Archbishop Dolan’s blog refused to take Father’s Day off from the crusade against gay marriage.  I applaud Dolan’s embrace of blogging, and Dolan’s posts have attracted a great deal of media attention, but I wish he would put more thought into his posts on this topic.  I think it would be a much more powerful use of the medium, and would be helpful for those of us struggling to understand the Church’s state of panic in the face of gay marriage, if he would engage in a more detailed way with the arguments on both sides of this issue.  One searches his posts in vain for  reasoned argument, finding instead a series of conclusory zingers like the one with which he finished up his most recent post.  “Government presumes to redefine these sacred words at the peril of the common good.”  How does expanding the definition of the family to encompass same sex couples threaten the common good?  Dolan doesn’t tell us.  His post simply ends.

I looked back at his earlier post, and it also fails to adequately explain his views, except to tell us that the family is the foundation of our civilization  and that tinkering with its definition is dangerous.  I suppose I agree with both of those points, but neither one rules out same sex marriage.  After all, the definition of marriage varies across time.  Polygamy is approved in the Bible, though it is now illegal.  Dolan doesn’t discuss that, despite a reference to the authority of Genesis in his most recent post.  Divorce used to be prohibited but no-fault divorce is now ubiquitous.  Interracial marriage was legally forbidden in many US jurisdictions until just a generation ago.  Now it is constitutionally protected.  Telling us that revising the definition of the family is dangerous either means that all of these past changes were wrong or that, more likely, some were better than others.  But if it means the latter, it adds nothing but a cautionary note to the present debate.  It cannot be decisive.

Indeed, Dolan himself can hardly make up his mind on the subject of marriage’s meaning.  In his two posts on the issue, he tells us that traditional definition of marriage is “timeless” and “as old as human reason and ordered good.”  And, yet, in these same two posts, separated by a mere four days, Dolan himself actually gives us, not one, but THREE different definitions of marriage.  In his first post, he says that marriage is “one man, one woman, united in lifelong love and fidelity, hoping for children.”  His second definition, in the same post, is similar but not identical:  “a loving, permanent, life-giving union to pro-create children.” Finally, in his Father’s Day post, he says that marriage is a “loving, faithful union between one man and one woman leading to a family.”

Of course, marriage has not been “lifelong” or “permanent” by law for a long time, and yet no blog posts urging NY legislators to (re)prohibit no-fault divorce  as a grave threat to the common good have yet appeared on Dolan’s blog.  [UPDATE:  By the way, no-fault divorce is actually a recent innovation in NY family law.  While the Church opposed the change, during the debate, the director of the New York State Catholic Conference (which bills itself as the "official public policy voice of the Catholic Church") noted that “[c]learly, not every marriage can be permanent.”]  Perhaps someone pointed this out after Dolan’s first post, which might explain why he dropped any reference to duration in his most recent, timeless definition.

As for procreation, “hoping for children” and “to pro-create children” are far from identical.  Both might be read to rule out marriages among the non-fertile, though the “hoping for children” formulation is less exclusive on that front.  But this leads to the question — which is it to be?  Does the marriage of two 80-year-olds threaten the timeless definition of marriage or undermine the common good?  If not, why not?  In his most recent definition, the reference to procreation is replaced by “leading to a family.”  This is circular, since legal recognition of same-sex couples as “families” would allow their unions to also “lead[] to a family.”  That’s the whole point.

These blog posts were useful opportunities for some thoughtful reflection on these questions, but the Archbishop chose instead to write unconvincing little screeds aimed at producing nice sound-bites for the press.   Those who agree with him will no doubt take heart from his vocal opposition to New York’s proposed legislation.  For the rest of us, we are no better able to understand the foundation for his fears than we were before.

Just in case you didn’t know, there is a Lewis & Short ap for the iPhone/iPad. The ap is $3.99; the dictionary itself is $255.  You can get an iPad for about $400. Now you have to get one, don’t you–it would almost be fiscally irresponsible not to!

And don’t forget the chiropractor fees you’ll save; I remember taking Reggie Foster’s intensive Latin class in Rome, and lugging that blasted dictionary up and down the Gianiculum, across St. Peter’s Square, and on the 40 bus. How nice it would have been to have it all on a iPad!

The TLS has a lengthy and rather well-balanced piece reviewing two recent books on G.K. Chesterton, one of them a very large biography by Ian Ker, known for his works on Newman.  Don’t be distracted by the “hook”: whether he should be canonized.

Last weekend I saw two plays that explore religious and philosophical themes against a backdrop of war. The first is a new American play now on Broadway (through July 3), Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year (although, strangely, not a Tony nominee for Best Play), and the Broadway production has generated some buzz around its star, Robin Williams. He plays the tiger (no kidding).

Bengal Tiger is set in Iraq in 2003, but its take on the war is not political. The war is a source of interior and exterior conflict, a disruption of the normal order of things, for everyone from the tiger — transplanted from his natural habitat, and now under bombardment in the zoo and guarded by two U.S. marines — to the American soldiers to the Iraqis themselves. The play is violent and suspenseful, but also comical and at times philosophical. It is haunted by ghosts, who increase in number as the plot moves forward, and who find themselves in a kind of purgatorial state, where their knowledge of the world and their own actions increases and leaves them with uncomfortable questions about God and morality. Even the tiger finds himself wondering whether God is punishing him for past cruelties — for his very tiger-ness. Having passed into some sort of afterlife, he is forced to consider the possibility that “Heaven” and “Hell” are not, as he (and, he says, all tigers) presumed, “just metaphorical constructs that represent ‘hungry’ and ‘not hungry.’” If there’s an afterlife, does that mean there must be a God? But if there’s a God — where is He? Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a little film clip about two and a half minutes long, where Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich lays out our basic economic and political dilemma, using little cartoons.

Robert Reich: Artist and Scholar

Since the clip is from Moveon.org, which we know is at the very heart of the liberal beast, there may be a strong temptation for many to either embrace the argument or dismiss it out of hand.  But don’t.

Instead, let’s use this as an exercise on how to test the veracity of two minute elevator speeches.  Totally disregarding Reich’s or Moveon’s intentions, we have the following four things we can test and discuss:

1. Reich makes what are, in effect, statistical statements (i.e. wages have been flat for workers since 1980).  Are these facts themselves true.  If not, what is the truth?
2. Reich takes groups of facts and draws links between them.  Even if the facts are true, are the links of cause and effect that he is proposing reasonable?  If not, why?
3. Reich selects groups of facts to draw his relationships.  He presumably selects the facts that bolster his argument.  Are there other facts that should be inserted that modify or oppose his reasoning?
4. Reich is making a case from which to draw a certain political conclusion.  Is his conclusion warranted by the facts?  Or can other conclusions be drawn?

For this experiment, you are only allowed to discuss this clip in terms of these four aspects. In the interests of free speech, something that I would never dare suppress, you can actually talk about whatever you want.  But anyone who puts out purely partisan remarks, trollish statements, or non-sequiturs is going to be “cheesecaked” by me.  That is to say, I will non-respond to you by posting a line from my late mother’s famous secret cheesecake recipe as a way of acknowledging you without actually engaging you.

Have at it.  I think Reich is spot on.

Brooklyn’s Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio writes a weekly column called “Put out into the Deep” – a title that expresses the high priority he places on the new evangelization.

But when the bishop uses his column in his diocesan newspaper, the Tablet, to assail  specific legislators, it doesn’t help to build the plunging number of Catholics in his diocese. Social science research shows that churchgoers, especially younger ones, are prone to leave churches they perceive as too involved in electoral politics. Robert Putnam and David Campbell make a strong case for this in their carefully researched book “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.”  They write: “Americans overwhelmighly disapprove of political persuasion by religious leaders.” And, they say, “in a competitive religious market they risk an exodus of members.”  And: “Continuing to sound the public trumpet of conservative personal morality may be the right thing to do from a theological point of view, but it may mean saving fewer souls than it did a generation ago.”

DiMarzio assails three New York state senators – Carl Kruger, Shirley Huntley, Joseph Addabbo – who have decided (after being undecided) to vote in favor of same-sex marriage, and notes that Kruger is under indictment and Huntley under investigation. (“Sadly, this is the character of our elected officials who are essentially redefining `marriage.’ “) “My hope is that constituents will hold these elected official accountable for their decisions,” he writes, adding that they “have ignored their constituents and preferred the counsel of powerful and well-funded elites.”

The upper half of the diocesan newspaper’s front page features a color spread with the three senators’ photos, a “yes” box on “same sex marriage vote” next to each one’s name. The headline is “Shame! Shame! Shame!” This front page is essentially a political attack ad.

It was no doubt a stinging rebuff to the bishop that these senators from his diocese rejected whatever means of persuasion he brought on them. But there are many other state legislators in the diocese who have voted or will vote in favor of same-sex marriage (for example, Assemblyman Vito Lopez, for whom the bishop made robo-calls praising his help in preventing a change in the statute of limitations on sex-abuse lawsuits). It doesn’t seem fair to single out these three in such a way and not to decry the “yes” vote already cast by Lopez (no stranger to law-enforcement investigation) and many others.

I would expect church leaders to speak out on important issues, including same-sex marriage. But  politicized attacks such as this one won’t accomplish anything except to hasten the movement of young Catholics from the church.

An alternative perspective to the views in the MSM: Continuing the question of Ahmadinejad’s power in Iran; the fraught relations between Iran and Syria; the threatened nuclear break-out or not; and the impact of sanctions. A short interview with Ray Takeyh at the Council on Foreign Relations.    He also co-authored an op-ed piece in Wednesday’s Times, (June 17), too clever to be wholly coherent (bad editor!).

As an observer of the re-translation of the Roman Missal since 1990 or so, I was very pleased to see that Robert Mickens has an article in the June 18 issue of the Tablet about the politics that have taken place behind the scenes — leading to the latest version. There has been plenty of intrigue, and Mickens, the Tablet’s reporter in Rome, is well situated to report on it. 

The new English translation, in case you are unaware, will be visited upon us here in the United States beginning in Advent 2011. Australia has just begun the first installment of their gradual rollout, with the people’s parts being implemented now, before the full text of the Missal is ready for use.

Mickens’s article will appear in two installments, so we have to wait to hear about some of the more recent (and most appalling) episodes, but he telegraphs the punch in the opening of the article:

It is the story of how a small number of English-speaking bishops broke ranks with their confreres and colluded with conservative papal bureaucrats to change the rules for translating liturgical texts. And it offers a sad spectacle of men who used the liturgy to further their own agenda of reinterpreting the ecclesiology envisaged by the Second Vatican Council.

Ouch. Is it really quite that bad? Well, the full details will only appear the next installment, but my general take on the subject is yes, alas, it is as bad as that. (Unfortunately, the article is subscriber only. I’ll post on it, though, when it appears.)

Now, a lot of people are trying to put on a happy face about the translation that is coming. Is it a good thing to look critically at the process which produced it? If the 2011 translation is coming, like it or not, isn’t this just stirring up discontent to no purpose?

I would say, first of all, that once people see and hear the texts, they will wonder what on earth happened. It is good to know the inside story just to make sense of it all. Second, we’ve discussed many times the need for transparency and accountability in the Catholic Church. The sex abuse crisis has brought this home to us time and time again. In the translation saga, a good deal of the transparency that existed in the 1990s has been done away with, and in the end (the period from 2008 to 2011) a few people, unaccountable to anyone but the curia, have held sway over the final texts of the Missal which the entire English-speaking world shall receive.

If these individuals had been the best, the brightest, the most skilled, and if they brought us a jewel of a translation, I admit we’d soon forget the vagaries of how we got here. There is such a thing as giving the reins over to brilliant people — artists in fact — who need to be let alone to produce their very best. But that is not what happened. And because the translation we are going to receive is far from the best that the Church can produce, we need to look at why.

There is also the question, which Mickens’s article takes up, of whether the latest translation project represents a retreat from the ecclesiology of Vatican II, which included de-centralization of liturgical decision-making. This strategic question is important.

Notre Dame Law graduate Matt Emerson now has a regular column at Patheos. As the title of the column suggests, he is deeply influenced by the Jesuit charism; he gave up legal practice in order to teach religion a Jesuit high school in California.
Check it out.

P.S. I have to say I smiled when I saw that Matt now has a column:  He took courses with me (a Commonweal columnist) in law school, and took courses with Fr. John Kavanaugh, SJ (an America columnist) as an undergraduate.  So he got an early double dose of exposure to the fascinations and frustrations of the genre!

Welcome, Matt!

As a socially inept and sexually inexperienced teenager heading off to college, I was grateful even then for the fact that Furman University had single-sex dorms, separated by a lush campus. And now, still socially inept and the father of a nearly six-year-old girl (though with an unfunded college account), I appreciate the distance between the sexes at Furman that allowed for a slow introduction to the opposite gender. (The fact that Bob Jones University was across town, with its, ahem, strict dating policies, made us seem postively libertine, of course.)

So my first reaction to the news that the new CUA president, John Garvey, is converting all 17 halls to single-sex next year was, “Good for him.” That was my second reaction too. (11 of the 17 are currently coed.) I figure motivated college kids will do what they’re going to do. (Furman was a “dry” campus as well, ostensibly.) Garvey points to some research indicating that single-sex dorms reduce casual hookups and binge drinking. The research doesn’t seem exhaustive by any stretch.

But still…Read the WaPo story here. And the paper’s higher ed blog has further reaction here, and notes that Notre Dame (what will conservatives say?!) does not have coed dorms. Thoughts?

Live coverage of the USCCB meeting from TeleCare:

I posted the other day about Julian and Adrian Riester, the Franciscan brothers and identical twins who died the same day, at 92, of heart failure. Now Dan Barry, the fine New York Times columnist and author of the affecting memoir “Pull Me up” (and most recently, “Bottom of the 33rd,” about baseball’s longest game), has a tribute to the men who worked devotedly and almost unheralded — until their deaths — at Barry’s own alma mater, St. Bonaventure University:

The Riesters were the sons of a prominent Buffalo doctor and his wife, and matching gifts to five older sisters. Though bright and observant, the brothers did not excel in school; a nephew, Kevin McCue, suspects a missed diagnosis of dyslexia.

After being turned down by the armed forces on medical grounds — a bad left eye for one, a bad right for the other — they attended radio technology school in California. Then World War II broke out, just as they were exploring religious life. They received an acceptance letter from the Franciscans one morning, and a letter from the draft board that afternoon. They made their choice: Jerome became Brother Julian, and Irving became Brother Adrian.

Back then, the Franciscans followed a rather un-Franciscan caste system, with priests the well-educated elite, often working with books, and the lay brothers the less-educated support staff, often working with livestock. The Riesters, though earnestly obedient, did not understand why the two groups were discouraged from fraternizing; why, for example, the priests and brothers had separate recreation rooms. Didn’t St. Francis say that we are all brothers?

A “Yes, but” answer came when their superior ordered the dismantling of a modest boat they had built to ply the wondrous Allegheny. He may have thought that the vessel violated their vow of poverty — or, more likely, he may have disliked how they took seminarians, their betters, for boat rides.

Here, then, were two shy men, surrounded by scholars, discouraged from speaking, uncertain what to say if given the chance, and yet confident that this was their calling. “They were definitely second-class citizens, and not always treated well,” said Michael Riester, a cousin and a former Franciscan. “But they channeled it, always, spiritually.”

Read the whole thing here; it’s beautiful, and The Times has a gallery of photos as well.

Why their story is so captivating is another question. There is the coincidence of their deaths, but also the simplicity and evident sanctity of their lives. And yet, such vocations are disappearing. Does that increase our fascination and admiration?

From the Huffington Post:

Slipped into the FY 2012 agriculture appropriations bill that the House is expected to take up today is an unusual provision on page 13 requiring the National Arboretum to maintain a very specific portion of its azalea collection.

“The Committee directs the National Arboretum to maintain its National Boxwood Collection and the Glenn Dale Hillside portion of the Azalea Collection,” reads the bill. “The Committee encourages the National Arboretum to work collaboratively with supporters of the National Arboretum to raise additional funds to ensure the long-term viability of these and other important collections.”

While azaleas are being carefully tended to, the bill would cut $832 million from a program that provides food assistance to low-income mothers and children. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the reduction could result in as many as 475,000 people being turned awayfrom the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) if food prices continue to rise.

The cover story in our latest issue, “The Cold War on Ice” by John Rodden, is an account of one young woman’s experience growing up in Communist East Germany. It’s long and full of fascinating detail. Since it’s summer-reading season (and we’re on our summer schedule, meaning you have twice as long to read this issue), I thought I’d open up a forum for discussion here. What are your impressions of the story?

What stuck with me most was the loss of innocence that Ute experienced, looking back at her youth with new eyes after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was obviously painful for her to take in the breadth of the betrayal and mistreatment she had encountered, and it left her wondering what else she should question or mistrust. A grim emotional legacy.

The article is available online to subscribers only. Not a subscriber? You can fix that here — and remember that an online subscription, which gives you immediate access to everything on our Web site, is only $34. Still on the fence? Try a six-month subscription (in print and online) for just $17. Then come back and read this story with the rest of us.

Is depression a spiritual problem?

When my brother died suddenly in 2008, I was shocked and bereaved, but what I didn’t see at the time was that my state of mind had opened up a giant crack though which a deep depression slipped and built its nest.  Feeling badly gave way to doing badly and until I was able to admit to myself that I was seriously ill I thought I was going senile, or mad.  Before the airplane of my psyche crashed into the mountain (a mountain that at one point I was aiming for) I pulled back hard on the stick, just missing it (and luckier than my brother, who had drunk himself to death.)

Sick as I was, being a modern man I reasonably expected to be entirely cured.  After all, when I had had my appendix out or had had the flu, I had recovered profoundly and completely.  The drugs I took (and I was taking a lot) and the therapy I underwent arrested my tailspin.  Since a sense of health (I find) is a matter of one state relative to another, the new strength and energy I felt exhilarated me.  I became very productive.  Even better, I found it to be very easy to be the kind of person I wanted to be with others.  This “ease” infused my spirituality.  I can almost say that it was like recapturing the state of mind that I had known when I had had my conversion experience.  Being a modern man, I saw this as progress towards a new peaceful maturity.

I relapsed about five months ago and once again it took me by surprise.  This time my psychiatrist had to almost double the drugs that I had since stopped taking; it took a lot of chemistry this time to get my undivided attention.  These drugs, of course, came with significant side effects that would themselves become a problem when my current wave of depression and anxiety had passed.

My depression did pass and with its passing came my usual spurt of creative energy.  Yet something had changed.  I could no longer rely on the contrast between the “sick” before and the “well” after.  While my confusion, madness, and self-destructiveness was not as deep as it had been before in early 2009, I have to come to terms with a new fact.  I could no longer consider myself either well or sick.  The contrast between these perceived states would now come moment to moment.  I could no longer think in terms of a general state of being.

My therapy had taught me to bracket out my depressed feelings and to just let them wash over me like waves of nausea until they passed.  But I also now knew that I could no longer expect this enemy to ever go away for good.  Brother D would always be in the neighborhood, just out of sight, waiting to slap me on the back and resume our conversation.  Since he was never going to go away, was there a way I could embrace him as a friend?

Depression is a spiritual problem for me, ironically because it causes me to have to fight using pure reason.  There is a faith behind this reason, in that I believe that I can and should use reason to oppose the emotions that my depression makes me feel.  But everything must now be sorted and weighed.  Gone (for now at least) is the buoyant feeling of love that I thought I could just float in.  It’s all focus all the time now and I have to now radically discount my desire to crawl away from the world.  In a sense I find myself back in my undeveloped childhood again fighting between impulses and rules.  My old friend Brother D forces me to live in the present.  Not in some Zen way of “be here now”, but in a more primitive way of always arm wrestling with the devil.

And behind all of this my faith has changed.  Being a modern man, I want to believe that attitudes precede action.  In our culture, this applies to faith, creativity, and to happiness; all will be well if we can just get our mind right (first).  Having done this our actions will then flow out naturally in righteous spontaneity.  But Brother D causes me to focus on the now.  There is no time to get my mind right first.  And although he is an exhausting friend to have, like a big dog that never sleeps and always wants to play, I find that at least a little, and a little more each day, I am finding myself blessed to have him around.

Is reason a way to uncover the truth? Or is it a weapon? Or is it both? “Some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose [than discovering the truth]: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena.”

Of course, this is the thesis of French social scientists–who else? But they seem to have some interested partners on this side of the pond. NYTimes.

Finally, a proof for the superiority of a Jesuit education.

Mitt Romney seemed to do well in last night’s first Republican debate, and Michelle Bachmann was the surprise success, for many. (Pawlenty seemed to confirm suspicions that he is the genuinely ersatz candidate of the race.) I was focused on the hockey game in nearby Boston, so didn’t watch, and am judging by the various live-blogging threads I checked in on. I’m pleasantly surprised Romney did well, as he has always seemed to me to be the natural leading candidate if the GOP wants to make a serious run at Obama, and I do think it’ll be a very tight race. Any Republican nominee, as any Democrat, will get a committed 45 percent, and it’s the few percentage points in the middle who will make the difference.

Romney has a record to run on, he looks good, and he can raise money. His health care plan in Massachusetts (source of Pawlenty’s “Obamneycare” dig) signals to the wider voting populace that he’s not an ideologue, as does his tack to the right to attract the more conservative GOP primary voters, and to rally the base of a more conservative Republican party. Romney is a politician who will do what his supporters want, and will also do what is possible and good for his track record. (Romney’s grown up response about Muslims also played well, and was refreshing; that must be an extension of his Mormon experience, and I hope he plays that out in the campaign, even though he’s vulnerable with many on his religion. Better to face it than run from it.)

Romney’s weakness in securing the nomination — a lack of ideological purity and right-wing culture warrior bona fides — would seem to hold him in good stead in the general election contest. And maybe Republican voters are sensing that too. A Gallup poll this week showed that 50 percent of Republicans would back the candidate with the best chance of beating Barack Obama while 44 percent would favor someone who shares their views on the issues they most care about even if he or she would not have as good a shot at the Oval Office.

Gallup also showed Romney widening his preference among Republicans, to 24 percent, with Sarah Palin coming in second. But Michelle Bachmann’s strong performance last night may switch things up, and make people realize what a nonentity Palin is, and what an underestimated, veteran politician Bachmann is. Those are encouraging developments, to me, because even if I don’t cotton to much Republican ideology these days, I do prefer grown-up pols who have a feel for governing.

So, “Romney-Bachmann 2012″? I have to discount Texas governor Rick Perry as yet another flavor-of-the-day for an underwhelmed GOP base. Besides he’s too busy trying to be the next Billy Graham, though the fact that he’s a cheapskate when it comes to the collection plate may not help him there.

I still think the GOP’s best candidate is “2016,” with a governor-to-be-named later. Same with the Dems. Cuomo v. Christie, anyone?

PS: Jon Chait sees Paul Ryan as the “missing man” who could instantly transform the field. Me, not so much. I think the party would rather keep him as the stalking horse for the more radical GOP agenda. But he’s be the third Catholic candidate! Ryan, Gingrich, and Santorum. Hmmmm….

Bless me, Grant, for I have sinned.  I bought the entire boxed set of The Wire two years ago, and planned to watch it during that summer–just before I smashed my ankle.  The accident and the pain killers left me not able to deal with anything darker and more intricate than NCIS–which I watched in its entirety–and still watch.

But now I’m ready to reform, to learn how “to keep the devil way down in the hole.” I’m halfway through the first season.

The Theme Song to the Wire

Juan Cole a Middle East specialist has this contrarian view of the run-up to the war in Libya; he also estimates deaths at 10,000. Here.

As part of its austerity plan, the United Kingdom’s governing Conservative Party wants to make the British university system a little more like ours: more responsive to market pressures, less expensive for the state. The nonrich will still be given places at Oxford and Cambridge, but many more of them will have to borrow money to pay their fees. In theory, the reform will improve the overall quality of British universities because students will decline to take on large loans for a mediocre education — or for an education of no financial benefit to them once they have their degrees. The government will still grant generous subventions to the sciences, but the humanities will have to fend for themselves. If classicists can convince bright young working-class students that a degree in Greats is worth going into massive debt for, then nothing needs to change. If not, then maybe the study of ancient literature – along with modern languages and philosophy — will just have to go back to being what it was until not very long ago: a special preserve for the well-to-do. Everyone else can do themselves and the rest of society a favor by getting a more marketable degree.

In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, Howard Hotson argues against the assumption that the American model of higher education is more effective than the British model. Yes, the best American private universities do very well in international rankings, but so do the best British universities, which are public. And once America’s much larger population and economy are taken into consideration, the rankings give the British government no reason to worry that we in U.S. are doing better by our students than they are by theirs. Hotson concludes:

The natural interpretation of the World University Rankings flies in the face of the key assumption underpinning current British government policy. Market competition in the United States has driven up tuition fees in the private universities and thereby sucked out the resources needed to sustain good public universities, while diverting a hugely wasteful share of these resources from academic priorities to improving the ‘student experience’ and debasing academic credentials through market-driven grade inflation. The partially privatised university system in the United States is not ‘the best of the best’. In terms of value for money, the British system is far better, and probably the best in the world.

Whatever the British government does, a few famous British academics — including the philosophe médiatique A. C. Grayling , Richard Dawkins, and Niall Ferguson — have decided that the time has come to bring the Ivy League to the Thames. They are setting up a private college in London that will charge students 18,000 pounds a year for weekly one-on-one tutorials and pay its star faculty handsomely. Terry Eagleton thinks it’s a bad idea:

[W]hy should anyone be surprised at the prospect of academics signing on for a cushy job at 25% more than the average university salary, with shares in the enterprise to boot?

What would prevent most of us from doing so is the nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit. British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, are not best served by a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded. It is as though a group of medics in a hard-pressed public hospital were to down scalpels and slink off to start a lucrative private clinic. Grayling and his friends are taking advantage of a crumbling university system to rake off money from the rich. As such, they are betraying all those academics who have been fighting the cuts for the sake of their students.

Eagleton is writing in a British newspaper (the Guardian) for a British public. Here in the states, where much of our higher-education system and most of our health-care system are already private, Eagleton’s analogy between academics opening a private college and doctors opening a private practice doesn’t have the same punch. “So what?” many Americans would ask. But most Britons are still quite attached to their National Health Service, believing as they do that health care is not the sort of thing that ought to be left to the market. Eagleton and Hotson believe the same is true of education. Just as health care ought to go to those who need it most (the sickest), education ought to go to those who can make the best use of it (the brightest). The idea of the commonweal — or of a commonwealth — is that we’re all better off as a community if some things aren’t allowed to go to the highest bidder.

Any suggestions?

Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution sets out the basis for expelling a member of the House of Representatives: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.”

As one of the 110,140 people who voted in New York’s 9th Congressional District race last November, I point out this passage to Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats doing their best to pressure the duly elected winner of that race, Anthony Weiner, to resign his office. The framers might not have understood the word “sexting,” but they knew  there would be times when a member of Congress would have to be disciplined for unbecoming conduct. If Pelosi actually believes that Weiner’s misconduct reaches that point, she should seek to expel him as provided by law.

The two-thirds majority the Constitution requires for expulsion indicates that the framers thought it  a grave matter to undo the result of an election. In Weiner’s case, he received 67,011 votes, or 60.8 percent, to the 43,129 votes cast for his opponent, Bob Turner. My sense, from talking to people, listening to the innumerable interviews being done with Weiner’s constitutents, and from poll data, is that most people in the district  prefer that Weiner serve out his term but would then look to vote for another candidate in 2012.

If Weiner were to resign, they would go unrepresented in Congress until a special election could be held. That would probably take six months, since there are certain filing periods involved, and a primary preceding the  election.

Rather than try to thwart the will of the majority of the constituents in the Brooklyn-Queens congressional district, Pelosi might instead use her influence to provide them with better choices  in the 2012 election. In Brooklyn and Queens, two counties where the Democratic machines control local races and judgeships, we’re not used to competitive campaigns. Incumbents consider a primary a personal insult. New York state’s outmoded, anti-democracy ballot access laws make it easy for the party organizations to block challengers from getting on the ballot. Maybe Pelosi can get a challenger or two on the ballot.

In other words, she should follow the processes set out in the Constitution.

But adhering to  the Constitutional process doesn’t fulfill the Democrats’ political need  to remove an embarrassment immediately. Perhaps the process is even intended to thwart quick judgments based on political expediency. Given the precedents, it would be difficult to justify Weiner’s expulsion for his particular “disorderly Behavior.” Just five House members have been expelled – three for siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War, and two for bribery.

As for sexual controversies, one representative-elect from Utah was denied his seat in 1899 for the Mormon practice of plural marriage.   For members of Congress, the most serious penalty the House meted out  came in 1983 when it issued formal censures to two members for having sex with Congressional pages. One was re-elected, and one was not. In both cases, the will of the voters was respected.

As Tom Fox reports, last night the membership of the Catholic Theological Society of America voted on a resoultion expressing regret over the procedures of the Committee on Doctrine, which claimed Elizabeth Johnson’s book Quest for the Living God “completely undermines the gospel.” The statement further recommended that the USCCB establish a committee to evaluate those procedures.

Michael Buckley, SJ, a past president of the CTSA, brought the resolution to the floor. It passed by a vote of 147 to 1 (with a couple of abstentions). That was the first time in several years that a resolution had come before CTSA membership for a vote. (I’m at CTSA this weekend.)

The discussion was relatively brief. One member wondered whether the resolution added anything to the statement released by the board in April. Another noted that what’s new is that the resolution suggests the bishops form a committee to evaluate the Committee on Doctrine’s procedures. One member took issue with the April statement, because it takes up the substantive points of Johnson’s book, rather than focusing on procedure, as the new resolution does.

Just before the question was called, a member stood to support the resolution, reminding the assembly that in November of last year, representatives of the CTSA and the Committee on Doctrine held their annual meeting, which they’ve been doing fairly regularly since the early 1990s. At that meeting, no one from the committee mentioned that they were preparing a critique of Johnson’s book. (The review began early last year.) Needless to say, that left many CTSA members feeling betrayed. After all, the point of having such meetings was, at least in part, to head off precisely the situation in which the CTSA and the Committee on Doctrine find themselves.

Apparently the USCCB will take up the matter at its meeting next week. I’d be surprised if they followed the CTSA’s recommendation. Still, not all the bishops are thrilled with the way the Committee on Doctrine behaved. And, after reading Johnson’s withering critique of their statement, you can see why.

Juan Cole offers this reflection on the rumors of a future Israel-Iran war.

“Dagan and other high Israeli security officials appear to believe that Iran has no present nuclear weapons program. That is what Military Intelligence Director, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, has told the Israeli parliament. Kochavi thinks it unlikely that Iran would start up a military nuclear program. In other words, Israeli military intelligence holds the same position as Seymour Hersh. (Of course, one piece of hypocrisy here is that Israel has hundreds of nuclear warheads itself). In the Obama administration’s pillorying of Hersh, it never came up that Dagan and Kochavi concur with him! (Iran has a civilian nuclear enrichment program, which is being inspected by the IAEA, but a civilian program is different from a military one; there is no evidence for the latter, though sometimes Iranian officials occasionally talk big. Iran probably wants what is called ‘nuclear latency,’ the ability to build a bomb in short order, as deterrence against attack, but probably does not want an actual bomb, which it considers contrary to Islamic law).”

President Ahmajinedad has his problems; hectoring Israel is one way to stay in office.

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$795 per hour for a tutor to get a well-to-do child in private school into the Ivy League.

And will the tutors go to college with them–to get them into law school?

Will they go to law school with them–to get them a good job in a law firm?

Will aspiring associates in the law firm be able to privately hire their own “legal assistants” to help them make partner?

Bishop Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, who failed to take action against a priest with serious child pornography and boundary violation allegations lodged against him, had a letter read out in all parishes last Sunday. It begins:

These past few weeks all of us have endured the consequences of our human failure. The destructive sins of a few and the serious lapses in communication have caused us shame, anger, and confusion.

There are victims that are hurting, and others who have been left vulnerable by our processes. As you know, in the past two weeks, one priest was arrested and we removed another from ministry. They are the first sitting pastors to be removed in our Diocese in more than 20 years.

These are sobering realities, particularly for those who knew and trusted them. We are assessing what went wrong and applying our analysis as we move forward. This past week, I met with our Independent Review Board chairman and discussed the objectivity of our decision processes. I have also met with parishioners, our priests and Chancery staff, as well as the media. These meetings and discussions will continue.

As bishop, I take full responsibility for these failures and sincerely apologize to you for them. Clearly, we have to do more. Please know that we have — and will continue to cooperate with all local authorities regarding these matters.

The Kansas City Star has a roundup of the growing dissatisfaction with Finn among the faithful, though it’s highly unlikely he’ll step down. Most unsettling of all may be the decision by a man, Jim McConnell, training to be ordained a deacon in the diocese, not to pursue that vocation. McConnell wrote this to his parish, in a note also signed by his wife:

Dear Holy Family Parish:

After a great deal of soul searching, prayer and reflection, I have decided not to accept the call to Holy Orders that I have received.

Because of the recent disclosure of failures within the diocese to protect the people of St. Patrick Parish from harm, I cannot promise respect or obedience that is a part of the diaconate ordination. To me this breakdown in the system that was put in place to protect God’s children is inexcusable.

It is with great sadness that I must inform you that I will not be able to serve Holy Family Parish as your deacon. Holy Family has been my spiritual home for over 30 years, and I have received great love and support during many joy filled and sometimes very difficult events in my life. Cindy and I will continue to support Holy Family in what ever way we can and wish to express our appreciation and love to all of you.

Jim and Cindy McConnell

H/T to Catholic World News

This week’s New Yorker (June13 and 20) has a heart-wrenching account of Isabel Hemon’s battle with cancer. She was 9 months old when diagnosed about a year ago. I read it before going to sleep last night. My dreams asked some questions.

The “Personal History” is written by Isabel’s father Aleksandar Hemon who ranges across the many events that took place from July to October 2010. It is a drama and a lament worth reading, especially his reflections and description of Isabel’s three-year old sister, Elsa. Elsa’s imaginative means of coping with Isabel’s several surgeries, multiple medical crisis, chemo, and her parent’s distraction included the invention of a brother always at her beck and call and whose story gave her a way of talking to her father.

When I woke up this morning, other parts of the account were foremost in my mind. Above all, Hemon’s indictment of religion:

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NCR has obtained a copy of Johnson’s 38-page reply to the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, whose statement [.pdf] on her Quest for the Living God claimed the book “contaminates the traditional Catholic understanding of God” and “completely undermines the gospel.” (We have a copy too [.pdf]. And you can find our posts on the dispute here.) Johnson sent the text to committee members, and executive director Fr. Thomas Weinandy, on June 1. Hope she included a copy of the book.

As I’ve written before, I think the Committee on Doctrine seriously misread Quest for the Living God. Riddled with errors and distortions, the bishops’ statement never should have gotten out of committee. It’s a shame that the USCCB Administrative Committee, chaired by the president of the conference, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, voted to publish the statement rather then send it back for revision.

Johnson herself offers a nice summary of the committee’s errors:

Given these initial misreadings, what follows was almost bound to miss the mark. Ideas are taken out of context and twisted to mean what they patently do not mean. Sentences are run to a conclusion far from what I think or the text says. False dilemmas are composed. Numerous omissions, distortions, and outright misstatements of fact riddle the reading. As a work of theology, Quest for the Living God was thoroughly misunderstood and consistently misrepresented in the committee’s statement. As a result, the statement’s judgment that Quest does not cohere with Catholic teaching is less than compelling. It hangs in the air, untethered by the text of the book itself.

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On the op-ed page of today’s New York Times, Peter A. Diamond explains why he’s withdrawing as a nominee to the Fed. A professor of economics at M.I.T. who won the Nobel Prize for his work on unemployment and the labor market, Diamond has been told by Republican senators that he isn’t qualified. In March Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, wondered aloud why President Obama would even consider nominating someone with Diamond’s background: “Does Dr. Diamond have any experience in conducting monetary policy? No. His academic work has been on pensions and labor market theory.” In his op-ed Diamond says Senator Shelby’s criticism reflects a “fundamental misunderstanding: a failure to recognize that analysis of unemployment is crucial to conducting monetary policy.”

[U]nderstanding the labor market — and the process by which workers and jobs come together and separate — is critical to devising an effective monetary policy. The financial crisis has led to continuing high unemployment. The Fed has to properly assess the nature of that unemployment to be able to lower it as much as possible while avoiding inflation. If much of the unemployment is related to the business cycle — caused by a lack of adequate demand — the Fed can act to reduce it without touching off inflation. If instead the unemployment is primarily structural — caused by mismatches between the skills that companies need and the skills that workers have — aggressive Fed action to reduce it could be misguided.

In my Nobel acceptance speech in December, I discussed in detail the patterns of hiring in the American economy, and concluded that structural unemployment and issues of mismatch were not important in the slow recovery we have been experiencing, and thus not a reason to stop an accommodative monetary policy…

If structural unemployment isn’t a good argument against accomodative monetary policy, it isn’t a good argument against stimulus spending either. Does anyone doubt that if Professor Diamond had reached the opposite conclusion, no one in the GOP would have questioned his competence to be a governor of the Fed? (There are seven governors, by the way, so there’s no reason any one of them has to be an expert about every problem the Fed must consider.)

Diamond’s work both qualifies and confirms a theory the Republicans have been attacking for over three decades — the Keynsian theory that there’s a positive correlation between total employment and aggregate demand. According to this theory, so long as there’s inadequate demand, neither monetary easing nor stimulative spending will cause inflation. If companies aren’t hiring because no one’s buying enough of their products – rather than because they can’t find workers able to do the jobs they need done — then the government can help by injecting more money into the system: more money will mean more demand and more employment, not higher inflation. Only when the economy is already operating at full capacity could such intervention cause inflation, and we are nowhere near full capacity now. More than 14 million Americans are currently unemployed, and millions more are underemployed. 

Unemployment, then, and not public debt, is our most urgent economic problem. The priority of the unemployment problem is not only chronological (we worry that the government will go broke later; we see that people are out of work now); it’s also functional. There’s a good reason to think that doing whatever it takes to get unemployed Americans back to work will improve the government’s balance sheet, but there’s no good reason to think that doing whatever it takes to cut the deficit will help get the unemployed back to work. Never mind what Paul Ryan and the Wall Street Journal say: most investors care more about demand than about debt-to-GDP ratios.

In an excellent piece in the New Republic, Dean Baker argues that if the government doesn’t start doing more soon, we may be headed toward a second Great Depression after all. If this were only a national slump, then we might make up the shortfall in domestic demand by increasing exports (in which case we’d want more inflation, not less); but, as Baker notes, many of our trading partners are in even worse shape than we are. That leaves U.S. consumers or the federal government. As Baker writes:

Demand must come from some discrete source and it is very difficult to see where that might be if the country continues on a path of deficit reduction. To see why this is the case, first note that nearly 70 percent of demand in our economy is from consumption, but consumption has been growing slowly for two reasons. The first is that the economy has been creating few jobs. Furthermore, in a weak labor market workers do not have the bargaining power to push up their wages. The slow growth in jobs and stagnant wages mean that most families, who get nearly all their income from working, are seeing little growth in income. Slow growth in income means slow growth in consumption. [...]

[T]his leaves the government as the only remaining candidate for boosting the economy. But additional stimulus is not even on the agenda in Washington. Instead, we are seeing cutbacks at all levels of government. These cutbacks led to a loss of 29,000 jobs in May.

Baker points out that it wasn’t the New Deal but World War II that finally pulled the U.S. out of the Depression. During the war, “deficits peaked at more than 25 percent of GDP. This would be the equivalent, in today’s economy, of running annual deficits of $4 trillion.”

There was no economic reason that the government could not have spent on this scale in 1931, as opposed to 1941; the obstacles were political. Then, as now, politicians in Washington were obsessed with the budget deficit. They never would have countenanced such spending, apart from the threat to the nation posed by Hitler and the Axis powers.

What would it take today to get our politicians to stop spending all their time worrying about the government’s long-term solvency and to start worrying about the people who have been out of work for years and are running out of unemployment insurance and savings? It’s hard to take seriously the GOP leadership’s unctuous expressions of solicitude for future generations burdened by our fiscal profligacy when that same leadership demonstrates so little interest in the plight of Americans who are suffering now: the jobless, the homeless, the uninsured. Politicians can’t protect future generations by allowing the immiseration of this one. Solidarity, too, starts at home — with our neighbors, not their grandchildren.

I hadn’t realized until the last few months of the budget debate that state tax rates tend to be much more “regressive” (or “progressive,” depending on your point of view from the income heap) than federal tax rates.

The states are also where the budget crunches are genuine crises. So this “flip it to fix it” campaign from the group United for a Fair Economy, and detailed at Ethics Daily, seems more than a bit intriguing. The pitch is simple: inverting the percentages of taxes being paid by the wealthiest and poorest citizens in each state.

In Oklahoma, when taxes from all sources are considered, the citizens in the lowest 20 percent of the income bracket pay 9.9 percent of their annual income in taxes.

The citizens in the highest 20 percent of the income bracket pay only 5.9 percent of their annual income in taxes.

UFE proposes that we reverse the percentage of taxes for the highest and lowest income quintiles.

Currently, citizens at the second lowest income quintile pay 9.5 percent of their annual income in taxes, while the citizens at the second highest income quintile pay only 8.2 percent of their annual income in taxes. Those percentages should also be inverted.

Taxes would remain the same for those at the middle income quintile.

Remarkably, these simple and fair inversions would increase revenues in Oklahoma by about $4.3 billion in a state where the entire budget for next year was projected to be $6.7 billion dollars.

You can check what this would mean for your state here. Appealing. Where are the holes in the plan?