St. Maximos' Hut

I make an appearance at Cafe Hayek.

I'll be in London and Florence this week, speaking at the International Policy Network and an NYU Center for Labor and Employment Law conference, respectively.

about his Moses action figure. Here. Clever.

I am part of a program on Friday at Boston College on the Solomon Amendment, the statute that requires universities that receive federal funding to grant equal access to military recruiters. You can read my thoughts in a forthcoming William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal article on the topic here.

Sen. John Kerry recently called the Republican budget approved by the U.S. Senate "immoral" and said it will hurt cities (story here):

"As a Christian, as a Catholic, I think hard about those responsibilities that are moral and how you translate them into public life. There is not anywhere in the three-year ministry of Jesus Christ, anything that remotely suggests--not one miracle, not one parable, not one utterance--that says you ought to cut children's health care or take money from the poorest people in our nation to give it to the wealthiest people in our nation."

James Taranto of Best of the Web points out in response that:

Contemporary liberals are happy to beat you over the head with the Bible, but only when completely technocratic matters, like budgets or environmental regulations, are at stake. When the subject turns to abortion or same-sex marriage or Terri Schiavo, suddenly they become absolutists about the separation of church and state.
In other words, they fear and oppose religion when it comes to matters of sex and death--the two great mysteries of life, and the two areas where a religious outlook has the most to offer.

This makes me all the more convinced that there needs to be some engagement between economists and religious leaders (not that Kerry counts as one), to help the religious community sort out the key facts about economic policy.

BTW, I am not surprised that Christ did not directly address current policy issues in US politics or that, if he did during his time on earth, that the authors of the Gospels omitted those parables, etc.

"Power Over the Body, Equality in the Family: Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law"
Charles J. Reid Jr., POWER OVER THE BODY, EQUALITY IN THE
FAMILY: RIGHTS AND DOMESTIC RELATIONS IN MEDIEVAL CANON
LAW, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004

BY: CHARLES J. REID
University of St. Thomas, St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN
- School of Law

Paper ID: U fo St. Thomas Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05-08

Contact: CHARLES J. REID
Email: Mailto:cjreid@stthomas.edu
Postal: University of St. Thomas, St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN - School
of Law
1000 La Salle Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403-2005 UNITED STATES

ABSTRACT:
The modern secular view of marriage as resting principally on the continuing affection and consent of both parties is a particular manifestation of a kind of philosophical liberalism that sees the marital relationship merely as an aggregation of individual interests and expressed in terms of rights. This secularized, highly individualistic view of marriage and the family and the rights of parties within those relationships has had an enormous impact on the shape of the American law of domestic relations over the last several decades.

However, this secularist viewpoint clashes with other strongly held and popular beliefs about marital relationships and especially with our instinctive sense that marriage should be about community formation: the parties to a marriage should not be pursuing purely egoistic interests, but should be engaged in meeting one another’s needs and providing for the upbringing of their offspring. Today, a renewed focus on marital obligation is a necessary antidote to threatening trends in popular as well as legal culture.

In this book, Dr. Reid demonstrates that many elements of the traditional understanding of marriage developed from concepts about rights and corresponding responsibilities that began to take shape in twelfth-century scholastic jurisprudence. American judges and lawyers over the past two centuries were hardly the first to speak in a vocabulary of conjugal rights or duties arising from natural obligations. These understandings have deep roots in Western notions of marital relations. Dr. Reid explores the historical foundations of this alternative way of thinking and speaking about the marital relationship and explains how a language of rights came to be grafted, at a very early date in Western history, onto the idea of marriage.

In the medieval period, marriage was understood as having a certain natural structure that neither the parties themselves, nor even the church, were free to alter. Marriage was ordered to the good of both spouses and the procreation and upbringing of children. Within this ordered structure, the canonist scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries recognized the existence of certain rights and obligations in order to ensure that the basic goods and goals of marriage were fulfilled. Through the historical developments explained in this book, a new picture of the law governing the marital relationship, from its historical origins in the medieval period, emerges.

From Max Boot.

The folks over at the Acton Institute have announced "Acton University", which is billed as:

...a unique, four-day exploration of the intellectual foundations of a free society. Guided by a distinguished, international faculty, Acton University is an opportunity to deepen your knowledge and integrate rigorous philosophy, Christian theology and sound economics.

The conference, which will take place in Grand Rapids from 13-17 June 2006 offers an intriguing set of 40 seminar selections which may be viewed here. Full boat for the conference, lodging and meals is $595, with fellowships for the fees available to students who are selected to attend (presumably by the Acton Institute).

I line the part about "rigorous philosophy, Christian theology and sound economics."

Reading about the French riots and reading The Church and the Market together prompt the following:

The reason pundits give for the French riots (French pundits, anyway) seems to be something like this: "The youth in the suburbs are discriminated against, have little hope of advancement,* and so have given up on France. In their despair, they are rioting." Let's assume that's true, at least in part.

Why does French society offer so few opportunities to these youth? I doubt it is because of inherent racism, although that may play a role.** The underlying reason is that the French economy is in the grips of a statist stranglehold that chokes off job creation. Woods is quite clear on this issue (not with respect to France in particular but as a general matter) - just substitute French for Catholic in the passage below:

Thus, for example, that every man should earn a "family wage" that allows his family to live in reasonable comfort is a desirable social goal. The strong implication of some Catholic social thinkers that such an outcome can be brought into existence by decree, however, that man's will can establish such a state of affairs by his ipse dixit, and that no recourse to any so-called economic law can be of any help in ascertaining the probable outcome of such measures, is no more intellectually defensible than the suggestion that man's desire to fly renders superflous any need to take into account the law of gravity.

(p. 43)


* My favorite book title by a French pundit, and one that almost makes me regret not reading French, is Aziz Senni's The social elevator is broken, I took the stairs.

**The Financial Times reported a study today that found that identical job applications got five times more responses when a French sounding name was used compared to when an Arab name was used.

Update: David Beito a similar analysis over at Liberty and Power.

Some interesting discussion of the French rights here and here.

Is it a clash of civilizations? No - a clash of civilizations implies two civilizations (at least). The rioters in France aren't civilized and shouldn't be dignified with a claim that they represent one.

Austin Bay (the second link above) talks about "encouraging “Euro-Islam,” (France has been doing the latter.)" I find this an odd idea - what makes us think the French (or any) state is going to do a particularly good job of creating a state religion? European established Christian churches have been decaying for a long time. "Euro-Islam" seems likely to produce a bunch of state subsidized, empty mosques just as "Euro-Christianity" has produced a bunch of state subsidized, empty churches. That seems unlikely to placate the rioters (although it also is hard to understand why France might want to placate the rioters.)