The Ivory Tower

I was struck recently by an exchange in the online review Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews between Lowell Edmunds, on the one hand, and David Fitzpatrick on the other. Edmunds is a professor of classics at Rutgers University, Fitzpatrick a professor in the history department of Trinity College, Dublin. The occasion for the exchange was a review that Fitzpatrick wrote of Edmunds's recent book, Oedipus: Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World, published by Routledge in 2006. While it is not exactly a glowing review, it is, in the main positive, and concludes with:

Notwithstanding my misgivings on certain points, I think Edmunds' Oedipus is a good contribution to series. The volumes are all presented very attractively: a casual bookshop browser could be tempted to pick up a copy. There is enough depth and breath in Edmunds' offering for such a customer to be happy with his/her purchase.

This apparently did not satisfy Edmunds, however, who felt moved to write a response to the review in a subsequent issue of the online journal (BMCR is one of the few review journals that prints responses to its reviews). The response is decidedly more prickly than the review had been, with such comments as the following:

His estimate of the intelligence of this readership [those to whom the book is addressed] is clearly lower than mine was....

Fitzpatrick seems to know something that even the experts, whom I cited, don't know, and I wish that he had told us what it is....

In order to grasp the relevance of the illustrations, one must first grasp the peculiarities just referred to and second look at Figs. 6 and 7. In writing as I did and in using these illustrations (which are quite remarkable), I had not thought that I would overtax anyone's intelligence....

I wasn't the only one to find Edmunds's response "prickly", for Fitzpatrick wrote a further response to Edmunds's response in which he, too, thought that somebody had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed:

His prickliness is due, perhaps, to an unfortunate conflation of two distinct points: a supposed difference of opinion between us about the level of intelligence of the intended readership and my (footnoted) comments on the handling of illustrations and iconography in Oedipus.

There follows a measured, if pointed, reply to Edmunds's criticisms. He was unable, however, to resist the temptation to conclude his response in this way:

Towards the end of his response, Edmunds declares that he makes "some original points". If I were to adopt, momentarily, the condescension towards the general reader which Edmunds imputes to me, I wonder would the general reader identify the points in question as original ones. We'd have to consult the general reader here, but I think the declaration betrays that Edmunds had another level of readership in mind too.

Well, such is life in the rarefied air of academia. The exchange came as no surprise to me, really, because I worked with Lowell Edmunds in the classics department at Rutgers during his first year there, 1988-89. I was there for a one-year position working for Project Theophrastus, fresh out of grad school (well, relatively fresh, anyway); he had just been hired in as full professor with tenure. We got along fairly well at first, and he even rented me a room in his condo, which was literally right next door to the department. Since I was only there for the academic year I had not moved much of my stuff to New Brunswick, and Edmunds kindly allowed me to use the computer he had in his office to read my email and write my papers.

During that academic year, the department was engaged in a search for a new faculty member with an interest in feminst approaches to classics. Since I was just a visiting appointment, I had no role in the selection process, other than to attend the colloquia that the candidates gave during their campus visits. One evening, after all of the candidates had visited, I was working late in my office and Edmunds came into the department with William Fortenbaugh, who was chair of the department at that time. They were talking rather loudly about the candidates, and even after I closed my office door I could still hear what they were saying. Now, Fortenbaugh was something of a curmudgeon, and the prospect of him hiring someone with interests in "feminist approaches" is already something of a hoot. When he hired me, for example, he explained my low salary by telling me that the college was being run by a "feminist lesbian dean" who did not like him and punished him by not supporting his projects. This was my very first day on campus, and he had never met me before, so arguably he didn't care what my own views of such matters might be. When he came into the department with Edmunds that evening, Edmunds was attempting to sell him on one of the candidates and, perhaps knowing his audience, Edmunds said about the candidate "She's a good feminist, and, unlike most feminists, she's actually attractive."

Well now. Strong words, even by the Cro-Magnon standards of 1989. In the end, they hired the "attractive" candidate. No surprise there. What was surprising, however, was my last interaction with Edmunds. As I said, he was very kind to let me use the computer in his office. On one occasion I left some papers on his desk when I left, and he brought them to me the next day and told me that it was OK for me to use his computer, but please don't leave anything in his office. I explained that it was just a mistake, and I wouldn't do it again. Then, about three weeks before the end of the academic year, I was in his office printing out a paper I had written. I wanted to put some paper in his printer to replace what I had used, so I fetched one of those bundles of 500 sheets of paper that are often stacked in the vicinity of copier machines, and I refilled his printer. Then I left. Apparently I also left the bundle of paper on his desk, because the next day he came up to me in the middle of the department, with several colleagues standing around, and he brandished the bundle of paper (now containing a mere 450 sheets, approximately, but still rather hefty). He yelled at me in a rather loud voice, "I told you not to leave any of your fucking crap in my office!" and he then threw the bundle of paper at me. It did not hit me, but I decided to maintain a low profile around him anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Life isn't always that exciting in classics departments, but the "attractive" feminist eventually quit working at Rutgers before coming up for tenure, and I've often wondered whether there weren't more things flying around that department than just bundles of paper. At any rate, if BMCR is any indication, academics will always find ways to irritate one another. It beats working for a living.

Steampunk!

I am so there!

Read the article at the New York Times.

So Why Not Do Us All A Favor?

I was browsing through the Oxford University Press philosophy catalog, and I came across this description of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence by David Benatar:

Better Never to Have Been argues for a number of related, highly provocative, views: (1) Coming into existence is always a serious harm. (2) It is always wrong to have children. (3) It is wrong not to abort fetuses at the earlier stages of gestation. (4) It would be better if, as a result of there being no new people, humanity became extinct.

It's difficult to know whether the guy's just angling for a chance to get himself interviewed by Bill Maher, but the description raises some rather delicious possibilities. If it's always a "serious harm" when a new human comes into existence, perhaps the elimination of one of these harmful beings--say, David Benatar--would be a serious boon. One wonders whether David Benatar practices what he preaches: if it is wrong not to abort fetuses, perhaps there is a duty to abort them oneself by force when one finds women stubbornly attempting to carry their fetuses to term. If David Benatar is not out there right now poking pregnant women in the stomach then he's a hypocrite.

While I can't agree that it would be better if humanity as a whole became extinct, books like this make me heartily agree that it would be better if certain elements of humanity became extinct. Sadly, my own Weltanschauung prevents me from working to bring about such an end.

Continuing Lefevbrists

If Anglicans who sign the CCC are struggling to find a way to remain distinctively Anglican, one can only imagine the difficulties the Society of Saint Pius X will have maintaining anything like an identity worth maintaining. According to a story at Catholic.org, members of the schismatic group are not satisfied with BXVI's motu proprio allowing wider use of the so-called "Tridentine Rite" form of the Mass, because the guy "still supports the reforms of the Second Vatican Council".

So, before any kind of "reunification" can occur, apparently, VCII will have to be scrapped. In short, reunification is formally impossible, as far as these guys are concerned. If VCII were "scrapped" in the way required by SSPX, that would signal the end of the teaching authority of Ecumenical Councils and, hence, the Catholic Church as it has existed since the Council of Jerusalem. So either VCII is retained, in which case SSPX stays out; or VCII is scrapped, in which case SSPX is still out, because they will have reunified themselves with something other than the Roman Catholic Church.

So long, SSPX! Enjoy the bizarre world of Catholic Protestantism.

Continuing Anglicans

There's some interesting stuff going on at The Continuum. There has been some discussion there the past few days of what it would mean for someone claiming to be within the Anglican Communion (of their specifically "continuing" variety) to endorse the CCC in its entirety, which, apparently, some Anglicans claim to do. There is a post discussing the Society of Saint Michael (one of said groups), a post discussing the question whether some Anglican bishops formally signed a copy of the CCC at a public Mass in Rome; and a post rehearsing the contents of the CCC teachings on Papal primacy (880-887). For your added delectations, there is a comment in the discussion section of that first one in which Fr. Robert Hart (a frequent contributor to First Things!) disses yours truly in a delightfully snotty fashion. (But then, I deserved it.)

The question of whether, and if so, to what extent, an Anglican may comfortably subscribe to the teachings of the CCC came up at this blog recently, in my discussion with Tobias Haller (see the comments section of this post). Clearly, Papal primacy is the major sticking point (to quote Hart: "the teaching in the CCC about the papacy is one of only a very few places where Anglicans cannot agree with the content"), but given the way most Roman Catholics understand the nature of Papal Primacy--especially in the developed West--it is not clear that there is really all that much at stake. If one is willing to accept most of what is in the CCC--including, I suppose, such things as the content of the teachings on, say, the Immaculate Conception, the Church's indefectibility, etc., then the teachings about Papal Primacy simply disappear in the mix. If, by contrast, one were to say that one accepted all of the teachings in the CCC except those on Papal Primacy and all other teachings that could reasonably be traced to an inordinate amount of influence on the part of the Papacy, then one would have a uniquely non-Roman point of view; but then one would not, in such a case, be able to say that "the teaching in the CCC about the papacy is one of only a very few places where Anglicans cannot agree with the content".

The long and the short of it is simple: the Papacy, whether or not one regards its influence over the various parts of the Roman communion as overweaning, has not exercised anything like the degree of influence in terms of de fide doctrine that some folks have imagined, if it is possible to agree with most of the CCC except for 880-887. If this is right, then the real dispute is not over Papal Primacy, but about Church polity, and this is something that Roman Catholics themselves are constantly bickering about, and indeed, have done for centuries, even prior to the rather sudden invention of the Anglican communion (as an entity distinct from the Roman communion).

Ehrman and Wright

Fr. Al Kimel has drawn my attention to an exchange at Blogalogue between N. T. Wright and Bart Ehrman on the so-called "problem of evil". Regular readers will remember that I, along with Dr. Michael Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae, have blogged frequently on the issues involved in theodicy, but having had a look at this most recent exchange I have to say that it continues to astound me how simplistic and thoughtless the popular treatment of the problem has become. To read Ehrman's piece is to hear a litany of the typical complaints one hears from a materialistic world: there is too much pain and suffering in the world, and, well, sorry folks, there's no way you're going to convince me that there's a caring God out there when I get tears in my eyes watching CNN. It's as if generations of sophisticated and complex theological and philosophical argument amount to nothing when compared to the emotional attitudes of a single individual living in a highly particularized time and place.

This, indeed, seems to be at least partly the point of Wright's reply, when he writes:

I want to ask: were you not aware, earlier, of the scale of evil in the world – the Holocaust, the dying babies, the inexplicable ‘natural’ disasters, and so on? You’re not implying, are you, that people (like me, for instance) who still hold to Christian faith are somehow failing to notice these horrors, or to reflect soberly and deeply on them? And if, as you say, your book (and your blog posting) do not actually constitute an argument against Christian faith (‘If you reflect on these issues you’ll see that the Christian claim is incredible’), might it not seem that the shift in your own position which you have described is a shift which came about, not because of logical argument, but because of other (unspecified) factors, with the problem of suffering providing a kind of intellectual backdrop to a journey whose main energy was supplied from elsewhere?

I think this is a rather important insight, and its importance is not diminished by its obviousness. Just as atheists and agnostics are often--perhaps way too often--tempted to assume that believers only believe for emotional or psychological reasons, so too, it seems rather obvious to me, every non-believer almost certainly has emotional and psychological reasons for not believing that will trump any and every legitimate argument posed against them. This is not to say, of course, that non-believers don't also subscribe to certain philosophical arguments that they think are in their favor, it is merely to note that the absence of such arguments would not deter many of them from continuing to believe what they believer.

The other elements of Wright's analysis are deployed more specifically against Ehrman's particular argument, which, it seems to me, is grounded not so much in deep theological introspection but in the fatuousness of his original religious foundation.

The second large, general point concerns your handling, and description, of the Bible and Christian faith. I want to take issue with your analysis of the biblical material. This is where I must refer to my own treatment of the same problem in Evil and the Justice of God, which forms part of the groundwork for my new book Surprised by Hope. I don’t know if you’ve read either of them, but in the former I give a very different account from you of the Old Testament material, seeing the call of Abraham not (as on your p. 66) as God simply calling Abraham ‘to be in a special relationship with him’ but as the moment when God launches the long-range plan to rescue the world from its misery. In other words, I read the story of Israel as a whole (not merely in its individual parts, which by themselves, taken out of that context, might be reduced to ‘Israel sinned; God punished them’, etc.,) as the story of theodicy-in-practice: ‘this is the narrative through whose outworking the creator God will eventually put all things to rights.’ Hence the promises of Isaiah 11 and so forth.

As Wright notes, Ehrman, like other Christians from his tradition, has (or, I suppose "had" is the better word) the tendency to spot-check individual parts of the Scriptures as though they are stand-alone commodities that can be tested independently of the multitude of variables that give them their substance and their meaning to actual believers (as opposed to casual readers, for whom they are merely texts).

Wright concludes with a simple, straightforward, and yet absolutely essential point:

In particular, of course, the resurrection of Jesus is absolutely central for me. Like many people ancient and modern, you don’t find it credible. If I didn’t believe it I wouldn’t have the beliefs I do about other things.

I don't suppose that any genuine Christian could disagree with these words. To me, the difficulty of making sense out of the Resurrection is far greater than the alleged difficulty of making sense out of suffering in the world. Indeed, to make sense out of the former just is to make sense out of the latter, and yet the former involves far greater empirical difficulties than the latter, which is relatively simple by comparison. Belief in the literal Resurrection of Jesus is a necessary condition on the truth of everything in the Gospel, and there is literally no reason to believe in it at all beyond one's capacity to take the word of Scripture at face value. The capacity to do that requires an act of supernatural grace, a further feature of our faith that takes it beyond the realm of the empirical. Ehrman has, of course, written about these issues, too, but his puzzlement about the problem of evil is far more mysterious than the problem of evil itself.

Contra naturam

There is an interesting little argument on offer over at In a Godward Direction that demonstrates rather nicely how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The author of the essay in question, Tobias Haller, is concerned to show that "nature", as he appears to understand it, cannot underwrite moral principles and, hence, cannot be appealed to in moral arguments against, well, same-sex relations. Although he claims to be addressing his argument to something he calls "the Natural Law tradition", it becomes evident rather early on that his real interest is in the alleged "is-ought" gap made so infamous by David Hume.

Haller addresses three varieties of arguments against same-sex relations, and appears to regard all of them as variations on the theme of Natural Law arguments. Of the three he describes, only the second one even comes close to being anything like a genuine Natural Law argument, but even that one falls far short of what a proper argument from the Natural Law would amount to. Now, of course, we're all just writing blogs here, so one must adopt Aristotle's adage from the Nicomachean Ethics and remember that "the same exactness must not be expected in all departments of philosophy alike" (I.3 1094b12). On the other hand, if one is going to be shooting fish in a barrel one had better make sure they are not red herrings. It simply will not do to trump up three ridiculous arguments against same-sex relations, label them "Natural Law" arguments, and then proudly proclaim that one has shown "Natural Law" arguments against same-sex relations to fail.

I will pass over in silence the first and third "arguments" that Haller addresses, as they are evidently straw men. But as I remarked above, the second argument does bear some slight resemblance to an actual argument from the Natural Law, so I want to say a few things about it. Here's the "argument", along with Haller's proposed reply:

Now, of course, my interlocutor will then advance to the second form of natural law and say, “By ‘unnatural’ I mean ‘not in concert with the ends for which sex is intended.’” This natural law position falls prey to the fallacy of begging the question, in that it rests on two prior premises, neither of which is self-evidently true: “Moral value is to be found in the use of things in advancement of the end for which they are intended” and further, “Sex is intended for procreation.” I have already demonstrated the falsehood of the latter premise, in that while sex may often result in procreation, there is ample evidence that it serves other purposes or ends having nothing to do with procreation. This is, in fact, the position of The Episcopal Church, as enunciated in the preface to the matrimonial rite, where procreation ranks third among the ends of marriage, “when it is God’s will.” It is also the reason marriage, and sexual activity within marriage, are not forbidden to infertile couples, and birth control is permitted.

Although there are some appeals to Natural Law that are similar to this one in certain details, no genuine such argument is precisely like this one. The principle difficulty is, perhaps, due to the informal nature of blogging, because the argument is summed up as "By 'unnatural' I mean 'not in concert with the ends for which sex is intended," and no natural law theorist would put it quite like that. First, the expression "in concert with" is hopelessly vague; second, the notion of "end" being appealed to here is undefined; and finally, "intended" suggests a principle of design that is simply absent in genuine natural law accounts. I think, however, for the purposes of analysis, we may assume that what Haller has in mind is some sort of appeal to the necessity of final causation, where precisely defined ends are related to functionality in one way or another.

If we make such an assumption, we are left with plenty to say about Haller's proposed reply. First, there is his claim that such an argument presupposes that "moral value is to be found in the use of things in advancement of the end for which they are intended". I would be willing to bet money that he thinks this is presupposed because of the use of the word "unnatural", and yet to use such a word implies nothing at all about "moral value". To say that something is "unnatural" is simply to say that, in general, things tend to work differently in natural settings. We all know that water tends to freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit when the pressure is one atmosphere, and we also know that altering the pressure or the composition of the water can alter the temperature at which it freezes. If we know that the water's composition has not been altered, and that the pressure is one atmosphere, it would, in this sense, be "unnatural" if water were not to freeze at the specified temperature. But that is not to say that it is logically impossible for it to do so, or that it would be anything like a moral outrage if it should occur.

Then there is the claim that another suppressed premise in the argument is "Sex is intended for procreation". Here Haller appeals to that notion of "intention" that he left so conveniently undefined earlier. In the present context it is entirely unclear what it means to say that sex is "intended" for anything. What sort of "intention" are we appealing to here? Is it the "intention" of some intelligence, that is, some agent acting with purpose? If not that, then what? Mere adaptedness, the byproduct, perhaps, of natural selection? It simply isn't clear in what sense we are to take it or how, taking it one way rather than another, the desired normative implicature would result. The sense, however, that is usually behind a Natural Law argument is that of final causation. That is, rather than saying that "sex is intended for procreation", the natural law theorist will say that procreation is the final cause of the sexual act. This does not entail that procreation is "intended" as a consequence of every sexual act, but rather serves to explain the function, or role, of the sexual act in a larger ecology.

This sort of claim may not satisfy everyone, of course. It is notoriously difficult to specify these sorts of final causes without appealing to evolutionary just-so stories or else material tautologies. By a "material tautology" I mean something like the following. Consider the question: What is the heart "for"? Suppose someone were to posit "The heart is 'for' the circulation of the blood" and someone else were to object "That's arbitrary--the heart does other things, too: it makes a rhythmic sound, it helps with oxygenation, it contributes to the overall body temperature." The objection seems strange: all of the posited alternatives--making a sound, oxygenation, temperature regulation--are materially identical to the function of circulating the blood, that is, they are present simply as an artifact of the blood being circulated by rhythmic contractions of the heart muscle. It seems clear that circulation is really the only thing that the heart is really "for", if it is "for" anything at all. But this sort of analysis will not do in other kinds of cases. What is the human mouth "for"? Is it for articulation? Mastication? Defensive biting? Sexual stimulation of another? These alternatives are not materially identical to each other, they are quite distinct, and they are all things that people have, from time to time, used their mouths for. So here one might appeal to evolutionary biology and try to pinpoint the selection pressures that gave rise to the mouth as it is presently structured. But this sort of exercise is plainly speculative and can bear no normative weight, since such hypotheses are always open to revision. The principle difficulty in a case like this is the fact that the mouth, quite simply, has many uses, and none of them stands out as definitive, rather, we might just as well say that what the mouth is "for" is the whole suite of them.

Is this the case with sexual activity and the sex organs? What is the sexual act "for"? Procreation? Mere pleasure? The unification of individuals? To communicate love? Haller, like many others, wants to claim that sex is really for all of these things, and not at all for any single one of them in a normative sense. In a strange irony, Haller alludes to a science that is morally neutral in defense of his thesis that one cannot infer an "ought" from an "is", and yet if we accept the truth of this--as we should--then science itself offers a rather straightforward refutation of his view that sex "serves other purposes or ends having nothing to do with procreation". The "other purposes" that he has in mind are, apparently, things such as were just described, and yet all of these things seem rather obviously materially identical to the act of procreation. From an evolutionary point of view, that is, the fact that people who have sex with each other sometimes also fall in love with each other means only that there is differential reproductive success attached to the emotion of love. Love is nothing more than an instrument of reproduction on an evolutionary account. Haller appeals to the fact that sex sometimes fails to produce offspring as evidence that procreation is not what it is for, but that is tantamount to saying that the fact that some batters strike out is proof that going up to bat is not for hitting the ball, so I think we may pass on that one. The point is that, biologically speaking, everything involved in sexual activity is directed towards reproduction, especially if the theory of evolution is true. On this sort of a reductive, materialist scientific account, same-sex relations are the ones that serve no purpose--indeed, they are virtually deleterious and are, hence, selected against.

Haller is right about one thing: the expression contra naturam does not, in and of itself, entail "morally vicious." To move from the claim that same-sex relations are contra naturam to the inference that they are thereby morally wrong does require some set of reasons for thinking that it is better for ends to be achieved than not. I won't bother to give that argument here, since Aristotle does it himself much more thoroughly than I ever could in his Nicomachean Ethics. The key lies in seeing sexual relations not in the isolated way in which Haller foists upon his alleged "natural law" theorist, but in the integrative, holistic way in which the virtue ethicist understands the final cause of the human being. This is the way in which the Church has traditionally deployed arguments from the natural law, and it is rather surprising that Haller would not even bother to address this form of the argument, given that he describes himself as a member of a (Christian) religious order. One begins almost to suspect him of special pleading.

Personally, I'm In It For the Groupies

DarwinCatholic has posted an amusing little follow-up to my piece on the NYTimes article about the value of a philosophy major in the marketplace. Included in Darwin's essay is a bar-graph from a Wall Street Journal article that compares college-graduate starting salaries by major. At the bottom: philosophy.

One feature of the chart that intrigued me was the fact that, whereas the average first-job salary for a philosophy major was listed as roughly 28k, the average salary for the history major is given as 34k. The history major. If someone had asked me to name a college major even more useless, in a jobby sorty of way, than philosophy, I'm not sure what else I could have come up with other than history. I think two things tell against the poor philosophy major in this situation. One is the fact that, while history is often taught in the schools, philosophy rarely is and, contrary to what is usually claimed by teachers' unions, starting salaries for public school teachers are actually quite good. So probably some of that 34k is due to the fact that a lot of history majors can get jobs as teachers, while very few philosophy majors can, unless they decide to get certified teaching something other than philosophy, something much easier, say, such as history. (I'll pass over in silence the question of whether a history major could get himself certified to teach philosophy.) The other factor that comes to mind is the possibility that a lot of philosophy majors tend to have interests in public service sorts of jobs, and they may very well take very low paying positions in charitable operations that don't pay much to anybody, let alone the philosophers. History majors, by contrast, are well known mercenaries who will do anything for a buck.

In the final analysis, of course, the philosopher isn't supposed to do philosophy for money anyway, so if the average salary of philosophers had been any higher, it would have served as proof that we're all a bunch of hypocrites. As it is, it simply goes to show you all how noble and professional the real philosophers are.

But I'm not trying to be snooty when I say that: As for me, I can't wait until I'm making 28k! But then, I wasn't a philosophy major. I majored in...history (and classics).

Fr. Kimel on Sacramentality

In my view what sets Christianity apart from all other religions is its unique understanding of Sacramentality. I have blogged on this topic myself a few times, but this recent post by Fr. Al Kimel of Pontifications sums things up quite nicely for me.

The End of Individual Responsibility?

I guess speed is of the essence in journalism: I mentioned yesterday that a student reporter for the Ohio University student newspaper was working on a story about the "updated" list of mortal sins proposed by Msgr. Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the Vatican Penitentiary, but the New York Times beat her to it, publishing an OpEd piece on the proposal even while she was canvassing my colleagues in Classics and World Religions for their take on the matter.

According to Eduardo Porter, author of the Times piece, the theme in this is a movement away from individualistic sorts of sins of the kind that might typify an agrarian society to more, shall we say, "corporate" sins of the sort that are often claimed to afflict the society of the 21st century. Now, the famous list of mortal sins (pride, envy, lust, etc.) could easily be cashed out in such a way that so-called "corporate" sins fall under their various rubrics (indeed, that sort of categorization is the very stuff of medieval moral theorizing), but I got the distinct impression that there was more to this movement than mere taxonomy:

Norms encoded hundreds of years ago to guide human behavior in a small-scale agrarian society could not account for a globalized postindustrial information economy. Polluting the environment, drug trafficking, performing genetic manipulations or causing social inequities, new sinful behaviors mentioned by Msgr. Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the Vatican Penitentiary, are arguably more relevant to many contemporary Catholics than contraception.

Ah, yes, of course, contraception. What a surprise to find that the sin of contraception is so very old fashioned as to be no longer relevant to modern Catholics. I don't suppose the prevalence of, say, lust, in contemporary culture could have anything to do with the contemporary Catholic (and, well, let's face it, everyone else's, too) attitude towards the teaching on contraception. It also comes as no surprise that the "new" mortal sins amount to a typical listing of leftist Shibboleths (which is not to deny that some of them probably really are sins, at least when engaged in by individuals).

The rest of Porter's analysis is, on the one hand, certainly correct (religions are like "clubs" in which membership is defined by adherence to certain "rules" of membership; the Vatican is particularly strict in its definition and interpretation of the "rules", etc.) but, on the other hand, hopelessly banal. To be informed that "it could be tricky to update sins in a way that could de-emphasize individual trespasses and shift the focus to social crimes bearing a collective guilt" adds nothing to what everybody already knows and, if anything, is an understatement. Some might go so far as to say that it is literally impossible to shift the focus away from the individual when it comes to determining the nature of sin.

Fit to Print?

I just got a heads-up about a student reporter for the Ohio University student newspaper, The Post, who is doing a story about "the new mortal sins as released by the Vatican". The reporter, one Ashley Lutz, sent an inquiry to the faculty members of the Department of Classics and World Religions here at Ohio University asking them for comments on these "new mortal sins" because she "was hoping to get some general comments from someone in the department about how this demonstrates flexibility on the church's part and how often sins are added."

One shudders to contemplate how a student reporter might think the phrase "flexibility on the church's part" ought to be parsed, but just as worrisome is the fact that the inquiry was addressed to the faculty in a department where there is only one practicing Catholic and several faculty who are openly hostile not only to Catholicism but to Christianity in general. (This is not to suggest that she would have fared any better had she addressed her inquiry to the faculty in the philosophy department!)

For the real scoop on this issue, there was an interesting story on NPR's Day to Day about a month ago. You can listen to it here.