Month: February 2010

Christianity Today has a web article noting (and quoting from) our recent discussion of John Paul II’s practice of self-mortification.

The piece—written by an Evangelical—is noteworthy in that it doesn’t just lash out against the concept. (No pun intended! Honest! Didn’t even notice that until later!) Indeed, it devotes a significant amount of attention to understanding the practice from a Catholic perspective.

Though ultimately the author sees self-flagellation as “misguided,” he acknowledges and recommends the practice of self-denial, including fasting.

(So . . . why is self-flagellation “misguided” whereas fasting is to be recommended? As long as you don’t permanently injure your body with either—and both can be done in ways that do permanent damage—why is one more misguided than the other?)

In any event, I’d like to kudos CT and the author of the piece—Collin Hansen—for seeking to explore the issue in a fair-minded way!

GET THE STORY.

File this one under the heading “defending the indefensible.”

Author and blogger John Allen, of the National Catholic Reporter (not the Register, just to avoid any misunderstanding), is a competent and insightful journalist whose pieces I enjoy reading.

Mostly.

A thing that occasionally mars them is his desire to play waggish phrasemaker, a role in which he can display a tin ear.

For instance, in today’s column he writes:

I may have inadvertently added fuel to the fire by introducing something new to fight over: My phrase “Taliban Catholicism” to capture a certain trajectory within the church. (At least I think I coined the term, though for all I know somebody else got there first.)

In my brief remarks Monday night, I applauded [Bishop Kevin] Farrell’s vision, underscoring it with a bit of rhetoric that’s become part of my standard stump speech. A defining challenge for the church these days, I said, is to craft a synthesis between entirely legitimate hunger for identity on the one hand, and engagement with the great social movements of the time on the other.

That synthesis, I said, has to involve striking a balance between two extremes. Here’s how I described them:

“On the one extreme lies what my friend and colleague George Weigel correctly terms ‘Catholicism Lite,’ meaning a watered-down, sold-out form of secularized religiosity, Catholic in name only. On the other is what I call ‘Taliban Catholicism,’ meaning a distorted, angry form of the faith that knows only how to excoriate, condemn, and smash the TV sets of the modern world.”

Allen then recounts how he was politely taken to task by a member of the audience he was addressing and offers two defenses of his use of the term “Taliban Catholicism.”

First, he says that he uses the terms “Catholic Lite” and “Taliban Catholicism” not to describe specific people but states of mind. Second, he says that he doesn’t use them to refer to the left or right portions of the theological/political/whatever spectrum and that both exist on both sides of the spectrum.

These are pretty weak excuses to my mind.

Unless one has the linguistic bullheadedness of Humpty Dumpty, it should be recognized that words do not just have stipulative definitions where you get to use them the way you want to, with no thought to the real-world consequences.

Words are used by communities, and when you create compound terms like “Catholic Lite” or “Taliban Catholicism,” they’re going to suggest particular things to the community. In this case, no matter what Allen might subjectively mean by these terms, they’re going to be taken by contemporary English-speaking Catholics of the type found in his audience as references to the Catholic “left” and the Catholic “right.”

That’s what the audience is going to automatically assume.

Perhaps, with a lot of explanation and exposition and disclaimers by Allen, he could overcome that initial perception, but that’s what the initial perception is going to be.

But there’s an even more fundamental problem.

There is just no parity whatsoever between Weigel’s term “Catholic Lite” (incorporating a reference to low-calorie food products) and Allen’s own “Taliban Catholicism” (incorporating a reference to murderous thugs with whom we are at war).

It is as if Allen had used the phrase “Al-Qa’eda Catholicism” or “Nazi Catholicism.”

Now matter how many Humpty Dumpty games you play with these terms, they are just going to generate more heat than light.

Allen is smart enough to know that.

I chose the picture that I did for this post to call to mind the kind of murderous thugs that the Taliban are. But this picture doesn’t tell the half of it. In searching for it, I came across far more disturbing and violent pictures of the Taliban. People they had killed. People they were about to behead. People about to be shot in the head. I don’t suggest that anyone go looking for such pictures, but they underscore the force of the word “Taliban” and just the kind of evil with which it is associated.

Allen’s “Taliban Catholicism” is said to “excoriate, condemn, and smash the TV sets of the modern world.” The real Taliban has done far, far worse acts than that, which is precisely why his use of the term to refer to people who—however much they rage against certain things in the modern world—do not actually commit Taliban-like atrocities is disgusting.

Opinionated Catholic asks: In 25 Years Will There Be A Papal Statement on Robots?

Who can say? Always in motion, the future is.

But this one seems a pretty sure bet, in part for the reasons that Opinionated Catholic cites:

What happens when warfare can be conducted just by robots. . . .
It appears this world is fast approaching. That is one reason when I hear of aircraft that have no humans, tanks that have no commander, and ships with no crews I start wondering if we want to go down this road.

What about new Just War theory issues? An inequity between nations that can have robots do the dying for them and those that have to use real live human beings?

However there is no stopping it. Soon we will have to deal with the moral and ethical questions involved here.

It’s a sure bet that the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace will be all over the issue of battlefield robots, with papal comments to follow, and perhaps even a whole papal document devoted to the subject, though that’s more iffy.

I would guess that we won’t be seeing full armies of autonomous droids in twenty-five years, though we already have a variety of battlefield robots, and their presence will increase over time.

And yes, technologically and economically developed countries—like ours—will have more and better robots than other countries, with poor ones not having any.

This disparity will be noted and will be part of the inevitable discussion—which will be prompted by the just as inevitable use of robots.

When I first saw the headline wondering whether there would be a papal statement on robots in twenty-five years, though, it wasn’t battlefield robots that my mind first turned to: It was ordinary robots whose job isn’t to kill people . . . but to kill jobs.

Given the Holy See’s concern for ordinary workers, the impact of robots on the workforce would also be likely to occasion papal remarks.

In fact, I thought, I’d be surprised if there weren’t already papal remarks on job-killing robots.

So I Googled the Vatican web site,

AND LOOKEE HERE.

There are already a number of hits. Mostly they aren’t statements issuing from the pope but from different Vatican dicasteries.

There are, however, a couple of statements from John Paul II that deal with—surprise, surprise—the impact of robots on the workforce.

Unfortunately, the Holy See doesn’t have English translations of these addresses up on its web site, but here are Google’s translations:

Address given during a 1983 papal visit to an Italian glass factory.

Papal audience from 1984 on Labor Day.

NOTE: If you’re good with Italian, you can help improve Google’s translation by mousing over the text.

This is a chart showing the fifty largest countries by population and the religious freedom they offer.

The chart was prepared by the Pew Forum, and it measures religious freedom along two axes. The first—the horizontal axis—is the amount of freedom allowed by law, with the most freedom on the left and the least freedom on the right.

The second—the vertical axis—is the amount of freedom allowed culturally (i.e., how much social hostility you are likely to meet apart from the law), with the most freedom at the bottom and the least freedom at the top.

The size of the circles represents the number of people living in the country.

When I first saw this, several questions occurred to me.

One was: “Where is Saudia Arabia? It ought to be in the extreme top right of the diagram.” The answer is that it’s not one of the top fifty countries by population, so it’s not on the chart. However, in the Pew Forum report that the chart is based on, Saudi Arabia is the only country listed in the “very high” category for both social hostilities (6.8) and government restrictions (8.4) to freedom of religion.

Another question was: “Why is the U.S. ranked the way it is?” It turns out that the government restrictions score the U.S. has (1.6) includes the fact that it requires religious organizations to apply for a special status (c3 non-profit) to obtain tax-exempt status, and there are strings attached to that (e.g., limits on what pastors can say about politics).

Fair enough.

I’m less sure about the social hostility score the U.S. is given (1.9). Certainly there are people in the U.S. who are hostile to different religions, and there are even crimes committed against people because of their religion, but I’m not sure that the Pew researchers have ranked things properly.

If you look in the full report, the U.S. is classed as having “moderate” social hostilities toward freedom of religion, with an overall score of 1.9. The Pew report justifies this by saying: “In the United States, law enforcement officials across the country reported to the FBI at least 1,400 hate crimes involving religion in 2006 and again in 2007.”

Okay . . . but it then immediately says that Belgium is a country with “low social hostilities” (it’s score is 1.3) and justifies that by stating: “In Belgium, for example, 68 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in 2007 and 31 in the first half of 2008, but none involved physical violence.”

But wait. Belgium has a population one thirtieth that of the U.S. if you took Belgium’s anti-Semitic incidents and scaled them up by a factor of 30, you’d get 2,040 for 2007 and 930 for 2008. And that’s just anti-Semitic incidents, not anti-Muslim or anti-Christian.

That’s not looking so different than the U.S. It may be looking even worse.

You could fix on the phrase “but none involved physical violence” to explain the difference in rankings. Presumably some U.S. incidents did include physical violence, but many no doubt did not (e.g., spraying anti-religious graffiti on churches or synagogues). And if you scaled Belgium up by a factor of 30, you might get some physical violence appearing as well.

In any event, I suspect that the ranking here is something of an apples-to-oranges comparison that has more to do with how the two governments classify, report, and track such incidents.

It’s still an intriguing way of measuring global freedom of religion.

MORE

FULL REPORT (.pdf)

Your thoughts on the state of freedom of religion—here or abroad?