A Sound of Sheer Silence

"So, what do you think about the bishops wanting to deny Biden Communion?" I've gotten that question a lot. There are a number of ways to approach this issue that I think are interesting on their own merits, but not ultimately the heart of the conversation.  For example, the lawyer in me is fascinated by the applicability of Canon 1405 p.1 , which states that "[i]n the cases mentioned in Canon 1401 [which includes ecclesiastical penalties such as denying Communion], the Roman Pontiff alone has the right to judge . . . Heads of State."  That seems pretty black and white to me--the U.S. Bishops' Conference has no jurisdiction over Biden so long as he is the President.  And, if you think through the "legislative history" of this Canon, it was surely written to prevent local bishops from mucking around with the Pope's broader diplomatic and spiritual initiatives.  In other words, exactly the kind of scenario we have right now.   Along those lines, ...

If there is anything we probably don't need in the Year of Our Lord 2019, it's a dude pontificating on abortion.  And, yet, we find ourselves, at least in the United States, in a place where the issue has absolutely come to a head, in the form of a serious of extremely severe restrictions on abortions passed in Georgia, Alabama, and my home state of Ohio.  In that light, I think everyone has some sort of obligation to indicate where they stand.  And I think it is particularly incumbent on people of faith, and especially Christians, to talk about where they stand, as the motivating force behind these moves has been explicitly Christian in its framing. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece that described what I think is a more constructive framework for thinking about the philosophical issues behind abortion.  I stand by what I wrote there, but upon re-reading it I noticed that I never committed to a particular position.  So, here it is--for the reasons set for...

This is almost certainly a mistake, but let's talk about Kevin Williamson and abortion.  For those who are not aware, Kevin Williamson is a conservative writer, long known for having controversial and provocative positions on things (he came to my attention for stating that people in distressed, rural communities have no one to blame but themselves, since they could always move from those distressed rural communities).  Recently, he was hired as a full-time writer for The Atlantic  (a higher-end, intellectually-oriented magazine), and then last week un-hired.  The source of his un-hiring was backlash stemming from repeated, public comments endorsing the idea that women who have abortions should be hanged . It is this position that I would like to talk about for a moment. The general response is to declare this an "extreme" position that is outside the bounds of any abortion-related discourse.  But, is it?  If you read the podcast exchange and strip away t...

Something of a recurring theme on this blog is my war stories from Catholic middle school and high school, as seen here and here and here and also here .  In doing so, I know I am presenting that experience in the worst possible light.  I got a very solid education during those six years, and I know I would not be where I am, and who I am, without the middle school and especially high school experience I had.  So, when I tell negative stories about that experience, there should be an unspoken caveat that, on balance, my experience was very positive. With that necessary caveat out of the way, I have another high school story, one that relates to a story in the news.   Maddi Runkles is an 18 year old senior at Heritage Academy in Hagerstown, Maryland.  Runkles is also pregnant, and as a result of her pregnancy, she was not allowed (or will not be allowed--it's not clear from the story when graduation will be) to participate in graduation ceremonies.  I ...

In the previous post , we looked at two basic ideas.  First, there is a moral intuition that many of us have with regard to the beginning of life--a child who is born is fully human, zygote is not fully human, and the stages in between are something of a disputed grey area.  Second, drawing on Girard, there is the notion of defining humanity in terms of its participation in human society, the "Social Other" as James Alison puts it, that forms us and is formed by our presence and action. Let's, then, try to put these ideas together.  By defining humanity in terms of the interaction with and participation in the "Social Other," the most critical event in the life of any human being is the moment of birth.  At the moment of birth, a human being is "installed" in human society in a way that is categorically different from what comes before, in at least two ways.  First, at the moment of birth a baby is able to interact with and be influenced by the entir...

The law school I attended had (as still has) a professor of criminal law named Paul Robinson.  I didn't have him for first year criminal law, but a number of my close friends did.  One of his big areas of research in criminal law involved the idea of moral intuitions.  Criminal law, and other areas of law for that matter, have often taken on a rationalistic and technical character, in which you attempted to come to the "correct" legal regime through the application of pure reason.  Professor Robinson believed that this approach tends to de-emphasize and de-legitimize our basic moral sense of what is just--a basic intuition that is often a more reliable vehicle to achieving justice than our hyper-rational structures, especially when that intuition is "crowd sourced" and incorporates our collective wisdom. I was thinking about Professor Robinson's ideas while reading this essay by Rachel Held Evans .  Evans writes about the dilemma that pro-life Christians f...

1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbatio...

I thought I would simply wait out the whole Planned Parenthood controversy, but it appears that it continues to grow and grow without any obvious endpoint.  So, here are some thoughts. 1.  The Messenger is Not the Message .  There are those who cannot fathom why people are not more upset about the Planned Parenthood videos.  There is a simple and direct answer to their question--there is a significant segment of the population that loathes the pro-life movement and pro-life messengers, and as such simply ignores everything they say.  Many think that insofar as these videos are the product of hardcore wing of the pro-life movement, and they are, then they are to be ignored. I say that to be descriptive, not prescriptive.  No matter how much you dislike the pro-life movement and its mouthpieces, I think these videos are disturbing and problematic for the pro-choice movement.  In fact, I think it would have been far more effective for the pro-life fol...

Before I get to Chapter 3, this piece on abortion polling is well worth a read (h/t to Elizabeth S. Bruenig via Twitter).  It supports and reinforces some of the points Camosy makes in Chapter 1 about the nuances in people's views on abortion.  It also brought out an element that I've never seen captured in polling, but is true in my anecdotal experience--people really don't like abortion protesters.  A number of otherwise pro-life individuals that the reporter spoke to made clear that they thought that picketing clinics was improper.  Substantial majorities, well beyond the number of people who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, felt that those women who do get abortions should be able to do so "informed by medically accurate information" (87%), in a "non-judgmental" context (74%), "comfortabl[y]" (72%), and "without added burdens" (70%).  More on this is later posts. On to Chapter 3, which is oriented around th...

Chapter 2 explores the question of the moral status of the fetus.  Here, a quick note--Camosy uses the term "prenatal child" in places as a substitute for "fetus."  He says that his use of the term is not a polemic, but I confess to a bit of skepticism on that point.  I have never encountered the term "prenatal child" before reading Camosy's book, whereas "fetus" is a real medical term.  Given the politicization of language in the context of abortion, I think Camosy's language choice is unfortunate, as it detracts from his attempt to forge some kind of middle ground.  I'm going to go with "fetus" throughout, because I think medically-approved terms are the closest we are going to find to neutral ground. Anyway, Camosy begins by doing important work in defining the question that one is trying to answer with this exploration.  It is not, as many assert, an attempt to figure out whether the fetus is "alive," as tele...

Camosy begins the book by laying out the state of the issue of abortion in the United States.  In doing so, his core point is that there is a fundamental discontinuity between abortion rhetoric and abortion practice , as seen in several dimensions. First, Camosy notes that the general rhetorical position of pro-choice advocates, especially pro-choice politicians, is some version of the formula "safe, legal, and rare," emphasizing the idea that abortion is, and should be, a low frequency occurrence.  And yet, as Camosy points out, the abortion rate in the United States is quite high.  Camosy cites a figure of 1.2 million abortions per year, which corresponds to figures from the Guttmacher Institute of 1,287,000 abortions in the U.S. in 2003 .  That works out to 21 abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age, or 31 abortions per 100 live births.  It should be noted, however, that this figure has been declining since the middle 1980s , and in 2011, the figure...