Since I recently questioned the consistency of Notre Dame’s policy on contraception and the paucity of parental benefits offered by the University to its employees, I thought it appropriate to share this most recent email message from President Jenkins to the ND community:

On campus, I have recently formed the Task Force on Supporting the Choice for Life. It will be co-chaired by Professor Margaret Brinig, the Fritz Duda Family Chair in Law and Associate Dean for the Law School, and by Professor John Cavadini, the Chair of the Department of Theology and the McGrath-Cavadini Director of the Institute for Church Life. My charge to the Task Force is to consider and recommend to me ways in which the University, informed by Catholic teaching, can support the sanctity of life. Possibilities the Task Force has begun to discuss include fostering serious and specific discussion about a reasonable conscience clause; the most effective ways to support pregnant women, especially the most vulnerable; and the best policies for facilitating adoptions. Such initiatives are in addition to the dedication, hard work and leadership shown by so many in the Notre Dame Family, both on the campus and beyond, and the Task Force may also be able to recommend ways we can support some of this work.

Jenkins presents this initiative as fruit of the dialogue that took place on campus surrounding Obama’s commencement speech last spring.  It will be interesting to see what the task force comes up with.

By request, read the whole thing after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

Given his own work on the subject, but this new movie on lying by Ricky Gervais looks pretty funny.

You wouldn’t guess it by looking at the cover (with its close-up of an electrical plug and the screaming headline “The Case for Killing Granny”), but the September 21 Newsweek has an excellent article on the subject of health care in the U.S. In “No Country for Sick Men,” T.R. Reid explains what he learned about health-care systems around the world when he reported on the topic for Frontline. He sums it up by quoting Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt: “The fundamental truth about health care in every country…is that national values, national character, determine how each system works.”

As Reid explains, the developed democracies of the world have very different solutions to the problem of providing health care for their people (they differ on who provides, what’s covered, what’s excessive, and so on). But they all agree that every citizen has a right to basic health care. All, that is, but the United States.

The design of any country’s health-care system involves political, medical, and economic decisions. But the primary issue for any health-care system is, as President Obama made clear last week, a moral question: should a rich society provide health care to everyone who needs it? If a nation answers yes to that moral question, it will build a health-care system like the ones in Britain, Germany, Canada, France, and Japan, where everybody is covered. If a nation doesn’t decide to provide universal coverage, then you’re likely to end up with a system where some people get the finest medical care on earth in the finest hospitals, and tens of thousands of others are left to die for lack of care. Without the moral commitment, in other words, you end up with a system like America’s.

When President Obama spoke to Congress last week, he quoted Ted Kennedy, who wrote: “What we face… is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.” Reid’s article is simple and not at all polemical. But the information he lays out makes it harder to turn away from that stark assessment.

Good get for Politics Daily:

We teach that health care is a basic human right, an essential safeguard of human life and dignity…. Health care reform especially needs to protect those at the beginning of life and at its end — the most vulnerable and the voiceless. It is essential that reform include long-standing and widely supported federal restrictions on abortion funding and mandates and uphold existing conscience protections for health care providers.

(…)

Universal coverage should be universal, including everyone. Health care reform cannot leave people out because of pre-existing conditions, chronic illnesses, their place of work or because they cannot afford insurance. Reform should not leave people out because of where they come from or when they arrived here.

(…)

Our political leadership faces both a challenge and an opportunity. We hope and we also pray that all in this debate will remember that what is really at stake are the lives, dignity and health care of all our people. Securing health care that protects the life and dignity of all is a moral imperative and an urgent national priority.

Read the rest right here.

Update: Our own Dave Gibson responds to the Archbishop’s column elsewhere at Politics Daily.

Pell vs. Hitchens, way beyond the Thunderdome. (Or is it the Areopagus?) Zenit has it:

The first ever Festival of Dangerous Ideas will pit Sydney’s archbishop, Cardinal George Pell, against one of the most prominent exponents of modern atheism, British journalist Christopher Hitchens.

A press release from the Sydney Archdiocese announced today that this festival will take place Oct. 3-4 in the Sydney Opera House.

In his address, titled “Without God We Are Nothing,” Cardinal Pell plans to speak about secularism as a “minority sport and a temporary phenomenon” that only survives “by attacking Christianity or living off Christianity’s moral capital.”

I’m sure Hitch will be fine with that. If not quite “Commonweal Conversations,” the event will likely be worth the price of admission.

I wouldn’t want anyone to miss what commenter (and deacon) Eric Stoltz posted in the thread below about altar girls. He scanned a few pages from a 1940s Catholic grade-school reader that are, as he says on his blog, “quaint, cute, humorous and horrifying, all at the same time.” I bet they’ll bring back some memories for a few of you.

It got me thinking about the role that images play in the ongoing struggle over the proper role of women in liturgy. Jim Pauwels (also a deacon, as it happens) responded to Eric’s find by noting, “Those stylized, idealized pictures of the four altar *boys* leading the priest to the altar are exactly what traditionalists want their ecclesial world to be. One image is more powerful than words. Think of what a procession looks like now. In our parish, a typical Sunday procession would be a girl, enrobed in an alb, carrying a crucifix on a pole, followed by two smaller boys, also alb-clad, bearing torches, followed by a lay adult and a lay teen who are the lectors, followed by a deacon, followed by a priest. There is something very refreshing and hope-filled when I compare what happens today to that picture from yesteryear.”

When I was working on my article, and when we were thinking about how to illustrate it, I discovered what happens when you do an image search online for “altar girls.” You turn up images like the one Jim describes — smiling girls, dressed to serve on the altar — but they’re generally hosted on traditionalist sites, as examples of how debased the Church has become. Sometimes they have a big red “NO!” imposed on the faces of the girls. Then I tried searching for “altar boys” and turned up many of the same hits — images like the one in Eric’s book, held up as an example of the Good Old Days when all was right with the Church, juxtaposed with the decadent image of little girls in albs. I was really beginning to worry about the Church…until I tried searching for “altar servers.” That’s when all the ordinary parish Web sites started popping up. It confirmed my original impression that most Catholics have long since moved on from worrying about the sex of the children who serve in their parishes. It’s only on the fringes that people can still work themselves up into an angry froth over a picture of a smiling little girl carrying a cross to the altar. I suppose that’s a lesson in the dangers of putting too much faith (so to speak) in what you find online as representative of the larger culture. Sometimes getting the big picture is a matter of using the right search terms — and sometimes it’s a matter of getting offline altogether.

There are, alas, no pictures of me in action as an altar server (that I know of) — and even if there were I’m sure they wouldn’t compare with the pictures that illustrated Peggy’s essay. So to accompany my article, we ended up using an image of a group of altar servers robed for Mass and holding the tools of the trade, but shot only from the neck down, so you can’t tell whether they’re boys or girls. It encourages me to think that for most Catholics, it doesn’t matter.

CNS has an interesting interview with one of the daughters of St. Gianna.   I’ve always been uncomfortable with her story, because of the way her decision left the other children motherless.

Another take on having a saint for a mother is the underrated movie The Third Miracle, with Ed Harris and Anne Heche.  If you have’t seen it, it’s worth a spot on your Netflix lineup.  The Anne Heche character is dealing with isssues of abandonoment by her mother –of a different sort.

I’ve never read anything by Dorothy Day’s daughter, but I imagine that can’t have been easy, either.

Are you planning to join us in New York to celebrate our eighty-fifth anniversary?

Date: 10.19.09.

Time: 6:30 p.m.

Place: Pier 60, Chelsea Piers.

Honoree: Tim Shriver, Chairman of the Special Olympics.

Presenter: Mark Shields, PBS commentator and columnist.

Dinner chair: Rev. Edward (Monk) Malloy, CSC, president emeritus, the University of Notre Dame.

Also on hand: lots of Commonweal contributors (Cathy Kaveny, Alice McDermott, Jack Miles, Peter Quinn, Thomas Reese, SJ, Peter and Peggy Steinfels, and others), and basically the whole staff.

There’s still time to reserve your spot. But hurry: the Commonweal Conversations rate at local hotels is expiring next week!

From a WaPo story today on the writing of the Kennedy memoir due out Tuesday:

Ted Kennedy Jr. told “60 Minutes” that reading the book has been emotional for him. “What I think I would like this country to understand about my dad — that even though he really felt he needed to hold it together throughout some really difficult experiences, he was kind of able to let it out in this book,” Kennedy Jr. says.

Referring to a passage in the book, the younger Kennedy said he was struck by what Joseph Kennedy said to his youngest child: “Teddy, you can live a serious life or a nonserious life. I’ll love you just the same, whatever you choose. But, you know what? I’m a busy guy. And I’m gonna do everything I can to help you. But you have to make that choice.

“My father had the same conversation with me . . . about our lives and really our obligation to really make something of ourselves,” Kennedy Jr. said. “. . . Yes, bad things have happened to us. But we’ve been given incredible advantages.”

I think the “serious/nonserious” framework is a good way to look at the main decision facing people today, young and old. And the problem, in my view, is that too many choose the latter option. Or many don’t even realize they need to make that choice, and that “nonserious” seems to be the default setting.

And, I would add, to me Jon Stewart is eminently serious, for example. And thank goodness.

The Dish had the link:

Many of the subjects discussed on this blog touch upon moral issues–and disagreements about moral issues.  I thought  that some people might be interested in a new book published by Notre Dame Press on the topic, edited by longtime Commonweal contributor, Larry Cunningham. I  have an essay in there too.  Here’s the blurb, which explains why we all did this:

Both as cardinal and as Pope Benedict XVI, one of Josef Ratzinger’s consistent concerns has been the foundational moral imperatives of the natural law. In 2004, then Cardinal Ratzinger requested that the University of Notre Dame study the complex issues embedded in discussions about ‘natural rights’ and ‘natural law’ in the context of Catholic thinking. To that end, Alasdair MacIntyre provided a substantive essay on the foundational problem of moral disagreements concerning natural law, and eight scholars were invited to respond to MacIntyre’s essay, either by addressing his work directly or by amplifying his argument along other yet similar paths. The contributors to this volume are theologians, philosophers, civil and canon lawyers, and political scientists, who reflect on these issues from different disciplinary perspectives. Once the contributors’ essays were completed, MacIntyre responded with a closing essay.

I also want to point out that the Catholic University of America and Ave Maria University also were asked to address these questions–I know that they ran conferences on the topic, but I am not sure whether they have been published yet.

Rocco Palmo has an important posting on the decline in number of the reporters assigned to write on religion by the major newspapers. A native of Rockland County, NY, I am sorry to see that “The Journal News” is among the papers who decide that they can do without reports on religion. Gary Stern has been an excellent reporter.

This past March marked fifteen years since the Vatican officially approved women and girls to serve the priest at Mass. I have an article on the subject in the current issue of Commonweal: “Passing on the Alb: My Career as an Altar Girl.”

The topic may seem trivial to you if you were never a girl yourself, haven’t been the parent of a girl, or generally aren’t convinced that it’s in the interests of the Church to treat women and girls with generous respect whenever possible. But if that sounds like a reasonable goal, you’ll understand why I find the situation troubling as it stands today.

I’ll paraphrase broadly in case you haven’t read the article: in 1994, the Vatican (via a letter from the Congregation for Divine Worship) finally confirmed, after several decades of refusals, that there was no reason, according to Canon Law, that girls and women could not fulfill the lay ministry of serving at the altar. Then, practically in the same breath, it authorized individual bishops (and, as a later statement clarified, even individual priests) to continue to bar girls from the job if they thought they had a good enough reason. In fact, the letter was mainly concerned that those bishops who did approve altar girls take care to explain their reasoning to the faithful. It didn’t offer any pointers to the bishops who preferred the no-girls-allowed approach, other than observing in passing that altar boys have traditionally been seen as potential future priests.

Many priests and bishops did come up with their own reasoning for keeping girls out of this job. I found several of these statements online, and reading through them only convinced me that this state of affairs is a bad one for the Church to be in. The apologetics vary – some claim that the Vatican didn’t say what it plainly said; others acknowledge that they *could* allow altar girls, but insist that doing so would be to the detriment of the souls in their care. Gender difference is usually invoked, but natural-law reasoning gets tangled up in armchair sociology and talk of being “countercultural.” Take, for example, this sermon I found in the EWTN online “library,” delivered by Rev. Peter R. Pilsner just a few weeks after the Congregation for Divine Worship announced its ruling in 1994. It gets off to a good start, going into the history of altar servers to explain how the ministry came about and why there’s no doctrinal reason for limiting its fulfillment to males. But then the slippery social theorizing sets in, and the whole thing begins to sound like it’s trying to sell you something. It’s increasingly unctuous, occasionally misleading, and thoroughly unconvincing. (I started cringing with the part about “sweet sixteen” parties and “Daddy’s Little Girl,” and I never recovered.)

The reasoning in this and similar statements goes something like this: it’s a simple fact of life that boys like doing things with other boys (and not with girls). So as long as a priest doesn’t allow altar girls, serving on the altar is a fun boys-only activity that young men will want to try. And from those young men, we get our future priests. Sometimes the priest will acknowledge that girls might benefit from being altar servers in their own way — but since girls can’t be priests, and since we really need priests, the best thing to do is to stick to the boys-only policies that have worked so well up to now.

I’m afraid the arguments persist today, and they have not grown any more convincing to my ears. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to “abortion neutral” health-care reform legislation, Peter writes in today’s New York Times, the status quo is in the eye of the beholder.

Currently the federal government does not pay for abortions under Medicaid, except in cases of rape, incest or physical threat to the pregnant woman’s life, although states can do so. Similar bans apply to other federal programs.

The Federal Employees Health Benefits program, for example, is often cited by advocates of health care overhaul as a model for extending insurance coverage. It gives millions of federal employees, including members of Congress, a choice of hundreds of private insurance plans and pays most of the premiums. But no plans can include abortion in its benefit package except, again, in cases of rape, incest, or physical threat to the woman’s life.

For abortion opponents, abortion neutral means maintaining these restrictions, whether in the private plans that might receive federal subsidies in a proposed insurance exchange or in any public plan competing in this exchange.

Abortion opponents also want these restrictions spelled out explicitly, not left to court decisions or to the appointees of a president who has repeatedly described himself as pro-choice.

Not surprisingly, defenders of legal access to abortion see the status quo differently. They recognize the reality of the near total ban on federal financing of abortion. But they emphasize that millions of women are covered by insurance plans, mostly through employers, that pay for abortions.

As low-income individuals or as employees of small businesses, many of these women may qualify either for the subsidized private plans or the public option offered in an exchange. If abortion could not be included in any of those benefits packages, these women would lose the kind of coverage they have now.

For abortion rights advocates, that would not only constitute an unacceptable departure from the status quo, it would also violate the president’s principle that under an overhaul, people not lose their current coverage.

Read the whole piece right here.

He is Richard Dawkins. In today’s Wall Street Weekend Journal, after singing a hymn of praise to Darwinian evolution, he says:

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

She is Karen Armstrong. In the same space she celebrates the “God beyond God” and says:

Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the “God beyond God.” The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.

Actually, they may both be saying the same thing. What say ye?

Two prolife activists Two people, one of them a prolife activist, were gunned down in Michigan yesterday. God rest their souls.  I can’t help wondering — is this in some sense a crazed retaliation for the killing of Tiller?  What kind of a society are we?  Those who recognize the Constitution protects abortion ought to recognize that the Constitution protects the right of free speech — including free speech that protests current constitutional interpretations.

But it was this story — more senseless murders — that made me realize that I myself am not as sanguine as some on this blog are about the possibility of neatly separating spiritual warfare from moral warfare from culture warfare from physical warfare. At the very least, I think prudence suggests dialing down that language in favor of other metaphors.  But for a contrasting view, which recognizes the undeniable role of spiritual combat in the Christian tradition, see Bob Imbelli’s post below.

I’m sure that it did not escape anyone’s notice that yesterday was September 11. Some Muslim scholars, as I understand it, argue that “jihad” was centrally meant to mean spiritual “jihad” — its use in the form of warfare was a misunderstanding.  My question, I suppose is, whether martial imagery in general  is too susceptible (by Christians too) to a distorted migration from interior to exterior warfare.

Last week, on the feast of St. Gregory the Great, I entered a post on the “Spiritual Combat.” I did not know at the time that the Monastery of Bose in Northern Italy was sponsoring an ecumenical conference on the theme, “Spiritual Combat in the Orthodox Tradition” from September 9th through 12th.

There is a very fine paper posted on the Monastery’s website, by the prior of Bose, Enzo Bianchi (though, as of this post, it is available only in Italian).

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a great friend of the Monastery, and went on retreat there prior to his consecration as Archbishop. He sent greetings to the gathering. Here is an excerpt:

I am very happy once again to send my blessings and best wishes as you gather at Bose to pray and reflect and to discuss what the great teachers of the spiritual life have called ‘the art of arts’ the disciplines and practices that shape us, by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit, into the likeness of Jesus Christ.

On this occasion, you will be focusing on the imagery of ‘spiritual struggle’. From the very beginning of Christianity, as we see in the words and actions of Our Lord himself, there has been the conviction that human beings have been the object of a violent assault from the forces of spiritual evil, an assault that has left them disastrously weakened and less than free. The Lord comes with a gospel of absolute, nonviolent mercy and promise. Yet the effect of this gospel confronting the aggression of evil is a great conflict, played out in what the Western liturgy calls an ‘astounding battle’, duellum mirandum, a hand to hand struggle between death and life in the Paschal mystery, from which Christ emerges as conqueror. It is that Paschal struggle that now takes place in the depth of the hearts of all the baptised: we struggle, not for our own victory, but for the victory of Christ to be manifest in us.

For this to become real, we need at least two things. The first is a keen eye to diagnose the stratagems of the forces of destruction, the various subtle ways in which Christ’s victory can be obscured or undermined in us by passions that cloud our understanding. We need to be able to see where our self-oriented, self-serving habits ally themselves with the deeper currents of negation and rebellion that are at work in the universe, and to which we give the name of the diabolical. Secondly, we need, quite simply, perseverance the long vision that is able to see the defeats of yesterday and today as opportunities for penitence and learning, not for despair. And this is a patience born out of the confidence that the victory has truly been won already in the cross and resurrection of the Saviour. There is nothing passive about it. It is the habit of unfailing hope, grounded in the faithfulness of the God who continually ‘is giving us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ’ (I Cor. 15:57).

In the eyes of some people, this language is difficult. In the modern world, we are inclined to recoil from the vocabulary of warfare. In our own Church, certain hymns that use this imagery have become unfashionable in recent years. It is also hard for many to accept that the task of being a disciple of Jesus Christ is a matter of a lifetime’s labour, not the work of a moment and not simply the enjoyment of comforting religious feelings.

My colleague Rick Garnett and I had a chat about this interesting New Hampshire custody case a few days ago. He blogs on it here. I’m afraid I don’t see the dire implications for religious freedom here that Jody Bottum and Rick do.

The parents, as far as I can tell, have joint custody of the girl — according to their custody agreement, the court was to step in if there was disagreement. The court did so. All along, the  father objected to home schooling, the mother endorsed it. His objections became stronger over time — in part because of the religious framework embedded in it.

If the mother was raising the child to believe that the father was going to hell–and didn’t love her enough because he didn’t share her belief systems, it seems to me he has just cause to be concerned. (Suppose the father was Catholic–and the mother was raising the child to believe Catholics go to hell).

So here are the questions:

1) Is it legitimate, in the course of a custody hearing, for the court to take into account the effect of a religious belief systems on a child’s relationship with the non-custodial parent? It seems to me that the answer is yes.

2) Is it legitimate for the court, in this context, to have and employ a theory of education–a default understanding of what it means to educate a child to operate in this society, apart from achieving test scores, to apply in the context of familial disputes?. Again, I think the answer is yes.

Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic quotes Gerald Marzorati, the editor of the New York Times Magazine, who was recently asked if his magazine has an ideology. Marzorati answered yes, and then explained:

Call it Urban Modern. That is, I think it reflects not a left-or-right POLITICAL ideology but a geographical one, the mentality of the place it is created: 21st Century Manhattan. So: the Magazine reflects a place where women have professional ambition, where immigrants are welcome, and where gays and lesbians can be themselves (if not marry, yet). The Magazine also reflects a place where being rich is not a bad thing, where fashion is not a sign of superficiality, and where individualism is embraced. Here, arguing is not bad manners. Here, a chief way of loving your hometown is criticizing it: For, say, not doing enough for those (children, the poor, the homeless) who are most vulnerable. Here, art is never spoken of in moral terms, and most aspects of everyday life–food and drink and bathroom fixtures–are mostly spoken of in aesthetic terms. And here, as E.B. White famously wrote, it tends to be those who come from elsewhere full of longing who make the place what it is. More generally, we reflect a place where change is not a threat, where doubt and complexity are more TRUE than certainty, and where most everything non-criminal is tolerated–except a bad haircut.

Wieseltier’s response to this is both predictable and satisfying:

[W]hat is being celebrated here is the ideology of no ideology–the ascendancy of the Nora Ephron view of the world, which may be succinctly described as “food and drink and bathroom fixtures.” What moves such a heart most (aside from children, the poor, and the homeless) are amenities and trivialities. The conferring of importance upon the unimportant, and of unimportance upon the important: this is a mark of decadence, the cognitive inversion of people who live “mostly in aesthetic terms” because they have secured themselves materially–or so they would like to believe—against philosophy and pain. They live for lightness and distraction. Their laughter is the sound of luck. They acquit themselves of their intellectual obligations with opinions. The anxiety that arguing may be bad manners is plausibly held by someone whose primary arena of political action may be the dinner party. (Darling, were we wrong about Obama?) [...] [W]hen Marzorati jauntily protests that in Manhattan being rich is not a bad thing, it has the effect of concealing that in Manhattan being poor is a bad thing. That is how high spirits work in hard times. And what is so terrifying about seriousness, anyway? I like to think of it as nothing more than proof of consciousness. Happy is the man whose worst misfortune is a bad haircut, but no such man lives.

In today’s New York Times, Michael Kimmelman has a quite devastating review of a concert in which the pianist, Lang Lang “twittered his way through Chopin’s F Minor Piano Concerto.”

In making his point, Kimmelman quotes some reflections by the estimable Anne Applebaum:

It brought to mind what Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post columnist, wrote about interpreting history these days. Writing for The New Republic, she reviewed a book by Nicholson Baker, “Human Smoke,” about the lead-up to World War II, which stitched together, without comment, hundreds of nuggets culled from newspapers, memoirs and other (often secondary) sources to suggest a case for pacifism.

“A series of pretentious, Gawker-like vignettes,” Ms. Applebaum called these orchestrated tidbits. “Ripped from their respective contexts each item has the same weight as the next. There is no hierarchy, no sense that one enigmatic anecdote might be more important than the next equally enigmatic anecdote.”

That’s not a bad description of what Mr. Lang did with the Chopin concerto. What Ms. Applebaum added is also true about music: “There are many legitimate ways to write history, even many avant-garde, nonlinear, novelistic ways to write history, as the historiography of World War II itself well illustrates.” But history persuasively told, like music interpreted, comes down to cogent arguments. The pianist Glenn Gould was an eccentric interpreter, but his interpretations, whether you liked them or not, had their own internal, neurotic logic. They made an elaborate case for themselves. The same could be said about playing by Vladimir Horowitz or Sviatoslav Richter.

Flashy passages strung together don’t make an argument. They make an assortment of fetishes. “Perhaps,” Ms. Applebaum wondered at one point about “Human Smoke,” “the whole book is a gigantic practical joke, a stunt intended to provoke.” I wondered the same thing during the concerto.

I take it that under “forms of thought” (Stanley Fish’s phrase, quoted in Matthew Boudway’s post below) one should include the ability to mount an argument in a coherent way, whether one is writing history or interpreting music. Diagramming sentences helped show the form of a sentence. But what about the form of a paragraph, of an essay, of a book?

In the current New York Review of Books, the philosopher John R. Searle makes an interesting observation:

It is much easier to refute a bad argument than to refute a truly dreadful argument. A bad argument has enough structure that you can point out its badness. But with a truly dreadful argument, you have to try to reconstruct it so that it is clear enough that you can state a refutation.

Form, structure, coherent argument — if we can’t bring back the nuns, at least bring back the ratio studiorum!

First up, the National Right to Life Committee:

“The claim that a federal agency would be spending private funds on abortion, not federal funds, is absurd on its face, a political hoax,” [NRLC legislative director Douglas] Johnson said.

Next, Bill Donohue:

President Obama is playing a shell game. He defended the public option plan last night, and under that plan, the person in charge of deciding whether abortion coverage will be mandated is his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. This is the same woman who befriended George Tiller, the infamous abortionist who specialized in killing babies 80-percent born. Is there anyone who doubts what her decision will be?… Being wrong is one thing. Being deceitful is quite another.

Finally, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops:

Calling it an important contribution to a crucial national debate, officials speaking on behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops welcomed President Obama’s September 9 address on health care reform, particularly his statements regarding abortion and the uninsured.

“We agree that ‘no one should go broke because they get sick,’” said Kathy Saile, Director of Domestic Social Development at the USCCB. “That’s why the U.S. Bishops have worked for decades for decent health care for all. The Catholic Church provides health care for millions, purchases health care, picks up the pieces of a failing health system, and has a long tradition of teaching on ethics in health care. Health care reform that respects the life and dignity of all is a moral imperative and urgent national priority. We welcome the President’s speech as an important contribution to this essential national debate and task.”

“We especially welcome the President’s commitment to exclude federal funding of abortion, and to maintain existing federal laws protecting conscience rights in health care,” said Richard Doerflinger, Associate Director of Pro-Life Activities at the USCCB. “We believe that incorporating essential and longstanding federal laws on these issues into any new proposal will strengthen support for health care reform. We will work with Congress and the Administration to ensure that these protections are clearly reflected in new legislation, so no one is required to pay for or take part in abortion as a result of health care reform.”

“We agree with the President that there are details that need to be ironed out,” said Saile. “And with his address last night, we see the opportunity to work towards a truly universal health policy with respect for human life and dignity, access for all with a special concern for the poor, and inclusion of legal immigrants. We also see the possibility of meeting the bishops’ goal to pursue the common good and preserve pluralism, including freedom of conscience and a variety of options, and restraining costs and applying them equitably across the spectrum of payers.”

Last night’s speech struck me as, above all, extremely shrewd. President Obama played the middle, as he does whenever he can, stressing the common ground of the issue and marginalizing what belongs to the margins. He began by stressing the moral and financial cases for health-care reform as matters of common principle that no one disputes. The distortions he then enumerated sounded as petty and unworthy of serious attention as they indeed are. His appeals to the American spirit, to freedom and independence, good-faith debate and the “sacred trust” of providing security to citizens, made it very uncomfortable for Republicans to sit with their arms folded acting out their refusal to cooperate. He even threw them a few surprise bones. Rep. Charles Boustany, offering the “response,” was left with very little to say.

I think Obama accomplished something simple but very important: he made reforming health-care and insurance seem like a common cause, a reasonable thing everyone ought to be able to commit to (as indeed it is). As Obama presented it, supporting reform isn’t a matter of choosing sides. At the same time — and this wasn’t entirely Obama’s achievement — the Republican “side” came off looking smaller and less attractive than ever. When the speech was over Jim Lehrer asked Mark Shields and David Brooks for their reactions, and Shields immediately called attention to the astonishing sight of the Republicans “sitting on their hands” when Obama called out the “death panels” claim as a lie. At other times — the Joe Wilson outburst; the pouty fellow with the “What Bill?” sign in his lap; the representatives waving whatever-they-were-waving in the back of the hall — the GOP simply looked petty, at least to my eyes. And they did it to themselves. When, in the end, Obama made the case that the debate over this issue is a measure of our country’s “moral character,” it was hard not to feel queasy.

Since the GOP was defeated in November, they’ve been scrambling to find their footing as the minority party. The tactic I find most remarkable is the simple fingers-in-ears posture of pretending they still represent the majority. It’s what drives all the Obama-is-a-usurper hysteria, from birthers to Fox News: he’s erecting a “shadow government,” he’s compiling an “enemies list.” Anything to avoid having to admit that he won the election (and the popular vote), along with many other members of his party, and is now pursuing the very things he said he’d do if elected. That same tactic is at the heart of rhetoric about “the real America” — Democracy only counts when the majority agrees with me; otherwise it must be malfunctioning. And you can hear it now anytime any Obama opponent talks about how reform is being “rammed down our throats”; how it’s something “nobody wants.” There are even people like Bill Kristol willing to claim “There is no health-care crisis.” Boustany, in his response, claimed that “most Americans” wanted the President to admonish Pelosi and Reid and “start over.” But by the time Obama’s speech was over, Boustany didn’t have much ground to claim to speak for “most Americans.” Lest we forget: Most Americans voted for the Democrats, and this is what they promised they would do. So what I most wanted to see in the speech last night, and what I did see, was Obama countering that line of opposition without acknowledging it outright. In fact, we do need reform. People do want it. And if your representative is acting in good faith, (s)he’ll work to improve it, not kill it for the sake of killing it.

What did you think?

In his online New York Times column, “Think Again,” Stanley Fish writes here, here, and here about the way writing is taught at American colleges. His conclusion: It usually isn’t taught well when it is taught at all. Along the way Fish spars with several composition teachers who, in their responses to his first column on the topic, assume that Professor Fish, an eminent Milton scholar, has never taught composition himself. True, he doesn’t say anything in that first column about his own extensive experience as a writing teacher and tutor (at UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and, most recently, Columbia University’s Teachers College). So his critics took the bait. Fish has some fun reeling them in.  

When Max Byrd says (contemptuously), “Professor Fish might get off his high horse and teach a course himself,” I reply, Professor Byrd should climb off his low horse and do some fact-checking before he pronounces.

In his third column, Fish mentions one important exception to his general observation that American high schools don’t teach students how to write.

By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all. The exception seems to be Catholic schools. More than a few commentators remembered with a mixture of fondness and pain the instruction they received at the hands of severe nuns. And I have found that those students in my classes who do have a grasp of the craft of writing are graduates of parochial schools. (I note parenthetically that in many archdioceses such schools are being closed, not a good omen for those who prize writing.)

Fish thinks the best way to teach students how to write is to teach them the various forms an English sentence can take. These forms are what generate meaning. They “are not inert taxonomic forms, but forms of thought.” The content doesn’t matter — indeed, to the composition teacher it is usually a distraction. Fish shows his own students a “neither/nor” sentence, has them write their own ”neither/nor” sentences (about anything), then asks them to analyse the deep structure of such a sentence: How does it “organize items and actions in the world”? This is not exactly the method those severe nuns used, but an emphasis on the formal elements of language– in English and, for many students at Catholic secondary schools, also in Latin — did once distinguish Catholic education. Does it still?

HT:  Andrew Sullivan

Johnathan Cohn, the exceedingly well-informed health care analyst at the New Republic:

“Somehow, though, health reform is not dead. Despite all of the setbacks and all of the missed opportunities–despite this train wreck of a month–the situation remains remarkably similar to what it was before the recess. Significant health care legislation is likely to pass, particularly if Obama manages to give a good speech on Wednesday night. And while the possibilities for what that legislation might accomplish have certainly diminished, mostly for worse, it’s not clear how much they have diminished–and to what extent progressives may yet have the power to change that fact.”

Read the whole thing: http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/why-reform-survived-august

We’re back to our regular biweekly schedule starting with the September 11 issue of Commonweal — the “Laity Issue” — now online and in the mail. Free for all to read:

• Our editorial on the president’s promise to make health-care reform “abortion-neutral,” and the difficulties of carrying that out.
• Peggy Steinfels’s memoir of growing up Catholic in Chicago (already under discussion below).
• Richard Alleva’s review of the film The Hurt Locker.

There’s much more in this issue for subscribers to enjoy: Kathleen Sprows Cummings fills us in on the myth of the Council of Mâcon — at which, according to a pernicious legend, Church leaders debated whether women have souls — and how the success of that particular falsehood illustrates the historical divide between Catholics and feminists. You’ll also find columns by E. J. Dionne (on the passing of Ted Kennedy) and Cathleen Kaveny (a response to the article by Gilbert Meilaender in the August 14 issue); an update from Britain by Bernard Bergonzi on the bleak outlook for the Labour Party; an article by a former altar girl — yours truly — lamenting the Vatican’s chilly attitude toward that form of lay ministry; and short editorials about Senator Kennedy, the most recent revelations regarding torture under the Bush Administration, and the Vatican visitation/investigation of American women religious. There’s an art review by Leo O’Donovan; book reviews by Andrew Bacevich, Eduardo Peñalver, Oliver Larry Yarbrough, and Francis X. Clooney; and Celia Wren’s review of the new PBS documentary The National Parks. And as they say on PBS, all this is thanks to readers like you. (Not a subscriber? Operators are standing by!)

Karl Vick of the Washington Post reports on the pernicious practice of insurance-policy “recission”–when insurers decide to cancel a policy on the grounds that they’ve been misled:

“They said I never mentioned I had a back problem,” said Marrari, 52, whose coverage with Blue Cross was abruptly canceled in 2006 after a thyroid disorder, fluid in the heart and lupus were diagnosed. That left the Los Angeles woman with $25,000 in medical bills and the stigma of the company’s claim that she had committed fraud by not listing on a health questionnaire “preexisting conditions” Marrari said she did not know she had.

By the time she filed a lawsuit in 2008, she also got a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and her debts had swelled beyond $200,000. She was able to see a specialist by trading office visits for work on the doctor’s 1969 Porsche at the garage she owns with her husband.

(…)

In the past 18 months, California’s five largest insurers paid almost $19 million in fines for marooning policyholders who had fallen ill. That includes a $1 million fine against Health Net, which admitted offering bonuses to employees for finding reasons to cancel policies, according to company documents released in court.

(Full disclosure: Health Net is my insurer.)

“We do not rescind a policyholder’s coverage because someone on the policy gets sick,” said Peggy Hinz, a spokeswoman for Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of WellPoint. “We have put in place a thorough process with multiple steps to ensure that we are as fair and as accurate as we can be in making these difficult decisions.”

Much of that process was a condition of settlements with state overseers, who fined Blue Cross $11 million over the past two years and required it, and all other major insurers in California, to restore canceled policies. Insurers still face court challenges, including a class-action suit targeting Blue Cross on behalf of 6,000 canceled policyholders.

(…)

In the only case to go to trial in California, an arbitration judge awarded $9 million to a beautician who had to stop chemotherapy for her breast cancer after Health Net dropped her policy. Company officials declined to comment.

In a pending case, Blue Shield searched in vain for an inconsistency in the health records of the wife of a dairy farmer after she filed a claim for emergency gallbladder surgery, according to attorneys for the family. Turning to her husband’s questionnaire, the company discovered he had not mentioned his high cholesterol and dropped them both. Blue Shield officials said they would not comment on a pending case.

(…)

For Teresa Dietrich, it was fibroids. The Northern California real estate agent was left to pay $19,000 after Blue Cross said she did not disclose a diagnosis of the benign uterine tumors. But Dietrich said the doctor who had written “fibroids” on her medical record never mentioned his suspicions to her. The bills destroyed her credit and cost her her home — and, in a comically cruel twist, the surgery proved the doctor was wrong.

“They said I had a condition I didn’t even have,” Dietrich said. “And they canceled me.”

If federal health-care reform bars companies from screening for preexisting conditions, insurers note that cancellations will no longer be an issue. But Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin, an economist at the Rand Corp., said that unless for-profit companies are compensated for taking higher-risk patients, the firms will continue to look for ways to unload them.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Joseph Ratzinger’s life is often tracked by dividing it into discrete stages, notably the progressive of the Council, the reactionary of the post-conciliar era, and now the irenic pastor-pontiff of encyclicals like Deus Caritas Est etc. I tend to see more continuity than discontinuity (something he appreciates in himself), though with a distinct flowering of his inherent “Augustinian” pessimism (an overused phrase, but apt in Ratzinger’s case, I think) since the 1960s. Other factors in his darkening vision of life in the church and the world might include more personal rather than ideological or theological factors, such as his innate distaste for the messy-ness of modern life (or much of anything) and for modern culture. He also enjoys mixing it up with his foes, which may be part and parcel of his careers as a theologian and as an upwardly mobile churchman. Every once in a while the “old” Ratzinger emerges, and reveals in plain terms what remains his worldview–as for example he does in this fairly routine address on vocations that he delivered this week to a group of Brazilian bishops:

Esteemed brothers, in the decades following the Second Vatican Council, some interpreted the openness not as a demand flowing from the missionary ardor of the Heart of Christ, but as a step toward secularization, perceiving there certain strong Christian values, such as equality, liberty, solidarity. They showed themselves ready to make concessions and discover areas of cooperation. We witnessed the interventions of some ecclesiastical officials in ethical debates, which responded to the expectations of public opinion, but which failed to speak of certain essential truths of the faith, such as sin, grace, theological life and the last things. Without realizing it, many ecclesial communities fell into self-secularization. Hoping to charm those who were not joining, they saw many of their members leave, cheated and disillusioned. When our contemporaries come to us, they want to see something that they do not see elsewhere, namely, joy and the hope that springs from the fact that we are with the Risen Lord.

At present there is a new generation born in this secularized ecclesial environment who, instead of looking for openness and consensus, see how the gap between society and the positions of the magisterium of the Church, especially in the ethical field, is ever greater. In this desert lacking God, the new generation feels a great thirst for transcendence.

It is the young men of this new generation who knock on the door of seminaries, and who need to find formators who are true men of God, priests totally dedicated to formation, who give witness of the gift of themselves to the Church, through celibacy and an austere life, according to the model of Christ the Good Shepherd. Thus, these young men will learn to be sensitive to the encounter with the Lord, in daily participation in the Eucharist, loving silence and prayer, working first of all for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

And of course he goes on to cite the Cure d’Ars as the role model for priests…

In any case, some will agree, others disagree, with Benedict’s assessment. But I think it shows in which camp he has cast his lot in the ongoing battle in the church.

I was fascinated by Peggy Steinfels’s memoir of growing up in a Chicago Catholic world. So I thought I’d open a thread, with a question. Which little First Communicant is you, Peggy? I haven’t gotten my paper version yet.

Woops–looking again, it isn’t first communion. What is it?

Those of you lucky enough to receive First Things in ink will find on the back page of the October issue (not yet on line) an ad “announcing the envoy of the year gala” (being awarded to Archbishop Charles Chaput). You may puzzle at the ad headline:

“Christian voices are far too silent in the public square. Join us as we turn up the volume.”

To this, we can only ask how much louder can it get? Before we are all deafened?