William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed; Economics and Christian Desire: Review Part 3

Finally in chapter 4, “Scarcity and Abundance,” Cavanaugh uses the logic of communion to challenge the logic of the market. We are desiring beings, but only in God can our desires be put to rest. An economics that bases itself on the assumption of scarcity is not only based on hunger but also on endless human wants. Shopping, then, is finally about the “pleasure of stroking desire,” for in “scarcity is implied . . . the daily erotics of desire that keeps the individual in the pursuit of novelty” (91). Such a lifestyle, Cavanaugh insists is “the death of Christian eschatology” (93). Instead, of placing our hope in Christ’s kingdom breaking into this fallen world system, we continually distract ourselves with more consumption even as we shrug before “a tragic world of scarcity.” Worse, we come to develop a taste for hearing of global tragedies: “Even the suffering of others can become a spectacle and a consumable item: tsunamis sell newspapers” (94). Cavanaugh holds that the Eucharist should teach us of “the communicability of pain from one person to another” within the Body of Christ. Rather than individuals facing off in competition over a scarce supply, we become truly individual as we impart help to each other, becoming dependent upon each other. We cannot give into despair but must respond in eschatological hope, for Christ daily gives of his self that we may know “where we are going” (100).

There are numerous ways to go about responding to Cavanaugh’s claims. One, for instance, could place his theology within numerous streams of Christian reflection. He draws off the Christian personalism of John Paul II and the economic distributism of early 20^th-century Catholic ethics. He also shows a great debt to the tradition of virtue ethics currently taught by Stanley Hauerwas at Duke Divinity School. Likewise, Cavanaugh is much indebted to the Augustinian tradition of reflection on ordered and disordered loves within the City of God and the City of Man, as well as the new Trinitarian insights of Hans urs von Balthasar, to name only one theologian. Each of these streams of Christian reflection has strengths and weaknesses. One could also ascertain whether he has truly understood the experience and logic of late, global capitalism in the last few decades. Has he, for instance, ignored counter-examples that might go against his theses of hypermobilization of capital, of the creation of constant, movable desire, and of globalization as a false parody of true Christian catholicity?

However, I want to respond more personally as one First World, Christian individual to his book. In my experience, much of what he claims rings true, at least some of the time. I am ashamed to say that I have found myself at various points in my life addicted to the buying of things, and of late, equally tempted by the consumption of short bursts of image and experience though online social networking and news. I, too, have often thrown up my hands in despair at the news of overseas economic abuses, wondering where to buy my clothing, my coffee, or my children’s toys. And I, too, have taken a kind of superficial pride and joy in my “diversity,” listening to African music while I eat fajitas, read a Russian novel, and look forward to watching a Dutch film on video later that evening. I would rather play it safe and not have to interact with the truly poor, unless, of course they seem grateful and don’t smell too much. After I finished reading Being Consumed , I struggled with what I should do in response, and my first desire was to simply and sadly think I could do nothing. Of course, this would simply be to “consume” Being Consumed as part of the endless diet of ideas in a collegiate environment. Instead, I am praying and seeking how my family should act differently in what we eat and buy and give. I have talked to my wife some about the book and will continue to do so.

It does not seem to me that you need be convinced by everything that Cavanaugh claims in order to respond to it with repentance and action. For example, I am somewhat dissatisfied with his theology of the Church and world. He seems to conflate the distinction between them too much at times, the logic of the Eucharist almost dissolving the need for individual repentance. I can’t always tell if his doctrine of the Supper actually merges nature and grace or simply brings them into a particular and local relationship for our time. Likewise, his portrait of multi-national abuses does not reflect the experience of local managers who are attached to their workers and seek to work for change for their benefit. Nonetheless, I am still left crying mea culpa. Well, not only “my fault” per se, for that too is part of his point. I am joined to the Body of Christ, and I must learn to work within the messy, faulty life of that local community called a church if I am to develop with others the habits and practices that help address some of these matters. Happily, Cavanaugh has provided some examples worth learning more about:

• Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, based on the principles of distributism, is worker-owned and governed and contributes greatly to neighborhood health, education, and lower crime.
• CRS Fair trade program in coffee, chocolate, and handcrafted items seeks to deal directly with growers and local artisans to promote fair payment, as well as promote a sense of solidarity with those overseas.
• Church Supported Agriculture (CSA) seeks to create a direct market between local family growers and local churches in hopes of providing a face-to-face buying environment with growers and helping to promote sustainable farming.
• The Economy of Communion Project associated with the Focolare Movement promotes a business model that divides profits into 1/3 aid to the poor, 1/3 education promotion, and 1/3 business sustainability. As of 2006, 700 businesses worldwide had adopted their model.

I would challenge us all to learn more about these and other Christian options like them.

William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed; Economics and Christian Desire: Review Part 1

Jekabs Bikis and I reviewed together Cavanaugh's Being Consumed. We've both agreed to post our reviews and our responses to each other here. Below is the first section of mine:

William T. Cavanaugh’s book is a slim volume on a broad topic. Just under a hundred pages, Being Consumed brings to our attention the impact of consumerism, commodification, and globalization on personhood, free markets, multinational corporations, marketing, shopping, tourism, self-identity, and human freedom. Yet despite such a wide range of concerns, Cavanaugh’s target is much more defined. As “a contribution to a kind of theological microeconomics,” he desires above all to help Christians “to discern and create economic practices, spaces, and transactions that are truly free” (viii). To do this, requires a theological critique of the spiritual and moral temptations of global capitalism. So rather than mount a macro-level reform of multinational markets, Cavanaugh is more concerned with how Christians might live differently at the local and particular level, and how by living in such a way they might further incarnate the eschatological promises that God has extended in the Lord’s Supper.

In chapter 1, “Freedom and Unfreedom,” Cavanaugh asserts that “true freedom requires an account of the end (telos) of human life and the destination of creation” (2), which for the Christian is to desire and participate in God. We need to keep this end in view because otherwise we cannot distinguish true and false desires. A model that judges the freedom of economic exchange as simply equal to the exchange itself is not truly free, for it has no standard by which to judge human flourishing. A model that values exchange in itself doesn’t care whether that exchange is about bread and beans or pornography and breast augmentation. Christians, on the other hand, are called to cultivate true desires, and we must do this in the face of marketing that seeks to create imprudent yearning in us and to addict us to the constant stimulation of those desires. We also have to work against large-scale organizations which ignore the needs of their employees. Charges Cavanaugh, we delude ourselves if we think that late capitalism is truly free for all its participants. Multinational corporations may choose to relocate their operations from one cheap source of labor to the next, quickly abandoning their workers, who after all, cannot easily move without disrupting their lives and communities. The ownership of property, Cavanuagh insists, is intended by God to serve the common good, not to pursue the maximization of profits at the expense of people. Christians then should work to create companies which keep this as one of their preeminent purposes.

Human Freedom and the Moral Law (John Paul II series)

John Paul II in this selection from Veritatis splendor argues that while humans have the freedom to use their reason to explore and understand the natural world and to seek out expressions of ethical action, this freedom is not intended for the radical autonomy preached by modernity. The conscience is not an idol unto itself. He warns that a loss of belief in definitive right and wrong is accompanied by a loss of belief in universal truth that can adjudicate between the claims of various individuals. Instead of a heteronomy, in which each person is a will unto himself or herself, one should recognize the existence of a participatory theonomy, in which persons enter into the law of God with their whole persons:

32. Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values. This is the direction taken by doctrines which have lost the sense of the transcendent or which are explicitly atheist. The individual conscience is accorded the status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the affirmation that one has a duty to follow one's conscience is unduly added the affirmation that one's moral judgment is true merely by the fact that it has its origin in the conscience. But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and "being at peace with oneself", so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment.

As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human nature.

These different notions are at the origin of currents of thought which posit a radical opposition between moral law and conscience, and between nature and freedom.

33. Side by side with its exaltation of freedom, yet oddly in contrast with it, modern culture radically questions the very existence of this freedom. A number of disciplines, grouped under the name of the "behavioural sciences", have rightly drawn attention to the many kinds of psychological and social conditioning which influence the exercise of human freedom. Knowledge of these conditionings and the study they have received represent important achievements which have found application in various areas, for example in pedagogy or the administration of justice. But some people, going beyond the conclusions which can be legitimately drawn from these observations, have come to question or even deny the very reality of human freedom.

The rightful autonomy of the practical reason means that man possesses in himself his own law, received from the Creator. Nevertheless, the autonomy of reason cannot mean that reason itself creates values and moral norms. Were this autonomy to imply a denial of the participation of the practical reason in the wisdom of the divine Creator and Lawgiver, or were it to suggest a freedom which creates moral norms, on the basis of historical contingencies or the diversity of societies and cultures, this sort of alleged autonomy would contradict the Church's teaching on the truth about man. It would be the death of true freedom: "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (Gen 2:17).

41. Man's genuine moral autonomy in no way means the rejection but rather the acceptance of the moral law, of God's command: "The Lord God gave this command to the man..." (Gen 2:16). Human freedom and God's law meet and are called to intersect, in the sense of man's free obedience to God and of God's completely gratuitous benevolence towards man. Hence obedience to God is not, as some would believe, a heteronomy, as if the moral life were subject to the will of something all-powerful, absolute, extraneous to man and intolerant of his freedom. If in fact a heteronomy of morality were to mean a denial of man's self-determination or the imposition of norms unrelated to his good, this would be in contradiction to the Revelation of the Covenant and of the redemptive Incarnation. Such a heteronomy would be nothing but a form of alienation, contrary to divine wisdom and to the dignity of the human person.

Others speak, and rightly so, of theonomy, or participated theonomy, since man's free obedience to God's law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God's wisdom and providence. By forbidding man to "eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil", God makes it clear that man does not originally possess such "knowledge" as something properly his own, but only participates in it by the light of natural reason and of Divine Revelation, which manifest to him the requirements and the promptings of eternal wisdom. Law must therefore be considered an expression of divine wisdom: by submitting to the law, freedom submits to the truth of creation. Consequently one must acknowledge in the freedom of the human person the image and the nearness of God, who is present in all (cf. Eph 4:6). But one must likewise acknowledge the majesty of the God of the universe and revere the holiness of the law of God, who is infinitely transcendent: Deus semper maior.

Grace, Love, and Freedom (John Paul II series)

This is part of a series of passages from the late John Paul II's encyclicals, which I as a Protestant can learn from. The following are reflections from the 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor. Here, he examines the nature of grace and freedom and their role in Christian morality:

"To imitate and live out the love of Christ is not possible for man by his own strength alone. He becomes capable of this love only by virtue of a gift received. As the Lord Jesus receives the love of his Father, so he in turn freely communicates that love to his disciples: "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love" (Jn 15:9). Christ's gift is his Spirit, whose first "fruit" (cf. Gal 5:22) is charity: "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us" (Rom 5:5). . . .

"Love and life according to the Gospel cannot be thought of first and foremost as a kind of precept, because what they demand is beyond man's abilities. They are possible only as the result of a gift of God who heals, restores and transforms the human heart by his grace: "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (Jn 1:17). The promise of eternal life is thus linked to the gift of grace, and the gift of the Spirit which we have received is even now the "guarantee of our inheritance" (Eph 1:14).

"And so we find revealed the authentic and original aspect of the commandment of love and of the perfection to which it is ordered: we are speaking of a possibility opened up to man exclusively by grace, by the gift of God, by his love. On the other hand, precisely the awareness of having received the gift, of possessing in Jesus Christ the love of God, generates and sustains the free response of a full love for God and the brethren, as the Apostle John insistently reminds us in his first Letter: "Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love... Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another... We love, because he first loved us" (1 Jn 4:7-8, 11, 19).

"This inseparable connection between the Lord's grace and human freedom, between gift and task, has been expressed in simple yet profound words by Saint Augustine in his prayer: "Da quod iubes et iube quod vis" (Grant what you command and command what you will).

"The gift does not lessen but reinforces the moral demands of love: "This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another just as he has commanded us" (1 Jn 3:32). One can "abide" in love only by keeping the commandments, as Jesus states: "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love" (Jn 15:10)." [secs. 22-24]

Freedom, as John Paul II reads the New Testament, is not simply a matter of self-expressive choices of the will, but is found first as the gift of the Holy Spirit, whose love and grace enables us to begin keeping the dictates of the law. Following Augustine, John Paul II holds that obedience comes from the love created in our hearts by the grace of God. Rather than a justification by faith or works, though it includes each of these at some level, the key is a justification by love, that is the benevolent action of the Spirit in us.

John Paul II and Human Freedom

Two fascinating passages from Redemptor hominis that examine what Christ and the Church mean to human freedom:

"Jesus Christ meets the man of every age, including our own, with the same words: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world. Today also, even after two thousand years, we see Christ as the one who brings man freedom based on truth, frees man from what curtails, diminishes and as it were breaks off this freedom at its root, in man's soul, his heart and his conscience. What a stupendous confirmation of this has been given and is still being given by those who, thanks to Christ and in Christ, have reached true freedom and have manifested it even in situations of external constraint!" (sec. 12)

"The Church cannot abandon man, for his "destiny", that is to say his election, calling, birth and death, salvation or perdition, is so closely and unbreakably linked with Christ. We are speaking precisely of each man on this planet, this earth that the Creator gave to the first man, saying to the man and the women: "subdue it and have dominion". Each man in all the unrepeatable reality of what he is and what he does, of his intellect and will, of his conscience and heart. Man who in his reality has, because he is a "person", a history of his life that is his own and, most important, a history of his soul that is his own. Man who, in keeping with the openness of his spirit within and also with the many diverse needs of his body and his existence in time, writes this personal history of his through numerous bonds, contacts, situations, and social structures linking him with other men, beginning to do so from the first moment of his existence on earth, from the moment of his conception and birth. Man in the full truth of his existence, of his personal being and also of his community and social being-in the sphere of his own family, in the sphere of society and very diverse contexts, in the sphere of his own nation or people (perhaps still only that of his clan or tribe), and in the sphere of the whole of mankind-this man is the primary route that the Church must travel in fulfilling her mission: he is the primary and fundamental way for the Church, the way traced out by Christ himself, the way that leads invariably through the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption." (sec. 14)

John Paul II here stresses that our freedom is tied to the truth of Jesus. Real freedom is not found in the unfettered expression of our wills, but in the grace that lays aside all that would burden and enslave us. This is not to suggest that our free actions themsleves are not meaningful. We each have a history made up of our numerous relations and choices. These various spheres of existence to which we are joined and which give us meaning are places that the mission of God moves within, offering the way of Christ. There is much here to reflect upon concerning the ethics and politics of culture. Since the work of the incarnation and redemption of Christ is encultured in each of us, who are in turn joined to our spheres of existence, the Church must always address us in our personal and social and community beings.

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 1

The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil's last work, The Need for Roots, was written in 1943, the year of her death, and published posthumously in 1949, as well as being translated into English in 1952 with an introduction by T.S. Eliot. The Need for Roots offers a passionate call for helping the French return to a sense of true patriotism, tied not to the State, but to place and ideals. In the first part of the book, Weil explores briefly fourteen "needs of the soul" before focusing on her chief concern, the 15th and perhaps most comprehensive need--rootedness.

1. Order, by which Weil means a sense of epistemic coherence. The soul needs a sense that a balance of the forces of the universe exists, that they have a beauty to them, a rationality at some level.
2. Liberty, that is the ability to choose within a system of rules that we trust because they "emanate from a source of authority which is not looked upon as strange or hostile, but loved as something belonging to those placed under its direction." None are free unless they operate out of goodwill and obligation to others, she contends.
3. Obedience of a healthy sort is "necessary food for the soul," and the one who is forced to obey a tyrant must partake of the sickness of such a society.
4. Responsibility of a real sort, that is, of type that actually impacts the person and his or her fellows in a meaningful way.
5. Equality in degree of respect and with a degree of opportunity. There must also be a way for movement to take place up and down the ladder of social equilibrium.
6. Hierarchism, that is a proper veneration of one's superiors who are symbols of what we each desire.
7. Honor in being a part of a noble tradition with a proud past of examples of virtuous actions.
8. Punishment that restores the one who has moved outside the circle of obedience--fully for the one who is truly repentant, and partially for the one who refuses. "Punishment is a method for getting justice into the soul of the criminal by bodily suffering."
9. Freedom of Opinion, that is an unrestricted freedom to explore all opinions, though this pursuit is conducted by one who serves the truth.
10. Security from constant, debilitating fear or terror.
11. Risk that keeps one from boredom even while not descending into terror.
12. Private Property such as owning a piece of land and one's own tools, because these are the means of a necessary and bodily life.
13. Collective Property, a feeling of ownership in public monuments, parks, and ceremonies.
14. Truth: "The need for truth is more sacred than any other need," so we must do all we can to curtail lying in print or in public speech.
15. Rootedness. She defines rootedness in the following way:

"A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by the way of the environment of which he forms a natural part."

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 5

So was Berlin right to charge Christian hope for the end of history with closet determinism? Are the theist claims of an all-provident God, a known future, and human freedom finally in the last analysis compatible?

For some Christian thinkers the key was to focus on the very question of final things. After all, what might a Christian eschatology have to offer? The biblical pattern of a good creation, a human fall into rebellion and subsequent decay, a redemptive history of covenants with Israel, culminating in the atoning work of Christ and Church, and leading up to a final consummation suggests a directional pattern and outcome to human history. Josef Pieper, while sharing the view that Christians cannot know the future, insisted nonetheless that human beings have a quality of "being-directed-toward-the-End," in which the chaotic events of history become understandable. Not every theologian or philosopher of history agreed.

For Karl Löwith, the promised future is a radical inbreaking into history and at the same time, a future hope not yet seen. The violence and contingency of history has no real discernable direction precisely because the future cannot be inferred from the past; it is a divine, mysterious promise not a human, rational pattern . Eric C. Rust and Carl Michalson concurred. For Rust, outside God's revelation in Christ, "history is generally a realm of meaningless chaos and frustration," while for Michalson, there can be no significant history since Jesus: "Christ is not the eschatological event because he will enter history at some moment of time but because when he appears in history, history comes to an end in its old form and the last, the eschatological age begins."

A divine destiny, some insisted, did not translate into a discernable pattern for human history in general. Jean Daniélou, however, would have us synthesize this eschatological double story. While there can be no progress beyond Christ who is "the culminating and final innovation" of history, yet to separate out secular and sacred history is to declare Christ as less than Lord of history. The Christian mission, he insisted, is not simply "to teach the word to individuals of all countries; it is to evangelize the civilizations . . . so that Christianity may find its appropriate and authentic expression in the idiom of every racial community."

The promised apocalypse, for Pieper, is both the end of history and the promise of a new eternal state which strictly speaking lies beyond time. Only in a willing commitment to martyrdom can the Christian truly understand the legitimacy of human action in history, not as a gnostic who denies the value of creation, but as one who "contains both affirmation of creation and readiness for blood-testimony; only the man who combines in himself this affirmation and this readiness will retain the possibility of historical activity." Martyrdom denies the cultural relativism of historicism. It is a commitment to the future. Eschatology, he felt, does not remove the call to human freedom and to responsible action.

To summarize, the debate about history, in trying to address questions of civilization and Christian culture, had to consider

1. how much one could say about the inner workings of history, as well as the moral nature of its events;
   
2. needed to answer the claims of the historicist persuasion on a number of levels;
3. had to consider questions of freedom and determinism and of idealism and materialism, especially the question whether some aspect of historical normativity still allowed for human free choice;
4. had to explore what a spiritual realm might say to human freedom;
   
5. had to ask what biblical eschatology had to say to the shape of history.
   

In particular, they needed to consider whether the eschatological promise of the gospel had anything to say to the national and cultural concerns of the average historian. For all its pledges of Christian faith, this was not a conversation with an easy consensus, nor I suspect should it have been, for they were seeking to hold together a number of tensions, as well as answer destructive claims from a number of directions. In my next post I will consider what this debate, then, has to teach us, as well as explore briefly how it relates to Christian personalism.

Nikolai Berdyaev and Personality's Gnostic Turn

The Russian philosopher and exile Nikolai Berdyaev in his 1944 Slavery and Freedom set forth his mature position on the human person, the political state, and freedom. He contrasted the triumphant existential subjectivity of God and of the human with the enslaving objectification brought by nature, by the collective, and by false views of religion. One caveat: Berdyaev especially prized the subjective and contingent nature of philosophy, so trying to describe his position is a bit like trying to track a moving target. He defended his pursuit of truth as necessarily contradictory in places because that is how humans think.

He did set out in Slavery and Freedom, however, his chief categories of thought: "the primacy of freedom over existence, of spirit over nature, subject over object, personality over the universal, creativeness over evolution, dualism over monism, love over law. The acknowledgement of supremacy of personality involves metaphysical inequality, distinction, dissent from fusion, the affirmation of quality against the power of quantity" (10). But these can perhaps be best summed up as the "principle of personality and freedom and the principle of compassion, sympathy, and justice" (11). Any system that seeks to crush human creativity does so because it denies the infinite creativity of each person. At the same time, without some measure of compassion and sympathy persons can turn inward and wither up, losing their freedom yet again.

Berdyaev, a former Marxist, was suspicious of the language of the common good, the collective, or even at times that of society or community. He feared any system that claimed to absorb the individual person into a collective whole, and thus, he also rejected any claims that the person's good came from society or that of the community as a unity. He also rejected any sense of social hierarchy except that of the natural hierarchy that arose from differences in talents and abilities, and even this he warned against encoding into a social or political hierarchy. Nonetheless, Berdyaev was an advocate of personalism, holding that personality could enslave itself in egoism and that individualism was not true personality unless it discovers itself in turning outward towards others.

For the Russian philosopher, each personality is truly unique, "unrepeatable," one of a kind, yet each personality must grow into itself, becoming a Gestalt of its parts. Like Martin Buber and the German phenomenologists, Berdyaev feared the self, the Thou, being enslaved by any force that objectified it. He saw this potential in the natural world and in human egoism, but he especially warned of it in political forces that sought to conform each person to a utopian vision. He did understand and value the language of communion, the turn outward 0f persons in relationships of compassion and love. Freedom is found in being subject to the truth, he insisted, but that truth is to discovered for each person. Obedience to the truth does not call for obedience to the claims of tyrants, and truth is not given but found.

Bedyaev has been charged with testing the boundaries of orthodox Christianity, and I think rightly so up to a point, for he held the nature of Christ as divine-human to be emblematic of all persons. We all have "theandric existence" he insisted (45). At its best, this approach does recognize that the image of God in all persons includes a spiritual element of supreme worth. At its worst, though, this approach can exalt too quickly the human person while excluding the communal nature of our personhoods. Berdyaev was quick to isolate anything like truth from its community of origins:

"To freedom belongs supremacy over tradition, but the possibility of free living lies in the fact that there has been truth in the tradition. . . . Not for a moment does personality become a part of any organism whatever or of any hierarchical whole. . . . The source of human freedom cannot be in society; the source of human freedom is in the spirit. Everything which proceeds from society is enslaving; everything which issues from the spirit is liberating" (106).

There are immense problems with this, not the least of which is a lack of any real rationale for the social form of communion other than separate persons reaching outward in their isolation. Much of this begins with his over dependence upon a Kantian view of the universe as broken into a subjective moral law within and an objective deterministic world of nature without. Berdyaev doesn't consider a truly Trinitarian interpersonal world where individuals are made up in part by each other and, therefore, are truly dependent upon each other, not in an oppressive uniform anthill, but in a pattern of relations that only draws out the vocation of each more fully and yes, unrepeatably.

His position lead him also to treat the authority of God as limited to a kind of existential offer of relationship while distrusting the Creator's role as King and Lord. He held that God was not the provident master of the natural, physical world, but only ruled in the realm of spirit. Of course, this then, creates a dilemma as to why Christ needed to come to earth at all. The world, for Berdyaev is finally not the home of persons but a place of temporary suffering that offers some measure of personal growth. He comes close to being a Christian Gnostic, his persons trapped in and warring against an oppressive physical world of ilusion. Thus, his position shows us a danger of personalism without any metaphysical sense of community's value as more than just a meeting place of sovereign selves.

Tocqueville on Materialism

To answer one of my own questions from my last post on Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, he condemns excessive materialism (consumerism?) as leading to civic weakness in a people and even to the eventual loss of humanity. He argues that the prosperity that comes with democratic freedoms may eventually undercut them because its people will not longer possess the virtues to use that freedom wisely:

"There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of the new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all. It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. The discharge of political duties appears to them to be a troublesome impediment which diverts them from their occupations and business. If they are required to elect representatives, to support the government by personal service, to meet on public business, they think they have no time, they cannot waste their precious hours in useless engagements; such idle amusements are unsuited to serious men who are engaged with the more important interests of life. These people think they are following the principle of self-interest, but the idea they entertain of that principle is a very crude one; and the better to look after what they call their own business, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters.

"As the citizens who labor do not care to attend to public affairs, and as the class which might devote its leisure to these duties has ceased to exist, the place of the government is, as it were, unfilled. If at that critical moment some able and ambitious man grasps the supreme power, he will find the road to every kind of usurpation open before him. If he attends for some time only to the material prosperity of the country, no more will be demanded of him. . . . A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart, the slave of its own well-being, awaiting only the hand that will bind it." (474-5)

"Whatever elevates, enlarges, and expands the soul renders it more capable of succeeding in those very undertakings which do not concern it. Whatever, on the other hand, enervates or lowers it weakens it for all purposes, the chief as well as the least, and threatens to render it almost equally impotent for both. Hence the soul must remain great and strong, though it were only to devote its strength and greatness from time to time to the service of the body. If men were ever to content themselves with material objects, it is probable that they would lose by degrees the art of producing them; and they would enjoy them in the end, like the brutes, without discernment and without improvement." (480)

Have we reached this point in the United States?

Jacques Maritain, Materiality, and Personhood

Jacques Maritain, the important neo-Scholastic philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, also contributed to the conversation on Christian Personalism. His most important book on the subject was his 1946 The Person and the Common Good. In this work, Maritain distinguishes individuality and personality:

"As an individual, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of the universe, a unique point in the immense web of cosmic, ethnical, historical forces and influences-and bound by their laws. Each of us is subject to the determinism of the physical world. Nonetheless, each of us is also a person and, as such, is not controlled by the stars. Our whole being subsists in virtue of the subsistence of the spiritual soul which is in us a principle of creative unity, independence and liberty" (38).

Maritian is invoking and answering the Kantian distinction between the physical and moral universes. For Maritain it is important that we recognize that we are both material and spiritual:

1. We are each individual. We exist separately in a material manner from other material organisms and objects. We each occupy distinct places in space. Our material existence receives a particular form-a particular shape and identity which is an expression of a more general type. We are each members of and particular examples of a species. Our bodily lives are grounded in our senses and desires.
   
2. Yet we are also persons. We have particular personalities. "Personality is the subsistence of the spiritual soul communicated to the human composite" (41), and because of this, persons communicate with other persons; they commune with them to a greater or lesser degree. Persons are oriented to each other by love and faithfulness, by recognizing the innate dignity in another who is made in the image of God.
   

For Maritain, our orientation to one of these has all to do with what we become. If we are dominated by our material selves, our higher personalities become debased and wanton. If we are dominated by our spiritual call and direction, our selves take on admirable and truly human expansiveness:

"If the development occurs in the direction of material individuality, it will be oriented towards the detestable ego whose law is to grasp or absorb for itself. At the same time personality, as such, will tend to be adulterated and to dissolve. But if the development occurs in the direction of spiritual personality, man will be oriented towards the generous self of the heroes and saints. Thus, man will be truly a person only so far as the life of the spirit and of liberty reigns over that of the senses and passions" (44-5).

Thus, true personhood points to the shape of the political society. Human beings are innately political because they are innately social. Will our common polis then be a society of individuals each tearing at the other in demands and negotiations, or will our common life be orientated to a common good? "The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is as a mirror of the whole" (49). Maritain is quick to stress that if we misunderstand the common good to be a collective goal other than the good of each person, we end with a totalitarian collective. If however, there is no common good, we end with radical individualism and no higher vision of human life.

The common good should be the development of the good life, the life of virtue, friendship, happiness, family, and so on. When this is the case, then the common good flows back to the benefit of each member, helping him or her to develop true liberty and freedom. But even this will eventually go wrong if it is not oriented to the greater end of the love of God and the beatific vision: "The common good of the city or the civilization . . . does not preserve its true nature unless it respects that which surpasses it, unless it is subordinated, not as a pure means, but as an infravalent end, to the order of eternal goods and the supra-temporal values from which human life is suspended" (62).

Any good political society will consider that the goods it imparts to its persons will ultimately recognize that as persons they are oriented to the eternal: "the common good by its essence must favor their progress toward the absolute goods which transcend politcal society" (76). Persons are created to serve their communities, but communities/societies that treat persons as material individuals will enslave most of them for the profit of a few. The Church is thus a society that models for other political societies God's best. Maritian sums it up this way:

"If we consider this grand City as living in its entirety upon the common good which is the very life of God, communicated to the multitude of the just and seeking out the errant, then each stone is for the city. But if we consider each stone as living itself, in its personal participation in this common good, upon the very life of God that is communicated, or as sought after personally by God, who wills to communicate His own life to it, then, it it toward each one that all the goods of the city converge to receive of their plenitude. In this sense, the city is for each stone" (86-7).

Christian Personalism

In the mid-twentieth century, a loose movement called Christian personalism arose in response to what it perceived as the extremes of totalitarian collectivism and atomizing individualism. Participants in the movement, Protestant and Catholic, argued that the human person must be understood as a relational and communal being, that one's personal fulfillment came from participating in relational social structures, that one's personality and growth were based in interacting with others in a healthy and holy way for the common good, and that ultimately community has its person-centered basis in Christ the Logos of the Universe. While personalist thinkers did not share a common political vision, they did hold that personalism had political and economic implications. Namely, to conceive of the body economic as only the market exchanges of otherwise isolated individuals was to ignore the material and cultural soil of our personhood. Likewise, to see individual persons as products of material, historical forces and thereby, subject to the all-powerful collective was to rob each one of his or her freedom expressed in community.

Individualism without some sense of how our persons are designed by God to be complementary cuts us off from the fruits of interpersonal aesthetic, ethical, and liturgical development. Collectivism without recognizing our personal free will and diverse identities robs us of the same.

Here's some brief passages from this school of thought that I think are worth pondering:

"Collectivism is no solution to the problem of modern individualism. Individualism and collectivism are two antithetical extremes which have in common only that they both leave the individual on his own. They both miss the essence of the human person who finds happiness and peace only in personal union, in common values and goals, in mutual giving and the sharing of personal values"--Walter Kasper

"[There is] an interdependence and reciprocity between the person and society: all that is accomplished in favor of the person is also a service rendered to society, and all that is done in favor of society redounds to the benefit of the person" --John Paul II

"Theological development and wholeness are found in community, not in isolation. Theological research in the spirit of communio is a search for the common truths and insights that bind me to others in Christ. The solitary thinker who follows no guidelines but his own mind, thinks himself into further isolation and loneliness. The thinker who is attuned to the Mind of Christ in the Church, is never alone. He is in communion with Christ and with the whole community of Christ's faithful who have lived in fellowship, and thought and believed in it, since apostolic times"--Cormac Burke

"Personality tends by nature to communion. . . . For the person requires membership in a society in virtue both of its dignity and its needs. . . . The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is a mirror of the whole. The end of society, therefore, is neither the individual good nor the collection of the individual goods of each of the persons who constitute it. . . . The common good of the city is neither the mere collection of private goods, nor the proper good of a whole. . . It is the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to both the whole and the parts into which it flows back and which, in turn, must benefit from it." --Jacques Maritian

"It is the sharing of a common life which constitutes individual personality. We become persons in community, in virtue of our relations to others. Human life is inherently a common life. Our ability to form individual purposes is itself a function of this common life. We do indeed enter into specific relations with our fellows in virtue of specific purposes of our own; and we must do so in order to realize, in concrete experience, the common humanity which makes us persons. . . . Community is prior to society."--John MacMurray

Individual and Community in Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev

My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok is a novel that I have read seven or eight times, each time to my lasting benefit. More than the fiction of Saul Bellow, the memoirs of Elie Wiesel, or the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Potok's story taught me to understand why many Jews dread and fear Christianity. It was from Potok that I first learned of the shameful pogroms and of the suffering of the Jews in "Christian" cultures. It was also a window into the Hassidic culture of New York, giving me a view of its education, its worship, and its ethics. I can truly say the book has been a gift to me.

Reading it again this summer against the background of other Jewish literature, My Name Is Asher Lev has yet again given me a gift. It has helped me enter more deeply and sympathetically into the dilemma of the individual and the community. The book explores a profound and intriguing scenario: what if a visual artist of powerful and undeniable talent, like that of Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, or Amedeo Modigliani, was born into a Brooklyn Hassidic community? The character of Asher Lev is who he is because he has been born with a painter's eye. Asher is also who he is because he is a religious Jew and an only child whose father often must travel abroad for the community's Rebbe and whose mother, having suffered the loss of her brother, battles with debilitating fear that she will lose her husband or her son. Asher's painting will eventually wound his parents, as well as his small religious community, deeply.

He is torn between two traditions--that of the art world and that of Hassidic Judaism. The wounding comes not just because many Hassidic Jews distrust painting, or think it a frivolous activity at best, but because Asher must turn to the painting of nudes if he is to truly absorb the tradition of Western art, and worse, he must turn to the painting of crucifixions if he is to find a form of ultimate suffering to embody in his personal vision his mother's pain. This last act is one of utterly bewildering betrayal that ends the novel and the artist's coming of age.

Potok labels this experience "core-core culture confrontation," that is when the values of one's community come into conflict with those of the larger general culture. Both the uniqueness of the individual and the particularity of the community are woven into their "sense of identity":

(1) You learn early on in your life the stable values of your particular community.
(2) You learn early on in your life that your life makes sense; that it's important, it counts.
(3) You learn that human actions are meaningful. They resonate. One cannot act without in one way or another affecting.
(4) You learn early on in your life that action and value ought to be in harmony. You cannot have a viable sense of self worth if you value one thing and act contrary to what it is that you value. When this happens, a dichotomy or split in the self is established.
Finally it seems to me that fundamental to an awareness of the nature of a core of both a tradition and an individual in that tradition is (5) that the individual be made aware of what is right and what is wrong, as far as the community is concerned, and that the individual be able to choose between the two.

In My Name Is Asher Lev, Asher experiences confrontation in his identity because the art world would hold that individual expression and personal honesty are essential to art's greatness, while in Asher's community, one learns to channel one's self into given roles. But it is not just that Asher's community has no real place for his vocation, it is that the worldview underlying it cuts against their deepest values. The struggle for the young artist is in seeking a way between these rival polities.

Asher, after all, cannot entirely jettison his community. They are at the core of his art--its subject matter, its mythic power, and its raw emotion. And Potok the novelist is sure to offer us a vision of his community that is human and multi-dimensional. They try to listen, to understand his art, to account for him, and to find a place for him: "Everyone is listening," his mother tells him in response to his complaints, "There would be no problem if no one were listening to you, Asher" (111). Yet this vision of the young's artist's individuality must still wrestle with counter-vision of secular modernity. When Asher later explains that he is accountable to his community because "All Jews are responsible one for the other," his teacher Jacob Kahn responds, "As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it. Do you understand? An artist is responsible to his art. Anything else is propaganda" (218).

Is Kahn entirely correct, however? As a Christian, I would contend that there may be a third way forward. Jacques Maritain thinks that art comes from an internalized habit of work and reflection. The artist is a maker of art objects. The subjectivity, the imagination, and the act of confession in the true artist are all subsumed to the act of making the beautiful work. Much like people as moral beings learn a kind of ethical prudence, an inner sense of what a given situation calls for, so artists over time develop certain habits of seeing and working. A poet, for example, has to put in the time and work with language, metaphor, observation, etc. in order to develop a poetic craft. The poet’s subjectivity is meant to serve the work and not the reverse. Maritain stresses that the Christian who would make art should focus on the task at hand:

If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to "make Christian." [. . .] The entire soul of the artist reaches and rules his work, but it must reach and rule it only through the artistic habitus. Art tolerates no division here. It will not allow any foreign element, juxtaposing itself to it, to mingle, in the production of the work, its regulation with art’s own. Tame it, and it will do all that you want it to do. Use violence, and it will accomplish nothing.

The artist can only make what she has learned over time to practice. It has its own demands, concerns, and rules. These are only right and natural and should be respected. Indeed, trying to bypass these in the name of religion is only bound to failure. The same can be said of the other arts, too. Poet Rod Jellema would warn us against using the label "Christian poet" too lightly: "It invites a poet who is a Christian into a frame of mind in which, proud of his humility, he can knock the tough commitment to art as merely arty, shrug off the world’s expected indifference to his work as the price he must pay for his martyrdom, and isolate himself in mutual-admiration groups of like-minded poets."

The artist as maker is a humbler definition of vocation than that of the prophet or truth-creator, and I would contend that it is more Christian, and yes, more Jewish. Such a vision does not deny the talent or the genuine inspiration of the artistic process, but it reminds us that the artist in serving a tradition of art is nevertheless still serving the truth, and a truth found in more than an individual

Individual Action is Relational Action

Graham Ward in an essay entitled "A Christian Act: Politics and Liturgical Practice" sets out a model for describing human action. His terms are similar to Kenneth Burke's dramaturigal model. Ward suggests that Christians begin with the principle "Your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col 3:3). He then asks, "What kind of act is a Christian act?" He examines this question from six perspectives, all of which overlap to a large extent:

1. Agent: The actions of the Christian are not those of an autonomous individual who claims self-sufficiency but of an individual who is wrapped in a vinculum caritatis, a bond of love. The Christian act is one that abides in Christ, that imitates Christ. The Christian agent is one who sojourns in this world, even while claiming it for Christ. This journey is traveled within the koinonia fellowship of the Church and experienced in the unity of the Lord's supper. As such, each Christian is called to resist individual privitization of his or her life and recognize the "interrelationality" of being a being on his or her way to a "final recognition of who she is in Christ."
2. Nature of the Action: Our actions, then, are Christological in orientation; they are discovered to be such at the level of our practices. We reach an understanding of them by participating in the Christian practice, which God names us through. We cannot name the nature of the action ourselves, for it is God who decides this as we participate in his will.
3. Evaluation of the Action: We are limited in our ability to judge our actions, though we must attempt to do so even as we are aware of our limitations. "We name and judge far better the more we are subject to God," and this happens as we enter into his eschatological expectations. We orient ourselves to his end purposes.
4. Object: We truly discover the object of our actions as we submit all things to Christ. The object of our actions is to be situated within the economy of redemption; thus, we learn to pursue the good , true, and beautiful as God intends. When we do so, our objects become worship. "In such a labouring, the agent is priestly, the act liturgical, and the object sacramental."
5. Effect of the Act: The effect of the act upon object and agent is transfiguration: to be obedient and desire what God desires. We learn that we are not truly transparent to ourselves even as we obey and grow in obedience.
6. Dispositions and Affections: These operate within a Christ-centered form of reasoning; we become more and more inclined to a direction of discipline, that inclined to the way of Jesus.

All of this suggests that our motives and intentions are mixed and failable and only become less so through the actions of grace upon us even as we enter in and seek to obey. We cannot truly act in a free manner as God intends without the relationships of Church and Triune God.

Ratio et Fidei -- part 3

Stephen K. Moroney has attempted to offer a more complete model of the ways in which sin and rationality impact the Christian:

1. Our minds engage knowledge in both subjective and objective ways, though perhaps the two are finally intermingled.
2. God, humanity, and creation can all be treated as both subjects and objects.
3. The regenerate mind or new nature, the communities which shape our knowledge, and individual traits of our personalities all have a part in this rational engagement.

This question of personal capacity and personal caprice is joined to covenant community, a community formed by God's Spirit and expressed in the Church. Rationality and ecclesiology are deeply joined for Christian conviction and teaching, and as such, must develop and use wisely the vocabulary of Christian insight into the world.

Rationality begins with the disciple's trust that the master has something to offer, and this trust is absolutely necessary to develop the skills intrinsic to ever understanding the truth in practice. Critical thinking that never trusts in authorities is incapable of anything like critical realism. There is no engaging the reality that is there until the capacity to embrace both theory and practice is in place. Not even this committed involvement suggests a uniform pedagogy for all learners. As Paul Griffiths points out, a teacher cannot adopt "identical argumentative strategies" for differing persons with different stages of "catechetical preparation" (152). This is especially a disturbing question when we deal with resistant learners, ones who have a "volitional depravity" that robs them continually of the humility necessary to undertake the discipline in question. The psychikos are not neutral but rebellious, even when willfully blind to that interior antagonism.

Nonetheless, as Reinhold Hütter has reasoned, our mental judgments can be redeemed. This restoration comes about alongside a "metaphysics of creation: "[a] knowledge of creatures that is not directed to its dutiful end, namely, the knowledge of God, is a distorted, sinful knowledge. . . . sinful knowledge by its lack of reference to and reverence for the One who grants being in the first place."

Curiosity is not always a virtue; it sometimes kills the cat when he takes to sniffing poison. A reorientation of our desire to answer questions must be directed to the contemplation of God and God's good creation, including the creaturely component called humanism. A metaphysics of creation and an ordering of our loves centers upon the contemplation of God and the signs of his goodness.

When Christian education does this it resists the critical distance so prized by the modern university; instead, it enters into a divine dance of desire, partaking of the proximity and distance of the lover, ever drawing into delight, not curious, but committed and ecstatic. The offering of God's presence and the offering of his perceived absence are both acts of one who would seduce us with his own divine, The triune community of love, and approaches to God and his truth are both intertwined as freedom and obedience are always mixed in love.

In such a vision of education, nihilism is replaced with laughter.

Life Together, Life Alone-Part 3

"Every Christian community must know that not only do the weak need the strong, but also that the strong cannot exist without the weak. The elimination of the weak is the death of the community."--Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Such a stance taken in the face of Nazi Germany revealed that Bonhoeffer's insights were inherently political, even though the polity they embody does not seem obviously so at first glance. He understood that a true community could not be founded on the destruction of lives considered useless nor could it exist in the delusion of strength. The Christian opposition to gossip and slander contain in them a profound spiritual discipline that opposses this kind of practice:

God did not make others as I would have made them. God did not give them to me so that I could dominate and control them, but so that I might find the Creator by means of them. . . . God does not want me to mold others into the image that seems good to me, that is, into my own image. Instead, in their freedom from me God made other people in God's own image. I can never know in advance how God's image should appear in others. That image always takes on a completely new and unique form whose origin is found solely in God's free and sovereign act of creation. . . . [T]he complete diversity of individuals in the community is no longer a reason to talk and judge and condemn, and therefore no longer a pretext for self-justification. Rather this diversity is a reason for rejoicing in one another and serving one another. (95)

The bearing of the burden of another's freedom strengthens in us the respect for another's dignity and the building of the bonds of trust that are essential for true shalom to flower. For Bonhoeffer, this reality is found in the Table of the Lord, which essence is gift: Christ, the giver of gifts; our gifts given for the sake of Christ; and Christ as the gift given to us in the sacrament of bread and wine. The community of forgiveness reaches its purpose and foretastes its end in that of joyful communion.

Life Together, Life Alone-Part 2

"Without the burden and labor of the day, prayer is not prayer; and without prayer, work is not work. . . . The unity of prayer and work, the unity of the day, is found because finding the You of God behind the It of the day's work is what Paul means by his admonition to 'pray without ceasing.' . . . Thus every word, every deed, every piece of work of the Christian becomes a prayer, not in the unreal sense of being constantly distracted from the task that must be done, but in the real breakthorough from the hard It to the gracious You."--Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

This is a deeply monastic insight on Bonhoeffer's part. It recalls Brother Lawrence's "practicing the presence of God." Bonhoeffer was concerned that prayer, whether alone or together, bring one into reality and not away from it. Reality is in Christ, while unreality is that of our own narcisstic experience. This insight also shows the influence of Martin Buber's I and Thou. Work by its hardness creates a world where people and their actions are robbed of relationship, while prayer draws us into a personal relationship with God, including as he is experienced in the actions of daily vocation.

The tests of daily life reveal whether our prayers have been true or mere illusions of our own making. One reason he encouraged the discipline of confession of one's sins to another mature Christian was to test if our confessions were truly to God or simply to ourselves--we can most easily forgive ourselves. The same is true for intecessory prayer--we uphold another in Christ and not in ourselves. Such prayer is the opposite of our self-comfort and emotional indulgence.

Bonhoeffer very sensibly warns that every instance of Christian community will be tested by natural rivalries. We are always dividing ourselves and comparing ourselves to others: "No sooner are people together than they begin to observe, judge, and classify each other. Thus, even as Christian community is in the process of being formed, an invisible, often unknown, yet terrible life-and-death struggle commences" (93). The hallmark of Christian community should be service, service which takes us out of ourselves in order to serve another.

This post discusses the possibility of guns being allowed in Texas Universities. The bill would only allow students to carry a handgun on campus if they are 21 or older and licensed to carry a concealed handgun.
If the law passes is it right that private universities could opt out?

The last statement in the article:
“Yet, when it comes to gun-related incidents, we seem to think that putting more guns in the mix will lead to a good, rather than bloody outcome,” Ellis said
Is Sen. Rodney Ellis right? Technically, I think it would be a bloody outcome either way. But at least an armed student would have a better chance of walking out alive if they had a gun (and trained) than they would by throwing a book at the gunman.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/6432279.html

Chris Carson

Boxer Battalion

http://iphone.foxnews.com/story/0/521138-Gates-Hails-Soldier-Snapped-in-Pink-Boxer-Shorts.html


I found this article interesting. A U.S. soldier from Ft. Worth was photographed fighting the Taliban in his pink boxer shorts. This reminds me of the off-duty police officer in his boxer shorts, that was reported chasing a criminal a few months ago. It appears that terrorists and criminals should always be on guard because the authorities are ready (or not so ready) always.

Some may view this response as disrespectful to the U.S. for failure to comply with uniform requirements. I think this is giving the terrorists exactly the kind of respect they deserve.
The article points out the bravery of this young soldier to fight wearing his pick boxer shorts. It certainly makes him a target, but maybe Gates was correct about psychological warfare. It is probably only a matter of time before others try this new form of psychological warfare. What about Football players or hockey players showing up out of uniform to play. That would be brave!
-Jamie Herndon

'til Divorce Do We Part?

Historian of law and religion John Witte, Jr. describes four models of marriage in the Western Christian tradition that have had an important impact on early marriage, divorce, and family law in the United States.

1) Within Roman Catholic tradition, marriage has been understood as a sacrament that, while a natural and contractual association of a man and a woman for the purposes of propagation, childrearing, and companionship, is primarily a spiritual union that brings grace to the couple and to those touched by their marriage. Such marriages might be annulled, but they can not be dissolved by divorce.

The three major streams of magisterial Protestantism each in turn rejected Catholic sacramentalism, but often borrowed many particulars from Catholic canon law.

2) Lutheranism stressed that the Christian life shares in two kingdoms, an earthly, political one and a spiritual, heavenly one. Marriage is a natural and civil institution, and thus both marriage and divorce are earthly, public acts that involve the judge, the magistrate, and the priest. In turn,

3) Calvinism stressed marriage as a covenant that involves the whole community--parents, witnesses, the minister, and the magistrate. As an act that shares in the creation, marriage has in mind the spiritual and moral well-being of the couple and of their children. God is a part of every covenant. Even though divorce might become necessary in cases in which the covenant has been broken, it is a serious undertaking, and it must encounter a large number of barriers to prevent easy suits.

4) Anglicanism pictured marriage as a little commonwealth in which the serious covenant with one's spouse serves not only to teach the couple the moral and spiritual virtues, but also to act as a "seedbed and seminary" for the local church, polity, and community in these virtues. Divorce was almost entirely prohibited in this tradition.

Arising in the 18th century, the Enlightenment view of marriage was often to void the sacramental and covenantal assumptions about marriage for purely contractual ones representing a voluntary bargain between two persons with agreed-upon terms and time limits. This view argued for the removal of conditions of parental consent, community witness, or ecclesiastical blessing. While these notions only marginally made their presence known in the U.S. during the 19th century, by the mid-20th century they became more and more predominant with divorce becoming easier and easier to obtain, especially after the rise of no-fault divorce and more fluid definitions of marriage and consensual relationships.

What does this brief history have to teach us about the nature of marriage, divorce, and family law? Any thoughts?

The Nexus of the Community v. Self Debate

Germany, Like most of Western Europe and England, provides several valuable services. The Faustenburgs, residents of the German Lander (a German Lander is the same as an American state) Baden-Wurttemberg, benefit from these policies in several ways.

For example, Germany provides generous unemployment benefits and health care benefits which shelters the family from the economic crisis. Additionally, the government provides a monthly stipend to families with children. Like many other European countries, citizens can receive an education from prestigious universities at a fraction of the cost their American counter-parts endure in pursuit of higher education.

Additionally, the German government intervened as the economic crisis worsened by asking ailing companies to reduce the number of hours employees worked (which reduced their compensation) with the proviso that the government would match any lost compensation.

Of course, none of these goodies are free. Average Germans pay taxes through the nose. The article cites the number as 52% of all wages. In other words, Germans give 52 euro cents back to the government out of every earned euro. The article contrasts that number with 30 cents out of every dollar for American citizens. However, I think that number is low as I will discuss in a moment.

So, which system do you prefer, The U.S. model or the European model? While I still hold that our system is on a more solid basis fundamentally, the German model has managed to cap costs on education and health care. This would not be a major issue for me if the cost of these two institutions had not exploded recently in a manner that is beyond market fundamentals or demand in my opinion.

Additionally, the 30% number is low. How do you feel about a comparison of the two systems if our tax burden is closer to 40-45% of earnings? We are simply not getting a good bang for the buck at that point!

I think that is where I am at right now. Taxes are a necessary evil for civil society. However, the U.S. government (and many state and local governments) simply dilute the power of our tax dollars with projects and programs that serve little to no benefit for average Americans.

Sorry, I left the philosophical aspect of this post behind in my rant!!