Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
The Blossoming Union of Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Freedom
posted by Ira Lupu
After approval of Proposition 8 in California last fall, who would have expected to find the movement for same-sex marriage and concern for religious freedom on common ground in the spring? As legislatures in Vermont and Connecticut have just demonstrated, however, a long-overdue reconciliation between claims of marriage equality and those of religious liberty is there for the taking.
In the fight over Proposition 8, social conservatives used arguments about religious freedom as a sword. Their most prominent arguments were spectacularly overstated. Some proponents of Prop 8 warned, for example, that recognition of gay marriage would lead to hate speech prosecutions of anti-gay pastors, and loss of tax exemption for churches that refused to host same-sex marriages. Though neither of these developments was remotely likely, some voters were apparently moved by these assertions to support Prop 8.
Very recently, however, same-sex marriage has gotten a tremendous boost. In early April, the Iowa Supreme Court and the Vermont legislature, acted in favor of same-sex marriage. On April 23, the Connecticut legislature did likewise. But Vermont and Connecticut, acting through the legislative process, took steps that are not open to courts in cases like that in Iowa. Both the Vermont and Connecticut legislatures acted to protect religious freedom as well as marriage equality. The recently enacted Vermont law recognizes the right of clergy to not preside over same-sex marriages; the right of religious organizations to refuse the use of their facilities to celebrate a same-sex marriage; and the right of fraternal benefit societies, such as the Knights of Columbus, to refuse to provide insurance benefits to same-sex partners of its members if the organization has religious scruples against doing so. The Connecticut law includes those three safeguards for religious liberty but goes farther still. It insulates religious organizations from liability for refusing to provide any goods or services when the request for such goods or services arises from a same-sex marriage – so, for example, a religiously affiliated college would not have to make its married student housing available to a married same-sex couple. And the Connecticut law exempts adoption and foster care services run by religious organizations from any obligation to serve same-sex couples, so long as these services are not government-funded. Thus, in Vermont and Connecticut, religious liberty became a shield for religious freedom against the intrusion of same-sex marriage on traditional religious values, not a sword to be used against all recognition of such marriages.
May 6, 2009 at 6:00 am
Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Politics, Religion
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The Separation of Church and Market?
posted by Nate Oman
Over at the NYT’s Think Again blog Stanley Fish has a post on the Obama Administration’s contemplated reversal of the so-called conscience clause, which allows medical professionals to refuse to provide otherwise legal procedure when they have religious objections. Fish presents the issue as pitting the demands of a neutrally applicable law against the demands of personal conscience. He writes:
In a series of cases stretching from Reynolds v. United States (1878) to Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Supreme Court has ruled that when the personal imperatives of one’s religion or morality lead to actions in violation of generally applicable laws laws not promulgated with the intention of affronting anyone’s conscience the violations will not be allowed and will certainly not be celebrated; for, says the court in Reynolds, “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
Of course Fish doesn’t quite get the law right. While he is correct that generally claims that the constitution requires the exemption of religious believers from neutrally applicable laws has been a loser in court, the Justices have also been quite clear of late that despite this hostility, it is fine for law makers to create such exemptions as a matter of non-constitutional law. This is my understanding what the Bush Administration did. No matter. We don’t read Fish for the constitutional law anyway. Far more interesting is his connection of the debate to the broader issue of religion in a liberal democracy:
April 13, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Contract Law & Beyond, Jurisprudence, Politics, Religion
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Polygamists Indicted in British Columbia
posted by Solangel Maldonado
The day after I posted What Exactly is Wrong with Polygamy, the Canadian press reported that two alleged leaders of the polygamous community of Bountiful in British Columbia had been charged with practicing polygamy in violation of the Criminal Code. The Code makes it a crime for any person to enter into “any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time.” One of the charged men is alleged to have 20 wives; the other man is alleged to have two wives. There is no allegation that the defendants’ wives are underage. Although no charges have been brought against any of the wives, as Angela Campbell has pointed out, “[e]nforcing the criminal law against polygamy risks imprisoning not only the women’s husbands, but also them.”
The criminal indictment has placed the issue of polygamy at the forefront of Canadian constitutional law. The British Columbia authorities have been aware of the practice of polygamy in Bountiful for decades, but had chosen not to prosecute, in part, because some legal experts believe that the prohibition on polygamy will not survive a constitutional challenge. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects “freedom of conscience and religion.” In fact, the British Columbia Attorney General sought legal advice from three independent sources before deciding to approve the indictment and two recommended against charging the men with polygamy. The opinion of the third source has not been released.
Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, which has rejected claims of religious freedom to practice polygamy, the Supreme Court of Canada has never addressed whether laws prohibiting polygamy violate the guarantee of religious freedom under the Charter of Rights. The accused men, who are alleging religious persecution, are likely to claim religious freedom as a defense to the charges. It will be interesting to see how this case develops.
January 10, 2009 at 11:54 am
Posted in: Family Law, Religion
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What Exactly is Wrong With Polygamy?
posted by Solangel Maldonado
Thanks to Concurring Opinions for inviting me back to blog this month. I look forward to your comments.
I have been thinking a lot about polygamy lately. As I prepare to teach Family Law once again, I am confronted with polygamy everywhere I turn. First, the third season of Big Love, the HBO series about a Utah entrepreneur struggling to support and “satisfy” his three wives and eight children, begins next week. Second, last April, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services removed 468 children from their homes in a polygamous ranch. Although the Texas Supreme Court ordered the children’s return to their parents after finding no immediate danger warranting emergency removal, child protective services has continued its investigation in a handful of cases. Third, I have been following Professor Angela Campbell’s research on the polygamous community of Bountiful in British Columbia, which has challenged some of my assumptions about polygamous wives. Finally, I recently learned that polygamy is practiced in the U.S., not only by members of a fundamentalist Mormon sect in Utah, Arizona, and Texas, but also by Black Muslims and African immigrants in New York and Philadelphia. This brings me to the question I would like to raise: What exactly is wrong with polygamy? I will discuss some frequently made arguments and look forward to reading yours.
Polygamy is illegal in all 50 states. Yet, it is estimated that 50,000 to 100,000 men, women, and children live in polygamous households in the U.S. Most polygamists do not enter into plural marriages for purely personal reasons, but rather are guided by religious beliefs. Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (which broke with the Mormon church in 1890 when the latter disavowed polygamy) believe that only men who have at least three wives will enter the highest level of heaven and that women can only get to heaven if their husbands take them there. The United States Supreme Court, in Reynolds v. United States , rejected claims of religious freedom under the First Amendment to practice polygamy.
January 6, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Posted in: Family Law, Feminism and Gender, Religion
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Christianity, Law, and Contracts
posted by David Opderbeck
With all the chatter recently about Sarah Palin and the religious right, and Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, it’s all too easy to charicature the relationship between law and religion in general, and law and Christianity in particular. A splendid new book edited by John Witte and Frank Alexander, Christianity and the Law: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2008), seeks to recover the deep and nuanced connections between Christian social theory and Western jurisprudence. Unlike many polemical works written by today’s battling theonomists and strict separationists, Christianity and Law doesn’t dwell on defining founding myths about America and its original status as either a religious “city on a hill” or a walled garden in which enlightened rationalists could feel safe from the Church. Most of the essays in Christanity and Law dig deeper into the Jewish, Roman and medieval roots of Christian jurisprudence.
Among the many gems uncovered in this excavation is Harold Berman’s chapter “The Christian Sources of General Contract Law.” Berman summarizes those roots as follows:
November 7, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Posted in: Religion
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Intersections of Religion and Governance
posted by Robert Ahdieh
I write with the latest in my series: “It’s Saturday, so I must be in…”
This Saturday, I’m in Washington, at a conference I helped organize at American University, on Exploring the Intersections of Religion and Governance: Past, Present, and Future.
Over the course of the day yesterday, and continuing today, the discussion has explored historical and comparative perspectives on the relationship of religion and governance, the relevance of religious communities to the pursuit of social and economic development, intersections of religious belief with the regulation of both climate change and corruption, and even the religious dimensions of intellectual property law. Speakers have included Arash Abizadeh, Abduh An-Na’im, Jeremy Gunn, David Hunter, and Layli Miller-Muro. All told – in my admittedly biased assessment – a fasinating conference!
Anyway, for those who may be interested in questions of law and religion, the conference is being webcast, and will also be available in video format for viewing/downloading later this coming week, at http://www.wcl.american.edu/secle/video.cfm.
October 11, 2008 at 10:58 am
Posted in: Religion
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Spike this Heel!
posted by Susan Scafidi
Many thanks for the invitation to join you all in blogging at Concurring Opinions! During my visit I’m looking forward to writing about things that are not necessarily part of my law-and-fashion beat over at Counterfeit Chic, but to start off I can’t resist sharing an image from Paris Fashion Week that touches upon – or, rather, walks all over – both fashion and cultural property.
Take a close look at this sandal from John Galliano’s runway show for Christian Dior. The carved statuette that forms the heel is reportedly a Masai fertility symbol.
Even setting aside the awkward juxtaposition of a curvy, pregnant woman with teenage fashion models so thin that they may not even be capable of conceiving (a legal issue for another day), the colonialist image is a disturbing one. Galliano, like many other Western designers, is known to “ransack the world’s closets for inspiration,” as I put it in my first book. Many of the resulting cultural hybrids (to use Naomi Mezey’s term) are extraordinarily beautiful expressions of human creativity that few would wish out of existence, even if greater norms of attribution to source communities should be developed and encouraged. Some uses of others’ cultural products, however, are simply inappropriate. Placing an African religious symbol literally under the heels of predominantly white women on a European runway is one such offensive use. Selling those same shoes to wealthy women around the globe is another.
I’m reminded of an Australian case that I’ve written about and taught, along with Christine Haight Farley and a number of other scholars. Milpurrurru v. Indofurn Pty. Ltd., (1994) F.C.R. 240, involved a rug merchant who appropriated a series of sacred Aboriginal images for his carpets. It happened that in this case the theft was so literal that copyright law provided a remedy. But what about damages for the desecration of the sacred images that had been trodden underfoot? Or the fact that, lengthy as copyright terms are, religious beliefs are likely to outlast them? Or the potential appropriation of religious images that are not the work of a specific living artist but are instead iconic forms, repeated and passed down over time?
To be fair, maybe the admittedly brilliant Galliano or the august fashion house for which he designs consulted authorized Masai representatives and female elders, who freely and without the pressure of economic or other coercion licensed the use of the fertility figure. It could even be their gift to the reproductively challenged pale populations to their north. But I doubt it.
Perhaps the most peaceful resolution of an issue like this one is a demand for mutual inquiry and respect, rather than protective legislation. Moreover, bearing in mind the violent response to Danish editorial cartoons of Mohammed several years ago and the resulting tension between religious demands and freedom of speech, any such legislation would require extraordinarily careful drafting. But if the cultural “owners” of this fertility symbol object to its commercialization, there should be some forum for their concern.
October 1, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Posted in: Culture, Intellectual Property, Race, Religion
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The Real Face of Shar’ia
posted by Nate Oman
Generally speaking, when Americans hear about shar’ia it conjures up images of bearded and turbaned Taliban executioners gleefully stoning women to death in an Afghan soccer stadium. It is an unfair stereotype of a great legal tradition, and it is also one that misses some of the most important issues that shar’ia raises for the modern world. As usual, if you want to find the real action follow the money.
In a nutshell, there is a lot of money sloshing around the Islamic world. 20 percent of the world’s population is Muslim and at least part of the population sits atop oil fields that churn out an enormous amount of cash every day. What is an observant Muslim, one who cares about Islamic strictures against usury to do? Islamic law forbids the taking of interest, but certain transactional structures that allow some return in exchange for tying up capital are allowed. For example, a straight out purchase-money loan with interest secured by a mortgage on a the purchased house would violate Islamic injunctions against usury. On the other hand, if the bank buys the house, leases it to the resident for a period of years, followed by the resident’s purchase of the house at the expiration of the lease for a nominal sum, it does not violate the injunction. The game in Islamic finance is to come up with ways of structuring transactions so as to generate an attractive rate of return for investors without running afoul of the strictures of shar’ia. The result has been a cottage industry of banks and lawyers experimenting with various transactional structures and then rushing to find a reputable Islamic legal scholar willing to issue a fatwah validating the deal for Muslim investors.
September 5, 2008 at 10:11 am
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, International & Comparative Law, Jurisprudence, Religion
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Theodicy in the New Yorker
posted by Frank Pasquale
James Woods’ essay on the problem of evil in the New Yorker is an illuminating reflection on the question of how an omnipotent and benevolent God can permit suffering. The essay gives us a sense of how everyday legal categories of restitution and responsibility inform theology (and perhaps should humble lawyers into recognizing how much their own categories owe to religious thought). Though there’s much to commend in the essay, I found his closing assessment of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead most interesting:
Heaven, one of the tenderest verses in the Bible has it, is where God will wipe away all tears from our faces. In her novel “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson adds, in a line just as tender, if a little sterner, “It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” Robinson, herself a devout Protestant, means that the immense surge of human suffering in the world will need, and deserves, a great deal of heavenly love and repair; it is as close as her novel comes to righteous complaint. But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world’s suffering—that, theologically speaking, Heaven is “exactly what will be required.” In the end, Heaven, it seems, is the only tenable response to the problem of evil. It is where God’s mysterious plan will be revealed; it is where the poor and the downtrodden, the sick and the tortured, will be healed; it is where everything that we went through on earth will suddenly seem “worth it.”
June 16, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Posted in: Religion
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“For Every Three Judges, Two Are in the Fire”: Richard Posner and the Usul al-Fiqh
posted by Nate Oman
I’ve been reading Richard Posner of late, and it strikes me that there is an odd analogy between the his vision of the pragmatic judge and the position of the judge under the classical usul al-fiqh of Islamic law. It seems to me that ultimately Judge Posner’s theory of adjudication rests on a radical rejection of the ex post perspective. On his view all judicial decisions are — and ought to be — forward looking, focusing solely on the consequences for the future that will come from deciding one way rather than another. Of course, a concern for future consequences needn’t preclude a certain respect for past practices, expectations, and rule of law values, but none of this stuff has any force in and of itself. It only matters in so far as it impacts the future. One of the implications of this theory is that the judge can never hide behind the “the law” as a way of distancing him or herself from moral responsibility for her decisions. The law does not dictate particular results in any case. Rather, it is always a matter of the judge making an individual — albeit practically constrained — judgement about what would — all things considered — be best. One doesn’t get any sense that Judge Posner spends much time thinking about the personal moral status of the judge, but it seems to me his theory makes the judge into a radically responsible moral agent. If the consequences of one of Judge Posner’s decisions is really bad, it really is Judge Posner’s fault.
Where Judge Posner’s theory of law is radically ex ante, the theory of law (usul al-fiqh) proposed by the classical Islamic jurists purported at any rate to be radically ex post. In theory, all human legislation is a denial of the sovereignty of God, a kind of blasphemy. Rather, a righteous society follows God’s law. This law, however, is finished and complete, indeed according to the dominant theological approach in Islam it is uncreated, a co-eternal emanation of the divine mind. The task of a jurist is to discover the divine law as revealed in the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Muhammed. Put in more concrete terms, the classical Islamic jurists claimed that every rule necessary for the proper government of society could be discovered — not deduced from or promulgated in accordance with — with the sacred texts of Islam. At this point in their theory, however, the jurists came up against the ultimately unsystematic and ad hoc nature of the Islamic revelation. The Qur’an is not a legal code. Rather it is a collection of “recitations” — often in the form of religious poetry — given by God to the Prophet, often in response to concrete questions or problems raised by the early Islamic community. It was only in the generation after his death that these “recitations” were collected into the Qur’an. Not surprisingly, it takes some nimble exegetical gymnastics to transform this religious ur-stuff into a functioning body of substantive law. What haunted the classical jurists was that they might be wrong in their exegesis. As Marshall Hodgson has written, for a Muslim “every person, as such with no exceptions, was summoned in his own person to obey the commands of God: there could be no intermediary, no group responsibility, no evasion of any sort from direct confrontation with the divine will.” Hence, there was no sense in which a jurist could hide behind some abstraction like office or “the law” to shield himself from full responsibility for his judicial decisions. He was to apply the law of God, and if he got it wrong he was responsible for that mistake.
According to one Muslim legal aphorism, “For every three judges, two are in the fire.” The fire in question here is the hell reserved by God for judges who do not apply His law. Indeed, there are stories of great classical legal scholars who fled from Baghdad at the prospect of being made an actual judge by the Caliph. The reason was that once one moved from exegetical speculation to deciding actual cases, one’s eternal soul was on the line. I don’t think that Judge Posner is much worried about hell fire, but ironically his radically ex ante approach leaves him in a similar moral position personally to the radically ex post approach of the ulema.
June 10, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, History of Law, International & Comparative Law, Jurisprudence, Legal Ethics, Legal Theory, Religion
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Preaching to the Court House and Judging in the Temple
posted by Nate Oman
I have put up a couple of posts here on my on-going research on the resolution of civil disputes in ecclesiastical courts.The full version of my research is now up on SSRN for those interested. Here is the abstract:
A number of American religious denominations – Quakers, Baptists, Mormons, and others – have tried with varying degrees of success to opt out of the secular legal system, resolving civil litigation between church members in church courts. Using the story of the rise and fall of the jurisdiction of Mormon courts over ordinary civil disputes, this article provides three key insights into the interaction between law and religion in nineteenth-century America. First, it dramatically illustrates the fluidity of the boundaries between law and religion early in the century and the hardening of those boundaries by its end. The Mormon courts initially arose in a context in which the professional bar had yet to establish a monopoly over adjudication. By century’s end, however, the increasing complexity of the legal environment hardened the boundaries around the legal profession’s claimed monopoly over adjudication. Second, the decline of the Mormon courts shows how allegiance to the common-law courts became a prerequisite of assimilation into the American mainstream. While hostility to the secular courts had been a hallmark of a major stream of American Protestantism during the colonial period and the first decades of the Republic, by the end of the nineteenth century, Mormons’ rejection of those courts marked them off as dangerous outsiders. Part of the price of their acceptance into the national mainstream was the abandonment of legal distinctiveness. Finally, the story of the Mormon courts also illustrates the importance of law for the development of religious beliefs and practices. Other scholars have documented the “public law” side of this story, showing how the federal government’s effort to eradicate Mormon polygamy was central to Mormon experience in the last half of the nineteenth century and ultimately forced a revolution in Mormon beliefs and practices. The rise and fall of the Mormon court system, however, shows that private law could exercise no less of a power over the religious imagination.
February 18, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books, Contract Law & Beyond, History of Law, Law and Humanities, Religion
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An Al Smith Moment?
posted by Nate Oman
I have an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today on what Romney’s “Mormon problem” tells us about American politics. Rather than asking the question of what it would men if a Mormon were elected president, I ask the question of what it would mean if Romney lost because he is a Mormon. In such a case, the correct analogy for Romney would not be Kennedy in 1960 but Al Smith in 1928, who for a generation stood for the rule that a Catholic could not be president. You can read the whole argument here.
January 2, 2008 at 8:31 am
Posted in: Politics, Religion
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A Hope-filled Christmas
posted by Frank Pasquale
It’s always difficult to know exactly how to observe a holiday like Christmas on a blog like this. On the one hand, norms of “public reason” tend toward the neutrality of a “happy holidays” approach. On the other hand, I do celebrate Christmas and have a sense that at least some dimensions of Christianity’s aesthetic and ethical appeal are universal. So I’ll make a brief note of three of that come to mind.
1) The Vatican’s increasing environmental awareness was manifest in the Pope’s midnight mass today, when Benedict XVI lamented “the abuse of energy and its selfish and reckless exploitation.” An eschatological awareness can help us better value a future too easily diminished by standard economic discounting methods.
2) On the aesthetic side, I would trade all the department store carols in the world for a few minutes of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. This podcast organized by the extraordinary Christopher Lydon is a great introduction to Bach’s music.
December 25, 2007 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Religion
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The Place of Charity
posted by Frank Pasquale
By the way, I don’t want to sound (from my last post) as if I am against all charity. I’m very concerned about the plight of those in LDC’s, and I’ve argued that charitable giving should be something of a moral requirement for many of us in the developed world. As this extraordinary program from Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith shows, charitable giving can help us find a true “moral balance” of sharing, saving, and spending.
Sometimes it is hard to know exactly where one’s contribution will do the most good. Over the past three years I have found many good causes through Global Giving, a group now sponsoring a Giving Challenge. Here are some causes I found compelling enough to give to:
–Safe Water and Latrines for Bangladeshi Slum
–Clean Water for DEPDC’s Underprivileged Children
–Help Feed 200 Neglected Elderly in Guatemala
I’m also happy to report that GG’s president, Mari Kuraishi, recently gave a talk at a conference devoted to figuring out the best ways of assessing the reputation and value of various online entities–including charities. As efforts like these improve, questions about the accountability of charities will become less nagging.
December 24, 2007 at 10:47 am
Posted in: Religion, Tax
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Questioning the Prosperity Gospel
posted by Frank Pasquale
Recently Republican Senator Charles Grassley has begun to investigate “six televangelists who are part of an evangelical subculture known loosely as Prosperity gospel.” For example,
Grassley wanted to know how Kenneth Copeland–who as a church leader pays no taxes but is expected to plow revenue back into the public welfare–got a private plane and whether flights to Hawaii and Fiji qualified as business trips. Grassley sought credit card receipts and the numbers of the church’s offshore bank accounts.
The conflict raises some interesting theological questions–for example, what if the religious group sincerely believes that its leaders deserve extraordinary opulence? What if their high spending is not a diversion of resources, but instead is the very point of the religion? As I’m mentioned before regarding The Secret, wealth worship may be working its way into the DNA of American culture. Consider this conflict between Grassley and the Prosperity gospel crowd:
Prosperity adherents believe the right thoughts and speech, along with giving to the church, will prompt divine repayment in this life, with a return as high as $100 on each dollar handed up. On a small scale, Prosperity’s positive thinking has sometimes energized the march of the poor into the middle class, but many Christians find it theologically and ethically perverse. Prosperity dominates American religious TV, and millions of adherents send millions of dollars to preachers they have never met. For Grassley, this might be fine if the ministers put all the money back into their mission work. But his now famous question about Meyer’s $23,000 commode suggests he questions the destination of her estimated $124 million annual take.
I think the answer has to be that the Prosperity Gospel crowd is itself distorting and ignoring Christian doctrine–even if such an indictment sets up the state as a more authoritative interpreter of the Bible in this case than those it would prosecute.
December 17, 2007 at 9:03 am
Posted in: Religion, Tax
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A strudel for Lawrence
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
He can’t say he wasn’t warned about the strudel, either.
So, Lawrence O’Donnell seems to have an interesting set of beliefs about Mormons and Romney. His discussion is a little disjointed, but as far as I can tell from his interview, his Hewitt interview, and his Huffington Post column, his beliefs can basically be distilled into some major ideas. For example:
1. Early Mormon leaders said some strange things.
2. All of those strange things play an important role in Mormonism today.
3. There are no moderate Mormons. All Mormons fervently believe everything that any prior church leader has ever said, and they accord those statements a very high priority.
3a. Mitt Romney is not a moderate Mormon. (This follows naturally from “there are no moderate Mormons”).
4. Therefore, Mitt Romney’s worldview is closely linked to any strange thing Brigham Young may have said 150 years ago.
5. Romney’s refusal to state this (and to discuss Mormon theology and/or history in detail) makes him a liar.
Let’s look at a few of these ideas.
December 14, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Posted in: Politics, Religion
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“Beyond Belief” Videos
posted by Adam Kolber
Earlier, I posted about this year’s Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 conference at the Salk Institute in La Jolla. The event touched on a wide variety of issues related to science, faith, and reason. Videos from that event are now available here.
For those following the Richard Dawkins thread from last week, why monogamously limit yourself to this year’s videos when you can also see last year’s, including Dawkins himself? See here (he spoke during session 7, but you may have to find a way to fast forward a bit).
December 11, 2007 at 10:08 am
Posted in: Religion
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For my op-ed about Mormonism, I read a book by a mountain-climbing expert!
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
Maureen Dowd wants you to know that she’s read Jon Krakauer’s book about Mormonism. She’s really proud of this tidbit, and she cites the book — a lot — in her Sunday column . By all appearances, this is the only book about Mormonism that she’s read so far. But hey, she gets her mileage out of it, quoting Krakauer extensively on topics like polygamy and underwear and Joseph Smith as a hypnotically charming salesman. That was ten dollars well spent at the airport bookstore.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Krakauer. Into Thin Air — Krakauer’s bestseller about the fatal Mount Everest climb — was a great read. And why wouldn’t it be? Krakauer has decades of experience as an outdoors writer, he’s got an undergraduate degree in environmental studies, and he’s written prior, well-received books about survival in the outdoors.
Also, he wrote one book about Mormonism, Under the Banner of Heaven — and as we now know, Maureen Dowd read that book.
Of course, a skeptic might suggest that Dowd should have considered interviewing other sources. A few of her colleagues even seem to have adopted that approach themselves. David Brooks, in his own article on the Romney speech, cites to established religious scholars like Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus, and (careful, he’s Mormon!) emeritus Columbia historian Richard Bushman. (Bushman is also a Bancroft prize winner, which cancels out at least 62% of his Mormonness). Meanwhile, over in the NYT Week in Review, writer Laurie Goodstein offers a nuanced and interesting article that quotes from theologian Richard Mouw, President of the (non-Mormon) Fuller Theological Seminary.
Dowd, though, sticks to her guns: She cites Krakauer, and then for confirmation, she interviews Krakauer.
Our skeptic could also argue that Dowd should have checked out a few books in addition to Krakauer’s magnum opus. For instance, the highly regarded Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition, by Indiana University historian Jan Shipps, a non-Mormon who has written about Mormon history for forty years. Or perhaps one of the biographies or studies by Richard Bushman (warning: may contain Mormon content), the Bancroft-winner whose status as a Mormon history superstar was again confirmed with his recent appointment to chair a new Mormon Studies program at (non-Mormon) Claremont Graduate University. Or maybe the short bio by (non-Mormon) star Jacksonian-era historian Robert Remini of the University of Illinois. Or even some of the Oxford-published work by (careful, he’s Mormon!) University of Richmond prof Terryl Givens. The list goes on, and on; it’s not like there is a shortage of really well-researched, well-regarded studies of Mormon history.
But then, those kinds of books — dry and boring and well-researched — are probably less likely to contain one-liners like Krakauer’s (and now, Dowd’s) “[Joseph Smith] could sell a muzzle to a dog.”
Hmm. Perhaps that’s the point?
December 11, 2007 at 2:37 am
Posted in: Politics, Religion
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A Quick Response to Douthat
posted by Nate Oman
Over at Atlantic Monthly, Ross Douthat responds to my post on Mitt Romney and Mormonism, writing:
[Oman's] analysis makes a lot of sense; I only object to note of self-pity at the end. Just because evangelicals (and Catholics, to a lesser extent) are using Mormonism as a marker to legitimize their own theological compromises doesn’t mean it isn’t a reasonable marker to use. It isn’t only about Oman’s religion, but it is about it to a great extent: Mormonism is a useful marker of how far ecumenism can go (and how far it can’t) precisely because there are much, much deeper theological commonalities between, say, the Vatican and the Southern Baptist Convention than between either body and the the LDS Church. And while it’s true that Mormons get more attention, and hostility, than other similarly-heterodox strands of American religion, they’re at least partially victims of their own success. If the Jehovah’s Witnesses, say, were doing as well as the Mormons are at winning converts, their tenets might be playing the same sort of “here’s where the Great Tradition stops” role in debates over ecumenical cooperation. But they aren’t, so they don’t.
Ross is right to call me on the tone of self-pity that creeps in at the end of my post. (Growing up on tales of anti-Mormon mobs, murdered leaders, and federal prosecutions tends to hardwire a certain persecution complex into the Mormon psyche, I suspect.)
I do, however, think that his response breezes rather quickly to the issue of theological difference and ecumenism. I would be the last to deny that there are real and important theological differences between Mormonism and Protestantism or Catholicism. However, it is not simply these theological differences that account for the strange political salience of Mormonism as an issue for some non-trivial segment of the Republican base. Rather, I think that the fact that the details of Mormon theology matter so intensely as a political issue for some voters comes from their need to assert — if only to themselves — their theological integrity in the face of political compromises. It is not Mormon theology but the strange series of historical accidents that pushed conservative evangelical protestants and conservative catholics into alliance that is causing most of Romney’s “Mormon problem,” a development that Mormonism had very little to do with. Furthermore, the fact that this same non-trivial chunk of the Republican base believes that the theological marker for ecumenism is also a valid reason in principle for rejecting a Mormon candidate is simply a graphic illustration of the problems of conflating ecumenism and political coalition building. It also illustrates that at least for some, Mormonism’s status as a religious outsider is sufficient reason to relegate Mormons to the status of outsiders within the political community as well. Supporter of a basically liberal political order (and member of the Mormon tribe) that I am, I find that a bit disquieting.
December 4, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Posted in: Politics, Religion
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Saving the planet via polygamy
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
There’s a really bizarre article in today’s Washington Post. Under the title, “Divorce Found to Harm the Environment,” the article states:
Divorce is not just a family matter. It exacts a serious toll on the environment by boosting the energy and water consumption of those who used to live together, according to a study by two Michigan State University researchers.
The analysis found that cohabiting couples and families around the globe use resources more efficiently than households that have split up. The researchers calculated that in 2005, divorced American households used between 42 and 61 percent more resources per person than before they separated, spending 46 percent more per person on electricity and 56 percent more on water. . . .
Married households use energy and water more efficiently than divorced ones because they share these resources — including lighting and heating — among more people, said Jianguo Liu, one of the paper’s co-authors. Moreover, the divorced households they surveyed between 1998 and 2002 used up more space, occupying between 33 and 95 percent more rooms per person than in married households.
This is certainly a novel use of statistics, and likely to see much use in intra-family discussions this holiday season. I foresee the use of this statistic as another arrow in the quiver of passive-aggressive matchmaking parents everywhere. (”I don’t see why George can’t just find a nice girl, settle down, and save the environment.”) But really, the stats seem to prove too much, don’t they?
December 4, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Posted in: Family Law, Religion, Weird
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