Christian Education and Personhood (John Paul II series)

This is the last entry culled from the encyclicals of John Paul II. The following is from Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the encyclical that attempted to give a more Christian course to Catholic university education. Much of what he has to say is true of Christian universities in general. Try replacing the word "Catholic" below with "Christian" and see how much you agree with and how much you can learn from:

4. It is the honour and responsibility of a Catholic University to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth. This is its way of serving at one and the same time both the dignity of man and the good of the Church, which has "an intimate conviction that truth is (its) real ally ... and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith." Without in any way neglecting the acquisition of useful knowledge, a Catholic University is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God. The present age is in urgent need of this kind of disinterested service, namely of proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished. By means of a kind of universal humanism a Catholic University is completely dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in their essential connection with the supreme Truth, who is God. It does this without fear but rather with enthusiasm, dedicating itself to every path of knowledge, aware of being preceded by him who is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life", the Logos, whose Spirit of intelligence and love enables the human person with his or her own intelligence to find the ultimate reality of which he is the source and end and who alone is capable of giving fully that Wisdom without which the future of the world would be in danger.

6. Through the encounter which it establishes between the unfathomable richness of the salvific message of the Gospel and the variety and immensity of the fields of knowledge in which that richness is incarnated by it, a Catholic University enables the Church to institute an incomparably fertile dialogue with people of every culture. Man's life is given dignity by culture, and, while he finds his fullness in Christ, there can be no doubt that the Gospel which reaches and renews him in every dimension is also fruitful for the culture in which he lives.

7. In the world today, characterized by such rapid developments in science and technology, the tasks of a Catholic University assume an ever greater importance and urgency. Scientific and technological discoveries create an enormous economic and industrial growth, but they also inescapably require the correspondingly necessary search for meaning in order to guarantee that the new discoveries be used for the authentic good of individuals and of human society as a whole. If it is the responsibility of every University to search for such meaning, a Catholic University is called in a particular way to respond to this need: its Christian inspiration enables it to include the moral, spiritual and religious dimension in its research, and to evaluate the attainments of science and technology in the perspective of the totality of the human person.

In this context, Catholic Universities are called to a continuous renewal, both as "Universities" and as "Catholic". For, "What is at stake is the very meaning of scientific and technological research, of social life and of culture, but, on an even more profound level, what is at stake is the very meaning of the human person"(10). . . .

21. A Catholic University pursues its objectives through its formation of an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ. The source of its unity springs from a common dedication to the truth, a common vision of the dignity of the human person and, ultimately, the person and message of Christ which gives the Institution its distinctive character. As a result of this inspiration, the community is animated by a spirit of freedom and charity; it is characterized by mutual respect, sincere dialogue, and protection of the rights of individuals. It assists each of its members to achieve wholeness as human persons; in turn, everyone in the community helps in promoting unity, and each one, according to his or her role and capacity, contributes towards decisions which affect the community, and also towards maintaining and strengthening the distinctive Catholic character of the Institution. . . .

33. A specific priority is the need to examine and evaluate the predominant values and norms of modern society and culture in a Christian perspective, and the responsibility to try to communicate to society those ethical and religious principles which give full meaning to human life. In this way a University can contribute further to the development of a true Christian anthropology, founded on the person of Christ, which will bring the dynamism of the creation and redemption to bear on reality and on the correct solution to the problems of life.

By its very nature, a University develops culture through its research, helps to transmit the local culture to each succeeding generation through its teaching, and assists cultural activities through its educational services. It is open to all human experience and is ready to dialogue with and learn from any culture. A Catholic University shares in this, offering the rich experience of the Church's own culture. In addition, a Catholic University, aware that human culture is open to Revelation and transcendence, is also a primary and privileged place for a fruitful dialogue between the Gospel and culture.

44. Through this dialogue a Catholic University assists the Church, enabling it to come to a better knowledge of diverse cultures, discern their positive and negative aspects, to receive their authentically human contributions, and to develop means by which it can make the faith better understood by the men and women of a particular culture(36). While it is true that the Gospel cannot be identified with any particular culture and transcends all cultures, it is also true that "the Kingdom which the Gospel proclaims is lived by men and women who are profoundly linked to a culture, and the building up of the Kingdom cannot avoid borrowing the elements of human culture or cultures(37). "A faith that places itself on the margin of what is human, of what is therefore culture, would be a faith unfaithful to the fullness of what the Word of God manifests and reveals, a decapitated faith, worse still, a faith in the process of self-annihilation"(38).

45. A Catholic University must become more attentive to the cultures of the world of today, and to the various cultural traditions existing within the Church in a way that will promote a continuous and profitable dialogue between the Gospel and modern society. Among the criteria that characterize the values of a culture are above all, the meaning of the human person, his or her liberty, dignity, sense of responsibility, and openness to the transcendent. To a respect for persons is joined the preeminent value of the family, the primary unit of every human culture.

Family, Work, and "Dominion" (John Paul II series)

This is section 10 of John Paul II's encyclical Laborem exercens. It raises a number of important questions about not only the nature of work, but also what Christians should believe about the nature of the family and community:

"Work constitutes a foundation for the formation of family life, which is a natural right and something that man is called to. These two spheres of values-one linked to work and the other consequent on the family nature of human life-must be properly united and must properly permeate each other. In a way, work is a condition for making it possible to found a family, since the family requires the means of subsistence which man normally gains through work. Work and industriousness also influence the whole process of education in the family, for the very reason that everyone "becomes a human being" through, among other things, work, and becoming a human being is precisely the main purpose of the whole process of education. Obviously, two aspects of work in a sense come into play here: the one making family life and its upkeep possible, and the other making possible the achievement of the purposes of the family, especially education. Nevertheless, these two aspects of work are linked to one another and are mutually complementary in various points.

"It must be remembered and affirmed that the family constitutes one of the most important terms of reference for shaping the social and ethical order of human work. The teaching of the Church has always devoted special attention to this question, and in the present document we shall have to return to it. In fact, the family is simultaneously a community made possible by work and the first school of work, within the home, for every person.

"The third sphere of values that emerges from this point of view-that of the subject of work-concerns the great society to which man belongs on the basis of particular cultural and historical links. This society-even when it has not yet taken on the mature form of a nation-is not only the great "educator" of every man, even though an indirect one (because each individual absorbs within the family the contents and values that go to make up the culture of a given nation); it is also a great historical and social incarnation of the work of all generations. All of this brings it about that man combines his deepest human identity with membership of a nation, and intends his work also to increase the common good developed together with his compatriots, thus realizing that in this way work serves to add to the heritage of the whole human family, of all the people living in the world.

"These three spheres are always important for human work in its subjective dimension. And this dimension, that is to say, the concrete reality of the worker, takes precedence over the objective dimension. In the subjective dimension there is realized, first of all, that "dominion" over the world of nature to which man is called from the beginning according to the words of the Book of Genesis. The very process of "subduing the earth", that is to say work, is marked in the course of history, and especially in recent centuries, by an immense development of technological means. This is an advantageous and positive phenomenon, on condition that the objective dimension of work does not gain the upper hand over the subjective dimension, depriving man of his dignity and inalienable rights or reducing them."

1. Should we see work and family as intimately related? Why or why not?
2. Is human dignity tied to our work, to its place in our homelife, and its place in the larger community?
3. What role should technology play in the humanizing of work, especially as a part of family and community?
   

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

Can Family Refuse Chemo??

Dr. Sullivan, Here is my 2nd blog.
> Article: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/16/teen-
> family-cannot-refuse-chemo/
>
> Should Government be allowed to Mandate Chemotherapy/drug Treatments?
> The recent case of Daniel Hauser has encouraged much debate among
> citizens regarding the role of government in our personal lives. Is
> Daniel Hauser posing any real threat to other Americans? Have
> people been healed from cancer through other more "natural"
> treatments compared to Chemo? Regardless of our personal views on
> Cancer treatment, we must carefully consider the implications of
> government intervention in these situations. Medical practices
> have certainly evolved over the decades. Doctors used to bleed
> patients as a form of treatment, feeling confident it was the right
> thing. Perhaps in the next 50 years cancer treatments will be more
> developed?
>
> This is not the first instance of parents having to fled to protect
> their ill child. According to an article on yahoo news, (http://
> news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090520/ap_on_re_us/us_forced_chemo) at least
> 5 other families have fled with their child to avoid "medical
> treatments". In 2003, Parker Jensen, a 12 year old boy, fled from
> Utah to avoid court-ordered chemo. He survived without chemo-therapy.
>
> Would you want the government to mandate certain treatments that
> may, or may not be considered "safe" or available on the market in
> the years to come? Consider the drug Gardasil that has been
> recommended to young girls as a preventative for HPV. State
> requirements for this drug proved to be very controversial when it
> was introduced. Some additional details now include: 20 deaths
> after Gardasil injections, and a small number of cases of Guillain-
> Barré Syndrome. This treatment is recommended to young girls around
> the age of 11, although there is no real evidence of the long term
> effects of the drug. Merck & Co. (the pharmaceutical company
> responsible for the drug) guarantees the effectiveness for only 4
> years after treatment, and have no approved booster shot available
> on the market after that 4 year period. All considered, girl’s from
> 11-15 are 60% "safe" from HPV and Merck is making billions.
>
> Merck & Co. is one of the seven largest Pharmaceutical companies in
> the world. Like others, their legal history is far from perfect.
>
> - A 58 million dollar settlement for deceptive marketing
> tactics to promote Vioxx.
>
> - 2004 removal of their drug Vioxx from the market. After
> 60,000 lawsuits, they agreed that long term (18 month) / high dose
> use raised concerns for increased heart attack and stroke.
>
> - Currently, the FDA is looking into a link between Merck &
> Co. drug Singular, suicide, and other psychological side effects.
>
> Before chastising families for taking personal responsibility for
> the health and care of their own children rather than depending
> upon the medical industry and drugs that the FDA deems "safe", stop
> and consider the amount of legal commercials you watch for drugs
> that have recently been removed from public use. Hundreds of
> millions of dollars are awarded to citizens each year for the long-
> term effects of these "unnatural chemicals," but that doesn't even
> compare to the multi-billion dollar Pharmaceutical industry profits.
>
> -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?