G. K. Chesterton on Journalists:
“…there exists in the modern world, perhaps for the first time in history, a class of people whose interest is not in that things should happen well or happen badly, should happen successfully or happen unsuccessfully, should happen to the advantage of this party or the advantage of that party, but whose interest simply is that things should happen.
Notre Dame law professor Richard Garnett wrote an outstanding piece for USA Today. He argues convincingly that the large-scale and widespread withdrawal of Catholic institutions from many of the nation’s cities has ramifications that extend beyond the interests of Catholics alone.
Read more on Government and the Decline of Urban Catholicism…
Noted evangelical scholar Randall Balmer castigates the religious right in a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The critique, in my view, amounts to little more than a slightly more sophisticated version of Jim Wallis. The criticisms leveled by Balmer and Wallis are the same ones made by leftist enemies of the religious right for decades; the difference is that Balmer and Wallis are evangelicals themselves and, therefore, their critiques are “internal” and, for some, more compelling.
Happy Independence Day, everyone:
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. Read more on Because It’s Worth Rereading…….
There’s a new e-version of The Federalist Papers produced by Edward O’Connor. The innovation with this edition compared to all the other various electronic iterations of the papers is the ability to link to an exact paragraph within a particular paper. O’Connor says of the impetus for the endeavor, “I haven’t been able find one that was simultaneously nice-looking and useful (useful insofar as pinpoint linkability is concerned, at least).”
Here’s a link to the introduction to Frederick Crews’ new book, Follies of the Wise, which includes the following statement:
Having made a large intellectual misstep in younger days, I am aware that rationality isn’t an endowment but an achievement that can come undone at any moment. And that is just why it is prudent, in my opinion, to distrust sacrosanct authorities, whether academic or psychiatric or ecclesiastic, and to put one’s faith instead in objective procedures that can place a check on our never sated appetite for self-deception.
This follows his description of the purpose of his book, to lay out the two sides in an “intellectual clash”:
Social and political theory is widely and, quite often, grossly misunderstood. What we call conservatism today, at least in several very important ways, was once called federalism, or classical liberalism. A central idea of this federalism was that the state should be built from below, not from above. Numerous orthodox Christian thinkers, both Catholic and Protestant, have explained and defended classical liberalism over the course of the past two or three centuries.
I blogged last week on the ongoing dispute between China and the Vatican. Another demographic giant with tremendous economic potential—and some religious freedom issues—is India. ZENIT reports on Pope Benedict’s address to the new Indian ambassador to the Holy See (May 18 daily dispatch).
Over at the Alabama Policy Institute, Gary Palmer takes on University of Alabama law professor Susan Pace Hamill and her assertion that Christians have an obligation to pay higher taxes. In “No Biblical Mandate for Higher Taxes,” Palmer examines her “theocratic tax inquisition.”
“There is a time for everything, / and a season for every activity under heaven…a time to tear and a time to mend, / a time to be silent and a time to speak” (Ecclesiastes 3:1,7 NIV).
On April 19, 1963, writing from the jail in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. penned the following words:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
King was responding to what he called the “white moderate” who “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” King concluded that “shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
This reminds me of an exchange that took place in 1933 between theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. Earlier in the year, the Nazis had passed the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), which contained the so-called Aryan clauses.
This section of the law required that any civil servant of non-Aryan descent be “retired” or “dismissed.” That summer, the German Christian (or Deutsche Christen [DC]) party of the state church would go on to win a huge victory in the church elections. Read more on A Time to Tear, A Time to Speak…
