On killing innocents

Two links:

Michael Jackson’s Death Means Little to Me

McNamara’s Evil

As I’ve pointed out before, one condition of any war being “just” according to traditional criteria would require a rigorous accounting for all the innocent lives lost and an equal weighing of those lives against any purported good that the war accomplishes. (And that’s assuming that all those deaths are unintended side effects of legitimate military operations.) Can we honestly say that our national war policies meet that standard?

Physician, heal thyself!

Strangest thing I saw on my trip: a sidewalk pamphleteer handing out literature attacking President Obama’s “socialist” health care plan. In Canada.

Home again

My lovely wife and I returned today from our great trip north. Montreal and Quebec City are both lovely, as are the people who live there, at least as far as I can tell. (I practiced saying “Je ne parle pas français” a lot.) We spent most of our time walking around soaking in the sights and stuffing ourselves silly, with the former hopefully offsetting the latter to some degree. We spent the last night of our trip in Burlington, Vermont, which is also a lovely place, perched as it is on the shore of Lake Champlain. Delicious flatbread pizza and locally brewed beer were the order of the night, followed by Ben & Jerry’s of course.

I won’t pretend to have any brilliant insights into Canadian culture, much less French Canadian culture, though I did get that feeling, as I have on previous trips to Canada, of being in a kind of alternate-reality U.S. Most things seem familiar, but there are enough differences to let you know you’re in a foreign country. (Not that Canadians think of themselves as the goateed-Spock version of the U.S.; or would we be the evil version of Canada?) Also, the Canadian media seems just as obsessed with Michael Jackson’s death as the American.

Here are a few highlights:

Montreal from Mont Réal

Notre Dame Basillica, Montreal

Jesus(?) on the frontier

Old Montreal

Delicious, delicious pastry

Quebec City - in the rain

Québec libre!

The Chateau Frontenac, overlooking lower Quebec City

Home again! (Well, in VT anyway)

Sunset over Lake Champlain

The birthplace of pragmatism (okay, exept for C.S. Peirce and William James)

O Canada!

Well, it’s Canada Day, and what better way to celebrate than by…going to Canada?

That’s what I’m doing, anyway. My honey and I are leaving tomorrow for Montreal, followed by Quebec City (or just “Quebec” to the Canadians).

It seems a bit unpatriotic to leave the country over Independence Day weekend, but I’ll think of it as a goodwill visit to our northern cousins.

Posting will be light to nil until sometime next week at least.

Enjoy the fireworks and burgers, my fellow Americans.

Looking beyond the labels

James McWilliams, author of the forthcoming Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, looks at the lives of free-range pigs. While emphasizing that they’re far better off than their factory-farmed counterparts, McWilliams finds some serious ethical problems with the practice.

McWilliams’ conclusion is a measured one:

As responsible consumers, it’s easy to decide to avoid factory-farmed pork. The hard part is what to make of the most acceptable alternative. Does free-range farming justify the mutilation that’s often required to keep pigs outdoors? As an ethical matter, the question is open to endless debate. What the conscientious meat eater can take away from it is not so much a concrete answer as a more nuanced way to think about our food choices. In this age of deeply convincing attacks on factory farms, consumers must be careful not to immediately assume that every alternative to factory farming is as “all natural” or humane as its advocates will inevitably declare. The alternatives might require still more alternatives.

This call to look beyond the labels is important across the “food issue” spectrum. Pollan and others have made a similar point with the “organic” label: there are big farms that are technically organic but are a far cry from the small bucolic family farms that the term may conjure up. Which isn’t to say they’re necessarily bad either. A world of small bucolic family farms may not even be a possibility at this point, in which case, big organic might be a very desirable alternative. What I take McWilliams to be saying here (and elsewhere and, I presume, in his forthcoming book) is that there’s no silver bullet solution to eating sustainably that can be captured in a handy slogan (e.g., buy organic, buy local). This argument has also been made by Peter Singer and Jim Mason in The Ethics of What We Eat, which tries to go beyond simplistic labeling and trace the origins of different kinds of meals and their attendant costs in terms of animal welfare, human well-being, and environmental sustainability. In their reckoning, “local” and “organic” don’t always come out ahead.

What the situation seems to call for is more nuanced discussion, more informed consumers, and more truth in advertising, along with reform at the level of the food system as a whole.

(Link via Erik Marcus)

More on Anselm, death, and redemption

Christopher has an excellent follow-up post on Anselm and atonement, addressing some of the worries I had about Jesus’ death being a payment of sorts. Instead of trying to summarize it, I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Some of what Christopher wrote brought to mind a passage from Denis Edwards’ Ecology at the Heart of Faith (which I talked about in the previous post). Here Edwards is discussing Karl Rahner’s account of redemption:

[Rahner's] focus is not on a forensic view of redemption, on Christ making up for human sin in legal terms, but on God embracing humanity and the world so that they are taken into God and deified.

[...]

He sees the death and resurrection of Jesus as two distinct sides of the one event. In death, Jesus freely hands his whole bodily existence into the mystery of a loving God. In the resurrection, God adopts creaturely reality as God’s own reality. Jesus, in his humanity and as part of a creaturely world, is forever taken into God. God’s self-bestowal to the world in the incarnation reaches its culmination in the resurrection, when God divinizes and transfigures the creturely reality of Jesus. (Ecology at the Heart of Faith, p. 87)

What I read Edwards as saying here is that Jesus offers his death, not as a payment, but as an act of total self-offering in trust. Because Jesus has made the perfect response to the Father, humanity–indeed, creaturehood–is taken into the divine life.

Kinship and cultivation, Francis and Benedict

Catholic theologian Denis Edwards’ Ecology at the Heart of Faith provides a good model of engaging environmental issues using the classic Christian theological tradition.

In chapter 2 he discusses the controverted issue of the image of God and dominion over nature. He argues that the imago is best understood as the human capacity for interpersonal love and relationship: with God, each other, and the rest of creation.

[W]hat is specific to the human can be seen as the personal, the capacity to go out from oneself to the other in interpersonal love. Precisely this personal dimension of the human involves the human in relationship not only with that radical other who is God, and not only with other human beings, but with the others who are our fellow creatures. Precisely because human beings are made in the image of God, they are called like God to care for every sparrow that falls to the ground. (p. 16)

Edwards then goes on to consider the topic of human dominion over nature. Rejecting a sheerly exploitative understanding of dominion and an ecological egalitarianism that gives no special preference to human interests, Edwards opts for a view that emphasizes kinship with other creatures and care and cultivation of the earth. As he puts it, this combines the “Franciscan” focus on other creatures as our brothers and sisters with a “Benedictine” call to cultivate the earth in work, gardening, and building and to creative contemplation of the world in learning and study:

Theologically, I would propose that this kinship brings into play what I have identified as the image of God in the human, the personal. It involves humans as persons, personally connecting with other creatures, respecting and loving them in all their differences from ourselves. (pp. 23-4)

[...]

The language of cultivating and caring for creation can include the many ways in which human creativity is used for the good of the community of life on Earth. It includes not only farming with best land-care practice, but also cooking, gardening, building, painting, doing science, teaching, planning, taking political action and many other creative actions. (pp. 25-6)

Edwards here is trying to balance an appreciation and respect for the otherness of the non-human creation with a sense of the importance of human culture and our unique role on earth. “What is crucial is that cultivating and caring for creation are based on the conversion implied in the model of kinship, a conversion in which human beings come to see themselves as interrelated in a community of life with other creatures, a community in which each creature has its own unique value before God” (p. 26). He rejects the metaphor of stewardship, which has become popular in some Christian circles, because it “can run the risk of suggesting an inflated view of the human as a necessary intermediary between God and other creatures” (p. 25). The non-human world has its own relationship with God apart from us. Cultivation of and caring for creation, founded on a recognition of kinship, implies both a creativity and a self-limitation on the part of human beings.

Cognitive ethology, the Left, faith, and dominion

A long but worthwhile essay that to some extent recapitulates the argument made by John Gray in Straw Dogs. Gray’s contention was that the secular Left has largely jettisoned the metaphysics of Christianity but held on to its anthropocentric outlook and belief in a progressive history. Echoing Nietzsche, Gray argues that the scientific, secular outlook undermines, instead of underwriting, humanism.

The author of this essay, Steve Best, maintains that the Left, even while taking pride in its progressive, enlightened, science-informed views, still has largely ignored the “animal question,” i.e., the fact that science increasingly reveals a continuity between human and non-human animals. Instead, progressives still largely hold on to the old, discredited humanism that posits an unbridgeable chasm between us and the rest of creation.

As a Christian who’s also interested in moving beyond a strictly anthropocentric theology, I come at this from a slightly different angle. On the one hand, the Bible (not to mention simple observation) reveals that we have at least a de facto dominion over the rest of nature: what we do disproportionately affects the rest of the world whether we like it or not. On the other hand, historical Christianity has largely adopted an anthropocentrism that is at odds with the Bible, at least on some readings. For instance, in a brief but interesting book, German theologian Michael Welker argues that a close reading of the opening chapters of Genesis describes a human dominion that privileges human interests but also demands a care for the rest of creation:

The mandate of dominion aims at nothing less than preserving creation while recognizing and giving pride of place to the interests of human beings. In all the recognizing and privileging of the interests of human beings, the central issue is the preservation of creation in its complex structures of interdependence. The expansion of the human race upon the earth is inseparable from the preservation of the community of solidarity with animals in particular, and inseparable from the caretaking preservation of the community of solidarity with all creatures in general. God judges human beings worthy of this preservation of creation. They are to exercise dominion over creatures by protecting them. Human beings acquire their power and their worth precisely in the process of caretaking. The mandate of dominion according to Genesis 1 means nothing more and nothing less. (Creation and Reality, p. 73, emphasis added)

Traditionally–and perhaps understandably given humanity’s limited ability to affect the non-human world in the past–Christianity has adopted the view that the rest of the world exists for our sake. There have been debates about whether this is an authentically biblical view or one imported from elsewhere (e.g., classical philosophy). Either way, I believe Christianity has the resources to adapt to new understandings of our place in creation without jettisoning the biblical tradition and the essential tenets of Christian theology.

Climate action and public corruption

A pork-ridden Waxman-Markey passed the House yesterday, and heaven only knows what version of the bill will come out of the Senate and the subsequent process of reconciling the two. George Monbiot calls the U.S. a “failed state” when it comes to climate action and says that addressing political corruption (”corporate money and an unregulated corporate media”) is necessary for meaningful action. Here’s an account of the particularly egregious behavior of the farm lobby.

Barr on faith and evolution

Since I was pretty critical of First Things a couple posts down, it seems only fair to note that Stephen Barr has been writing some excellent posts on Christianity and evolution (see here, here, and here).