Catholicism, vegetarianism and the conscientious omnivore

Bernard Prusak, who teaches at Villanova University outside of Philadelphia, recently published a thoughtful article on Catholicism and vegetarianism at Commonweal (you can also read it at his website here). Dr. Prusak was a practicing vegetarian for a while, but gave it up partly because he became convinced that meat-eating was, if not necessary, at least conducive to human flourishing. “Even if we don’t strictly need meat in order to survive, it can help us flourish-and this, I cannot but believe, is good.” This is a more nuanced argument than the usual “eating meat is natural” argument.

I’m not going to try and adjudicate the debate between which is healthier, vegetarianism or meat-eating and I wouldn’t want to try and lay down any hard-and-fast rules about out. Happily, though, there’s no dearth of resources for living as a healthy vegetarian. I found Vesanto Melina and Brenda Davis’s Becoming Vegetarian a helpful resource on vegetarian nutrition.

The rest of Prusak’s essay is a good examination of various moral arguments about the relative moral status of human and animal life. He’s surely right that Christians should resist arguments for animal well-being that rely on downgrading the moral status of human beings. In particular he engages with the late James Rachels’ argument from Darwinism - the idea that evolution has shown that human life isn’t particularly sacred and that we share more with non-human animals than traditionally thought.

Prusak points out that one can accept the second of these claims without accepting the first. And, moreover, downgrading the significance of human exceptionalism might well lead us to stop taking morality as seriously as Rachels urges. “Rachels never considers whether there is a connection between belief in human dignity and commitment to the moral life.”

Indeed, a sense that humans have a special calling to be good stewards of the earth can encourage greater respect for animal life and well-being. Vegetarians and conscientious omnivores can agree that legitimate stewardship requires, if nothing else, respecting the natures of our fellow-creatures. “If the justification for eating meat is that it is natural for us and helps us flourish, consistency requires that we respect in turn the natures of the animals we eat: chickens, pigs, cows, fish, sheep, turkeys, and many others.”

Friday metal - Unearth, “Zombie Autopilot”

Boston hardcore meets Swedish death metal.

Sanity from Texas (relatively speaking)

Texas clemency for death row man

The governor of Texas has halted the execution of a getaway driver in a botched 1996 bank robbery that ended with an accomplice shooting a man dead.

Governor Rick Perry commuted Kenneth Foster’s death sentence to life after a recommendation from the parole board.

Foster, now 30, was convicted under a Texas law allowing accomplices to a crime that results in murder to face capital punishment.

Read the rest…

Spong’s Jesus

Ben Myers at Faith and Theology reviews the new book Jesus for the Non-Religious by the notorious John Shelby Spong.

Dr. Myers’ review is consistent with the impression I’ve long had of Spong’s work: in an attempt to be modern and relevant he evacuates Christianity of everything that makes it remotely interesting and weird and challenging. At that pont why not just sleep in on Sunday morning?

Political self ID - a Christian humanist?

This is an exercise in bloggy narcissism (or is that a redundancy?) so feel free to skip this post.

The other day a friend asked me to describe my political outlook and I couldn’t come up with a very satisfying answer. Having persued the blog he suggested religious conservative, but to me that sounds a bit too close to Jerry Falwell.

I definitely thought of myself as a conservative at one point, though lately I’ve been toying with the idea of “Christian humanist” as the best descriptor of my overall outlook.

Anyway, here are a handful of posts on my various statements of political principle and self-identification, if anyone’s interested.

“Apologia pro vote sua” (On voting for the Green Party in 2004)

“…on Sort of Going from Right to Left or How I Became a Quasi-Pacifist Conservative Vegetarian Pro-Lifer”

“Am I a Conservative?”

To me, what a “Christian humanist” position would emphasize is the dignity of the human person rooted in a transcendent moral order while at the same time recognizing human frailty and our limited apprehension of that order this side of the eschaton.

This leads me to be in favor of strong limits on government power and to oppose, or at least be extremely wary of, the destruction of human life in the forms of abortion and euthanasia (traditional “conservative” views).

On the other hand, economics was made for human beings not vice versa, so the idolatry of the free market has to go (see Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Roepke’s A Humane Economy). State killing in the form of war and capital punishment is at least equally as troubling and difficult to justify as other threats to life. And human beings can’t flourish while despoiling the environment.

Throw in a general skepticism about bio-engineering (see Lewis’ Abolition of Man, Huxley’s Brave New World) and trepidation about unchecked technology more generally (Borgmann, Jardine, Ellul) and you’ve got an electric conservative-liberal-green-libertarian stew.

The penal state

I finally got around to reading this Glenn Loury piece on our scandalous rates of punitive and discriminatory incarceration. Very powerful stuff.

The theologian William Placher has written some very good stuff on this often-neglected topic. In his book Jesus the Savior he writes:

Practices like visiting prisoners grew out of the core of Christian faith. After all, Jesus was a crucified criminal. He was not merely punished, one important strand of Christian theology has maintained–he was guilty, for he had taken on our guilt. “For our sake,” Paul wrote, God made Christ “to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21)

[...]

Christ takes our sin, and frees us from it. Some of us may have a more immediate need of rehabilitation, or more need to be prevented from doing harm to others in the short run, but according to Christian faith it makes no sense to think of “distinguishing the innocent from the guilty.” Apart from Christ, we are all guilty. In Christ, we can all be found innocent. We may need to be helped, both by being protected from doing further wrong, and by being helped to be better, but there is no reason to punish anyone. (pp. 153-4)

If God in Jesus assumes solidarity not only with victims, but also with perpetrators, Christians should be the last ones to adopt the attitude of “Lock ‘em up, throw away the key, and forget about ‘em!”

Pacifism and just war in The Mission

Last night I re-watched The Mission, one of my all-time favorite movies (with screenplay written by Robert Bolt, who also wrote the screenplay of one of my other all-time faves, A Man For All Seasons). Like A Man for All Seasons, The Mission is about conscience and the way we respond to injustice.

The Mission is the true story of Jesuit missionaries in 18th century South America trying to protect the Indians to whom they’re ministering from the unscrupulous machinations of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, with the papacy stuck in the middle

Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) is an idealistic young priest who founds a mission in the high country above an enormous waterfall in a remote part of the jungle. He’s joined by his brother priests including Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert DeNiro), a reformed mercenary and slave-trader who accompanied the Jesuits to the mission as a kind of self-imposed penance for killing his brother (Aidan Quinn) in a fit of jealous rage. Mendoza ultimately has a dramatic conversion experience and becomes a Jesuit, finding a new kind of happiness among the Guaraní Indians.

The Indians are running self-sufficient communal plantations where the profits are shared and reinvested in the community, but have a somewhat precarious existence under the protection of the church. The Portuguese would like nothing better than to expropriate the Guarani’s lands and enslave them. As it happens, the missions exist in a dusputed territory recently ceded to the Portuguese by the Spanish, but this means the Guararni are at risk of being subject to Portuguese slavers unless the papal emissary,Altamirano, rules in their favor.

Unfortunately, the precarious position of the church in Europe, which would only be exacerbated by the Jesuits interfering with the secular powers, leads Altamirano to reluctantly conclude that the missions should be closed down and that all the Jesuits should leave. This, of course, means dispossession and enslavement for the Guarani unless the manage to disappear back into the jungle whence they came.

Fathers Gabriel and Mendoza both vow to stay with the Guarani, but diverge sharply over their responses to the imminent invasion of the mission by a combined Spanish-Portuguese force. While Gabriel insists that fidelty to their vocations requires Christ-like non-resistance, Mendoza reverts to his military ways, organizing the Guarani for an armed response against the invaders.

When Mendoza comes to Gabriel to renounce his vows as a priest, Gabriel counters with the theological rationale for not fighting:

Gabriel: What do you want, captain, an honorable death?

Mendoza: They want to live, Father. They say that God has left them,
he’s deserted them. Has he?

Gabriel: You shouldn’t have become a priest.

Mendoza: But I am, and they need me.

Gabriel: Then help them as a priest! If you die with blood on your hands, you betray everything we’ve done. You promised your life to God. And God is love!

Later, when Mendoza comes to Gabriel asking him to bless his fight, Gabriel responds:

If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that, Rodrigo.

Ultimately (SPOILER) both Mendoza and Gabriel meet their deaths at the hands of the invaders, the former felled in battle, the latter killed while leading his flock in a Eucharistic Procession. Those Guarani who aren’t killed or captured disappear back into the jungle.

It takes no great leap of insight to recognize that Gabriel and Rodrigo represent two divergent and contrasting Christian approaches to the problem of violence. Gabriel represents Christian pacifism: because God is love, as shown in the example of Christ, Christians can’t shed blood even in what may be a just cause. Rodrigo represents the “just war” ethos: force can be used to defend the innocent when their rights are being aggressed against. There’s no question that the Guarani are innocent and well within their rights, as far as natural justice is concerned, in defending themselves against the European invaders.

Of course, neither one of these approaches prevails in any concrete historical sense. The armed uprising is crushed and the pacifist priest is slaughtered. Force doesn’t stop the invaders and love doesn’t change their hearts (though there is one scene where even the hardened conquistadors hesitate momentarily before setting fire to a church full of men, women, and children).

You could say that Rodrigo ignores a cardinal tenet of just war theory: that war should only be waged when there is a reasonable likelihood of success. Unlike the pagan ideal of a noble death, the Christian just war tradition finds no virtue in fighting for a lost cause (Being martyred, of course, is another matter). The ragtag band of Indians, accompanied by three renegade priests, hardly seems likely to fend off a combined invasion by two of the world’s superpowers.

And yet, at least as the movie portrays it, Rodrigo’s response is understandable, if not justifiable. He sees massive injustice about to be inflicted on the people he loves and wants to fight back and to defend them. And this ideal is hardly unknown in Christendom. Rodrigo could be seen as a kind of knight-errant who, after repenting of his evil ways as a mercenary, uses his skills to champion the cause of the poor and oppressed.

But the movie’s heart seems to be with Gabriel and his Christ-like non-resistance. The image of him, dressed in white surplice, bearing the monstrance with the Host, leading his flock into the hail of gunfire has a special kind of power. It suggests, at least, that there is a power that love has when it refuses to hate, even if it is trampled underfoot by the world. Rodrigo gives in to the temptation to use violence, and fails anyway. Gabriel refuses to hate or strike back and that does seem to give him a kind of victory. It’s not some sentimental notion that you can love your enemy into loving you back, but that precisely by refusing to hate, love overcomes the powers of this world.

Bonus trivia: The radical priest Daniel Berrigan has a cameo as Sebastian, one of the priests at the missoin.

Contra the contrarians

Bradford Plumer debunks the claims of some of the recent debunkers of conventional wisdom about battling climate change, but concedes that they have a point in that navigating a “green” lifestyle is in fact a tricky thing to do (e.g. eating local food is a good rule of thumb, but there are exceptions). However, he also points out that serious political action (e.g. a carbon tax) would make this much simpler.

Bono fatigue

I was reading this somewhat interesting piece on “emergent” Christians in Austin, TX and found myself pondering a deep mystery: why are all these post-evangelical, post-conservative, post-modern, post-whatever Christians so into U2?

“For the emerging churches, (church is) not a place, it’s a people,” Gibbs said. “It’s not a weekly gathering; it’s a seven-day-a-week community. And you don’t go to church; you are the church.”

That doesn’t mean emerging Christians have turned their back on observing the sabbath, but their services are a far cry from what many grew up with. They might use literature and poetry in the liturgy or play U2 and Van Morrison songs before and after the service.

[...]

Charles Whitmire, pastor of Crestview Baptist Church, began noticing that the young professionals moving into the church’s North Austin neighborhood would rather go for a bike ride on Sunday morning than sing “The Old Rugged Cross” with a congregation where the median age is 70.

So with his members’ support, he established Phoenix Church of Austin earlier this year. Whitmire leads the evening services in the sanctuary, and his first service included references to Bono and David Letterman and featured a driving rock band. Whitmire, an avid cyclist and screenwriter who fits the demographic he’s trying to reach, had bumper stickers made up that said “Make Church Weird.”

I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other on the value of the whole emergent/emerging church thing. A lot of it seems to me to be a kind of intra-evangelical dispute with younger people breaking away from the bland megachurches and Republican politics of their elders. So, I take it that part of what it’s trying to do is to appeal to “da yoots.”

Hence my question: what’s the deal with all the U2? U2 is old people’s music! (By which I mean music enjoyed by people my age.)

I mean, I like U2 as much as the next guy (well, some of their stuff, anyway), but are they really that big among people, say, under the age of 25? (This is not a purely rhetorical question; maybe they are.)

Part of the whole U2 obsession (extending even into the stolid mainline with “U2charists” and the like) no doubt has to do with Bono’s status as vaguely Christian global do-gooder. And, yes, you can find all kinds of religious themes and references in U2’s music. But I can’t help but wonder whether gen-x goateed “emergent” pastors aren’t doing the same thing that Baby Boomer evangelicals did: projecting their ideas of what’s cool onto the young people they’re ministering to. All the facial hair, tatoos, grunge-y rock, candles, and angst - it’s sooo 1990s, people!

On the other hand, if someone wants to put on a Killswitch Engage eucharist, I might be interested…

Lessons of Vietnam

A few that the President left out of his speech, from Andrew Bacevich.

Among others:

Sometimes people can manage their own affairs. Does the U.S. need to attend to that mess? Perhaps not.

Here the experience of Vietnam following the U.S. defeat is instructive. Once the Americans departed, the Vietnamese began getting their act together. Although not a utopia, Vietnam has become a stable and increasingly prosperous nation. It is a responsible member of the international community. In Hanoi, the communists remain in power. From an American point of view, who cares?

Bush did not even allude to the condition of Vietnam today. Yet the question poses itself: Is it not possible that the people of the Middle East might be better qualified to determine their future than a cadre of American soldiers, spooks and do-gooders? The answer to that question just might be yes.