Richard John Neuhaus has died. His book The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America had a formative influence on me years ago, his involvement with Chuck Colson in Evangelicals and Catholics Together was historic, and his journal First Things remains vital. In recent years I’ve become more critical of the neoconservatism that Neuhaus represented, but all of us who think and write and act on the role of faith in public life today owe him a debt of gratitude. RIP.
To be sure, God’s plan and our history are not identical. God’s plan consists of much more than what God chooses to reveal to us or what we are able to discern of it. Much of what we see appears to be the work of a concealed God, even at times a seemingly capricious God. In Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) colorful image, history is ‘God’s mummery and mystery,’ ‘God’s joust and tourney.’ History is ‘God’s theatre,’ in which the play cannot be fully understood until it ends and until we exit. To equate one act or actor, one speech or text, with the divine play itself is to cast a partial and premature jugment. To insist on one interpretation of the play before it ends is to presume the power of eternal discernment. To judge the play on the basis of a few episodes is to insult the genius of the divine playwright.
— John Witte, Jr., God’s Joust, God’s Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition.
In Matthew 4, Satan tempts Jesus with worldly power. Jesus refuses. Hauerwas notes in his commentary:
The devil is but another name for our impatience. We want bread, we want to force God’s hand to rescue us, we want peace — and we want all this now. But Jesus is our bread, he is our salvation, and he is our peace. That he is so requires that we learn to wait with him in a world of hunger, idolatry, and war to witness a kingdom that is God’s patience. The Father will have the kingdom present one small act at a time. That is what it means for us to be an apocalyptic people, that is, a people who believe that Jesus’s refusal to accept the devil’s terms for the world’s salvation has made it possible for a people to exist that offers an alternative time to a world that believes we have no time to be just.
My friend and colleague Frank Pasquale offered this quote from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in his address today at the Seton Hall Law School new student orientation:
The government of democracy is favorable to the political power of lawyers; for when the wealthy, the noble, and the prince are excluded from the government, the lawyers take possession of it, in their own right, as it were, since they are the only men of information and sagacity, beyond the sphere of the people, who can be the object of the popular choice. If, then, they are led by their tastes towards the aristocracy and the prince, they are brought in contact with the people by their interests. They like the government of democracy without participating in its propensities and without imitating its weaknesses; whence they derive a twofold authority from it and over it.
The people in democratic states do not mistrust the members of the legal profession, because it is known that they are interested to serve the popular cause; and the people listen to them without irritation, because they do not attribute to them any sinister designs. The lawyers do not, indeed, wish to overthrow the institutions of democracy, but they constantly endeavor to turn it away from its real direction by means that are foreign to its nature. Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link between the two great classes of society.
Here’s a great site on the “Access to Knowledge” movement in Africa.
This month’s First Things includes a short essay by Gilber Meilander on immigration policy. There is no direct link yet on the FT site. I guess I went on a little FT binge this morning. Here is another bit I sent in to the correspondence section, this one on Meilander’s piece:
Peter C. Meilaender’s thoughts on immigration policy (“Immigration: Citizens & Strangers,” May 2007) are careful, balanced — and devoid of any Biblical, prophetic passion for the poor strangers among us. Meilaender concludes that we must “weigh carefully our obligations toward both curent members [of our society] and outsiders, duties particular and universal.” Our “particular” duties, Meilaender reminds us, are to our own families and local communities (as he puts it with more rhetorical panache, to “the aged father in need of regular attention, the cousin whose husband is way fighting in Iraq, the fellow parishioner who has lost his job”).
Well, yes. And yet in the “careful weighing” we are supposed to be doing before welcoming the stranger, Meilaender never explains why the proper metaphor is a set of scales that represent a zero-sum game. How does a broad and welcoming immigration policy detract from the resources available for us to employ in our local communities? The reality is that immigration is a dynamic social and economic force that creates economic growth and enriches communal life. Not the least benefit of this dynamism is that many immigrants from the global South bring with them a fresh and fervent religious vitality that we in the more prosperous North often leave behind in our zeal to preserve our social privileges.
I just received the following in an email from Sojourners / Call to Renewal. I agree with it 100%. In fact, I’m very excited about something I’ve just gotten involved in to help poor immigrant families in New York City. I can’t say yet exactly what it is, because the initiative hasn’t yet launched publicly. It will be something that is outside my comfort zone a bit. However, over the new year’s break I prayed that God would give me a specific ministry to the poor in which I could use my skills and position as a law professor, and a chance to be on the policy committee of this immigration initiative just sort of came to me.
From Call to Renewal:
With Congress on the verge of rewriting our nation’s immigration laws, too many of the loudest voices on the issue are politicians and pundits who seek to scapegoat immigrant workers , falsely blaming them for many of our nation’s social and economic problems.
As Christians called by scripture to welcome and care for the strangers among us, we must seize this moment and raise our voices in a debate that is too often tainted by prejudice and fear.
Tell your representative to fix our broken immigration system with reform that is fair and compassionate.
From the law in Leviticus to the words of Jesus, our faith is very clear about our obligations to the “strangers” and “aliens” in our midst . That’s why Christian leaders from across the theological and political spectrum are coming together to support immigration reform that lives up to our moral and theological principles.
It is entirely possible to protect our borders while establishing a viable, humane, and realistic immigration system, one that is consistent with our American values and increases national security while protecting the livelihood of Americans.
But we must act now in order for our voices to be heard – legislation has just been introduced in the House of Representatives, and we have a very short window in which to act.
Stand up for comprehensive immigration reform by sending a message to Congress today.
Specifically, we must demand that any immigration legislation includes:
Border enforcement and protection initiatives that are consistent with humanitarian values;
Reforms in our family-based immigration system that help to safely reunite separated families;
An opportunity for all immigrant workers and their families already in the U.S. to come out of the shadows to pursue an earned legal status, leading up to citizenship; and
A viable guest worker program that creates avenues for workers and their families to enter our country and work in a safe, legal, and orderly manner.
Tell Congress: immigration reform must be fair and compassionate.With so many immigrant families living in poverty, we must acknowledge that discussion of immigration cannot be separated from our understanding of poverty – and is thus central to achieving the vision for overcoming poverty found in Sojourners/Call to Renewal’s Covenant for a New America.
That’s why we’re hard at work advocating for comprehensive immigration reform – organizing a broad coalition of Christian leaders to raise up a prophetic voice in the media on this important issue, and developing a toolkit for grassroots advocacy.
I hope you’ll join us as we seek to respond to Jesus’ words: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).
In the past, I’ve referenced my interest in Radical Orthodoxy, which developed after I attended an RO-heavy conference at Baylor last fall. I’m working up a proposal for a presentation at next year’s Baylor conference, with the vague thought of how the “ontology of peace” can apply to information law and policy. I stumbled across this nice summary of the Augustine-Aquinas-Milbank trajectory through the “ontology of peace” in a delightful little essay by Joel Garver about “Kenny” from “South Park” as a Christ figure:
An Ontology of Primordial and Final Peace
Let’s begin sketching an alternative by examining some of the suggestions and presuppositions of two Christian philosophers and saints–Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Then we will consider some considerations of a contemporary Christian philosopher–John Milbank.
Augustine
The fundamental presupposition of Augustine is that the material world is a result of free creation by God–as opposed to violence. Since, for Augustine, God is a Trinity of persons in a relation of love, freely shared, God is free to create a reality that may enter into that love. Futhermore, human beings who are in the image of God possess free will by which they do wrong–as opposed to find evil’s source in mere ignorance. Moreover, evil has no ontological purchase on Augustine’s view. It is defined negatively as the choosing of lesser goods over greater goods and so evil is seen as a privation–as opposed to an ontological reality.
In his Confessions Augustine presents the history of his person, lived before the face of God and offered up to God, redeeming his painful memories of the past. Thus, Augustine can be credited with the first deep theorization of psychology and personality as we know it–as opposed to the ultimate impersonalism of the Greeks.
Finally, in his City of God Augustine proposed an alternative city, a re-telling of the pagan myths which unmasks their inherent violence. Moreover, it is the proposal of a new narrative that is plausible by out-narrating the alternatives.
Let us turn then to Thomas.
Thomas Aquinas
For Thomas the fundamental nature of the world is to be understood by means of the analogy of being (analogia entis) in which the relations and reality of creation find an analogy in the very life of God. Thus being and difference must be seen in the final context of relation and love within the Trinity. God is who he is–both in the unity of the Godhead and in the differences between the Persons–only in virtue of his internal relations of love.
By the analogy of being we can then also see that the ultimate nature of things is love. Difference within the creation is established in love. Moreover, being unveils itself to me and so knowledge is a gift of love, but since love is fundamental to knowledge reason and faith are not extrinsically and externally related to one another and to knowledge, but are mutually and intrinsically related. This ontology and epistemology provides an alternative to empirical-positivist model of science by invoking formal and final causality, intrinsic relationality, and gift–as opposed to a privileging of control, atomism, and force.
John Milbank
Augustine and Thomas show us, then, that it is possible to narrate reality in a way that does not presuppose and perpetuate violence either as a primordial condition of ontology or as a sustaining event within the world and human practices and discourse. There is an alternative within the Christian message.
For Milbank, the Christian message is not to out-argue the ontology of violence by an appeal to some supposedly neutral and universal discourse of rationality. Rather, Christian belief claims to out-narrate and out-practice any alternatives. Part of that narrative is the example of Jesus who embodies the ultimate rejection of violence by refusing to play the game and answering conflict with transforming love. In him, the church is to be the space in which the alternative world is manifest with its alternative narrative and counter-history. Thus the ontology of violence is to overcome with a lived narrative and ontology of peace.
I get a daily mass email from the Family Research Council. Honestly, most of the time it ticks me off. Today’s missive was particularly infuriating. Under the headline “The War Over War Rages On,” the message states,
In the four years since coalition troops first invaded Iraq, it has become painfully obvious that some Americans have short memories and even shorter attention spans. While our brave men and women risk their very lives for freedom, some at home have grown weary of the fight.
First, what does this have to do with family issues?
More importantly — well, no, we don’t have “short memories and even shorter attention spans.” We’ve been paying close attention, and we remember all to well that our troops were committed to an unwinnable war, with great cost to American and Iraqi lives, at untold financial cost, on false pretenses, and without any coherent plan for victory and no realistic hope of resolution.
All Christians should be disgusted that this organization, which purports to represent our interests in Washington on family issues, has instead become the mouthpiece of neoconservative warmongers. In my view, this is just another evidence that FRC speaks only for a radical fringe and not for mainstream evangelical Christians who care deeply about peace and justice.
There was an amusing story in the Wall Street Journal this week about Al Gore’s indoor heated pool and the way in which he purchases “offsets” for his personal carbon emissions. According to the story: “Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh–guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year.” Gore “offsets” this energy usage by purchasing blocks of “green” power from wind farms and such.
The story also notes that Oscar attendees received as part of their “swag” 100,000 pounds worth of carbon credits from an outfit called TerrPass. Here’s how TerraPass describes itself: “When you buy a TerraPass, your money funds renewable energy projects such as wind farms. These projects result in verified reductions in greenhouse gas pollution. And these reductions counterbalance your own emissions.”
As I’ve said before, I’m not a skeptic of the basic scientific conclusions about global warming. I am, however, skeptical of international emissions trading schemes, and the above is one reason why. The market dynamics of this “offset” process mirror some potential problems with a global market — specifically the differential between the wealthy and poor concerning elasticity of demand.
Gore and his fellow Oscar winners aren’t really “offsetting” their carbon energy use. What these “offsets” are really doing is maintaining the supply of carbon energy such that the elite’s demand can be satisfied. Here, the concept of the “elasticity” of demand is important. A demand curve usually is not constant. At different places in the curve, demand responds more or less sharply to changes in price. Demand is “elastic” if demand is relatively sensitive to incremental changes in price. Demand is “inelastic” if demand is relatively insensitive to incremental changes in price.
For most of us, I suspect that demand for energy is relatively elastic. A relatively small fluctuation will cause us to change behavior — lower thermostats, not driving as much, etc. For the very wealthy, however, demand for energy probably is much less elastic. They aren’t likely to notice a few thousand dollar increase in cost of electricity for the swimming pool.
At best, then, the “offets” Gore is buying will allow some alternative energy supplier to offer energy to the more elastic segments of the market (us regular Joes) at prices competitive with traditional carbon-based suppliers. But this is highly unlikely, since the “offsets” purchased aren’t anywhere near the amount needed to make up for the higher variable costs of supplying alternative energy (not to mention the sunk costs of research and development and building infrastructure). Thus, demand for traditional energy is not likely to decrease among the more elastic segments of the market, or if it does, the decrease will be marginal.
Meanwhile, the “offsets” allow the more inelastic segments of the traditional energy market to feel good about their conspicuous energy consumption, fueling additional demand. The net is likely to be an overall increase in traditional energy usuage!
Once the problem is conceived in terms of elasticities of demand, another solution suggests itself. Where there are differing elasticities of demand for the same good, a typical efficient response is differential or “Ramsey” pricing. Differential pricing means that the more elastic segments of the market are charged more than the more inelastic segments.
This is one reason why a graduated carbon tax seems to make sense. Instead of buying “offsets,” the price of energy should be graduated based on the amount used. After a basic level, the price would increase sharply, to the point where even elastic segments of the market would feel pain for conspicuous use (either through regulation, taxation, or both). I’ll be this would do more to fuel research into alternative energy sources than an “offset” market that only allows the wealthy to buy their peace.