Trump and Celebrities: A Beautiful Moment for the Natural Law

Last night I watched the latest episode of The Apprentice:  Celebrity Edition.  I have been pulled into the series this year largely because of the compelling finishes where The Donald lectures celebrities about their work habits and managerial ineptness.  Dennis Rodman has been a draw because of his incredibly bad behavior.

This was Dennis’ week.  His teammates chose him to be the project manager because they hoped he would rise to the challenge if he was running things.  It worked, for a short while, then he drank enough to go past caring.  First, he got angry.  Then, he absented himself from the project he was supposed to direct.

The men’s team lost, which gave rise to the beautiful moment.  Motorcycle entrepeneur and reality star Jesse James confronted Dennis Rodman with his drinking problem.  The others readily agreed with the diagnosis.  Rodman got angry and defensive, mostly offering support of his own worthiness by adverting to his NBA career which has been over for some time now.  Finally, getting nowhere, Rodman said in frustration, “I . . . I could kick all y’all’s asses.  Everyone one here.”

Now, I’m not sure that is actually true.  Jesse James, for example, was a professional bodyguard at one point.  But James didn’t respond to Rodman’s provocation with a physical challenge.  His actual reply was devastating:

“Then why don’t you kick our asses at being a good person?”

Rodman sat silent.

I called this a beautiful moment for the natural law because Jesse James put the idea out there for millions of people whether he or they realized it.  We know what a good person is.  We expect people to aspire to that AND to achieve it.

At a minimum, we expect people to be honest, to keep their promises, to be reliable, and to moderate their own behavior out of respect for others.  These are things Thomas Aquinas would say we can reason to from the premise of the social nature of man.  Rodman did none of that.  And he was kicked out.

The Philadelphia Society and New Orleans, Part II

This year’s national meeting of the Philadelphia Society was my first.  William Campbell of LSU invited me (a young-ish faculty member of Houston Baptist University) after reading a piece I wrote on libertarians and conservatives for the Acton Institute.  I am very thankful for the opportunity and enjoyed the event very much.  The list of attendees was really quite impressive and people were generally interested in and open to others.

At each meal I sat with a different group of people and found the conversation rewarding.  There was a strong sense of fellowship and collegiality.  I felt that individuals who offered divergences of opinion were treated respectfully and well.  It was, in the best sense of the word, scholarly.

However, I write to offer a suggestion.  To me, the panels shaded too much to the hall of famer/veteran side and not enough (or even at all) to rising, young talent needing an opportunity to demonstrate what they can do or what new things they have to say.  A meeting of this kind would represent a great way for the distinguished members to identify talent and then to figure out how to promote the careers of young people who can seek to build on the previous generation’s successes.

For every paper delivered by a long-standing member who is confident in what he has said and is ready to say it again, there are young people who will work their brains out for a chance to present something impressive to people they respect.  The leadership needs to figure out how to move national meetings in that direction to a greater degree.

Philadelphia Society and New Orleans, Part I

The Philadelphia Society’s New Orleans meeting has concluded.  This was my first time to be invited.  I have some impressions to report about both the society and the town.  For this post, I’ll focus on New Orleans.

If I can judge from the French Quarter and the rush hour traffic, New Orleans is back.  The downtown area was absolutely hopping and it wasn’t Mardi Gras time.  I’ve never seen an American city other than NYC with so much night life.

However, I have to admit I was taken aback by Bourbon Street.  On Saturday morning, I visited Cafe du Monde with a fellow academic who’d been a Bush appointee.  After eating our beignets, we walked along the sidewalks and were nearly flooded out by a street washing machine that literally poured soapy water all over the streets and walkways.  I wondered how often the city conducted that operation.  My guess now is every night.  By the end of Saturday, I’d seen the Quarter in operation.  You run into an awful lot of questionable liquids on the street and sidewalks.  Come morning, the wages of overindulgence (and a lot of horse droppings) need to be washed away.

I was stunned by “out there” nature of the sexually-oriented businesses in evidence.  That takes a little doing since I live in Houston which is filled with elaborate strip clubs, but there you spin rapidly by them on elevated freeways.  In New Orleans, you walk by women in lingerie standing on sidewalks and in doorways to beckon customers inside.  I imagine Times Square was like that P.G. (pre-Giuliani).

Having been to 21st century Times Square and seedy Bourbon Street.  I’ll take Times Square.  One changed for the better.  The other stayed the same.  Of course, I take into account the admonition of Thomas Aquinas that you can’t use the law to abolish all vice, lest you create a backlash of total rebellion.  Still, Rudy G. seems to have done a better job of locating the golden mean than his counterpart Ray N.

Notre Dame: Decline, Fall, and the Options

I visited Notre Dame last year at this time to meet with a few professors for the purpose of academic networking. My university was hiring and I hoped to hear about Christian doctoral students ready for their first job. As I walked across the snow-covered campus, I was a little in awe of how wonderfully the sacred space had been planned and laid out.

But when I met with one older professor who had been with the university for quite some time, he expressed a great deal of regret for how his student (the current president) was making decisions. Looking around his office, I noticed photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. holding hands with priests protesting the injustice of segregation. I thought to myself, if this man feels something good has been lost at Notre Dame, it must truly be so.

When I heard about Notre Dame’s decision to invite President Obama to speak and receive an honorary doctorate, I could not believe it. I knew the university had liberalized. I knew many faithful Catholics felt ND had lost its way, but I also knew many fine, Christian scholars populated its offices and classrooms. How could it be that the university many of us point to when we aspire to building a great Christian academic institution would invite a president to speak and receive and honorary doctorate when he could not liberalize abortion laws quickly enough upon taking office?

Has the protection of unborn and newly born life not been a distinctive of the Christian church from the beginning? Did not the Catholic church act convincingly to remind evangelicals and others of their duties to protect life?

All I can think about as I watch this great university rushing to honor a president who considers the question of when life begins to be above his pay grade and yet who acts to liberalize the capacity to extinguish it is that Notre Dame is trading its heritage for the applause of the culture. Friend, Father Jenkins, I pray that you would consider the quality of the culture whose applause you seek.

As Walker Percy, a self-proclaimed bad Catholic who was actually a great one said, there is decline and fall and then there are the options. Choose life instead, sir. I say that to both of these presidents. One, the president of a university, and the other, a president of a nation.

Killing by Studying: The Occasional Logic of Academic Inquiry

You study what you want to undermine and critique.  That’s why we have departments of religion at universities.  That’s why Berkeley is starting a center to study “right wing movements.”

I study secularism.

The Successor to Niebuhr That Wasn’t

At the Making Men Moral conference a few weeks ago, Robert George shared the story of how Richard John Neuhaus gave up his opportunity to be the media star of mainline Protestantism in order to remain an advocate for the unborn.  Professor George has now memorialized that speech by publishing it as a column at the First Things website.

Enjoy.

And make Neuhaus your role model.

Book Confessions Meme

I rarely participate in any of this internet “tagging” but Kevin Holtsberry hit me with one I couldn’t refuse.  It’s about books and how you treat them.

1. To mark your page you: use a bookmark, bend the page corner, leave the book open face down?

I occasionally leave a book open face down, but I almost always dog-ear the corner of the page I’m on and shut the book.  When I try to do this with my six year old son’s books, he reprimands me for not using a book mark as he has been taught to do at his fascist public school. 

2. Do you lend your books?

I loan books because I want to influence people’s thoughts about the world.  I usually don’t get them back.  It’s not something I judge the human race about because it is very easy to forget you have borrowed a CD or a book.  I’m sure I have done it myself.

3. You find an interesting passage: you write in your book or NO WRITING IN BOOKS!

Not only do I write extensively in books by bracketing text, underlining text, and adding marginalia, but I also write in library books.  I know this is a vile habit which horrifies anyone I tell, but I can’t help but note places that meant something to me.  I promise I do it in a very modest and not very noticeable manner.

4. Dust jackets – leave it on or take it off.

OFF.  They are an impediment and were not made to be long for this world.  I used to remove them while reading and replace them.  Then, I started putting them in a drawer.  My wife threw them away one day.  I freaked out for several minutes and then realized, so what?

5. Hard cover, paperback, skip it and get the audio book?

Hardbacks are unnecessary for me.  I probably like the trade paperback format the most for ease of handling and reading.  Of course, I keep getting more and more interested in using the Kindle to read.

6. Do you shelve your books by subject, author, or size and color of the book spines?

I shelve them so as to get them off of other furniture and keep my wife from injuring me.  Not much rhyme or reason except that I usually isolate the mass paperbacks and keep my very favorite books downstairs in the best bookcase.
7. Buy it or borrow it from the library later?

I don’t use the library much these days.  Amazon turned me into a serious book buyer.  Especially Amazon marketplace.

8. Do you put your name on your books – scribble your name in the cover, fancy bookplate, or stamp?

I used a beautiful book embossing device that says Baker Family Library — Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.  It is a treasured gift from a friend.

9. Most of the books you own are rare and out-of-print books or recent publications?

Highly eclectic mix of books.  I am becoming averse to really old books because the dust and mildew affects as I age.

10. Page edges – deckled or straight?

Straight.  I think the rough cut book pages are just a little precious.  You have the technology to do it straight, so just do it that way.

11. How many books do you read at one time?

I frequently have multiple books going at one time.  If I am reading only one book, that is a sure sign that it is a marvelous read.

12. Be honest, ever tear a page from a book?

Are you a barbarian?  Leave me and go sack Washington, D.C.

Amazon Kindle and the Future of Content

Okay, I have now had time to read an entire book on the Kindle.  Excellent experience.  What is really amazing is the content delivery aspect of it.  I was going to deliver a lecture on technology and culture and wanted to brush up on Orwell’s 1984.  I downloaded it via the Kindle for .99.  Instant delivery.  No shipping.  I was reading in the next minute.

I was worried about the issue of notetaking, highlighting, underlining, etc.  Good news on that front.  You can easily highlight text and then go to a separate page that keeps all of your highlighted sections.  Outstanding.  Only one minor complaint is that you can’t highlight text across pages.  You highlight on the page you are on.  Stop.  Then highlight the section you want on the next page.

It takes a little reading experience to get used to holding this device in hand and reading.  It is different from holding a book.  No question.  Feels different.  At first, I thought I was going to reject it.  But after reading for about 10 minutes, it became quite natural.

I think these e-readers are going to change the publishing business substantially.  E-publishing will eventually grab maybe a quarter of the overall take.  Just a prediction.  Probably too modest.

The real question is what is this going to do to publishing companies.  With a device like the Kindle, you simply do not NEED a publisher.  At least, you do not need a publisher if you have established your own name and/or brand.  Though the attempts have been abortive so far, there WILL come a time when the big writers, analysts, reporters, etc. just sell their stuff direct.  It will be interesting to see what the political effect of that kind of democratization of discourse will be.  The model, strangely enough, might be something like the old Evans and Novak report.  Something like that would be perfect to just purchase direct via micro-payments or a cheap subscription.

Has Damon Linker Dethroned Natural Law?

I’ll save you the suspense. No.

Linker, known primarily for betraying Richard John Neuhaus by serving as editor of First Things and then publishing a book accusing Neuhaus of scurrilous theocratic aims, now writes primarily at the New Republic. In a recent post there, he brilliantly claims to have demonstrated the idea of natural law is obvious poppycock. Why? Because he disagrees with two officials of the Catholic Church holding that a nine year old who was raped and with her life endangered by the pregnancy should still have the children rather than an abortion. Linker reasons that if the Catholic Church is wrong about that, then their idea of natural law is wrong.

Where to start?

Given that Mr. Linker worked at First Things, I’d figure he had his Aquinas down pat. Thomas Aquinas (AKA, the DOCTOR OF NATURAL LAW) held that we should agree on the first principles of natural law (like that the lives of innocent children should be protected), but that we may well disagree with the application of that natural law on a case by case basis. Well, guess what? Here we have just such a case. Does it mean the idea of natural law is vacuous? No. And Aquinas didn’t think so, either.

Mr. Linker thinks the church (or more specifically two church officials) is wrong about this case. And maybe they are. I’m unfamiliar with it. But does his disagreement with their reasoning about this case mean that the larger principle (the lives of innocent children should be protected) no longer holds? No, that position is obviously incorrect. The broad propositions of the natural law continue to hold.

First Things, Economics, and Conservative Protestants

First Things online just published my thoughts on conservative Protestants and their attitude toward corporate behavior.

Here’s a clip:

Several months ago, I heard a story that forced me to give more careful thought to my views on the built-in morality of the market. A large airline on the brink of bankruptcy in 2002 asked employees to make substantial wage concessions. They agreed. The airline returned to profitability, and management acknowledged that it had the workers to thank, but in the subsequent years, instead of restoring the wage concessions, it awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives.

When pressed by reporters, the airline’s spokesman said the bonuses were necessary to retain top managerial talent. Pilots and other airline personnel could not leave because the airlines’ seniority systems would require them to start over at a new company. In effect, the workers could not easily punish the airline for failing to pay them back, so it was in no hurry to do so.

The story jarred me. Somehow, I had never applied my Christian conception of a sinful world to corporate behavior. In hindsight I realize my faith should have cautioned me against too easily deferring to the idea of the sufficiency of the invisible hand to produce justice.

Now, judging from this short bit, I’m guessing some of you will think I’ve gone all lefty on you.  Not so.  Read the piece.  There is not a call for the slightest government action.  What I’m calling for is the exercise of moral suasion.  If we can protest when the convenience store decides to carry porn, we can also protest when an airline screws its employees.  Follow the link and see whether you agree.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

I’m excited about the movie and can assure you that the graphic novel is every bit as good as you’ve heard.

You can read my take on it here.

Here’s a clip:

The author of this masterpiece, one Alan Moore, is a paranoid left-winger (See V for Vendetta, for example), but the man can write.  Perhaps the character people remember the most from the Watchmen is Rorschach, a man in a hat and trenchcoat who covers his face with a mask of ever-changing ink impressions.  Rorschach has no superpowers or even the genius and equipment of Batman.  He is a man determined to set things right and is uninhibited in his willingness to do violence to wrongdoers.  Rorschach was once a more conventional hero, but he has seen too much evil in the world and is no longer prepared to accept limits on his retribution.  This vigilante, full of retrograde opinions and mourning for an America whose best days are behind her, is Archie Bunker without the laughs.  Rorschach walks along a street in the red-light district and notes that he is offered French love, Swedish love, and other exotic pleasures.  But American love, he regrets, “is like Coke in green glass bottles . . .  they don’t make it anymore.”  He is dangerous.  And he is Moore’s idea of a conservative.  If it is intended as an insult, it is one most of us can live with.