The United States has extra-protection from this because it’s not a pure or direct democracy, but a constitutional republic, based upon the rule of law. Yet the recent attack against religious liberty shows that America is not immune from the danger; and it isn’t the first time the nation has lost its footing. Writing about the 1830’s, historian John B. McMaster wrote:

The decade covered by the ”˜thirties’ is unique in our history. Fifty years of life at high pressure had brought the people to a state of excitement, of lawlessness, of mob-rule, such as had never before existed. Intolerance, turbulence, riot became the order of the day. Differences of opinion ceased to be respected. Appeals were made not to reason but to force; reforms, ideals, institutions that were not liked were attacked and put down by violence; and one of the least liked and first to be assaulted was the Church of Rome.

We recovered from that delirium, and””God willing””can recover from today’s serious troubles, too, whoever wins on Tuesday. But in order to do so, Christians need to be a leaven on America’s democratic enterprise, and not shrink from our role in the public square.

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It seems to me that Niebuhr’s appeal to many nonreligious people was because he treated idolatry as the root of the injustice they felt was so wrong and had to be opposed. Niebuhr did not require them to make a theological commitment in order to be more coherently opposed to injustice. He did not require them to first affirm “the God of Justice” (Isaiah 30:18) in order to then appreciate how injustice is not only an assault on humans, but it is an assault on truth itself.

What Niebuhr did try to persuade them was that their opposition to injustice would be more coherent if they understood that the injustice they opposed is not just the result of human error at the epistemological level, but that it is the result of human deceit at the ontological level – substituting a false god for the true God, even if they could now only affirm the possibility that there is such a God. And to affirm what is clearly a desirable possibility is the essence of hope. Hence Niebuhr gave their moral instinct a deeper and more hopeful intentionality.

So when Stanley Hauerwas criticizes Niebuhr for promulgating “an ethic for everyone,” I think Niebuhr would have taken that criticism as a compliment, for an ethic for everyone is precisely what ethics must be in order to have a voice in an idolatrous world. Clearly, Niebuhr would have liked for his nonreligious hearers to move into a position of faith in the God of the Bible, but he did not present that move as some sort of logical necessity. He knew full well that no one can be argued into faith, yet they can be argued into opposition against idolatrous injustice.

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Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating The Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates,and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the “present state of the question”. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge””to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour””this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that “history is bunk…”

–Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape (Screwtape Letters, Chapter 27)[emphasis mine]

…religiously speaking, there are only three possible responses: you can continue to believe in a God who knows in advance the number of our days; you can sharply limit your conception of God’s power, by positing a deity who does not know in advance what we will do, or who cannot control what we will do; or you can scrap the whole idea of divinity. The problem with the first position is that most believers, as Richard Mourdock did not do, run away from the dread implications of their own beliefs; and the problem with the second position is that it is not clear why such a limited deity would be worth worshipping. So cut Richard Mourdock some slack. He’s more honest than most of his evangelical peers; and his naïve honesty at least helpfully illuminates a horrid abyss.

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On one side, then, we have Lewis as conflicted evangelical bully. On the other, there is the figure that the Episcopal Church in the United States celebrates as “holy C.S. Lewis” (with a feast day on 22 November). In the concomitant hagiography, his connection with Mrs Moore and his odd late marriage (famously sentimentalised in the 1993 film Shadowlands) are either silently elided or eirenically glossed; beer and tobacco fade into mere period colour.

Unsurprisingly, the man himself was more complex than either approach fully allows. Lewis was a supremely bookish man, but also a loud man, and like many loud men annoyed as many as he entertained; that aside, there were formidable, and almost wholly anonymous, practical charities (he gave away most of his income); unquantifiably great personal influence (without Lewis, Tolkien’s imaginative writing would probably have remained unpublished); and a dogged effort to live a Christian life. One non-believing acquaintance described him, after his death, as “a very good man, to whom goodness did not come easily….”

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It is a fact that few people become atheists either in foxholes or philosophy class. But having seen the minor outcry against criticism of the New Atheist position by their adherents, I have come to the conclusion that Ruse and Berlinerblau are right: the new atheism is a danger to American intellectual life, to the serious study of important questions, and to the atheist tradition itself.

I have reasons for saying this. Mostly, they have nothing to do with the canonical status of a few books and speakers who draw, like Jesus, multitudes of hungry listeners. At this level, emotion comes into play, celebrity and authority come into play. Perhaps even faith comes into play. The bright scarlet A of proud atheism as a symbol of nonbelief and denial becomes an icon in its own right: The not-the-cross and not-the-crescent. And again, as we reach beyond not believing into symbolism and the authority of speakers who can deliver you from the dark superstitions of religion, without having to die on a cross, we have come a long way from simply not believing. That is what Professors Ruse and Berlinerblau have been saying….
But the real disaster of the new atheism is one I am experiencing as a college teacher. Almost three decades back I faced opposition from students who denied that history had anything to teach them about their strong emotional commitment to a belief system or faith. Today I am often confronted with students who feel just the same way”“except they are atheists, or rather many of them have adopted the name and the logo.

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4) Sexual desire, sexual intention, and sexual action must be distinguished, whether for psychological or moral or legal purposes, and each may be well ordered or disordered.

5) Well-ordered sexual intentions have in view goods both of body and of soul, goods that are at once personal and societal.

6) Consideration of these goods ought to respect the conjugal nature and reproductive potential of the most fundamental sexual act.

7) Consideration of these goods ought to respect the highest human good, which is enjoyment of God and of one another in God.

8) All human persons are constitutionally ordered to this highest good and as such are deserving of respect regardless of their desires, intentions, or actions.

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Suppose there had not been a single riot in response to the now infamous video “The Innocence of Muslims,” Not a single car burned, not a single embassy breached, not a single human being physically hurt. Would the makers of this risible little clip have done anything wrong? If so, to whom, and why?

These questions are now at the center of an international debate. President Obama himself touched on the issue in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, in which he directly addressed the violent reaction in the Muslim world to the “crude and disgusting video.” But does philosophy have anything to say to the view that many people have that there is something about this kind of speech itself ”” not just its harm to public order or its adding of insult to the injury of imperialism and war ”” that should not be uttered or produced?

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The reason given by Christiane Taubira, France’s justice minister: ”Who is to say that a heterosexual couple will bring a child up better than a homosexual couple, that they will guarantee the best conditions for the child’s development?” She then reassured critics of the proposed law, “What is certain is that the interest of the child is a major preoccupation for the government.”

If the law goes through, then all references to “mother” and “father” will be erased from the civil code and replaced with the more abstract, cover-all, cover-anything term “parents.”

Let’s focus on that shift to abstraction. It’s more important than you might think, because, as France is now demonstrating, he (or she) who controls the language controls the fundamentally human ability to speak about reality.

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Perhaps it is understandable angry Muslims in the Middle East or Africa would demonstrate outside American diplomatic missions against the apparent circulation of a YouTube video mocking the Prophet Muhammad by a person based in the US. There is no such excuse for Australian Muslims.

Citizens and residents of Australia know we live in a democratic society in which the government does not, and mostly cannot, engage in acts of political and religious censorship. That’s why Americans have not been able to get the cheap film deleted from the web. And that’s why footage of beheadings of non-believers by Islamist extremists remain on the web.

Some Muslim leaders in Australia have condemned Saturday’s violent demonstration in which several members of the NSW Police were injured. Others have not. Whatever the response of Muslims, the incident provides yet more evidence that multiculturalism – after a promising start – has failed. If some Australian Muslims do not understand how democracy works, it’s time for a rethink.

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Aristotle’s reflection on the political life and his preference for the republic as a form of government help us to understand the foundational importance of the rule of law. Commenting on Aristotle’s reasons for favoring a republican form of government, combining good features of both oligarchy and democracy, Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, renowned professor of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., underlines the essential relationship between a stable political life and the respect for the norm of law. He writes:

In a republic, a large middle class ”“ middle in both an economic and an ethical sense ”“ is established between the rich and the poor, and the laws and not men rule, and they do so for the benefit of the whole city, not for any particular part. To live this way is a great human accomplishment. It is a truly exalted exercise of reason for citizens to allow the laws to rule, to have the strength of reason and character to subordinate themselves to the law, which they allow to rule for the benefit of the whole. Not all people have the civic habits and public vision to let the laws and not their own partisan interests rule over the whole; not all people are immediately capable of being citizens…

The stability of any society or government depends upon the education of the people in the civic virtues which respect the rule of law for the good of all.

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“Today we are often in a situation in which we have to defend Catholic teaching within a cultural framework which is not of our creation and indeed may be hostile to our thought. This is especially the case when a culture becomes dominated by individualism. It is very difficult, for example, to defend the Catholic understanding of marriage and sexuality in a culture of individualism, when sexuality involves by its very nature the concept of mutuality and self giving. If we end up simply defending, there is the danger that we will end up being trapped within the categories of someone else’s culture and only present a negative vision of our teaching.

It is important at times to be against, but there is the more fundamental task of illustrating the real nature of our teaching. If sexuality is seen only in terms of individual rights, then any expression of sexuality, unless it is patently exploitative, will be acceptable. In today’s society we have to be able to illustrate the values of a vision of society which springs from our faith, but we have to be able to do so through rational argument”.

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Hebrew scripture is a “message in a bottle,” says Yoram Hazony, and in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, he tries to decipher that message. Hazony’s new book makes the case for a different reading of the ancient texts ”” and argues that the Hebrew Bible is a work of philosophy in narrative form.

Hazony says the five books of Moses ”” which Christians speak of as the Old Testament ”” should not be thought of as discrete narrative but, rather, considered together with the books of Judges, Samuel and Kings. All of those books form a history of Israel, from the creation story to the dissolution and dismemberment of a decadent monarchy. It is a cautionary tale, an epic that advocates wariness of great imperial powers and individualism in the face of authority.

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Some claim that palliative care, combined with psychological and spiritual support, can address all the problems of all dying patients. This ignores a clinical reality, in which some patients, despite the best palliative care, still have bad deaths, with some resorting to dreadful journeys to Dignitas to end their suffering. International experience also confirms that palliative care and assisted dying are not either/or options. For the last ten years, assisted dying has been legal in Oregon under the Death with Dignity Act. Of the 50 states of the USA, Oregon has amongst the best palliative care and nearly 90 per cent of those seeking assisted dying do so from within those services.

The claims that assisted dying would inhibit the development of palliative care services, and would break down trust between doctors and patients, are unsupported by international evidence. So, too, are nightmare scenarios conjured by opponents in which decriminalisation of assisted dying places us on a slippery slope that would lead to the involuntary euthanasia of people who do not want to die. The Dutch experience, frequently misrepresented by those against assisted dying, has shown how liberalisation of the law has the reverse effect. Rates of non-voluntary euthanasia (i.e. doctors actively ending patients’ lives without having been asked by them to do so) have decreased. The present clinical, ethical and legal fudge in the UK, where some patients’ deaths are hastened with no regulatory framework, is more dangerous.

Even more absurd is the claim that to accede to someone’s request for assisted dying is to devalue human life….

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A column on the Obama-Romney race by political and social commentator David Brooks in the August 20 New York Times bore the caption “Guide for the Perplexed.” Brooks was trying to give some helpful counsel to undecided voters trying to make up their minds, and either he or the editors of the column thought this would make a good title. If it came from Brooks, I have no doubt that, a man of cultivation, he was aware that it is also the name of a greatly influential, late 12th-century work of Jewish religious philosophy by Maimonides or Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, widely known among Jews by his acronym of “Rambam.” If it came from the editors of the columns page, I’m not so sure.

I say this because, lately, “guides for the perplexed” have been popping up everywhere, like mushrooms after a rain. Recently, the British Daily Telegraph published an article on “Cancer Cure: A Guide for the Perplexed.” August’s Jewish World Review has a contribution called “A Parenting Guide for the Perplexed.” This past June, The New Yorker ran a piece on the euro crisis, titled “The Spanish Bailout: A Guide for the Perplexed.” Last January, American film historian David Bordwell reviewed the movie version of John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” under the title “Tinker Tailor: A Guide for the Perplexed.” Among books appearing in the past several years, you can find “Christian Bioethics: A Guide for the Perplexed,” “China Energy: A Guide for the Perplexed,” “Egypt and Islamic Sharia: A Guide for the Perplexed” and “A Guide for the Perplexed: Translations of All Non-English Phrases in Patrick O’Brian’s Sea-Tales.”

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What even a translator of genius can never give us, however, is the original author’s true likeness. Even the best translation is a darkened mirror, in which one glimpses only a partial figure moving among shadows. At times the mirror becomes very obscure indeed, at others delightfully bright; but at no time can any translator permit us to meet the artist face to face.

The problems of translation have been in my thoughts a great deal lately, for a variety of reasons. The most trivial of these is that I have been dipping into foreign versions of some of my own books, as well as I can, and sighing at the frequent accidental deformations of meaning. It is not that I feel myself greatly aggrieved by the mistakes I find; the texts in question are not exactly deathless masterpieces to be dithered over reverentially by their poor translators. I have, however, begun to wonder whether such distortions of meaning are not inevitable.

If nothing else, seeing what has become of my own words at the other end of the linguistic alembic has begun to make me doubt the profit in the whole enterprise of translation, even as I grant the necessity of that enterprise.

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Many people are Christians because of the work of C.S. Lewis. With wit and wisdom, Lewis imaginatively exploded the hollow pretensions of the secular. Moreover, he helped many see, for the first time, the world in the light of fact that “it had really happened once.”

It is, therefore, not easy to criticize Lewis when he has such a devoted following. Yet I must write critically of Lewis because here I want to examine his views concerning violence and war. I am a pacifist. Lewis was anything but a pacifist. I want to show that his arguments against pacifism are inadequate, but I also that he provides imaginative resources for Christians to imagine a very different form of Christian nonviolence, a form unknown to Lewis, with which I hope he might have had some sympathy.

Before turning to Lewis’s arguments against pacifism, I think it important to set the context for his more formal reflections on war by calling attention to Lewis’s experience of war.

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The idea behind the veil of ignorance is relatively simple: to force us to think outside of our parochial personal concerns in order that we consider others. What Rawls saw clearly is that it is not easy for us to put ourselves in the position of others. We tend to think about others always from our own personal vantage; we tend to equate another person’s predicament with our own. Imagining what it must be like to be poor, for instance, we import presumptions about available resources, talents and opportunities ”” encouraging, say, the homeless to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and to just get a job, any job, as if getting a job is as simple as filling out an application. Meanwhile, we give little thought to how challenging this can be for those who suffer from chronic illnesses or disabling conditions. What Rawls also saw clearly was that other classic principles of justice, like the golden rule or mutual benevolence, are subject to distortion precisely because we tend to do this.

Nowadays, the veil of ignorance is challenged by a powerful but ancient contender: the veil of opulence. While no serious political philosopher actually defends such a device ”” the term is my own ”” the veil of opulence runs thick in our political discourse. Where the veil of ignorance offers a test for fairness from an impersonal, universal point of view ”” “What system would I want if I had no idea who I was going to be, or what talents and resources I was going to have?” ”” the veil of opulence offers a test for fairness from the first-person, partial point of view: “What system would I want if I were so-and-so?” These two doctrines of fairness ”” the universal view and the first-person view ”” are both compelling in their own way, but only one of them offers moral clarity impartial enough to guide our policy decisions.

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The shooting at a Sikh Temple in the Wisconsin town of Oak Creek last Sunday revealed an ugly side to America’s pluralistic society. In a country of immigrants, there are still people who hate or fear those they see as “outsiders,” and when those people have access to semi-automatic weapons, they can put their fear and hatred into action.

The shooter, a former US Army soldier named Wade Michael Page, was a white supremacist, and before he was gunned down by a police officer, Page managed to kill six of the temple’s worshipers and to wound another police officer.

The incident is being treated as a domestic terror incident, with Page’s embrace of the “racial holy war” rhetoric of the far right making this more than just another case of American mass murder. But the shock of the event also hit many Americans at another level. Here, the terrorist was white, and a former US soldier. His victims were Asian. The terrorist’s ideology, white supremacy, was every bit as hateful and destructive as the religious holy war (jihad) of the men who hijacked the planes on Sept. 11….

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Faith, in the Christian life, has nothing to do with a subjective belief that does not admit rational justification (not even Kierkegaard quite said that), because faith begins not with the subject of faith but its object””the Trinitarian life of God. It consists not of assent to some proposition but the entrustment of one’s being to God’s providence. Faith does not originate in the individual believer’s own efforts, but is rather a gift of grace to the believer, usually received in baptism, as one means among many of participating in God’s own life.

Far from posing a threat to one’s faith, knowledge reinforces it: the more reason one has to believe in God’s providence, the more readily the believer entrusts himself to God. Faith likewise facilitates a more intimate knowledge of the plans God has set in store for the believer. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, “faith” in the Bible is often better rendered “faithfulness”; one has faith, therefore, less by belief than by piety. Faith is””at least in the order of time””primarily performative and only secondarily reflective. Recall St. Irenaeus’ dictum: “to believe in God is to do his will.”

The naive concept of faith as blind assent arose from an equally naive and philosophically disreputable theory of knowledge, according to which one knows a thing best by detaching oneself from its use and setting aside personal biases in order to form an idea that corresponds to the thing.

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Wherever I turn, the popular media, scientists and even fellow philosophers are telling me that I’m a machine or a beast. My ethics can be illuminated by the behavior of termites. My brain is a sloppy computer with a flicker of consciousness and the illusion of free will. I’m anything but human.

While it would take more time and space than I have here to refute these views, I’d like to suggest why I stubbornly continue to believe that I’m a human being ”” something more than other animals, and essentially more than any computer.

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Chris Mulherin, featured here on Eureka Street TV, similarly has a foot in both camps; an Anglican clergyman with a substantial academic background studying and lecturing in science and the philosophy of science.

He is now doing his doctorate on the relationship between scientific and theological ways of knowing. He argues they are different but complementary ways of understanding, and summarises the difference by saying that while science deals with mechanics, religion deals with meaning….

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But there in Aurora, there was no Batman to stop the killer, no director to cut the scene. There was no plan to it, no plot ”” at least not that we can see. It’s just a tragedy ”” another senseless horror in a world that’s known far too many.

Of all the words that can be used to describe the Aurora shooting, “senseless” may be the worst word of all ”” particularly for those of us who call ourselves Christian. We claim to worship a good, just and all-powerful God ”” a God who loves us with a passion as broad as the universe itself. We are His children, we say. And God wouldn’t let any harm come to His children ”¦ would He?

And the question hangs in the air, waiting, pleading for an answer.

It’s sadly appropriate Holmes took on The Joker’s persona. He, among all of Batman’s archvillains, offers the worst possible answer to that hanging question: God? he chirps, brushing a hand through his caterpillar-green hair. How quaint. How precious. There is no God. There is no meaning. There is no reason in this cold, dark place. The only truth is that there is no truth.

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“The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.”

–C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, Chapter Nine (Hat tip: SP)

Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn’t. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader’s shirt.

This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.

This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I’m sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University.

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There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ”˜wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique: and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious.

–C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1955 paperback ed. of the 1947 original), pp. 87-88, emphasis mine

The people who pioneered democracy in Europe and the United States had a low but pretty accurate view of human nature. They knew that if we get the chance, most of us will try to get something for nothing. They knew that people generally prize short-term goodies over long-term prosperity. So, in centuries past, the democratic pioneers built a series of checks to make sure their nations wouldn’t be ruined by their own frailties….

Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves. Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the self-doubt went away and the chastening structures were overwhelmed. It became madness to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder would not be restraining theirs.

This is one of the reasons why Europe and the United States are facing debt crises and political dysfunction at the same time. People used to believe that human depravity was self-evident and democratic self-government was fragile. Now they think depravity is nonexistent and they take self-government for granted.

Read it all (my emphasis).

The issue for faith is not whether we have had an experience like Moses with the burning bush or St. Paul on the Damascus road. The issue is whether we can be open to interpreting the experiences we have in ordinary life as so deeply meaningful that we are willing to claim them as religious.

Is it possible to find such an experience in the cup of coffee with a friend? Is it possible to find in the worship service you attend on a regular basis? Can something in the beauty of nature catch you up, or music, or the arresting vision that takes form in the stone Michelangelo chiseled?

Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary is the ego-dissolving experience upon which spiritual growth and development rests.

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(Close readers of this blog may note that we featured the amazing resource of Michael Sandel’s Harvard Course on Justice in September 2010–KSH).

Should people be paid for donating blood? In the United States, there is a mixed economy of free donation and the sale of blood through commercial blood banks. Predictably, most of the blood that is dealt with on a commercial basis comes from the very poor, including the homeless and the unemployed. The system entails a large-scale redistribution of blood from the poor to the rich.

This is only one of the examples cited by Michael Sandel, the political philosopher and former Reith Lecturer, in his survey of the rapidly growing commercialisation of social transactions, but it is symbolically a pretty powerful one. We hear of international markets in organs for transplant and are, on the whole, queasy about it; but here is a routine instance of life, quite literally, being transferred from the poor to the rich on a recognised legal basis. The force of Sandel’s book is in his insistence that we think hard about why exactly we might see this as wrong; we are urged to move beyond the “yuck factor” and to consider whether there is anything that is intrinsically not capable of being treated as a commodity, and if so why.

Read it all.