For those who are interested in debates about the interesection of faith, science, public education, and freedom of religion, as well as other issues relating to the intersection of government and religion, see this book review from my friend and law school colleague Angela Carmella in the current Journal of Law and Religion.
The press is of course in a tizzy about Sarah Palin’s pregnant 17-year-old daughter, and her bona fides as a reformer and cost-cutter are being called into question, while conservatives rally to her side,
I think Palin’s supporters are right about the pregnant daughter thing. It’s a personal family matter concerning a near-adult child’s bad choice, and should remain private, as Obama rightly acknowledged. As to Palin as reformer and cost-cutter, her alleged flip-flopping on the “bridge to knowhere” and “troopergate” — yup, she’s a politician, like the rest of them.
I think what bothers me more is that Palin has a baby, Trig, who was born with Down Syndrome only five months ago.
I respect Palin’s right to make her own choices about her family and career. I’m thrilled, actually, that there is a woman vying for this high office. But — I know first-hand how difficult it is to raise a child with a significant disability. My wife and I both have had to accept some limitations in our own careers and lives to care for our children, and particularly for our youngest son, Garrett, who has a severe language disability. Everyone has to make their own choices about this sort of thing, and in our case the burden falls more on my wife right now than on me given our respective career stages. Yes, we both work hard and we aren’t always “ideal” parents to any of our kids, including Garrett, but I don’t think either of us would contemplate a job right now that would involve being on call 24-7 and constantly traveling around the globe. Presidential politics is on its own extreme level in terms of time demands and ambition. I’m not sure that anyone, male or female, who seeks that sort of office while raising young kids can be considered a champion of the family.
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.
Daniel S. Greenberg is a seasoned science journalist who has been reporting on research and industrial science for over forty years. In Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism, Greenberg explores the web of relationships among academic science, private industry, and government.
The primary strength of Greenberg’s approach to this question is his journalist’s ability to tell colorful stories, often based on personal interviews with key players, which elucidate both individual personalities and big questions. For example, Greenberg has Drummond Rennie, an activist and editor of prestigious medical journals, explain a key problem in scientific publishing: “’What we’re talking about . . . is the influence of money on research that my journal and other journals publish. The distorting influence of it. And this distorting influence is huge.’” This sort of first-hand testimony – and there is much of it in this book – is a powerful indictment of the supposed Mertonian neutrality of academic-industrial-government science.
The primary strength of Greenberg’s book, alas, is also a major weakness. Very often, the book reads like a string of tedious, unending anecdotes and quotations lacking a cohesive vision for reform – which is a fair description of the book as a whole. In a very brief concluding section on “Fixing the System,” Greenberg suggests “transparency” is the key to reform, but he never explains what this might mean. In a major omission, he does not examine at all whether “open access” publishing models might help push things towards greater transparency. Moreover, his dismissal of the Bayh-Dole Act and other legal developments that have encouraged universities to privatize their research through patent protection is so cursory that it flies by almost unnoticed. Yet the tension between “open” and “property” models of scientific research surely is both a driver and a symptom of the problems Greenberg exposes in his anecdotes and interviews.
On the whole, Science for Sale contains some useful source material for those who are interested in the sociology and business of institutional science in an age of money. It also will open the eyes of those who naively assert the neutrality of the scientific establishment. It does not, however, provide any meaningful proposals for reform.
Here’s a great site on the “Access to Knowledge” movement in Africa.
I get the Family Research Council’s email updates, mostly to see what the Religious Right is thinking about. Today’s email, offensively, was titled “Here Come the Grooms.” Among other breathless turns of fearmongering phrase, it tells us “When the clock chimes 5:01 p.m. (PST), the California ruling that threatens to undo thousands of years of natural marriage will officially take effect, triggering five months of social chaos that could wreak havoc on every state in America.”
And they wonder why reasonably educated Christians who live in the real world are increasingly unwilling to put up with the marriage our faith to right wing politics? Does anybody really believe that at 5:01 p.m. PST “thousands of years of natural marriage” will be undone? So, suddenly, all of the marriages recorded in my family geneology book going back to the 1600’s are going to disappear? Everything I know from my family and church about loving my wife and children will vanish from my brain?
And does anyone really think there will be “five months of social chaos” starting at 5:01 PST? Gas prices will shoot up to $10 per gallon, the markets will collapse, Wall Street bankers will line up for food stamps, loving moms and wives will march in the streets against their husbands and children… not. Well, the $10 gas might get here, but not because of this court case.
Whatever happend to the Church against which even the gates of hell won’t prevail? If we can’t “win” in American courts or legislatures, suddenly God’s creational ordinances relating to families will be repealed?
As Christians, we have ideals for human relationships, including the very special relationship of marriage. We very often don’t live up to our own ideals even within the Church, even within “natural” marriage. I’d daresay that pornography, workaholism, overconsumption, and just plain selfishness are far greater threats to our Christian ideals of marriage both within and without the Church right now than whether or not secular laws purport to give the status of “marriage” to gay couples. But even if our ideal includes a social order that gives a privileged legal space to life-long commitments between one man and one woman, it’s long past time that we realize we don’t live in a nation-state that endorses our ideals. America is not, never has been, and never will be a “Christian” nation — get over it.
Should we then not advocate for what we believe are civil laws that reflect our ideals? No, we should not cease to advocate for what we believe is right and best. But our expectations have to be realistic, our tone and tactics have to be Christ-like, and our hope ultimately has to be patiently eschatological. Maybe this is a time when we are being called to live faithfully and counterculturally in Babylonian exile as the Church and not as the State. What if all the Christian families in America really practiced what we profess about mutual respect, love and perseverence within marriage? Nothing would then “undo” marriage. And what if we all decided that our attitudes towards our gay neighbors must above all else be to love them as we love ourselves? Maybe then we’d start to become instruments of grace in places where the gospel often doesn’t get a hearing. (And no, “love” doesn’t mean “I’m ok, you’re ok.” One thing it means, I think, is “I’m a mess, you’re a mess — and here is Jesus, who loves to forgive and work on messes.”)
Carrying on its tradition of announcing important breakthroughs on April 1, Google announced today its new “custom time” feature for Gmail. You can now back-date an email so that it appears in proper sequence in the recipient’s in-box. Say, for example, you forgot to email grandma on her birthday. No problem; use the “custom time” feature and send an email from the past! Although this might raise some problems with respect to the space-time continuum, Google explains that “Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality.”
Also today, Eisenbraun’s has put out a new catalog of resources for the study of the ancient near east. I’m particularly hankering after the cuneiform typeface insert.
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.
In the February First Things, Jordan Hylden, a self-identified young evangelical, responds to Tony Campolo’s recent book, “Letters to a Young Evangelical”. In the correspondence section of the current First Things, Campolo responds and Hylden adds a sur-reply.
Hylden is right about one thing: Campolo’s book is frustrating because it suggests that the moral substance of some social issues, such as abortion, is fuzzy, when it is not. What Campolo should say is that there is not necessarily one “evangelical” political approach to such moral questions (and even then, Campolo should better represent why there is perhaps justifiably a relatively broad consensus within evanglicalism on the general politics of some of these big moral questions).
But overall, Hylden’s criticism is unfair. This is even more evident in his correspondence with Campolo in the current issue of FT, in which Hylden lamely bashes not only Campolo, but also all things emergent — even to the tiresome point of dropping Brian McLaren’s name as a scare token.
I sent this in to FT’s correspondence section — let’s see if it gets published:
Jordan Hylden’s zeal to bash the emerging church movement, Tony Campolo, and all else that fails his sniff test, is a shame. When Hylden suggests Campolo and the emerging church movement “have had the courage to emerge from worn-out things like Christian doctrine,” he apparently is oblivious to the work of theologians such as the Stan Grenz, John Franke, Scott McKnight, Leslie Newbiggin, James K.A. Smith, and others, who identify with or whose work informs much “emergent” thinking.
I wonder whether Hylden has any idea, for example, about the potential connections that James K.A. Smith has identified between the robust theological movement of Radical Orthodoxy and emergent sensibilities? And does Hylden have any notion of how John Franke, an Origen scholar, is reaching back into the Patristic tradition to find fresh ways of revitalizing evangelical hermeneutics and theology? Can Hylden trace Newbiggin’s missiology to the emerging church’s missional posture towards contemporary postmodern culture? Apparently not. Hylden is instead content merely to whisper the scary words “Brian McLaren” into the inquisitor’s ear.
Hylden seems equally oblivious to the devastating impact a generation of political and theological crankery has had on American evangelicalism. Hylden self-identifies as a young evangelical, but he seems not to care that the angry, spitting rhetoric of some of evangelicalism’s so-called leaders has made many young believers — as well as, sadly, most young unbelievers — wonder what all of this has to do with the Jesus who sacrificed himself for the world in love on the cross.
Tony Campolo and the emerging church can indeed be frustratingly obtuse sometimes. It would be wonderful if Campolo, McLaren and other emergent leaders would “speak the truth in love” about clear “traditional” social-moral issues such as homosexual practice and abortion. But I, for one, am thankful that someone is willing to expose how far contemporary Western evangelicalism, for all of its goods and blessings, seems to stray sometimes from the central “good news” of the gospel. And I’m not even so young anymore.
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).