Category: The Dish

New Orleans, Louisiana, 6.45 am. 

Paul Moses worries about inter-faith ruptures

I think some bridge inspectors should be called in before too much weight is put on these structures of supposed interreligious friendship. In particular, the bridge to Islam has corroded  in the last three years. The chief engineer, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, the Vatican’s top expert on Islam, was moved from his key post and dispatched to Egypt. The pope then famously insulted Islam in his Regensburg lecture. And he upset Muslims again by giving such a high profile to the conversion of a Muslim journalist who criticized Islam, baptizing him in St. Peter’s at the Easter Vigil.

In short, much of the good will that John Paul II built up is  being lost. There is reason to be concerned with this new direction.

For community:

Novak, 54, is a member of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago, a religious group that focuses on respecting others and does not worship a deity. He found it 16 years ago when looking for a nontheistic moral education for his children, and knew right away that he wanted to get involved.

"It’s a place where atheists and agnostics can get what a lot of people get out of church and temple," Novak said of the society.

Novak is part of the growing group of American atheists who have left traditional religions but still feel a desire to be part of a religious group. Many had a positive experience with religion before losing their faith and now miss the community, the tradition and the chance to talk about values with like-minded people. So they join religious organizations that are accepting of atheists, form churches just for atheists or even attend traditional theistic churches.

(Hat tip: GetReligion)

From the archives, Cullen Murphy’s 1986 article:

Christology and related fields are extraordinarily active enterprises. David Tracy, a Catholic priest who teaches at the University of Chicago, says, "More has been written about Jesus in the last twenty years than in the previous two thousand." The subject has engaged not only prominent clerical theologians from many Christian denominations but also feminists, Jews, and agnostics. In a very direct way the current wave of scholarship (together, of course, with social conditions in Latin America) is responsible for the emergence of liberation theology. By its nature the study of Jesus is rooted in the past, but it is among the least antiquarian of historical or theological pursuits.

Those involved are modern men and women with an eye on the modern world, and the end that many of them have in mind is a reformulation and refinement of the Christian message for the kinds of people who inhabit our times. Tracy compares the present era to that of Saint Paul, in the first century, when the message of Jesus, a Jew speaking to Jews, was refashioned by Paul and others into a thought-language that the larger gentile world, unfamiliar with Palestinian Judaism, could understand and accept. Edward Schillebeeckx, a prominent Dominican theologian, expressed the same idea to me in another way: "In every age we must try to embed the faith in a new culture. That is the delicate function of hermeneutics—the reacculturation of the Gospel. This is the only possible way, in a new period, to believe in the same Christian faith."

Drew Carey covers L.A.’s famed, illicit hot dog:

(Hat tip: Baylen Linnekin)

Thomas Reese describes what the church could learn from other modern institutions and proposes six reforms:

If history shows that the church has always borrowed ideas and structures from civil society, then the question arises: What are some of the best practices in civil society that can help the church today? Over the past two centuries, civil society has learned that good government calls for: the elimination of a powerful nobility, adherence to the principle of subsidiarity, and creation of a system of checks and balances. I will propose six reforms I think reflect practices that have proved successful in civil society.

Make the Vatican a bureaucracy, not a court. Most countries have found that a royal court composed of a king and his nobles is not a good way to govern. The Vatican is still as much a court as a bureaucracy, with cardinals referred to as princes of the church and bishops acting like nobles. I would recommend that no Vatican bureaucrat be made a bishop or a cardinal. One of the problems with nobles and bishops is that it is difficult to fire them even when they are incompetent or when there is a change in administrations. Such a reform would also remind the Vatican bureaucracy that it is a servant of the pope and the college of bishops and not itself part of the magisterium.

Strengthen the legislative bodies in the church. At the same time that the role of the nobility in governance was declining in civil society, the role of independent legislatures was increasing. No modern political philosophy would advise a polity to depend only on the wisdom of an executive. There is universal recognition that the synod of bishops created by Paul VI has failed to rise to expectations. I would recommend that no member of the Vatican bureaucracy be a member of the synod of bishops: they could attend the synod as experts and staff, but not as voting members. All of the members of the synod should be elected by episcopal conferences; none should be appointed. The synod should also meet on a regular basis—say, once every five years—and, of course, the synod would need committees to prepare agendas and documents between meetings. There should also be an ecumenical council at least once every generation.

Convert congregations into elected synodal committees. Vatican congregations and councils are committees of cardinals and bishops appointed by the pope. Each is responsible for a special domain within the church-such as liturgy, ecumenism, evangelization, and canon law. The Vatican cardinals are the most influential members of these committees. The chairman of each committee (called a prefect for a congregation and a president for a council) is also the head of an office of the same name. These offices advise the pope and implement church policy.

One important function of any legislative body is oversight of the bureaucracy. Members of Vatican congregations and councils should therefore be elected by synods or by episcopal conferences; that way synods and conferences can act as policy-making and oversight bodies for the Vatican bureaucracy. Vatican bureaucrats should not also be members of congregations, though they could attend meetings as experts and staff.

Create an independent judiciary. One of the most important elements in a government that operates under the rule of law is an independent judiciary. To allow the executive to indict, prosecute, judge, and sentence a defendant is today considered a violation of due process. The treatment of theologians accused of dissent by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) is one of the scandals of the church. The potential for such scandal will remain as long as the CDF continues to act as policeman, prosecutor, judge, and jury. An independent jury, perhaps made up of retired bishops, could correct the problem.

Elect bishops. The appointment of bishops by the pope is a modern innovation that follows a corporate model, whereby the pope acts as CEO and the bishops as branch managers. While this corporate model is highly centralized, successful political models teach us that local leaders need to be chosen by local citizens. Today it might be possible, and advisable, to return to the system endorsed by Pope Leo I, so that every bishop would be elected by the local clergy, accepted by the people of his diocese, and consecrated by the bishops of his province.

Strengthen episcopal conferences by making them councils. Not everything can or should be decided by a centralized government. Catholic social teaching speaks of the importance of subsidiarity in political structures and policy: what can be done locally should be done locally. In ancient times, local and regional councils of bishops played an important part in determining church teaching and discipline. Episcopal conferences need to become episcopal councils. They need to regain their independent role in establishing church policy. They should not need to have every decision and document reviewed and ratified by the Vatican. Bishops must be trusted to know what is best for the local church.

         

The whole article is here.

Hendrik Hertzberg says it well:

Hillary Clinton has not, in fact, survived the worst that the Republican attack machine (and its pilotless drones online and on talk radio) can dish out. We will learn what the worst really means if she is nominated. The Commie law firm will be only the beginning. Many tempting targets—from Bill’s little-examined fund-raising and business activities during the past seven years to the prospect of his hanging around the White House in some as yet undefined role for another four or eight years to whatever leftovers from the Clinton “scandals” of the nineteen-nineties can be retrieved from the dumpster and reheated—remain to be machine-gunned. The whole Clinton marital soap opera, obviously off limits within the Democratic fold, will offer ample material for what Obama calls “distractions.” To take the most obvious example, the former President’s social life since leaving the White House will become, if not “fair game,” big game—and some of these right-wing dirtbags are already hiring bearers and trying on pith helmets for the safari. Is this a “there” where the Democratic Party really wants to go?

Kenneth Roth makes the case against preventative detention:

The most common argument against criminal prosecutions is that they examine crimes that were already committed, whereas the threat of terrorism is said to be so dangerous that it requires preventing acts before they occur. But the crime of conspiracy is sufficient to address today’s terrorist threat because it is both backward and forward looking.

Under U.S. law, a conspiracy can occur whether or not an intended illegal act has been carried out. Much as with the French crime of association de malfaiteurs, all that must be proved is that two or more people agreed to pursue an illegal plan and took at least one step to advance it. This should cover most terrorist plans: the lone wolf terrorist is rare, and al Qaeda and its spinoffs have typically relied on numerous participants to agree on a plan and pursue it. The same intelligence that allows investigators to identify and prevent a terrorist plot should allow them to prosecute the participants for conspiracy. Similarly, the crime of providing material support to terrorists can occur even when a terrorist act is only in preparation and has not yet been committed.

Another objection to conventional prosecutions is that they make it harder for interrogators to obtain information from suspects. Under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a suspect facing criminal charges is entitled to a lawyer, who will generally tell his or her client not to talk to interrogators. But in fact, many criminal suspects with lawyers end up cooperating with interrogators because doing so can shorten the prison time they face. Moreover, the constitutional limits on a prosecutor’s ability to question a suspect without counsel need not interfere with parallel but separate questioning aimed at investigating other suspects or preventing terrorism. Even if a suspect’s right to counsel has been violated, the Constitution only prohibits prosecutors from using the information derived from the flawed interrogation at trial; it does not forbid other investigators, such as those trying to prevent future terrorist acts, from questioning the suspect without a lawyer present, so long as these investigators do not relay his or her words (or leads based on what he or she said) to the prosecution team. This division of labor may not be ideal, but it is better than resorting to preventive detention and discarding many basic due process rights.

Preventive-detention advocates also oppose criminal prosecution because many terrorism suspects have been subjected to torture and other harsh interrogation methods, the fruits of which no ordinary judge would admit at trial. This, they argue, makes criminal prosecution impossible. But it would be a perversion of justice to invoke the illegality of coercing evidence in order to justify the further trampling of suspects’ rights through preventive detention. Moreover, coerced confessions are not the only route to criminal convictions. A review of the hearings held before the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo shows that the government often possesses plenty of evidence unrelated to abusive interrogation — from computers and cell phones seized, financial records, and witnesses who have cooperated voluntarily. The U.S. government has tacitly acknowledged this point by reinvestigating the major Guantánamo suspects using allegedly "clean teams" in an effort to free prosecutions from the taint of previously coerced statements and allow them to go forward.

Advice from the 1930s:

(Hat tip: Core 77.)

This gives a new meaning to high tech jobs:

Those who don’t avail themselves of subcutaneous microchips and other implanted technology, [Professor Kevin Warwick] predicts, will be at a serious disadvantage in tomorrow’s world, because they won’t be able to communicate with the "superintelligent machines" sure to be occupying the highest rungs of society, as he explains in a 2003 documentary, Building Gods, which is circulating online.

(Hat tip: 3QD).