John Paul II gave us all a tremendous gift by endorsing the terms Culture of Life and Culture of Death. But as with all great gifts, we must guard these terms carefully so as not to wear them out with misuse, robbing them of their relvence. Unfortunately, this is precisely what is happening in the current debate over CAFTA. A group called Catholics for Faithful Citizenship claims the following: “Clearly, supporting CAFTA is inconsistent with upholding a culture of life.” They provide a list of vague quotes by a Colorado bishop and conlcude (somehow–I cannot quite follow their reasoning) that free markets are “clearly” inconsistent with a culture of life.

To jump immediately to rhetoric like this–and what’s more, to do so without an actual reasoned argument behind it!–is not only irresponsible, but smacks of trite political lobbying. If this group is truly concerned with a better society, they will consider the freedom inherent in the people for which they claim to advocate and allow them fair access to greater markets. They ought to use some economic prudence here instead of resorting to sound-bite politics, throwing around “culture of life” as if it were the latest political buzzword.

Instead, they have slapped this powerful term onto their half-reasoned view of CAFTA, capitalizing on the term’s moral connotative power, using it to advance a half-truth. It is crucial that sound economic thought is employed by Christians before tossing out irresponsible rhetoric involving our most powerfully relevent terminology. Otherwise, we appear to be no different than other flapping mouths blasting the landscape with an irrelevent wind.

Foreign Policy hosts this exchange on environmental issues and economics. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, gets the first word and Bjørn Lomborg, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, gets the last word.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this local story: “Four people are charged for their alleged involvement in killing two bald eagles.”

The details of the alleged crimes are as follows: “Prosecutors say two teenagers shot the eagles in the Muskegon State Game Area with a .22 caliber rifle in April 2004 and then chopped them up with a hatchet.” Since the bald eagle, one of the nation’s revered symbols, is an endangered animal, it is protected by both state and federal laws.

Given the law of the land (the Endangered Species Act), it makes some sense that those involved would be prosecuted for illegal killings of protected animals. But here’s the strange thing: two of the alleged participants are “charged with one count of animal cruelty, which is a four-year felony.” Unless I’m misunderstanding something, the eagles were “chopped…up with a hatchet” after they were killed. How can you be cruel to something after it’s already dead?

And just in case you were wondering which is considered more severe, the two men “are also facing one count each of killing a bald eagle, which is a 90-day misdemeanor.”

It’s hard for me to fathom why anyone would shoot and slaughter bald eagles, but that perversity is almost matched by the irrationality of the possible sentences.

Mr. Phelps takes issue with my characterization of Stanley Fish’s position as amounting “to a philosophical denial of realism.”

Let me first digress a bit and place this comment within the larger context of my post. My identification of a position that “words and texts have no meaning in themselves” is really just an aside within the larger and more important question about what measure of authority authorial intent has in the interpretation of documents, specifically public documents like the Constitution.

This aside is essentially a further claim than I need to make to demonstrate the flaws in Fish’s analysis. All that needs to be done to expose Fish’s error is to show that authorial intent or acontextual (deconstructionist?) interpretation are not the only two options. I argued, along with Ramesh Ponnuru and Ann Althouse, that the contemporary corporate understanding of a public document is the most definitive human factor in determining the meaning of a text. One way of putting it would be to say, it isn’t the Sitz im Leben of the author of a public document that norms meaning, it’s the Sitz im Leben of the document’s ratifiers, adherents, affirmers, et alia that is normative (or should I say “more” normative).
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The recent blogpost by my colleague Jordan Ballor discusses an op-ed written by law professor Stanley Fish. I am more familiar with Stanley Fish from his days as a literary theorist, and perhaps a quick review of a younger Fish will contribute to the conversation.

Fish is known for, among other things, an idea of literary interpretation he called ‘interpretive communities’ that suggests meaning is not found in the author, nor in the reader, but in the community in which the text is received. His famous illustration of this theory is as follows: He once left a list of names of literary theorists on the board of his classroom, told the class it was a medieval poem, and asked them to interpret it. Of course the duped and eager students developed a wide array of convincing interpretations, thus illustrating the power of the interpretive community.

So you can image my mild suprise when I read Fish endorsing ‘authorial intent’ in opposition to what in literary circles is known best as Formalism, the idea that “the text itself” contains the meaning. Of course, the modernist and post-modernist theorists have shared a strong aversion to “the text itself” theories. But I think it is a mistake to suggest that simply because the Mods and Postmods attacked both Formalism and Realism, anyone who attacks Literary Formalism is attacking Realism. There are other theories and theorists who would not (properly speaking) align themselves with staunchly relativistic theories and yet would take issue with Formalism (a phenomonologist such as Wolfgang Iser I think would be one of them.)

How does this relate to the larger question of Constitutional Interpretation? To deny ‘textualism’ is not necessarily to suggest that meaning is subjective in the author, the reader, or the interpretive community. Denying texutalism is not necessarily to deny objective reality. One can question textualism and maintain absolutism. What allows for this is the fact that all language, especially in a publicly crafted document like our Constitution, is in some sense ‘corporate’ (the etymological connection between ‘communication’ and ‘communion’ speaks volumes on this point, I think).

As far as we humans are concerned, there is always an element of mystery in language, in the Word. To my knowledge, there is only one who can express an icon of meaning so perfectly as to unite the Utterance with its Reality. All (human) language is at best an attempt at meaning, a part of meaning, and never the last word.

A week ago Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about the principles of constitutional interpretation, especially as represented by Justice Antonin Scalia.

Fish takes issue especially with the notion that the text can have meaning “as it exists apart from anyone’s intention.” Fish essentially denies that texts are things that can have meanings in themselves, and it amounts to a philosophical denial of realism.

Part of Fish’s problem is that he sets up a false dichotomy: either you must believe only in meaning as intended by the author of a document, or you must believe in the meaning of the document apart from “anyone’s intention.” In reality the dynamics of interpretation involve a relationship between the two.

Fish’s intentions, I think, are clearly to protect and clarify what the Constitution means, founded on authorial intent. He states, “Without that constraint handed down by the past, law and predictability disappear and are replaced by irresponsibility and the exercise of power. If you can just make it up when interpreting the Constitution, you can also make it up when deciding whether or not to honor your contractual obligations, and so can everyone around you.”

Today’s BreakPoint commentary by Mark Earley addresses some of the problems with Fish’s analysis. Earley writes of Fish’s piece, ‘However well this kind of argument does in the academy, it doesn’t fly in the courthouse. As law professor Ann Althouse puts it, Fish’s analogy to a rock formation is “ridiculous, because no one ratified the rock formation.’ No one agreed to be bound by what they thought the rock formation said.”

And this is a key point in the hermeneutics of public or corporate documents, like the US Constitution or a Protestant confession like the Lutheran Augsburg Confession. Meaning is not solely conferred upon the text by the authors. What might be the decisive factor in understanding the meaning of such documents is the view held by those who ratified or affirmed these documents.

Merely because Philip Melanchthon wrote the Augsburg Confession didn’t mean that he could rewrite or amend it later on his own. It’s status as a corporate document meant that he no longer had a monopoly on determining the text’s meaning. The same is true, for example, of the Barmen declaration written by Karl Barth. These are not individual, personal, or private documents. They are public and corporate, and therefore have a meaning that is in some sense independent of the author’s original intent.

There are so many things wrong with this news item from Canada, I hardly know where to begin.

But I’ll make perhaps the most obvious point of contradiction. This guy is “worried that the separation between church and state is under threat,” so he wants to initiate state control over religion, especially “given the inertia of the Catholic Church.”

I’m not at all familiar with Canadian law. Is there something in Canada similar to the American Establishment Clause?

The New York Times reports this morning that “leaders of four of the country’s largest labor unions announced on Sunday that they would boycott this week’s A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention, and officials from two of those unions, the service employees and the Teamsters, said the action was a prelude to their full withdrawal from the federation on Monday.”

The withdrawal is the culmination of a period of dissatisfaction with the direction of big labor in the US. The leaders of the dissedent unions feel that “the federation under the leadership of its president, John J. Sweeney, has been ineffective in halting the decades-long slide of organized labor.” The disagreement is in part over the amount of AFL-CIO money that should go back to the local unions for recruitment.

Some of the dissenters feel that more money should be used for recruiting the next generation of union members, while the AFL-CIO leadership fears the diversion of funds would weaken the national political influence of labor unions.

This schism is occuring despite the efforts of the labor leadership to utilize religious leaders to push union membership. The Los Angeles Times recently reported on the interfaith outreach of the AFL-CIO, which “has hired more than three dozen aspiring ministers, imams, priests and rabbis to spread the gospel of union organizing across the nation this summer.”

This attempt to revitalize a form of the social gospel “seeks to recreate the historic partnership between faith and labor, an alliance that for nearly a century gave union leaders an aura of moral authority — and their cause the stamp of divine righteousness.”

There is some cause for doubt as to the authenticity of the effort, however. After signing up an interested worker, rabbinical student Margie Klein:

was pinning on a yarmulke — “to look more like a rabbi,” she explained — and preparing to march on AlliedBarton.

She read through a letter she had drafted to the firm: “Our traditions tell us that when one of us is poor, we are all impoverished…. When we work hard, we must be given the resources not only to get by, but to live, pray, and dream.”

“It’s a little spiritually cheesy,” she said doubtfully.

Two other interns came by to help; they added a quote from the Book of Micah to make the letter more authoritative. When Klein made her pitch to the exasperated manager at AlliedBarton, the other interns sang the line from Micah in the background: “We’ve got to do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with our God.”

The Interfaith Working Group on Trade and Investment, a Washington-based amalgam of left-liberal religious activists, has asked the U.S. Congress to reject ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Here’s a representative statement: “Religious leaders boldly stood with impoverished people and called today for sustainable development in Central America and respect for the integrity of Creation.” Some of our best friends are impoverished?

In this group’s statements, there’s scarcely an intelligible economic thought to be found or, for that matter, a practical understanding of what makes business part a functioning society that creates wealth not only for owners, but for workers, too.

Let’s turn the tables. How would these religious leaders respond to theological platitudes tossed at them from people who make their living in finance and industry? Imagine an economist trying to pass a graduate seminary exam with statements such as, “God loves us, that’s why” or, “We should all be nice to people.”

So, imagine a business person sitting in the pews on Sunday and the pastor hauls out the Interfaith Trade Group’s Statement on International Trade and Investment in lieu of a real sermon. This business person learns that the free economy has brought about “mounting global inequities” and “growing disparities and injustices” and we should be working for “distributive justice.” And so on.

A better way to prepare a sermon on the justice of trade would be to first absorb some real understanding. Maybe start by reading this analysis from the Dallas Fed which informs us that:

Entering into regional trade agreements has well-documented positive effects on participating nations, rich or poor, even though the impact on the United States would be lessened by the small market sizes of the DR-CAFTA countries. From the DR-CAFTA countries’ perspective, the agreement’s impact would be large. Even the most populous of these nations, Guatemala, has less than half as many people as the state of Texas. Moreover, despite what the habitual detractors of trade liberalization claim, there is much evidence that trade openings typically have positive effects on income per capita — generally including that of the poorest fifth of the population, even in developing countries.

Increasing the opportunities for trade is precisely what people of faith should be demanding for the impoverished. Unless we want the impoverished to stay that way.

Read Rev. Robert Sirico’s analysis of the Religious Left’s drive to derail CAFTA in “Unholy Opposition: A Moral Case for CAFTA” on National Review Online.

The last of many gems here:

“Here’s Williams’ roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.” — Walter Williams

HT: The Anchoress