics attest to their attitude that this is what women "really want" anyway, so why not <i>make</i> them do it when they pretend otherwise. This is the world that my daughter wants to aurally immerse herself in, and I find it rather disturbing.<br />
<br />
There are rumors about our middle school--rumors that are believed by students, parents, and teachers--to the effect that oral sex is also just the tip of the iceberg there. There is a lot of sex of other kinds, and lots of experimentation with drugs. This middle school is not one in which deprivation has driven kids to find bizarre forms of escape, it is one in which the students are mostly suffering from affluenza. So I'm putting my foot down and I'm not letting her listen to this kind of stuff. I am a grumpy conservative, but I'm also enough of a progressive feminist to think that young girls can do better things with their minds than listen to this crap. And there's certainly no point in putting money into the pockets of vile, self-styled artists who promote a worldview in which women are not persons but tools and whose contribution to culture is not merely negligible but downright negative.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-82581047849815404392014-02-26T13:53:00.000-05:002014-02-26T15:33:38.280-05:00Pragmatic TruthI recently heard a lecture by a renowned philosopher of science on pragmatic approaches to truth, and it raised some interesting questions for me. On his account, which is grounded in his reading of Peirce, James, and Dewey, "truth" as a predicate has different meanings depending upon the "domain of discourse" in which it is applied. He takes as basic what he calls the "scientific" or "factual" domain, in which "truth" basically means correspondence in Tarski's sense.<br />
<br />
But he identifies three other domains in which that sort of correspondence conception of "truth" will not work. For example, we can say that it is "true" that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street even though it is not a fact in Tarski's sense. This is dubbed "literary truth", and we are told that it is the overall literary context that determines which sentences are "true" or "false" in this sense.<br />
<br />
So the literary domain is one area in which we need a different notion of truth from "scientific" or "factual" correspondence. This seems fair enough to me, though I would add that it seems as if one might be able to find another route for defending the <i>acceptability</i> of sentences like "Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street" without actually proposing a model of <i>truth</i> in which the sentence is regarded as "true" in a technical sense. But literary truth is not the domain that I found most interesting.<br />
<br />
The other two domains, ethics and religion, caught my attention to a much higher degree. In ethics, he suggested that "truth" be understood in a progressive sense. "Weak ethical truth" he ascribes to those propositions that are universally, or nearly universally, accepted by all human communities, with the proviso that these be propositions that have to do with the enhancement of human involvement with social projects regarded as fundamental. I will add that the talk that I heard was just a popularized presentation of a much more sophisticated argument made in a book-length treatment of the matter, and that is why this definition of "ethical truth" seems so thin and cartoonish. A fuller case is made for it in the book.<br />
<br />
In addition to "weakly ethically true", however, propositions can be "strongly ethically true" if they lead to a progressive enhancement of the body of propositions that are successful and enhancing human involvement in fundamental social projects. One can imagine any number of objections to this notion of strong ethical truth, starting with what it is even supposed to mean. But although I was interested in the ethical domain more than in the so-called "fictional" domain, I confess that it was really the fourth domain that I found most interesting.<br />
<br />
The religious domain has its own conception of truth drawn from the sociology of religion, in which the stories told by religious movements are described not as propositions that can be either true or false but as "myths", stories that have some underlying message or instruction or exhortation. I am not an expert in the sociology of religion, but my own (limited) familiarity with the literature suggests to me that "myth" is an invented category devised precisely in order to give some account of why religious sentiment is as widespread as it is given the implausibility of the literal truth of its claims. In short, my impression has been that saying something like "Myths are neither true nor false in the literal sense" is simply shorthand for saying "The claims of religion are obviously not factually true, but they guide the lives of millions of people and communicate deeply held values and foster important practices, so we may regard propositions within the religious community as not open to factual dispute in any important sense." Whether this view is adopted for paternalistic or diplomatic reasons seems hardly relevant: the important thing, it seems to me, is that the factual claims of religions are never taken seriously <i>as</i> factual claims, because those who study the sociology of religion are, usually, not theists themselves and so take it for granted that any claim about a deity that presents itself as a factual claim will necessarily be false.<br />
<br />
But along comes the pragmatist, who says that we should go farther than calling the claims of religions "myths", we should define a domain of discourse within which the claims of religion are actually true, though "true" in the technical sense that is specific to this particular domain of religious discourse. So the pragmatist proposes a definition of "religious truth" that runs parallel to the definition of "ethical truth" sketched above, but that is clearly intended to be quite distinct from the correspondence version of truth found in the "scientific" or "factual" domain. On the pragmatist conception of truth, a proposition P is "weakly religiously true" just in case there is a community with a religious practice R and an extension of that practice, R*, such that R* involves the affirmation of P and the transition from R to R* would be religiously progressive. A proposition P is "strongly religiously true" just in case P is weakly religiously true and the practice of affirming P would be retained in any indefinite sequence of of religiously progressive modifications of R*. Although this project may sound anti-realist in its orientation, the pragmatist argues that it is really a realist view of truth and one is prepared to believe it in this case because, frankly, the "scientific" or "factual" domain is explicitly treated as fundamental. That's where "real" truth lies.<br />
<br />
So as I think about this proposal I have, on the one hand, great admiration for the adroitness on display, not just in the talk but in the book version of the argument. Indeed, the book version makes for fascinating and compelling reading, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone interested in contemporary pragmatism. I think that this particular pragmatist has done about as good a job as could reasonably be expected of anyone trying to defend this point of view. On the other hand, I also found myself wondering about the precise motivation for this conceptual scheme, given the pride of place given to the so-called "factual" domain. I wondered, for example, why it wouldn't just be a lot simpler to say "Look, Jesus did not literally rise from the dead. That proposition is literally false. The people who believe it have false beliefs, and false beliefs cannot count as knowledge. Nor does it help matters to say 'The Resurrection is a metaphor for sacrifice, redemption, and kenotic love, and it is successful primarily because it is such a very powerful and motivating metaphor, so we ought to keep the image in our religious culture', because that is tantamount to saying that false belief and ignorance are useful tools for the common involvement of humans in their social projects. Instead, we should just abandon these propositions--indeed, we ought to abandon religion altogether and replace it with something else."<br />
<br />
Come to find out--as the expression around here goes--our present pragmatist actually does make that very recommendation, in a sense. He does not endorse the elimination of religion in the sense that Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris do. He thinks that religion does play a valuable role in society, a role not unlike the roll played by beautiful art and literature. It expresses humanity's deepest longings in a metaphorical and artistic way, and that is a function worth retaining. The rub is that he thinks that, in an ideal world, that function will be gradually taken over by institutions other than religion. Institutions such as art and literature, for example. And he thinks that religion is "progressive" just in case it makes clear to its adherents that its claims are not to be taken literally and are to be used only for humanistic unitive purposes. Presumably that sort of thing could indeed be accomplished by plenty of institutions other than religion, and our present pragmatist thinks that, if all goes well, religion will indeed not so much disappear after the manner of extinction called for by Dawkins but will, rather, evolve in a Darwinian way into something really quite different from religion as we know it today. And that will be a Good Thing.<br />
<br />
For the theist, I suppose, all of this will seem somewhat paternalistic. The Christian believes in the literal truth of the Resurrection, not some metaphorical kind of analogous truth. Indeed, St. Paul famously argued in defense of the literal truth of the Resurrection, claiming that if it were not literally true Christians would be the most wretched people on earth. So clearly the theists themselves take these propositions to be literally true, and importantly so. What good does it do to pat them on the head and say "There there, your beliefs are 'true', don't worry" when what you really mean is "Your belief is false, but we're going to let you hang on to it for a while because it makes you useful to society, docile, and pleasant to be around, but as soon as I can find a way to make you useful, docile, and pleasant without you committing yourself to falsehoods we're going to go that way instead"? Having dealt with the problem myself I can imagine being a little nervous about "literalism" in religion, especially when the context is something like creationism, so I'm not saying that I don't sympathize with someone who wants to find a way to parse the propositional content of religions into what ought, and what ought not, to be taken as literally true. But I would stop short of claiming that <i>none</i> of the propositions can be taken as literally true, if only because that would open me up, quite rightly, to the charges of question begging and special pleading.<br />
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So my puzzlement consists in a picture of truth in which everybody knows that "factual" truth is fundamental, and that the pragmatic model of "truth" in these other domains--fiction, ethics, and religion--is not really what anybody really means by "true" but we're supposed to hang on to this model anyway rather than coming right out and saying that the claims of religion are false or that ethical judgments are relative to the cultures that make them or something along those lines. In short, I'm not sure what the philosophical payoff is supposed to be in seeing truth in this way, short of finding some way of not coming off looking as obnoxious as Dawkins or as uninformed as Harris when talking about religion. The model is an elegant one, but its central component--the retention of the word "true" as the predicate for consistency, usefulness, or success within a domain--strikes me as useless. I've been wrong about this sort of thing before, though, so I stand ready to be corrected.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-40553733154519537992013-09-19T21:54:00.000-04:002013-09-19T21:54:10.648-04:00The Present PopeThirty years ago, when I first entered the Catholic Church, I frequently had conversations with folks who liked to characterize themselves as "progressive Catholics". As a convert who had chosen to enter the Church precisely because I found her teachings attractive, I was sometimes mystified at their willingness to remain connected to an institution with which they seemed (to me, at least) to have so little in common, especially when one considers the fact that there are over 30,000 Protestant sects in the United States alone, and surely some one of them (or perhaps some combination of them--in some cases it may not require an exclusive membership) could have met their needs better. John Paul II had been elected Pope prior to my conversion (indeed, I was not even a Christian in 1978, let alone a Catholic one), but I found him and his style very congenial, so I was also a little mystified when these same folks would insist on referring to him only as "the present pope", never as "the pope" or "the Holy Father" or what have you. Based on the context and contents of these conversations it was very clear to me that by "present pope" they intended to suggest that, as far as they were concerned, this rather conservative little fellow from Eastern Europe was just an anomaly, a bump on the otherwise smooth road from Vatican II to a more liberal and progressive Catholic church that <i>would</i> meet all of their needs, hence their willingness to stick it out and remain in the Church.<br />
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John Paul II's lengthy and serene reign as Supreme Pontiff managed to cool their jets somewhat over the years, and in spite of feeling intense sympathy for his sufferings I couldn't help but rejoice in his longevity. When his successor proved to be the very person whom I myself would have nominated to take his place, I couldn't help but feel just a tiny bit of <i>Schadenfreude</i>, though I no longer knew anyone who used the expression "the present pope" by that time--it seemed they had just given up on that.<br />
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Well. Today, the Jesuit magazine <i>America</i> published an interview with the present pope that has caused something of a stir among Catholics and non-Catholics alike, even though Francis said nothing extraordinary or unusual in the interview, at least with respect to what the Catholic Church teaches. This fact may come as a surprise to anyone who relies for their information about the interview on such sources as CBS News, the New York Times, or the editor of the Jesuit magazine <i>America</i>, all portraying the content of this interview as "unprecedented" and "revolutionary".<br />
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To cut to the chase, the part of the interview that is supposed to be so extraordinary is the pope's declaration that the Church has, in recent years, been "obsessed" with certain "technical" and "minor" issues and has thereby missed out on certain opportunities to be more welcoming, compassionate, and forgiving. These minor technical issues are, at least to judge from what CBS News and the New York Times have to say about it, such things as abortion, homosexuality, and contraception. I did not catch any reference to the whole pedophilia thing, so I don't know whether <i>that</i> sort of sexual peccadillo is going to count, from now on, as just minor and technical, or whether it's still something we should worry about. Apparently, the Church is not really able to walk and chew gum at the same time, because somehow, in preaching against abortion, we are neglecting to be compassionate and welcoming, so this is a Big Problem. Indeed, the whole of the Church's moral authority is in danger of falling like a "house of cards", because there is no way that we can continue to obsess over these minor technical issues and still preach love, forgiveness, and compassion. To say that we can do both of these things is like saying that a quarterback has to be able to run <i>and</i> pass the ball, and we all know that you can't really be good at doing both of those things. Certainly any quarterback who chooses to pass the ball when he needs to is basically showing the whole world that he's not interested in running with it. Ever.<br />
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Now, let's be perfectly clear about what Francis is <i>not</i> saying. Everyone, including the otherwise Catholic-blind New York Times, is reporting that Francis is <i>not</i> changing any of the Church's teachings, that he is a "son of the Church" (which, for you progressives out there, means that he actually accepts those teachings about abortion, homosexuality, and contraception). So, even the New York Times is willing to admit (probably with some reluctance) that these teachings are not going to change; they may even understand (though I doubt it) that they are not going to change because they cannot be changed. But we should certainly see this as a "change of emphasis", a kind of "new direction"--after the Dark Ages of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, we are finally in the time of the New Enlightenment. Those other popes are dead (one of them literally, the other metaphorically), long live the pope!<br />
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So since the Church is not going to be ordaining women, marrying homosexuals, or sending money to Planned Parenthood just what, precisely, is this "change of emphasis" supposed to consist in that is so different from what Those Other Gloomy Popes were up to with all of their reactionary skulduggery? Benedict XVI, in particular, has said precisely the same things about welcoming homosexuals that Francis is now being praised for, so there is no change of emphasis there. John Paul II, rather famously, said precisely the same sorts of things about having a preferential option for the poor that Francis is now being praised for saying, so there is no change of emphasis there either. And the <i>world</i> itself --in the form of scientific studies--has said precisely the same sorts of things about HIV, contraception, and other such issues, as Benedict XVI has said, so if there is change of emphasis here it is in a direction <i>away</i> from both the traditional teaching and modern science, so congratulations: if it is a change of emphasis, it's a stupid one.<br />
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But is it really even a change of emphasis? This, unfortunately, is a question that has two aspects. On the one hand, there is the question of whether it is, in fact, a change of emphasis; on the other hand, there is the question of whether Francis <i>believes</i> that it is a change of emphasis. I say this double aspect is "unfortunate" because the <i>fact</i> of the matter is clear: it is not. Which means that if Francis really believes that it <i>is</i>, he is mistaken. But that's OK--although popes are protected from error in faith and morals, nobody said their methodological orientations were always spot-on. So Francis thinks this is all new--well, welcome aboard, Holy Father, but we've been on this train for quite some time already; glad you could join us.<br />
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Hold on there, Carson, you're thinking. Why is everyone saying that this <i>is</i> a new emphasis if it isn't? Why aren't <i>you</i> the one who is mistaken in saying that it is not a new emphasis? What do you know that the pope himself doesn't even know?<br />
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Fortunately, my assessment of the situation doesn't depend upon any secret or arcane knowledge that only I have access to. In fact, never having been to Argentina, I have no idea what it's like there. For all I know, abortion is not a problem at all in that country, and homosexuals are not pressing for marriage rights there, and contraception isn't being forced on Catholic health care providers there. So from the point of view of your average Argentinian, it may well seem mysterious to discover that there are elements in the Church that are concerned with these issues because they are really important issues in <i>other</i> places. Like here, for example. Are these issues more important than being compassionate, welcoming and forgiving? Duh. Have you stopped beating your wife yet?<br />
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In the increasingly secular world of Europe and North America, we have witnessed incredible social changes in the last fifty years, and many of these social changes revolve around the minor, technical issues of sexual morality. Just to take one of these minor technical issues as an example, abortion is fully legal almost everywhere in these areas, and if we bear in mind that abortion is the unjustifiable killing of an innocent human being it might be a little easier to regard it as somewhat less minor and technical than, say, whether kids should be allowed to purchase cigarettes. One way to help reduce the number of abortions, of course, is to provide lots of helpful resources to women who are tempted to have them, and that means exercising--you guessed it--compassion, forgiveness, and charitable acceptance. In fact, I don't see how it would even be possible to preach against abortion without making it very clear that the Church is the place to turn to when you are tempted to have one, precisely because the Church is the place that welcomes you with compassion and forgiveness. The problem is not that the Church in American neglects to be compassionate, welcoming, and forgiving--the problem is that in America people would rather turn to the government for help than to the Church, and the government says there's nothing wrong with killing your own child in the womb. A similar story can be told, of course, tying the Church's teachings on homosexual marriage, contraception, and women's ordination to the need for welcoming, compassionate forgiveness, but that story gets drowned out in media accounts that are one sided because the folks who write those accounts are already predisposed to see the Church's teachings on these sexual issues as misguided if not outright wrong. So when someone comes along talking about the flip side of that same coin they see it as revolutionary, as though the coin really only has one side and the Church has finally discovered it after looking too long for the non-existent other side.<br />
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The present pope has blundered. He did not blunder by saying something false, he blundered by not saying what is true: that the Church has <i>always</i> emphasized the Gospel of love, and that the teachings on abortion and the rest <i>flow from</i> that very Gospel. It is simply a mistake to interpret the preaching of the last 30 years in any other way. This is not to say that a pope ought not to call for <i>even more</i> compassion, forgiveness, and welcoming. To make that kind of call would be salutary. But the right way to call for that is to say something like "The Church should always reach out to the dispossessed, to the poor, to the oppressed, to the suffering, to the excluded, to the other: the Church should welcome all with love and compassion." If you say something like that, you are saying pretty much what every pope has always said, including Francis, and you are not implying that the Church has ever acted otherwise. But Francis prefaced it by saying that the Church has also been obsessed with minor technical issues, and then he specifically mentioned several issues that are neither minor nor merely technical, and so of course anyone listening to him is going to think that he sees these things as standing in some sort of contrast, some sort of tension, rather than as two things that flow logically from each other.<br />
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This blunder is a purely rhetorical one. He did not say anything that will bring about any actual changes in what the Church does or teaches, but he opened a real can of worms in terms of what some people are going to start looking forward to and expecting from the Church. In this sense he has invited misunderstanding and misinterpretation, which may not cause much harm in the long run but it certainly cannot bring about any good. Francis said that the Church should not be reduced to a tiny core of True Believers, and many are contrasting this with Benedict XVI's famous remark that a smaller Church would not necessarily be a poorer Church. It seems to me, however, that one can agree with Francis that the Church ought to welcome all while not agreeing with his implication that the Church does not <i>already</i> welcome all with open arms. The sad fact of the matter is that people are not turning away from the Church because the Church is not welcoming them, they are turning away from the Church because they don't agree with what the Church teaches and expects of them. As any true Son of the Church knows very well, accepting the Church's teachings is not simply a matter of mere rule-following, it is an inner conversion of one's very self, a turning away from one's own needs and desires toward absolute self-negation as the only authentic form of genuine love. Self-negation entails very many things that the secular West cannot abide, and that the secular West always interprets as Mean Old Rules That Make Life Less Fun. To act as though this characterization of self-negation is correct or fair, even if only for rhetorical purposes, is to do a real disservice to the Church.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-28302685195105456652013-02-09T17:40:00.002-05:002013-02-10T18:39:14.884-05:00The Road to DamascusLast night I began my Aspirancy program with an overnight retreat at the St. Teresa Retreat Center in Columbus. The Aspirancy program is the first step in the (rather long) road to the Permanent Deaconate. The Aspirancy year is spent in formation and discernment, with monthly meetings like the one I had this weekend, in which one listens to talks about prayer and discernment, gets to know one's fellow Aspirants and their wives, and begins the hard work of introspection and prayer that one hopes will lead to spiritual growth.<br />
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I didn't have any trouble getting to the general neighborhood of the Retreat Center, because I had been to that area several times last year for follow-ups to two surgeries for a torn and detached retina in my left eye. My familiarity with the area didn't keep me from turning into the wrong parking lot when I got there, however. The place seemed right to me: it was a large, churchy-looking building, with cars in the lot and people milling around and going in. So imagine my surprise when I got to the door and a friendly woman greeted me with "Happy Shabbat!" Temple Israel, it seems, is right next door to St. Teresa's.<br />
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I might not have made that mistake if the lot had been better lighted, but since my surgeries I just can't read signs in the dark as well as I used to, so even though there was a large sign right at the entrance to the lot, I couldn't make out what it said. I suppose I convinced myself, mentally, that there was enough writing on it to say St. Teresa's Retreat Center, or something. This is something that I will have to get used to, and it was bound to happen whether or not I had a torn retina: old people simply cannot see all that well at night. Aging is hard, kiddies, so don't get cocky while you're still young: be humble and help out old geezers like me when they get lost, like the nice lady at Temple Israel did when I remarked, in response to her greeting, "I think I'm in the wrong place." She smiled. "Yes," she said, "I thought you had that look."<br />
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It is definitely a little difficult not to be grumpy about the gradual decay of my eyesight, but there is one aspect of it that I try to keep in view (get it?) on the days when things look particularly blurry. When I was getting prepped for my first surgery I was was literally terrified. I remember thinking to myself, "This is what it is like to be really scared." I thought I had been scared of other things, of course: I was nervous about the birth of my first child and the implications it might have for my life; I was nervous about getting tenure; one is almost always nervous, these days, about money. But being nervous is not really the same thing as being scared, even though at the time those things did seem kind of scary in their own way. Now that I have experienced real fear, however, I know that they were not really scary at all. I'm not saying that what I went through last year was anything like the kinds of really terrifying things that many people have to go through every day: military personel, ghetto kids, cancer patients, people in Syria--these people have it far worse than I ever have or will have it. But, for what it's worth, getting prepped for eye surgery was the scariest thing I've been through in my life. What made it bearable was the presence of competent and reassuring people. The nurses, the anesthesiologist, my surgeon: they were all very professional, soothing, and in several instances they did their job best simply by being there. When you're signing forms explaining that you acknowledge that you might die, the presence of a calm woman with obvious expertise and compassion is a remarkable balm for the soul. My surgeon, too, although he constantly put off my compliments with remarks about "just doing my job", was such a remarkable combination of care and technical excellence that I was sure that I would come through everything OK. And indeed, I did.<br />
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What has been most remarkable to me about the whole experience is not just the fact that it seems like just about anything can be fixed these days, but also the extent to which we <i>need</i> each other. Not just for technical reasons (such as, I can't operate on my own eye): we need each other just to be there, to care and <i>make manifest</i> the bond of humanity that ties us all together. The growing awareness in me of this deep and essential connectedness to others, a sense of community that increased as I underwent my recovery, was what motivated me to make my application to the Permanent Deaconate Program. This is my chance to be there for others who need someone, anyone, to be living signs of God's love for them. I had considered applying four years ago, when the first Deaconate class began, but I missed the deadline. That turns out not to have been a bad thing: for various reasons, four years ago was not the best time for me to embark upon this journey. For one thing, both of my children were much younger. Now they are in very different places, and so am I.<br />
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I am in a very new and, I believe, very <i>good</i> place, <i>because</i> of my surgeries. The concept of God's providence was always one that mystified me in the past, though I thought I understood it intellectually. Now I think I understand it experientially as well as intellectually, and that makes a big difference. Indeed, for me, it has made all the difference: something very good can, indeed, come about as the result of something very bad.<br />
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I am very grateful that I did not have to go through what St. Paul went through on the road to Damascus: I am not going to go blind, thanks to some wonderful doctors and nurses in Columbus. But I had my own little Damascus journey last year, and if God is willing, I hope to follow a path not unlike the one followed by St. Paul, at least in the sense of finding a way to see with great clarity even though my eyes are not what they once were.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-91364704193793890822013-02-06T13:44:00.001-05:002013-02-06T13:44:36.115-05:00Alvin Plantinga Receives Rescher PrizeDavid Theroux of The Independent Institute reports that Alvin Plantinga, the Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin College, has won the Nicolas Rescher Prize for Contributions to Systematic Philosophy, awarded by the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Philosophy. You can read David's announcement <a href="http://blog.independent.org/2013/02/02/alvin-planinga-receives-prestigious-rescher-prize/">here</a>.<br />
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Plantinga has been very active in philosophical discussions of the rationality of religious belief, and has participated in public forums with some well-known skeptics. Some of his arguments seem rather strange to me (for example, he has argued that if evolutionary theory is true, it is a disaster for naturalism), but his work on the so-called "ontological proof" for the existence of God has kept an otherwise arcane logical problem on the front burner for many years now, and has prompted a wide variety of responses from the philosophical community. He has written extensively on the concept of epistemic warrant, and has deployed his version of it in defense of the rationality of religious belief. You can find links to many of his papers and books at The Independent Institute's announcement of the prize linked to above.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-52263946254337649942010-10-29T10:07:00.006-04:002010-10-29T11:52:13.633-04:00Our New Dark AgesRecently I had the opportunity to listen to part of a debate between candidates for public office, and the topic of cap and trade was on their agenda. I was struck by something one of the candidates said about global warming. He claimed that not only is the question of whether global warming is driven by human activity a myth (so-called "anthropogenic climate change"), but that the very <i>fact</i> of global warming is a myth ("myth" was the very word he used). I was struck by this for two reasons. First, while it is true that no scientific theory is literally irreformable and, hence, the question of the causal mechanisms behind climate change must remain an open one, nevertheless the interpretation of the actual data involved in climate change is actually rather straightforward, in spite of what some rather excitable folks tried to make out of the data collection and interpretation methodologies revealed in the whole kerfuffle over the hacked emails from Phil Jones and other involved with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. I say this in spite of my own decidedly anti-realist leanings in the philosophy of science: all data are multiply interpretable, but usually only a very few interpretations are intellectually warranted, and in this particular case the scandal had to do not with the meaning of the data but the manner in which it was disseminated. Charges of "cooking" the data have been made, but usually only by folks who do not fully understand the nature of scientific inquiry in the first place.<br /><br />Second, and more importantly from a philosophical perspective, I was struck by the attitude towards climate research that was revealed by this particular candidate's characterization of the work being done. The word "myth" is not necessarily, in my opinion, a <i>pejorative</i> one per se. For example, I believe that much of what can be read in the Scriptures is mythological, but that does not mean that it is not true, and importantly so. But for this particular candidate the word "myth" clearly means "falsehood" or perhaps even "lie". But even if we assume that he means only something benign, perhaps something along the lines of "an unwarranted fantasy foolishly endorsed by certain useful idiots in the climate research lobby", the attitude is nevertheless striking because of what it says about the long Western tradition of interpretations of nature as a fundamental component of our epistemological growth and self-understanding.<br /><br />The candidate actually said, explicitly, "I'm not going to believe in this myth", and then there was an exchange between him and his opponent in which "believing" in climate change was compared to believing in the tooth fairy. (I am <i>not</i> making this up.) The first thing that should be noted, I think, is that there is an interesting tension here. On the one hand, the candidate is asserting that there are reasons to think that climate change is not happening at all. He does not say what those reasons are, he merely asserts that the whole theory is a "myth" and leaves it at that. Now, ordinarily, I would have to agree: in every empirical study the data underdetermine the available theories, so there is always a possibility that any given theoretical interpretation of the data is mistaken. However, usually when one wants to plump for one theory over another, there is an intellectual burden to say what reasons one has for thinking that Theory One is preferable to Theory Two. However, this candidate seemed to be suggesting that it is not merely that there are reasons for thinking that climate change is not happening, he seemed to suggest that there are <i>no</i> reasons to think that climate change <i>is</i> happening, just as there are no reasons (or no rationally warranted reasons) to think that there is such a thing as a tooth fairy. This is a much stronger position than mere underdetermination would warrant. It is, in fact, an irrational position to the extent that it outright denies the very thing that it sets out to assert: that empirical data are multiply interpretable.<br /><br />But there is a much more worrisome aspect to this whole thing. The candidate made it clear that he actually has a criterion of warrant that justifies his position. He said quite explicitly that the reason why it is warranted to say that climate change is a "myth" is because there is no "consensus" among scientists about the causal mechanisms of climate change. In other words, it is his belief that unless there is unanimity of opinion among scientists (he made it clear that by "consensus" he means "unanimity of opinion") that Theory X is true, we are warranted in thinking that Theory X is actually false. As I remarked above, there is a viable anti-realist view that would be consistent with a moderate version of this--namely, one would be warranted in thinking that theories of climate change are always reformable--but the candidate clearly is endorsing something much stronger than mere anti-realism with respect to scientific theories. Now, let's be honest here: the guy's a political candidate, not a rocket scientist or a philosopher of science, so perhaps we should cut him some slack. What does he know about underdetermination or anti-realism? In fact, I suspect that most folks who challenge climate science would find anti-realism rather unpalatable, but that is just one of the many delicious ironies of the political age in which we live.<br /><br />What is it about this that I find worrisome? Principally it is the idea that we are justified in turning a blind eye to scientific inquiry when scientific inquiry does not present us with absolute certainty of interpretation. Indeed, in the present case we are told that it is not enough to turn a blind eye: we are being told that to accept certain interpretations is tantamount to believing in the tooth fairy. Well, speaking of believing in the tooth fairy, I recently noticed that Bob Sungenis and some of his cronies have started plumping for the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system (see his website <a href="http://galileowaswrong.com/galileowaswrong/">here</a>). Since at least some PhDs in physics claim to find this view worthy of attention (or perhaps it would be more correct to say that Sungenis claims that they claim to think this), are we then warranted in thinking that there is no real "consensus" on the Copernican heliocentric model? Because if so, our political candidate would appear to be committed to the proposition that believing that the earth revolves around the sun is tantamount to believing in the tooth fairy. On the other hand, if our candidate were to respond that he did not mean to suggest that kooks like Sungenis constitute a viable alternative to "real" science, so there still is a "consensus" on heliocentrism, he would be opening himself to similar charges: just who are the people who challenge the science behind climate change, and why should we take them seriously? But as I mentioned above, he does not actually give us any reasons for thinking that climate change is just a myth, he merely asserts that it is.<br /><br />The difficulty here should be obvious. Science is, by its very nature, an open inquiry. No scientific theory can ever reasonably be held to be an established, irreformable fact (contrary to what Richard Dawkins says about evolutionary theory--evolutionary theory is one of the most robustly confirmed scientific theories in the history of science, but it is nevertheless still not an irreformable "fact" that is indisputably "true" in a realist sense). All data are multiply interpretable, and this includes theoretical claims. Indeed, it is difficult to see in what sense it would even be meaningful to claim that a scientific theory, which is by its very nature a model of something else, is a "fact". By claiming that science is not to be trusted or even "believed" unless it can establish "facts" by means of a "consensus" of unanimity, our candidate endorses a belief about science which is tantamount to believing in the tooth fairy. Science is no more the sort of thing our candidate believes it to be than is the tooth fairy a real live fairy who leaves children money in exchange for their teeth.<br /><br />In short, our candidate's view about science is an instance of ignorance about science, and yet it is being put forward as a rational, detached, and objective view about science, one that is allegedly free from the sort of ideological dogmatism that our candidate believes has beguiled those poor benighted folks who still "believe" in climate change. This man wants to hold a position of public trust and authority; he wants to shape science policy. And yet he knows nothing about science. Voting for this man would be like letting witch doctors set the curricula in our medical schools. And this view is no longer a minority view: many other political candidates are joining this throng, based partly on the perception that the public at large tends to agree with them.<br /><br />Does the public, in fact, accept this view of science? The real fear here is that, yes, by and large folks are becoming ever more irrational about the nature of the scientific enterprise. Because many people have been persuaded that science is already politicized, they are becoming ever more receptive to charges of politicization in just about every scientific arena. I do not deny that scientists are human beings with political aspirations, nor do I deny that much scientific research receives funding and other means of support on the basis of political considerations. To deny these things would be as irrational as adopting the view of science adopted by our candidate. I agree with those who worry that many policy decisions that accept and appeal to the data of climate scientists are politically motivated and often unwarranted, but this does not mean that I think that every and all <i>scientific</i> interpretations of climate data are equally rationally warranted. In spite of the fact that there is no "consensus" of the sort our candidate demands, it would be irrational to claim that it is not the case that the majority of experts in the field of climate research think that the climate is, indeed, changing. Many of these same experts think that the climate is changing because of causal mechanisms set into play by human activity. This latter claim is much more difficult to establish, of course, but it is not irrational to believe it--believing in anthropogenic climate change is not the same thing as believing in the tooth fairy, nor would it be even if it were the minority view among climate scientists. It is one possible interpretation among many, and to deny this is mere political posturing. Putting political power ahead of genuine epistemic progress and knowledge of the natural ordering of things is just one sign among many that we are living in an age characterized by willful ignorance and indifference to intellectual achievement and the nature of scientific expertise. In short, we are living in a new dark age.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-46137044942550778582010-09-16T11:18:00.002-04:002010-09-16T11:45:24.977-04:00The Rightward TurnIn the late 1950s and early 1960s William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, and other prominent conservative intellectuals pulled off a kind of Velvet Revolution. By means of a series of thoughtful and thought-provoking publications and other media appearances they managed to separate mainstream conservatism from the far-right kooks such as the John Birch Society, Fr. Coughlin, and others who represented the know-nothing, knee-jerk fringe. The effect of this little coup was salutary, because it resulted in a period of nearly thirty years during which the conservative voice carried moral weight in the public square.<br /><br />Of course, the culture at large was rather different in those days. The PBS television network had room for such middle-brow intellectual fare as Buckley's <i>Firing Line</i>, Sir Kenneth Clark's <i>Civilisation</i>, and Jacob Bronowski's <i>The Ascent of Man</i>, and there were only two or three "major" conservative publications, <i>National Review</i> and <i>The American Spectator</i> being the ones with the largest circulation. Our culture has since, shall we say, "moved on".<br /><br />I first began to notice the change quite some time ago--back when Buckley retired from editing <i>National Review</i>, in fact. Slowly but surely the writing in that forum grew less interesting and far from intellectually stimulating. But other publications arrived to fill its place, or so I thought: I began reading the <i>Weekly Standard</i>, and found that it sometimes rose to level of the <i>National Review</i> of the late 60s and early 70s. At about the same time, Rush Limbaugh was growing in popularity with radio audiences across the country, and for a little while he even had a television show.<br /><br />Today, as I look through the sources of "conservative thought" available on the Internet, TV, and radio, I find that the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Andrew Breitbard make the John Birch Society look like Plato's Academy by comparison. The capacity to communicate the conservative stance by means of intellectual disquisition and rational argumentation has vanished, only to be replaced by the same sort of shrill, knee-jerk bigotry that characterizes so much of the left. While it is true that even Glenn Beck will, on occasion, say something that I find congenial, one must sadly note that even a broken clock is right twice a day, and as any reader of Plato's <i>Theaetetus</i> will know (hence, none of the current "conservative" pundits), getting something right once in a while is not a sufficient condition for knowledge or even intelligence.<br /><br />This is unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of them being that (a) genuine conservative values will stand less of a chance of making any headway in the public square and (b) our culture, as a whole, is now "slouching towards Gomorrah" at twice the rate it was when this sort of behavior was largely confined to the left. Among these reasons, however, the genuine conservative must surely include the painful irony of a movement in which the noble and the good, construed as the end of man, are at the heart of what it means to be a member of that movement, winds up pillorying itself by stooping to the very tactics of its opposition in an appeal to the vulgar prejudices and bigotries of populism.<br /><br />Nothing is new under the sun, of course, and while one may lament the present state of things, one comforts oneself with the thought that we have been here before and somehow managed to survive. The history of political discourse in the United States, contrary to the current wisdom, has not suddenly arrived at an unprecedented nadir, but has rather always been characterized by the sort of stuff that one might find flowing forth from the Cloaca Maxima. It is only our short institutional memory that prompts us to characterize our own situation as the End Time. But as new media and new cultural trends multiply ever more quickly with the aid of modern technology, it begins to seem as though the likelihood of another Velvet Revolution in conservative thought is very small, and that, perhaps, is to be lamented even more than the present situation.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-88276876976270062662010-07-31T19:44:00.002-04:002010-07-31T21:33:19.028-04:00Facile InferencesIn my previous post I suggested that some misunderstandings about intellectual history are due to a lack of literary experience and reading comprehension. Many of the misunderstandings I had in mind were misunderstandings by non-scientists about science. In this post I will suggest that this sort of misunderstanding also occurs among scientists about non-science, specifically about value theory and theology--domains that are arguably quite removed from the "hard" sciences, which may serve to explain, in part, why some scientists might be liable to this sort of misunderstanding.<br /><br />I was reminded of this sort of misunderstanding among scientists by an opinion piece in the August 2010 issue of <i>Scientific American</i> (not available online, which is probably just as well), which I continue to read in spite of the increasing presence in it of opinion pieces of this sort. The essay, called "Faith and Foolishness", was written by Lawrence Krauss, who is presently the Director of an outfit called the "Origins Initiative" at Arizona State University, which appears to be some sort of popularizing "think tank" directed at what they describe as "deep and foundational questions ranging across the entire spectrum of scholarship at ASU" (see the website <a href= "http://www.origins.asu.edu/index.php">here</a>). The essay itself begins by pondering "the sad fact that U. S. adults are less willing to accept evolution and the big bang as factual than adults in other industrial countries." Evolution and other Big Ticket scientific theories appear to be the principle focus of the "deep and foundational questions" of interest to the folks at the Origins Institute. It would be easy, at this point, to focus in on the mistake of conflating the notion of "fact" with the notion of an explanatory theory, however robustly confirmed, but that would be rather like shooting fish in a barrel, and I certainly have no beef against evolutionary theory or any particular cosmological theory as such. This sort of mistake is made quite often on both sides, by both scientists and non-scientists, and there isn't much point in belaboring it here. I was more interested in something Krauss said later in his essay:<blockquote>Last May I attended a conference on science and public policy at which a representative of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences gave a keynote address. When I questioned how he reconciled his own reasonable views about science with the sometimes absurd and unjust activities of the Church--from false claims about condoms and AIDS in Africa to pedophilia among the clergy--I was denounced by one speaker after another for my intolerance.</blockquote>It probably goes without saying that Krauss is not <i>complaining</i> about his martyrdom to the truth, in fact he is reveling in it. Of greater interest is his strange opinion that there is something difficult to reconcile here.<br /><br />Look carefully at the point where he thinks he has caught his interlocutor out. The Catholic Church, he avers, makes false claims about condoms and AIDS in Africa, and there are some priests who are pedophiles. These, I take it, are intended as specific examples of cases where the Church has engaged in "absurd and unjust activities", and these particular cases are then supposed to make it difficult to "reconcile" having, at the same time, "reasonable views about science". We may put aside, for the moment, the fact that his own asseveration about condoms and AIDS in Africa is actually contradicted by the empirical evidence, which rather supports the Church's view; we may also lay aside the fact that the church does not actually support pedophilia, but rather condemns it (though perhaps not fast enough to suit Krauss, but that is irrelevant). These are, perhaps, satisfying rejoinders if one is out to win debating points, but what is more important here is not the refutation of Krauss but the "sad fact" that he thinks he has made some sort of clever inference that establishes the general point he is trying to make.<br /><br />It seems to me that it can hardly serve to increase public respect for scientists and their powers of reasoning if people like Krauss are the ones put up for consideration. Here, in particular, we have an astonishingly stupid assertion made by someone who is not merely blissfully ignorant of how silly he is making himself look, but quite the contrary, he appears to think he has scored quite a point, and one gets the impression from looking at his <a href="http://krauss.faculty.asu.edu/">personal website</a> that he is unlikely to benefit from training in critical reasoning (it would be unfair to laugh at <a href="http://krauss.faculty.asu.edu/bio.html">his belief</a> that he was somehow responsible for the "reevaluation of the Catholic Church's position on evolution", so I will leave it to the reader to explore the many howlers he claims as his own; indeed, an exploration of his website will be a salutary exercise for anyone who worries that they have too high an opinion of themselves--no matter how prideful one may feel, it is always nice to find someone else with an even bigger ego).<br /><br />Let us take the most obvious mistake here: the claim that a disagreement over an empirical question entails a difficult-to-reconcile attitude towards science and religion. So Krauss happens to accept one set of studies regarding condoms and AIDS in Africa, and some folks in the Church accept another. Again, putting aside the fact that <i>most</i> empirical studies support the Church's view, it is enough to merely point out that scientists disagree among themselves all the time about empirical facts, and it ought to go without saying that scientists differ amongst themselves even more frequently regarding what sort of <i>social policy</i> ought to be enacted <i>given</i> the empirical facts. So there is nothing at all absurd about both having "reasonable views about science" <i>and</i> agreeing with the Church regarding condoms and AIDS in Africa (indeed, <i>given</i> the empirical evidence, it appears rather as though it is Krauss who has a problem with reconciling the facts with his ideology). In short, theoretical questions cannot be settled by observational data alone, the classic problem of underdetermination. This is not unrelated to Krauss's earlier mistake of conflating the notion of a fact with the notion of an explanation: every explanation is theoretical, including explanations that appeal to, say, natural selection or quantum physics. Hence every explanation is in principle falsifiable, but facts are not falsifiable even in principle.<br /><br />I suspect that the bit about condoms is supposed to be the "absurd" activity of the Church, while the bit about pedophilia is supposed to be the "unjust" activity, but really it is the claim that the Church is unjust when it comes to pedophilia that ought to count as something absurd. What on earth does this even mean? I take it that his central claim here is really nothing more than "the Church has not acted in the way (or, perhaps, as quickly) as <i>I myself</i> would act if <i>I</i> were in charge". That is, of course, the standard of justice held by many people, but it would be pointless to undertake a proof of how ridiculous it is to accuse someone of injustice on grounds of that sort, because those at whom the proof would be directed would be unlikely to benefit from it. It is enough to merely point out that it comes as no surprise that someone whose expertise is physics but who has an ego to match his MIT PhD in physics should be so willing to air his sophomoric views about value theory in a public forum. Putting aside the obvious facts (the Church <i>does</i> oppose pedophilia among the clergy, the Church <i>is</i> taking action against clergy who are pedophiles, etc.) the broader issue is really why we ought to take seriously someone who actually believes this to be a major point in favor of the claim that anyone who agrees with the Church <i>and</i> has "reasonable views about science" has something difficult to reconcile on his hands. One begins to think that when Krauss uses the expression "reasonable views about science" what he really means is "views that are consistent with my own opinions."<br /><br />Krauss goes on to criticize Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who somehow "excommunicated" Sr. Margaret McBride for her decision in support of an abortion at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix (for a slightly better informed analysis of that, check out <a href="http://examinelife.blogspot.com/2010/07/ectopic-pregnancy-and-double-effect.html">my own earlier post</a> on the topic). Again, we may pass over the erroneous details, which are probably due to the fact that Krauss knows nothing about Catholicism (for example, the Bishop did not "excommunicate" her, she excommunicated herself by her action). We may even pass over the fact that in the space of just two sentences Krauss forgets McBride's name, calling her first "Sister Margaret McBride" and then in the very next sentence "Sister Mary". These are, again, just debating points. More important is the glibness with which such ignorance is passed off as magisterial scientific authority, or at the very least as the voice of someone who represents the voice of "reason" in the face of "faith and foolishness".<br /><br />Krause concludes his condemnation of Bishop Olmsted by saying<blockquote>Ordinarily, a man who would callously let a woman die and orphan her children would be called a monster; this should not change just because he is a cleric.</blockquote>This particular sophism is so outrageous as to border on being intellectually offensive. Note, first of all, the deliberate rhetorical re-description of what has happened. A woman with a dangerous condition needed an abortion in order to alleviate the danger to her own health (and possibly to her very life). This set of facts can be described in a lot of different ways, depending upon the particular values one might happen to want to emphasize. One could say that a woman was about to deliberately kill her own innocent child, or that a doctor was about to kill one human being in order to save another one, or that a terribly difficult situation was being faced with great bravery by all around--the way one describes it will be a function of what one happens to think is going on. Krauss casts the situation in terms of the Bishop deliberately letting a woman die, which clearly reflects his own values, but he asserts his view as though it were not a value judgment but a set of facts. Again, one could note that an innocent child was about to be killed, but Krauss chooses instead to talk about the orphaning of children (which ones--the ones that are already safely outside the womb, perhaps?). I suppose that from Krauss's point of view the "facts" are all rather obvious, and this is why he feels no need to address possible arguments that might be directed against him. Indeed, he may describe any attempt to re-describe this situation in a way other than his own way as something "monstrous". But what he has done here is pure sophistry, and it is the sort of sophistry that one could only engage in if one were already in the grips of a theory about what abortion is. Although Krauss continually portrays himself as the voice of reason acting to protect the rest of us from the "irrationality" of the foolish faithful, what we get instead is a pompous rant grounded in nothing more than Krauss's own prejudices. Rather than discuss the difficult moral complexity of the situation, he acts as though it is clear cut: a woman is about to die--there are no other variables at play here. As simplistic and simple-minded as this is, it is not enough for him: he must also paint anyone who disagrees with him as a "monster", because of course when the argument does not go his way invective is the next best thing.<br /><br />Why on earth should anyone, scientist or non-scientist, take this man seriously once he has made such a spectacle of himself? It seems to me essential, if we are to correct the "sad fact" of scientific illiteracy in the U.S., to put forward thoughtful and intelligent advocates for science. I suppose it is not impossible for an ideologue to be thoughtful and intelligent, but if that conjunction has occurred in Krauss he has done a remarkably good job of hiding it: all one can see here is the blind adherence to ideology, and poorly argued (if argued at all) ideology at that.<br /><br />The "sad fact" is that there are plenty of well-informed, thoughtful, and intelligent scientists out there who know plenty about value theory, philosophy of science, theology, and related areas, but none of them writes for <i>Scientific American</i>. They are out there (one thinks of Stephen Barr, for example, or Kenneth Miller), but they are in need of a larger public forum. Sadly, many of the popular venues, such as <i>Scientific American</i>, appear to prefer the strident and ideological to the thoughtful and the intelligent.<br /><br />The tag line of Krauss's essay, "Religious leaders should be held accountable when their irrational ideas turn harmful", is one of those delightful instances of unintentional irony that are happily becoming ever more common in writers of this sort. The good news is that most people don't pay much attention to this sort of thing; the bad news is that some people, including many who ought to know better, find it exhilarating reading. I'm not sure what the prognosis is at this point, but the prescription ought to include wider reading in the relevant literature: philosophy, value theory, intellectual history, theology. The bigger egos won't have room for all those extra books on their shelves, but the honest scholars will, and that ought to give everyone hope.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-27334879364803172412010-07-27T19:21:00.002-04:002010-07-27T19:53:29.255-04:00Science, History, LiteratureWhen I teach introductory level courses in the philosophy of science I find that many students approach the material with a few historical misconceptions that are rather revealing. One of the most common misconception, mentioned by at least one student in every class I have taught on this subject, is the belief that many people believed that the earth was literally flat until the voyages of Columbus. The reason why this is often mentioned in my classes is because one of our discussion topics has to do with the way in which even well-entrenched scientific theories can be replaced by utterly new ones, given the right sort of evidence. So some students think that this belief illustrates that point. "It was once universally (or widely) believed that the earth was flat, but now we know it to be round" is how it usually goes.<br /><br />In fact there was never any time in Western intellectual history when this was true. There may have been a few individuals here or there who thought that the earth is flat, but the vast majority of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and other interested parties all knew that the earth is roughly spherical. Why do so many students think otherwise? One reason might be because the myth has been repeated by some people who ought to know better. For example, Daniel Boorstin repeats it in his 1983 book <i>The Discoverers</i>, and Boise Penrose mentions it in his 1955 book <i>Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance</i>. So where did this idea come from in the first place? Lesley Cormack has traced it back to a biography of Christopher Columbus written by Washingon Irving (of "Rip Van Winkle" fame). According to Cormack, Irving was trying to portray Columbus as a landmark figure, rather like Copernicus, who by virtue of his voyage of discovery put to rest one more vestige of the so-called "dark ages". In short, it was a piece of propaganda.<br /><br />Of course, one cannot expect your average undergraduate to be so well-versed in these matters, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that they simply accept whatever they hear along these lines. Unsurprising, but still disappointing, since so many undergraduates these days like to portray themselves as skeptical inquirers after the truth who are not willing to blindly accept everything they are told. It turns out they are just like the rest of us in that regard.<br /><br />So what sort of remedy is there for this kind of situation? I would like to suggest that one step in the right direction would be to re-integrate the study of the sciences with the study of intellectual history. Many of the best contemporary science writers are people who not only know a lot about science, they know a lot about the history and philosophy of science as well. More importantly, they are sensitive readers who are able to ferret out important details that can aid in the formation of more subtle interpretations of that intellectual history. <br /><br />There is an interesting illustrative example early on in Bede's <i>Ecclesiastical History of the English People</i>. In I.3 he writes, in part:<blockquote>Ireland is far more favored than Britain by latitude, and by its mild and healthy climate. Snow rarely lies longer than three days, so that there is no need to store hay in summer for winter use or to build stables for beasts. There are no reptiles, and no snake can enter there; for although often brought over from Britain, as soon as the ship nears land, they breathe the scent of its air, and die. In fact, almost everything in this isle confers immunity to poison, and I have seen that folk suffering from snake-bite have drunk water in which scrapings from the leaves of books from Ireland have been steeped, and that this remedy checked the spreading poison and reduced the swelling.</blockquote>The last sentence of this report, in particular, is apt to make one roll one's eyes at the credulity of an earlier age, but H. Mayr-Harting, in his book <i>The Coming of Christianity</i>, has argued at some length that in fact this passage is not meant to be taken seriously, but is rather a parody, by Bede, of the sort of pseudo-scientific writing common in his day. Seeing this requires knowing, first of all, that Bede was a rather witty writer not above making jokes or parodies, and also knowing about the pseudo-scientific literature that he would have had access to. Again, this is not the sort of thing that we can expect just anybody to know off-hand, but clearly knowledge of this sort of thing would make a difference in how one interprets this passage of Bede.<br /><br />I suspect that there are many such misapprehensions abroad. I think that much contemporary discussion of the conflict between Galileo and the Church, for example, suffers from a lack of full information on both sides, and that even when it comes to such obvious non-problems as the "conflict" between evolution and intelligent design, or anthropogenic climate change, the clearer heads are the ones who understand fully what sorts of issues are at stake on all sides and who, more importantly, are careful enough to know the difference between principled arguments and ideological scrums. This requires wide reading, and a careful assessment of merits of the arguments on all sides. The intellectual acumen required to accomplish this ranges more widely, I am afraid, than the typical training either in the sciences or the humanities can give. A broader education is required, and those who are fluent in both will have the best chance of making an accurate assessment of the situation.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-63564795913014760072010-07-18T14:52:00.003-04:002010-07-18T17:06:57.085-04:00Ectopic Pregnancy and Double EffectLast month Sr. Margaret McBride, an ethical consultant at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, was declared excommunicate by Bishop Thomas Olmsted on the grounds that she had cooperated in the procurement of abortion (apparently by giving the procedure her approval as ethical consultant). McBride defended her decision on the grounds that the life of the mother was at risk (she suffered from pulmonary hypertension, which put her at risk for eclampsia; her condition is sometimes referred to as pre-eclampsia. Eclampsia can be life-threatening, though pre-eclampsia rarely is--unless, of course, it leads to eclampsia). She appealed to the Church's teaching that only direct abortion is gravely sinful; indirect abortion (abortion in which the death of the fetus is not intended, though it may be foreseen) is regarded as, at least in principle, something that can be morally licit under the right conditions.<br /><br />The basic idea here is to appeal to the principle of double effect, but it is not at all clear that pre-eclampsia constitutes a sufficient condition for invoking that principle. For one thing, pre-eclampsia, in itself, simply isn't as life-threatening as the principle would require. Second, even if the condition were life-threatening, it isn't clear that the principle would apply to this sort of case.<br /><br />In a statement released in late June, the United States Bishops' Committee on Doctrine drew a distinction between kinds of cases based upon the nature of the threat to the mother's life. They gave the following examples to illustrate the distinction. In one sort of case, we are to imagine a woman whose organs are experiencing problems as a consequence of the added burden of pregnancy; in the other sort of case, we are to imagine a woman with cancer of the uterus. According to the document, the former case is not sufficient to render licit an abortion to save the life of the mother, because to remove the fetus in order to save the mother's life is a direct killing of a human being in order to save the life of another, and this is not permitted by Catholic moral theory: we may not do wrong in order to bring about good. In the latter case, the removal of the cancerous uterus is what is directly intended, and the death of the fetus, though foreseeable, is not intended, so the principle of double effect applies. It is difficult to avoid drawing the inference that, when it is the mother's own organs that threaten her life, they may be removed even if doing so kills another human being who is lurking therein; but when it is another human being who threatens the mother's life, that human being may not be killed, even if it is hiding in one of the mother's organs.<br /><br />The case of ectopic pregnancy, in light of the directive from the Committee on Doctrine, is particularly interesting. Some Catholics have thought that an ectopic pregnancy is a clear case in which abortion to save the life of the mother would be licit under the principle of double-effect. But clearly not, if the distinction drawn by the Bishops' Committee is correct. In the case of ectopic pregnancy there is nothing organically wrong with the fallopian tube, so it is not analogous to the case of the cancerous utuerus. Instead, the fetus has become lodged in the fallopian tube, and the only way to save the life of the mother is to either (a) remove the fetus from the fallopian tube, which would be a clear case of a direct abortion and hence illicit; or (b) remove the entire fallopian tube, with the fetus in it. It is this latter scenario, (b), that those Catholics who defend this procedure as licit point to as the case covered by the principle of double effect. Their thinking is that the intention is to save the life of the mother, not to kill the fetus, and they save the life of the mother by removing, not the fetus, but the fallopian tube. The death of the fetus is, of course, foreseeable in this scenario, but since it is not intended, these folk reason, it is licit because covered by double effect. But according to the distinction drawn by the Bishops the removal of the fallopian tube cannot be seen as anything other than the removal of the fetus, since the fallopian tube itself is in no need of being removed, and certainly would not need to be removed if there were not a fetus lodged in it. If a stone had become lodged in the fallopian tube there is little doubt that the procedure would be referred to as the removal of the stone and not as the removal of a fallopian tube that just happened to have a stone in it.<br /><br />Fortunately ectopic pregnancy is extremely rare, occurring in less than 2% of all pregnancies, though it is, apparently, on the rise: it has increased sixfold since 1970. Most patients that present with ectopic pregnancy have no identifiable risk factor, so the temptation to blame the rise of the condition on increasing use of fertility treatments (also frowned upon by Catholic moral theory) must be resisted. However, I won't resist the temptation to report the following (from<a href="http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/258768-overview"> MedScape</a>):<blockquote>One study has demonstrated that infertility patients with luteal phase defects have a statistically higher ectopic pregnancy rate than patients whose infertility is caused by anovulation. The risk of ectopic pregnancy and heterotopic pregnancy (ie, pregnancies occurring simultaneously in different body sites) dramatically increases when a patient has used assisted reproductive techniques to conceive, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) or gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT). In a study of 3000 clinical pregnancies achieved through in vitro fertilization, the ectopic pregnancy rate was 4.5%, which is more than double the background incidence. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that up to 1% of pregnancies achieved through IVF or GIFT can result in a heterotopic gestation, compared to an incidence of 1 in 30,000 pregnancies for spontaneous conceptions.</blockquote>So apparently the only method of saving the life of the mother in the case of an ectopic pregnancy is not actually morally licit, according to the most recent statement by the United States Bishops. Not all Catholics commentators have argued that it is licit, but those who have will now have to rethink their arguments.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-73803351479203969622009-12-06T19:01:00.003-05:002009-12-06T19:53:47.634-05:00History and Evolutionary TheoryAccording to orthodox mythology, Galileo was something of a martyr for the cause of science and human enlightenment. After the publication, in 1632, of his <i>Dialogo</i> (its full title in English, <i>Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Copernican and Ptolemaic</i>), he was condemned at Rome the following year. The way the story if often told, his only offense was to challenge the dominant scientific orthodoxy of his day, which claimed that the earth was motionless. The Church, it is often claimed, held this to be a theological truth not open to challenge by mere laymen, and his trial was, accordingly, one for heresy. He was forced to abjure his belief that the earth moved, and to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. As if to make the story even more dramatic--and to add a nice kick on behalf of the "good guys" who might be reading this story nowadays--it is also reported that he muttered "And yet it moves" under his breath after his public proclamation that the earth is motionless.<br /><br />High drama--drama that would be rather spoiled if the whole story were told <i>sine ira et studio</i>. The story provides some comfort to those who would defend a kind of secular humanism, in which the saints are such figures as Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and their ilk. Comfort because, in our own enlightened times, we see the scientific community as the victors, the Catholic Church as the loser, in this earliest of modern-era culture wars. Indeed, when John Paul the Great offered up an apology for the condemnation of Galileo there was much rejoicing on the part of those who think that the Church has much to answer for in terms of her opposition to scientific enlightenment. The apology was actually seen, in some quarters, as some sort of a <i>victory</i> for the humanist side, if you can believe it, though that sort of thinking is of a pace with those who so often fail so utterly to understand anything about the Faith.<br /><br />A similar culture war rages in our own day, this time not between The Church and The Astronomers but between The Church and The Biologists. In the present conflict, a few humanist biologists are pitting (in their own imaginations) the theory of evolution by natural selection against the truth of the Faith, in the rather vain hope that any rational person accepting the truth of the former will, by some strange (bio)logical necessity, have to reject the truth of the latter. There are a few humanist biologists who think this way who are not otherwise insane, so it is at least worth thinking about what on earth could possibly give rise to such a risible belief in a putatively rational person. My own hunch is that it is largely an accident of history.<br /><br />The accident that I have in mind is the fact that Darwin did his work in the 19th century, while progress in molecular biology did not really occur until the 20th century. I think that if these two historically contingent facts were reversed, we would not see the present conflict. Darwin's idea was a big one: a grand explanatory theory that was sent forth fully formed into a public that was just beginning to grapple with the social and political pressures of materialism, industrialization, and internationalism. The perceived threat to religious belief was, it seems to me, already incubating on a number of fronts. When <i>The Origin</i> came along it was not a particularly revolutionary work from a theological point of view, but the popular culture was prepared to receive it as such principally because it came along at a time when religious folks were already beginning to feel besieged. If you add to this the rise, forty years later, of Protestant fundamentalism and the rather bizarre belief in the literal truth of the mythological cosmology at the start of the book of Genesis, along with the fact that the majority of Americans at the time (indeed, to this day) were Protestants who were also Americans committed to the view that every opinion is sacred, it is not all that surprising that things have evolved (so to speak) the way they have.<br /><br />Contrast this with the rise of modern cosmology. The theory of the Big Bang seems to me to present no less a challenge to the cosmology of Genesis, but although I have heard a few religious skeptics discount it I don't think it has nearly the same hold on the popular imagination as the debate between defenders of evolutionary theory and the proponents of intelligent design. One reason for this is the fact that modern cosmology has taken shape during a completely different historical epoch, in which that sort of science was already widely accepted among a more materialist public. If Darwin had published <i>The Origin</i> in 1959 instead of 1859--after the growth of molecular biology and modern genetics--I think the public attitude towards evolution would be no different than it is towards the Big Bang. There would still be a fundamentalist reaction to it, but it would be much more marginalized.<br /><br />To see where the present debate will be fifty years hence I think we need only turn back to the 17th century. None of the revolutionary scientific proposals from that era, including not only Galileo's contributions to astronomy, but the theories of universal gravitation, combustion, circulation of the blood, and many others, are not exactly on the table as matters up for continued debate between working scientists and armchair theologians. No one is going before the local school board demanding that Aristotelian gravitation be taught alongside the universal theory, or that the theory of the four humors be taught alongside other medical theories. One of the principal reasons, of course, is that the theories of universal gravitation and modern medicine have far more wide-ranging practical applications than does the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Evolutionary theory is, principally, a historical discipline; but molecular genetics and other branches of modern biology have more important applications, and so far they are robustly consistent with everything predicted by evolutionary theory. So as these science continue to impact our lives, the rabble that continues to push intelligent design will become ever more marginalized until, like the flat-earthers, they are seen for what they are.<br /><br />Of course, they are already seen that way by the folks who know better, but one does wonder when the media will catch on to this fact. Part of the problem, I think, lies in the fact that too many working biologists are playing into the hands of the crazies. I teach philosophy of biology at both the undergraduate and the graduate level, and most of the textbooks that cross my desk looking for inclusion in my classroom have sections on the "debate" between evolution and intelligent design. For the life of me I can't imagine why. No philosophy of science textbook contains articles by flat-earthers who challenge the Copernican system. There aren't many such articles to begin with, I suppose, but even if there were hundreds available that would not warrant anthologizing them along with real science. The sooner we begin to treat these folks as the outliers that they are the sooner the hubbub will die down. Since publishers have to sell books, I take it that the inclusion of this stuff is still in demand. This is a good reason never to use a textbook that has such a section in it.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-48185652964389499872009-10-23T22:43:00.002-04:002009-10-23T23:19:06.788-04:00DuhI understand that there are some folks in the Catholic Church who do not agree with everything the Church teaches, but this one goes beyond mere dissent to the level of sheer stupidity. Maureen Fiedler, a Sister of Loretto with a PhD from Georgetown, <a href="http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/welcoming-segregationists-altar">writes in the online edition of the National Catholic Reporter</a> (where else):<blockquote>Imagine for a minute that it’s 1954, as segregationists faced Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Supreme Court case which mandated school de-segregation. And imagine that the Vatican, or the Catholic bishops, said to Protestant segregationists in the South, “You can come to our schools, to Catholic schools, and we’ll provide you with a home.” Most Catholics would have been outraged, I daresay. (And of course, precisely the opposite actually happened, as many Catholic bishops were outspoken against racial segregation, and integrated Catholic schools -- thank God).<br /><br />But it’s a different story with gender segregation or sexual orientation. This is not a perfect analogy, granted. But the Vatican’s overtures to dissident Anglicans sound like those “imagined” 1950’s with a different twist. The Vatican is opening Catholic doors wide to Anglicans who believe in “segregation at the altar,” for women, and for openly gay/lesbian clergy.<br /><br />Where is the outrage at this policy? I have heard some of it. I attended a small liturgy with friends this week, and they shared this sentiment: We have enough Catholics who have not come to terms with human equality and gospel equality… why would we go searching for more? We should welcome newcomers who wrestle with issues, yes… including these issues, … but why establish a policy that give special place to those with segregationist credentials?</blockquote>Let's pass over in silence the rather laughable attempt to claim moral equivalence between racism and faithfulness to the Magisterium regarding admission to Holy Orders and sexual activity outside the Sacrament of Matrimony. Much more to the point is this: in admitting these particular Anglicans into the Church, the Church is admitting people who actually believe <i>what the Church herself has always taught</i>. In other words, it isn't like a non-racist Church admitting new members who are racists; rather, it is a faithful Church admitting new members who are also faithful. I'll tell you where the outrage is: it's at the National Catholic Reporter.<br /><br />"Not a perfect analogy." Duh. More like, not analogous in the least. Ironically, just as Fiedler and her ilk ask themselves questions like Why welcome people like this into the Church, I ask myself, Why do people like Fiedler stay in the Church? One possibility is that they seriously believe these teachings may change, hence the talk of "human equality" as though it is the least relevant to the question of admission of women to Holy Orders. To think this way is to be seriously out of touch with reality, but it was not an uncommon way to look at things forty years ago. Just as one might claim that dinosaurs are not really extinct but rather have evolved into birds, so, too, the dinosaurs of academia are still with us even in this more enlightened age. What they have evolved into, unfortunately, is nothing quite so beautiful as a songbird. Instead, they have become like shrill harpies, continually shrieking about the same range of dead-letter issues. A quick perusal of the entries in <a href="http://ncronline.org/blogs/maureen-fiedler">Fiedler's blog</a> is sufficient to show that her understanding of Catholicism is not only seriously wrong, it is seriously outdated.<br /><br />And yet. Imagine for a minute that it is 1954, and a group of segregationist Protestants from the south seek reconciliation with the Church. I can think of no reason to say to them, You cannot come home--people like you fill us with outrage. Rather we should say: your desire to come home is like that of the Prodigal Son! Do penance for your sins and come on home! Fiedler writes as though, by welcoming these Anglicans home, we are "giv[ing] special place to those with segregationist credentials", without even considering the possibility that those whom we welcome are coming to us with humble and contrite hearts. Of course, if you look at the world the way Fiedler does, assenting to Church teaching is orthogonal to being humble and contrite, since the Church teachings themselves <i>just are</i> the "segregationist credentials" that she bemoans. So for people like her it's a lose-lose proposition: the teachings on Holy Orders and Matrimony are not going to change, and the people who are welcomed home are going to be continually diluting the influence of the heretics of Loretto.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-82169880727649957492009-10-23T20:14:00.002-04:002009-10-23T20:35:38.836-04:00It Depends on What You Mean by "Forward"There has been some consternation among bloggers both Anglican and Catholic about what's happening at the Forward in Faith UK general meeting. Fr. Jeffrey Steel blogs about it today at <a href="http://frjeffreysteel.blogspot.com/2009/10/fif-and-unseeming-ability-to-see-truth.html">De cura animarum</a>. He writes, in part:<blockquote>To be perfectly honest, it almost feels like a bluff has been called. Sitting and listening to those speeches made me sad and realise that for many in the C of E, the issue that alone makes them 'feel' Catholic is being against the ordination of women or so it seems. Let me state clearly that I did not leave the C of E over women's ordination or homosexuality though in regards to both of these issues I hold the Catholic orthodox line. I became Catholic because being Catholic was true, the primacy of Peter and his infallibility is true and the lack of the Magisterium in Anglicanism leaves the priest with nothing other than his (or now her) own opinion. I am afraid that this sort of approach has nothing to do with true Catholicism. This approach has nothing to do with the theological idea of <i>communio</i> in the writings of the Holy Father either.</blockquote>I have a great deal of sympathy for this--my own reasons for conversion were similar. Indeed, women had already been ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal church when I was a member of it, but that was not really what tipped me off that the boat was about to start sinking. It was rather the bizarre individualism that is the artifact of the phenomenon Fr. Steel mentions here, the lack of any sort of counterpart to the Magisterium.<br /><br />But on the more personal level I also feel very deeply the same sort of sadness that Fr. Steel mentions in his post:<blockquote>Many might ask me why I care. The answer is, because our Holy Father and pastor just extended a hand of welcome for reunion and reconciliation beyond what any could imagine and they have to think about it...I hope the Vatican isn't listening to that assembly.<br /><br />What I feel is most problematic is that so many claim to have been praying for the very thing that the Holy Father has given and even more and now what is in reality a lovely piece of fish seems to be treated as if it were only a stone.</blockquote>When I think back to the mid-1980s, when I was myself yearning for this very thing (along with some of my Anglican friends), I can't help feeling a little like a parent watching a talented young child drop out of medical school to join the circus--if I had had back the then the opportunity that they have now, etc.<br /><br />Some might suggest that it is far better, for those who are not fully prepared to accept the Magisterium, to stay out of the Church, rather than to join it and become irritating dissenters. After all, some may say, there are enough of that ilk in the Church already, and some of them cause real harm. My own view is that those who do choose to make the conversion will make it for the right sorts of reasons--the sorts of reasons that prompted Fr. Steel to make the change, or Fr. Al Kimel. Such persons only strengthen the degree of orthodoxy in the Church by their presence in and contribution to it.<br /><br />The folks at Forward in Faith seem remarkably reluctant to move, well, <i>forward</i>, preferring to remain in the stasis of separation. What the advantage of this could possibly be only they can imagine.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-74691299641249902642009-10-21T10:22:00.006-04:002009-10-21T11:10:51.654-04:00Sursum corda!A very literal translation of <i>sursum corda</i> might be something like "Up with the hearts!" Personally I prefer the more standard "Lift up your hearts", which is one of the many places in which the English translation of the Latin Mass matches the English of the Book of Common Prayer used by Anglicans. I mention all of this because I have always thought that there is a great deal of commonality between Roman Catholicism and what is best about Anglicanism (in the interest of full disclosure I will remind my regular readers--both of them--that I am myself a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism). I have blogged often about the reasons for my conversion, so I won't go over all of that again, but in light of what happened yesterday I felt as though some sort of effusive outburst on my part would be appropriate.<br /><br />So what happened yesterday, you ask? Well, let me begin by saying that if it had happened twenty-five years ago my conversion story might have been very different. Yesterday the Vatican announced the creation of a Personal Ordinariate for Anglican Christians, allowing as many as wish to enter into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church (see the story <a href="http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=34677">here at Catholic.org</a>). This is nothing short of spectacular, in my opinion, and it is the first step towards the righting of the wrongs that began centuries ago when Christians first started disagreeing with each other so vehemently that they began to excommunicate each other.<br /><br />A Personal Ordinariate is an ecclesial structure that allows for parallel Ordinaries. To put it more simply, if there is both a Roman Catholic Bishop of, say, Steubenville, and an Anglican Bishop in the same area, the Anglican Bishop and his entire Diocese can retain their current ecclesial structure--that is, they will continue on as the Anglican Diocese of Steubenville or whatever, and will not need to be "absorbed" into the Roman Catholic Diocese--and yet they will be in full communion with Rome. They will continue to use the Anglican Rite liturgies, their priests, if married, will continue as priests in communion with Rome, and their Bishops will continue to have autonomy within their Dioceses.<br /><br />I have already seen many reactions to this, some happy, some virtually ecstatic, but also some not so happy and some downright negative. I suppose this sort of distribution of views is to be expected--you can't wipe away 500 years of bitter division overnight--but one does hope and pray for further healing, and not just between Romans and Anglicans, but among all Christians worldwide. Our greatest charism is our unity as members of the Body of Christ, and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for having thrown that away, and we ought to work ever harder to make amends for what we have wrought. It is not an easy task, but yesterday's decision shows that it is not as difficult as some have feared it might be.<br /><br />Many who call themselves Anglicans do not approve of this move, however, and they will say that it is easy for me to rejoice today, since I view myself as having made the right move long ago. Those who do not think this is the right move will have many different reasons for being unhappy. Some will say that Rome has been in error about many things, including Papal Primacy; others will say that to "come back", as it were, is to admit that you were wrong; still others will say that the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, that it just doesn't matter all that much if one is in communion with Rome or not. All of these views entail that it would be wrong to take the Vatican up on its offer, though clearly some of these views entail it much more strongly than others. Certainly the first objection--that Rome is the one that has been wrong all these years--is the biggest worry for some. If Rome has been wrong about such things as Papal Primacy, the Marian dogmata, the nature of justification, etc., then it would not only be a bad idea, it would be virtually heretical to rejoin her. But this sort of view is typical only within the more Protestant parts of Anglicanism, and I don't think it is very widespread. In any event, there is not much one can do about that sort of view, since the arguments against it are out there and anyone who is not yet persuaded by these arguments is unlikely to be persuaded by kindly invitations to just forget the whole thing. Much more to the point, I think, is the fact that many hundreds of thousands of Anglicans--if not millions--have secretly been longing for this sort of invitation for years, and now here it is. If charity and unity can be miraculous, then here is a miracle for you.<br /><br />What would I have done had this invitation been made prior to my conversion in 1983? It's difficult to say with any certainty, obviously, but I remember quite clearly thinking at the time that I wanted to work for reconciliation. I had followed the work of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission with great interest, and at that time the prospects for reunification did not seem so dim as they had come to seem in recent years as the Anglican Communion slowly began tearing itself to bits. The Anglican Use is an attractive one, and I imagine that I would have taken advantage of an offer such as this; but after 26 years of the Latin Rite I don't see myself getting rid of all my Latin Breviaries and taking up the Anglican one (though it is a wonderful thing and I heartily recommend it--you can <a href="http://www.anglicanbreviary.net/">order one here</a>), or trying to find an Anglican Use parish somewhere around here. Time is grace, and I think that, in general, it is a mistake to try to undo what one has done thoughtfully and prayerfully (unless of course one discovers some serious error in one's thoughts and prayers). So I remain quite happy and content with my own choice, while rejoicing in this opportunity that has been made available to all those I was grieved to leave behind 26 years ago.<br /><br />Those who have followed my last few posts will know that I particularly have Robert Duncan in my thoughts and prayers today. When I wrote my last entry, Sunt Lacrimae Rerum, I really had no idea that this sort of thing might happen, and I really wonder what his response will be. Many years ago I would have guessed that he might take advantage of such an offer, but as I indicated in my last post, it seems I did not know him as well as I had thought. So who knows? One can only hope and pray. Time is grace.<br /><br />In the meantime, <i>sursum corda</i>! Rejoice in the Lord, for he has done great things for us, and this is surely one of them.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-64478050866784409012009-10-09T19:51:00.003-04:002009-10-10T00:33:30.194-04:00Sunt Lacrimae RerumIt has been a while since I blogged about the man who brought me into the Church--by which I mean "Christian Church" this time, rather than "Roman Catholic Church". I thought of Robert Duncan again today because I have been getting some email about me previous post here, the one about appearing on Marcus Grodi's <i>The Journey Home</i> program on EWTN. I mentioned on that program how hearing the preaching of Fr. Duncan, when he was still an associate pastor for campus ministry at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was one of the principal factors in moving me from abject atheism to Christian theism. There were many other factors as well, of course, but the Christian community is essentially just that--a community, and so when one thinks of what brought one in to such a community it is inevitable that one thinks of the persons who helped to form one's conscience in such a way as to finally be able to discern the presence of God permeating all of creation.<br /><br />Fr. Duncan was not the only such person in my life--I can name several others, beginning with my own mother who, as I also mentioned on <i>The Journey Home</i>, was not herself a theist (possibly she was some sort of deist, but I fear I know little about what her precise views actually were). But she taught me the words to the Lord's Prayer when I was just five years old, and although I have no idea what she herself thought about that prayer, either at that time or later in her life, it was surely a gift of some sort, freely given and dutifully received, though I never really realized how great a gift until decades later, when I finally learned to believe what the words of the prayer really say.<br /><br />I don't think I could have learned to believe those words if Fr. Duncan, and certain other individuals like him, had not shown me by his own example what those words actually mean. Such discoveries are not to be made by the individual working on his own in the dark, separated from his brethren, whatever the post-Reformation individualist may like to think. And so, as I have written here several times before, Fr. Duncan was instrumental in my becoming a Christian, and I will always respect and admire him for that, another great gift that I was slow to appreciate.<br /><br />That is why I find Fr. Duncan's present state of affairs so utterly depressing. He was deposed as the Bishop of Pittsburgh in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States by that denomination's Presiding Bishop, Katherine Jefferts Schori, in September of last year. In my opinion, that would have been the perfect opportunity for him to find a way to make an appearance on Marcus Grodi's program. Given the number of ex-Anglican priests of my acquaintance--Al Kimel, Jeffrey Steel, Trevor Nicholls, among others--I can't help but hope to meet more, especially one who is already an old friend. But that, alas, was not to be. What was to be instead reads like something out of one of my worst nightmares--or one of my many rants right here in this blog about denominationalism in this country.<br /><br />Things began, if not with the desired appeal to the Pastoral Provision of 1980, at least with a step in the right direction: Fr. Duncan made a move to associate with those elements of worldwide Anglicanism that still cling, however precariously, to the precious traditions of our faith. Happily, these elements are more numerous once one moves outside of the United States. But for whatever banal reason, the leadership in the worldwide Anglican communion feels a strange loyalty to that train wreck that is now the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, a body that has moved steadily away from authentic Christian belief ever since the election of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Christianity_for_a_New_World">John Shelby Spong</a> to the episcopacy. Consequently Fr. Duncan did not receive the welcome that he deserved among those in communion with Canterbury. This too, would have been a good time to contact Marcus Grodi. What happened instead, sadly, was aptly described--it breaks my heart to say it--by Ephraim Radner, one of the co-founders of the Anglican Communion Network, in <a href="http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/2007/07/resignation-from-acn/">his statement of resignation from the ACN</a>:<blockquote>It is with sorrow and deep disappointment that I tender my resignation from the Anglican Communion Network. Since the time I assisted in its founding, its leaders, members, and mission have been dear to me, even when I have disagreed with some of its corporate actions. The recent statements by the Moderator of the Network, Robert Duncan, however, so contradict my sense of calling within this part of Christ’s Body, the Anglican Communion, that I have no choice but to disassociate myself from this group, whom I had once hoped might prove an instrument of renewal, not of destruction, of building up, not of tearing down. <br /><br />Bishop Duncan has now declared the See of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference — two of the four Instruments of Communion within our tradition – to be "lost". He has said that God is "doing a new thing" in allowing these elements to founder and be let go. I find this judgment to be dangerously precipitous and unfair under circumstances when current, faithful, and hard work is being done by many to bolster these Instruments as servants of our common life in Christ. The judgment is also astonishingly self-confident and autonomously prophetic in a mode not unlike the baleful claims to visionary authority of those who have long misled the Episcopal Church. Finally, the declaration in effect cancels out the other two Instruments of Communion that also uphold our common Anglican life – the Primates’ Meeting and the Anglican Consultative Council. It is the entire Anglican Communion, therefore, that Bp. Duncan is declaring to be "lost". The judgment is far too sweeping. <br /><br />Bp. Duncan has, in the end, decided to start a new church. He may call it "Anglican" if he wishes, though I do not recognize the name in these kinds of actions that break communion rather than build it up – for such building is what I have long perceived to be the "thing" God was "doing" with the earthen vessel of our tradition. In founding his new church, furthermore, he is, I fear, not working for the healing of our broken Body, but repeating the mistakes of Christians in the past, whose zeal has not only brought suffering to themselves, but has wounded the Church of Christ. It is not only his own diocese that his statements and actions will affect; it is many others, including parishes within them, many of which have worked for faithfulness and peace, truth in love, for some time, and for whom new troubles and divisions are now promised. Enough of this. I cannot follow him in this way. There is great work to be done, with hope and with joy, if also with suffering endurance for the faith once delivered, in the vineyards of the Anglican Communion where the Lord has called us and still maintains His calling; just as there has been in the past, and all for the glory of the larger Church Catholic.</blockquote>He has, indeed, "decided to start a new church", and as my faithful readers will remember, that is one of the things that I so despise about Protestantism generally--the instinct to reboot things in one's own image that Radner rightly describes as "astonishingly self-confident and autonomously prophetic".<br /><br />The only saving feature to all of this that I can see is that Fr. Duncan has at least moved towards orthodoxy, if not towards orthopraxis, simply by moving away from what was so egregiously heterodox and heretical. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and one ought not to praise the workmanship of such a clock just because one happens to look at it at the right time.<br /><br />So what is a person in my position to do? When he remained in the Episcopal Church, Fr. Duncan was a voice for orthodoxy crying out among the heretics. In becoming the archbishop of what is basically his own denomination (this is, of course, somewhat hyperbolic--he did not create the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_Church_in_North_America">Anglican Church in North America</a>", but still, I can't help but be reminded of <a href="http://popemichael.homestead.com/">this guy</a>), he has done something that ordinarily would strike me as just plain wacky. Yet, of course, what he has done he has done in the name of orthodoxy, a kind of protestation against what Protestantism has become. While protesting the Protestants is perhaps not a bad idea, it can't be a good idea unless it leads you back to Rome. That is clearly not in the cards here, so orthodox or not this cannot be seen as an intrinsically good move.<br /><br />I suppose the good news is that this provides further confirmation of the truth that our freedom lies in our capacity to make mistakes of such grandiose proportions.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14247942.post-64618034664543402382009-10-04T22:32:00.003-04:002009-10-06T19:40:34.889-04:00Catholicissimi!So last weekend I hopped on a plane and flew down to Birmingham, Alabama. I've never been to Alabama before, and in some respects I suspect that I have yet to see the real Alabama, because the purpose of my trip was not to visit the Yellowhammer State but to put in an appearance on <a href="http://www.ewtn.com/journeyhome/index.asp">Marcus Grodi's Journey Home</a> program on EWTN. I've never been on TV before, either, so the whole trip was something of a novelty for me.<br /><br />I was picked up at the airport by an EWTN car, and it was a short drive to "the compound", barely 20 minutes at the most. Since it was Sunday there weren't many people about and, in particular, there didn't seem to be anybody in the little booth at the entrance to check our passports or anything--we just drove right in and I was taken to a house (called "Madonna House" by the locals) where I would stay for the duration. It seems that EWTN owns a number of houses on its property and some of the employees live in them, some of them are used for guests, and at least one of them is used as a set for some of their shows.<br /><br />The house was deserted when I got there, but I knew that there would be two more gentlemen joining me before my stay was completed. That didn't stop me from looking around a bit. It was a modest house, tastefully decorated. Lots of Catholic art on the walls, and a crucifix in every room (except the bathroom; I didn't actually look in the garage). There was a big TV just like in a hotel, and it had cable, including ETWN. I didn't check to see whether it blocked the sorts of channels that regular EWTN viewers would find objectionable. There was a computer but the internet connection wasn't working, which was probably a good thing or I would have wasted a lot of time reading my email when I should have been preparing my classes for my return to Ohio.<br /><br />Since I had been traveling all day I had not had an opportunity to attend Mass, so when I heard bells ringing I thought that perhaps there was going to be an evening Mass that I could attend, so I high-tailed it to the chapel--the very chapel where they have the Masses that one can watch on EWTN each day. It turned out not to be Mass, but Vespers, which was the next best thing as far as I was concerned, so I stayed and enjoyed the largish community of folks who had turned out. After Vespers there was a Benediction service, and then I returned to my little house. I was soon joined there by Fr. Trevor Nicholls, a former Anglican Priest turned Catholic priest (thanks to the Pastoral Provision of 1980). He turned out to be a delightful conversationalist, and we had many fine conversations over the course of just a day and a half.<br /><br />Monday morning dawned early for me, what with it being in a different time zone and all, and I got up to say the Office. By this time I was starting to get a little nervous about my appearance on Journey Home--what on earth was I going to talk about for an hour? My own conversion story seems prosaic and uninspiring to me, and it is very difficult to imagine why on earth anybody would want to hear all the gory details. My confidence was not the least bit increased by my conversations with Fr. Nicholls, who was not only far more articulate than I but who also had a nifty British accent sure to wow the folks in the audience.<br /><br />To take my mind off my troubles, I attended the daily Mass at noon. The venue was small and it was packed full of people--I had to stand at the back, along with several others. The liturgy was exceptionally well executed, I thought, with great reverence all around. Indeed, many who received Holy Communion did so kneeling on the ground, and even those who did not kneel to receive made a genuflection rather than bowing the head prior to reception. Servers held small patens under the chins of all who received.<br /><br />After Mass I walked around the compound, but there wasn't much to explore: part of the enclosure is a monastery, and one cannot just walk in and look about. On the other hand, right next to the house where I was staying was a "farm" of satellite dishes--seven in all, one of them as large as the two-storey house in which I was staying. (You can see these dishes, and the house in which I stayed, if you look at the EWTN compound with Google Earth. You will not see me snooping around the dishes, and you certainly won't see me trying to break into the monastery. I really have no idea what you're talking about.)<br /><br />When it was finally time for the taping, I changed into my best dress uniform and walked over to the studio with Fr. Nicholls. His uniform was much nicer than mine, being all black and priestly, but I did have on a nice tie and a sweet little silk hankie that Lisa gave me for Christmas about twelve years ago. Nevertheless as I walked along beside him I couldn't help feeling like a pair of old brown shoes at a black tie party.<br /><br />The studio was deserted except for Marcus Grodi, the host of The Journey Home, and his crew, which seemed to me to number fewer than a dozen people. There were three cameramen, a Franciscan stage director who also applied makeup to everyone, and the producer and director and whoever else was back in "the booth". Although there were chairs for an audience, there was nobody there watching the taping. Some episodes of the show are live, and they take calls from viewers and questions form the audience, but both shows we taped that night were canned.<br /><br />Fr. Nicholls went first, which meant that I had to watch him be all urbane and sophisticated before I went out there with my countrified Ohio ways. Shucks, Padre, that there was some mighty fancy talkin'! When my turn came I was still a little nervous, but since the studio was basically empty it didn't seem so bad. I soon discovered that I wasn't going to have any trouble filling up the time allotted--what with my blabbermouth ways and all--and the conversation seemed to go fairly smoothly. At the end, however, I couldn't help feel that I had done a terrible job. It seemed that I hadn't really said anything very substantive--but on the other hand, I was just supposed to be bearing witness to my conversion, so I don't think there was any expectation that I produce philosophical gems (if only I could get the folks at Ohio University to see things the same way).<br /><br />Then it was all over. Fr. Nicholls and I talked long into the evening about many things, and then the next day I flew home. All in all I found the experience rather exciting, and one certainly can't help wishing that one lived in a community with such a strong Catholic identity. The task, I suppose, is to make a community where one is, rather than travel around looking for one to sneak into. It's difficult in a secular university to make such a community, but we already have the beginnings of one here, at least among some of the Catholic students. But I have to admit that when the guy who drove me back to the airport told me that he had retired from the fire department in Florida in order to take a job at EWTN, the idea didn't seem like a bad one to me.Vitae Scrutatorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12808120163472036743noreply@blogger.com3