An interview with the authors of “How Far Can We Go? A Catholic Guide to Sex and Dating”

The award winning book How Far Can We Go? A Catholic Guide to Sex and Dating has recently been released in the US by Paulist Press. I had the opportunity to ask the authors, Leah Perrault and Vox-Nova’s Brett Salkeld  a few questions about the book and how it came to be. FWIW this book is the best book of its kind which I have read, so give the interview a read and get yourself a copy of the book.

    Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your ministry is?

Leah: I am married to Marc, and we have a daughter, Robyn, who is just about four and a son, Eliot, who is six months old.  We have made our home in Saskatoon, close to family and under great big prairie skies.  I work for the Diocese of Saskatoon as the director of pastoral services.  I have a Master’s of Arts in Pastoral Theology from St. Michael’s College in Toronto.

Brett:  My wife Flannery and I live in downtown Toronto in Student Family Housing with out two little guys, Toby and Oscar.  We’re expecting number 3 in March.  I am currently working on my doctoral dissertation in Theology and hope to find work in the near future as a university professor in Theology.

Leah: Our speaking and writing ministry began when we were undergraduates at Campion College the University of Regina.  As young adults, we found that most discussions among our friends and colleagues eventually led to relationships and sexuality.  Conversations led to invitations to speak to youth groups, young adults, classrooms.  Over time, we have expanded our repertoire, but the sex, dating and marriage talks remain very popular, especially since the publication of the book.  Our website, howfarcanwego.com provides more details about our speaking on other subjects. These days we are both doing a lot of custom speaking work, tailored to the needs and interests of the school, church or group who contacts us.

   How did this project get started?

Brett:  I think there are at least three factors that led to us writing a book.  The first is that almost every time we gave a talk someone would come up to us afterwards and say something like, “My daughter had badminton tonight and she couldn’t be here, but she would have really loved this.  Do you have something I can take home for her?”  Other people asked if they could video tape us for their friends who couldn’t make it.  So one big impetus for the book was simply to have something available for those who couldn’t make it to the talks.

A second reason we ended up writing a book is that people are very careful with bringing in speakers about sex and dating.  Sometimes we would end up in 3 hour phone interviews before giving a 1 hour talk.  Some people want to know exactly what you’re going to say before they let you in.  In a way this is understandable given the difficulty of cleaning up a mess if a speaker really misses the target.  On the other hand it could get frustrating.  Sometimes you’re thinking, “If you already know everything, why don’t you give the talk?”  Having a book makes this process much easier.  We can tell people, if you like the book, you’ll probably like the presentation.  If you don’t like the book, we’re probably not the ones you want for your youth group.

The last factor is that we would never have thought ourselves capable of writing a book until we were enrolled in our Master’s degrees and came to realize that our theses were basically like writing a book.  Once it became clear that we would essentially be writing books for school, writing a book didn’t seem so intimidating.  (In fact, the American publisher (Paulist Press) that picked up How Far Can We Go? has also published my Master’s thesis.  It’s called Can Catholics and Evangelicals Agree about Purgatory and the Last Judgment.)

Once it became clear to us that it would be good to have a book, and that it wasn’t unreasonable to try to write one, we put in a proposal to Novalis, the Canadian Catholic publisher.  They were very interested and supportive right away.

What resources influenced your model for dating?

Brett:   We are part of the John Paul II generation, so when we had questions about this stuff in early undergrad, we went looking through his stuff and other things in the tradition.  Of course, there is very little explicitly written about dating in the Catholic tradition.  Essentially what our model does is take a Catholic theology of marriage and work backwards from it.  If sex belongs in marriage because it is the physical manifestation of a full gift of self, as John Paul II says, what should people who are in a serious relationship, but have not yet made that full self gift in marriage be doing?  What should their relationships look like?

When we were working out a model to answer these questions, we assumed that dating was done for the purpose of discerning your future.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun too, but Catholic dating has marriage as at least a remote possibility.

One big key for our model came when Flannery, who is now my wife, and I went to see a priest we were close with when we started dating.  We knew we shouldn’t have sex, but we had very different ideas about appropriate physical intimacy at that stage in our relationship.  When we asked Father Peter for advice, he didn’t give us any specific lines, but instead starting asking us questions about our relationship in general.  He made it clear that physical intimacy has to correspond to the other ways of self-giving in your relationships.  And this is true for everyone, whether dating, married, friends, family members, whatever.  Physical intimacy is an important way that human persons communicate with one another, but it needs to say what the rest of the relationship is saying or it can really hurt people.

Leah: We were young adults ourselves when we developed the model.  We were trying to figure out how to date in a way that would prepare us for whatever vocation God had in mind for us.  We wanted dating to be fun but also respectful of our own and others’ dignity.  We were frustrated with the predominant models for faithful dating that had been offered to us: either don’t touch each other at all or draw arbitrary lines based on someone else’s advice and then try not to cross them.

When I met Marc’s fabulous French family for the first time, he walked into the house and kissed everyone on the lips.  By the time I came a second time, his dad and other male relatives were giving me quick greeting kisses on the lips.  While it took a little while to get used to that, it gave me an insight that we’ve been relying on for a long time.  In healthy relationship with our families, friendships and even strangers, we navigate physical intimacy based on the whole context of the relationship.  As we get to know people, our whole lives become more familiar to one another.  Touch progresses along a continuum, according to the time we spend with someone, the commitment we have and with reference to social norms.  Hormones often make this natural process rushed and a bit urgent when people are attracted to one another, and secular society’s norms around sex and dating aren’t helping young people to heed the Church’s wisdom to save sex for marriage.  We needed a dating model which would help young people navigate growth in physical intimacy, develop skills to discern God’s plan for them, and develop a reverence for the mystery of the person they love.  All of these skills are highly transferable to marriage, friendship and the rest of life, no matter where the relationship goes.

Can you give a brief synopsis of the dating “model” you propose?

Brett:  The model grew out of our attempt to answer the title question of the book “How Far Can We Go?”  Young people were asking us this question, as they ask almost anyone who works with them.  They mean, primarily, “How far can we go in terms of physical intimacy?” or “Which physical acts are OK and which aren’t?”  This is driven by a natural inclination towards physical intimacy, and that’s a good thing, but we thought it would be important to channel that natural desire into a way for discerning healthy relationships in general.  While it is important to point out a few things that young people striving for chaste relationships should not be doing (e.g. engaging in acts that simulate sex or getting themselves into situations where avoiding sex becomes a real challenge), it is also important to teach young people how to be self-aware enough about their relationships to be able to answer this question for themselves.

In order to do this, we came up with a way for people to picture their relationships.  There are actually graphs in the book! The basic structure is something like this:  the person you will someday marry, started out as a stranger.  You have to navigate the journey from stranger to spouse.  That means you have to navigate from zero intimacy to full intimacy and from zero commitment to full commitment.  But intimacy and commitment aren’t merely physical realities.  They are social, spiritual, intellectual and emotional.  To grow in intimacy in a healthy way is to grow across all the areas of human relationships.  The best way to judge if your physical intimacy is healthy is to ask questions about the rest of your relationship.  “Do I feel like he listens to me?”  “What do my friends and family think about her?”  “Am I able to pray with this person?”  Our model teaches people how to ask questions about their relationships in order to gauge what a healthy progression of physical intimacy should look like.  It helps them to keep all areas of their relationship in mind when they consider questions about physical intimacy.

And, if young people date in this way, they can use that natural desire for physical intimacy as a tool for discernment.  It is very easy to a relationship’s physical aspect to take over so that people become blind to what else is going on in the relationship.  Many young people are hurt when they get trapped into bad relationships that seem so intense when physical intimacy that has gotten out of hand.  When physical intimacy is always gauged with reference to the broader relationship, it is easier to recognize and get out of an unhealthy relationship and it is easier to protect and nurture a good and healthy relationship.

Finally, physical intimacy itself comes to mean more, even if it is less intense for a time, when it is consciously linked with more than animal attraction.  People can tell the difference between a kiss that says, “I care about you deeply,” and a kiss that says “I’m having trouble controlling myself right now.”

    You say that the book is written for teens, but you have a short chapter which functions as a note to parents, teachers, and pastors.

Leah: We discovered very early in our speaking career that most adults are ill-equipped to support young people as they move through their dating years.  Some didn’t follow the Church’s teaching themselves and feel a knowledge gap or hypocrisy, even though they hope young people will make wise choices.  Others want to prevent their kids from heartache and hurt by making the decisions for the young people in their lives.  And these reasons are usually coupled with a general discomfort with talking about the subject!

We also discovered that speaking to youth with their parents, teachers and pastors in the same room increased the likelihood that both young people and the adults in their lives would talk to one another about sexuality and relationships.  When mom and dad drove the family home from the presentation, their teenage sons and daughters would initiate conversations with their parents about the presentation material – often for the first time.  Parents came back to us with gratitude and a measure of awe.  We think this is preferable to that awkward meeting after a presentation when young people walk into the kitchen to the dreaded, “So, what did they have to say about sex?”

And finally, our model assumes that relationships are not private.  They are part of the social nature of our humanity.   This means that my dating affects my friendships, family, work, school, church and service in the community.  All of these people can help to support those who are dating to make wise and healthy choice in and about the relationship.  If I am called to marry someone, my relationship should make most of these other relationships even richer.

An examination of mission

“To devote oneself to others and to act, misereor super turbam, that is the great saying, but how? Intellectual needs, moral needs, social needs, everything cried out for help. Christ is there, but who are we to give him to and where are we to take him? To devote oneself to others is the rule common to all men, just as Christianity is the universal remedy — but how? Is it to be in intellectual conflicts, in the melee of ideas?…Or in hand-to-hand fights, in the political and social fray?…Is it not action alone which defines ideas?…

There are three human ways of serving the supernatural: either my making room for it in the intellectual order, which invades it and seems to force it back, by preparing room for it with hte help of healthy, clearly defined, really scientific ideas in philosophy and in the theory of the human mind; or by making room for it in social and political action, by introducing it by example, by means of discussions and personal influence, into the traditions of the people, the customs of the countryside, through legislation and practical reason; or by calling upon it to reanimate the generosity of feelings, the dry or withering heart, the enthusiasm that is dulled by the abuse of material things, of positive, scientific things…In a word one must restore either the object, or the practice, or the feeling of religion and moral things. It goes without saying that each of these means only supplements the supernatural action upon any Christian, and upon others through the communion of saints. That is the common, impersonal source of the power for good; great thoughts, noble resolutions, striking and influential devotion to others, spring form the inchoate prayer and austerities of the humble and the ignorant.”

- Maurice Blondel, entry in Carnets Intimes for 15 Dec. 1883. Quoted in Introduction to The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, p 37.

Role of Religion in the public square

There are those that advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere. There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged. These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square.

- PBXVI, address at Westminster Hall, 9-17-2010

Reflecting on this, a friend writes:

What should be the role of religion in the public square and how can religions avoid competing in the same public space?  What exactly is “the legitimate role of religion in the public square”?

1 – The more religion is relegated purely to the private sphere the more likely it becomes that persecution will follow. To understand the persecution angle we’d have to discuss some of anti-theist philosophical roots of liberalism, modernism, and post-modernism.  Suffice it to say what we are seeing now is result of deliberate efforts by some and less conscious but still deliberate efforts by others to pursue a certain brand of freedom which rejects God as creator in order to assert the autonomy of man to the extent that man can create himself. Who he is, all that matters, is the personal choice — freedom as license.  God is a threat to this freedom and must be pushed out of the way. Thus, in the short term the relegation of religion to the purely private sphere may in the short term diminish persecution as fewer religious voices are their to persecute.  But by its nature religion is a public and communal phenomenon. People of faith will eventually feel moved to speak up, to witness to their faith in a public way. After becoming accustomed to the silence of the religious, when those who want God pushed out of the way are confronted again by religious voices they will believe they have a “right” to keep the voices silent.  Count on it.

2. It seems at the very least that religions should have the same dialogical role with the government as do other interest groups, interest groups which often, though not always, are motivated by self-serving interests rather than the common good, but we would have to be comfortable with other religions (including distorted forms) having as much dialogue with the government as we would want. This is pretty much what the Church says in VCII’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. The key, as Pope Benny mentioned, is the collaboration of faith and reason: when either is silenced ( faith silenced by govt or reason by fundamentalist groups), bad things result.

3. The Pope sort of answers your questions in the speech from which you quoted, although you probably already know that.  He said,

“the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these [ethical] norms [which prescind from natural law], as if they could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves.”

Finally I would add that in America the practice of Catholicism, generally speaking, is already too privatized. We laity do not witness to Christ eloquently enough to effectively ethe places in which we work and live, and that, after all, is our vocation.  (See Lumen Gentium 31).

What do you all think?

Come Holy Spirit

Without the Holy Spirit, God is far away,
Christ stays in the past,
the Gospel is a dead letter,
the Church is simply an organization,
authority a matter of dominion,
mission a matter of propaganda,
the liturgy no more than an evocation,
Christian living a slave morality.

But in the Holy Spirit:
the cosmos is resurrected and groans with birth-pangs of the Kingdom,
the risen Christ is there,
the Gospel is the power of life,
the Church shows forth the life of the Trinity,
authority is a liberating service,
mission is a Pentecost,
the liturgy is both memorial and anticipation,
human action is deified.

Metropolitan Ignatios of Latakia, Main Theme Address in The Uppsala Report 1968. Quoted from Tom Norris, The Trinity: Life of God, Hope for Humanity, p. 41.

Some thoughts on “same-sex marriage”

I find the decision of Judge Walker in the gay marriage case overturning CA Prop 8 to be disappointing and disconcerting, but unsurprising. His opinion seems to lack objectivity and includes a “finding of fact” which attacks religious groups that hold homosexual actions to be sinful as bigoted. On the one hand, the potential implications and ramifications of such a ruling are staggering and frightening. On the other hand, charges of bigotry are to a certain extent understandable. Christians have long failed, and egregiously so, to love the sinner and correct the sin when it comes to the issue of homosexuality. Nevertheless, warranted or not, the claims of the judge may spell trouble for religious freedom in the U.S.

On the issue of same-sex marriage itself, it seems to me that its legalization is nigh inevitable and has been so for some time. In his encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI offered prophetic warnings about the consequences of the widespread use of contraceptives.  For example,

. In 1988, Janet E. Smith noted that all the prophecies contained in “Humanae Vitae” had been fulfilled. The encyclical predicted that:

• The widespread use of contraceptives would lead to conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality;

• “The man” will lose respect for “the woman” and “no longer (care) for her physical and psychological equilibrium” and will come to “the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion”;

• The widespread acceptance of contraception would place a dangerous weapon in the hands of public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies; and

• It would lead men (and women especially) to think they had absolute and unlimited dominion over their bodies.

Indeed the separation of the unitive and procreative aspects of marriage and the nuptial act has had disastrous consequences. Same-sex marriage can be seen as another one of these consequences. The institution of marriage is no longer understood to be what it actually is. Judge Walker wrote that marriage is

“a couple’s choice to live with each other, to remain committed to one another, and to form a household based on their own feelings about one another, and their agreement to join in an economic partnership and support one another in terms of the material needs of life.”

Jennifer Roback Morse, to whom I have linked above, responds to the above by asking:

How would this definition exclude college roommates? Not only does this definition include nothing about children, it includes nothing even about marriage being a sexual relationship, and certainly nothing about permanence, nothing about sexual exclusivity, nothing about connecting the generations to one another.

After all, marriage is essentially about joining a man and woman together for the sake of their children and for the sake of each other. This requires permanence and fidelity.  Sadly however, the working definition of marriage has long since ceased to be such. And in fact, defenders of “traditional” marriage now have little ground to stand on. If we were serious about fighting same-sex marriage, then we should have been fighting no-fault divorce more seriously. At this point, in the public eye, there is little left for us to defend.

So…what are our options?

Realistically, I think same-sex marriage will be legalized. If that is the case, a clear distinction should be made (legally and otherwise) between civil unions and sacramental marriages. On the Church’s part, parishes should more firmly and uniformly insist that couples being married live as if they recognize the sanctity and dignity of marriage and its sign-value. On the government’s part, tax breaks should be reserved for marriages that produce children and that last, (although I could see certain exceptions). These are the marriages which a government should want to encourage.

Frankly, I don’t like this compromise, but since our society no longer acts in accord with the institution of marriage in which we believe, it is unlikely that said society will respect the integrity of that institution. Judge Walker’s definition of marriage, while incomplete, is probably closer to how many people see marriage; even if they wouldn’t use those words, they act in accord with it.   And on those grounds, there is little or no reason to exclude homosexuals from such unions.

Christian Imagination

Imagination is probably more important than we realize. Scholars in the theory of communications have argued that a person’s ability to successfully navigate various interpersonal situations depends largely on her ability to imagine herself in such situations. Such imagined conversations and interactions prepare her for successful interactions in reality.

Similarly, many successful athletes have spoken of envisioning their performance prior to the game or a key shot. Jack Nicklaus has said that he has never made a shot which he didn’t first see. Thus it seems that one’s ability to imagine how he will respond in certain situations can be an important indicator of how successfully he will interact with the world.

Unfortunately, many, myself included, seem to have significant difficulties imagining themselves living a holy life.

On the value of words

Language is sacred. It is holy. It is a vehicle of the communion for which we have been made. The WORD became flesh, sanctifying language and communicating with us through it and thereby raising us and our language to new heights.

But we have trashed language, not merely by speaking vulgarities and banalities, for we live in an age in which words have lost their sign value. They no longer actually refer to any objective reality in our minds. When one sees smoke, that signifies fire, but words no longer offer a direct link to concrete realities. They don’t really mean anything. We don’t stand by our words, thus language has become impotent – unable to communicate the truth of ourselves.

Indeed many of us have become abstracted from ourselves. We know a certain thing to be true, good, beautiful, but because the words no longer effectively signify, we have diffuclty reconciling our lives, our actions, with these truths. For our words to have authority we must be willing to defend them with our blood, our lives. We cannot determine whether we will ever be asked to stand by our words at such a price, but like the WORD, we must choose to do so. Only then can we hope to effectively communicate love to others.

However, this is difficult. Not only because we are to varying degrees formed by a society of deceit and half-truths, but also because this idea itself often fails to meaningly signify, to take root in us.

In a world which features the dis-integration of persons how can one overcome self-abstraction to stand by his words? How is one to live according to Truth when she so often recognizes it without standing by it, without living in accord with it? How is one to help others, family members, friends, students, etc., to stand by their words, to hear his words, or the words of the Gospel, as integrated persons, such that they are moved to communion and to a reciprocal and authentic communication?

How can I experience metanoia if the words which point to the WORD have been made impotent?

A Three-Year-Old’s Take on the Ascension

After telling my son the story of the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven two thousand years ago, he says, “Is there a You-tube of that? I want to see what it looked like!”

A genocidal God?

At Vox-Nova there have been several very interesting conversation on violence in the Old Testament and God’s apparent command to the Israelites to commit genocide.

Referencing 1 Sam 15, fellow EC blogger Kyle Cupp, posted his view that moral reason and Christian conception of God deny the possibility of God having commanded genocide. Nevertheless he wished to maintain the inerrancy of the Bible. He explains:

Health Care: the third way

Now that SOME of the turmoil and vitriol has died down, perhaps this can be a some service.

Kim at Faith, Fiction, and Flannery writes about Dorothy Day’s approach as an alternative to the partisan hate party that surrounded the health care bill.  I think she is probably right. That is all.  What do you think?

The CHA and the Bishops

Anyone who’s paid attention to the debate over healthcare reform among Catholics is no doubt aware of the disagreement over the Senate bill between a number of bishops and the Catholic Health Association. These bishops oppose the bill while the CHA supports it. The narratives about this conflict have generally stressed their opposition and even called into question or outright dismissed the Catholic identity of the CHA. Their positions on the bill, however, are not radically different. Both the bishops and the CHA want pro-life healthcare reform legislation that explicitly protects the unborn. The difference between their positions is that the bishops want such protection incorporated into the bill before it is passed, whereas the CHA is willing to support the bill as is while intending to work for the implementation of better protections, and a number of other fixes, in another bill that amends the current one. Their difference resides in how, not whether, they think the legislation should be made to protect the unborn. The bishops and the CHA agree on the basic principles themselves; they differ in how they apply those principles, and principally, in how they interpret the language and practical consequences of the legislation.

Social Obligations, Charity, and the State

Whenever we institute structures to benefit society, we risk allowing those structures to take over our responsibilities, but I wouldn’t say that such a risk is reason never to institute them. It’s not as thought the face of suffering that motivates our charity will disappear: even the most perfect social program couldn’t help everyone or diminish all suffering. Individual obligations will abound in even the most socialized state.

Social programs and institutions can be a very effective means for individuals to come together as a society to care for one another. We can exercise virtue through our participation in institutions—that’s an idea behind the Catholic Church: we seek and find salvation not as individuals but as part of a community, the Body of Christ. The state, of course, isn’t a church, but the basic underlying principle remains. Specifically, the state allows us to seek and find justice and practice charity not only as individuals, but as part of a community of citizens.

Likes all ways of life, living in the state requires a particular disposition, a particular virtue: citizenship, in this case. The citizen must remember that the state is a means to an end, a way we meet social obligations. It is not something “over there,” detached from us, something to which we should hand over our obligations. If virtue is, as Aristotle taught, a mean between excess and defect, the virtue of citizenship is found not in ignoring social obligations (defect) or in handing them over to the state (excess), but in appropriately and prudently using the state as an instrument to meet obligations.

Catholics and Politics

I was originally going to post this as a reply to Joshua’s latest post, but I ended up having more to say than I think is appropriate for a com-box.

Joshua observes that “we see church’s splitting over some of these issues on which conservatives and liberals tend to disagree.” This is a sound observation, and here is one attempt to explain it.

Man is a political animal, we learn from book one of Aristotle’s Politics. This reality might not have been as obvious during the Middle Ages, when the interests of Church and State were often one and the same. But we now live in the age of ideology, an age during which for billions of people around the globe, political ideologies replaced religious beliefs as the spiritual axis their lives revolved around. This was most obvious of course in the countries that fell to Marxism-Leninism and varieties of fascism in the 20th century.

But the West was not and is not immune. As religion becomes less relevant or at least less of a unifying force for more people, politics fills the void. The “end of ideology” proclaimed by certain intellectuals after the collapse of the Soviet Union has turned out to be one of the most bogus claims ever uttered, triumphalism at its worst. But how have political conflicts made their way into the Church, and why do they continue to rend and tear at the body of Christ?

Eucharist: miracle or mystery?

Recently I have read a series of posts on the Eucharist. Most of them have been concerned with the change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. In response one commenter wrote,

Sure on some level the creator of the Universe can of course do this or that – but than again why literally create miracles out of something utterly invisible – please oh Lord have mercy with us poor souls and have the Holy Spirit inspire somebody to cry that the emporer is utterly naked. Sure we can spin all kinds of air castles as trappings for our thoughts – in the end for me these are all vehicles to give some formal expression to some deep human desire to be godlike.

In light of such sentiments I think it is important to point out the historical issues involved in the development of the theology of the Eucharist.

Conservatives and Liberals, Catholics and Protestants

I have been aware for some time that broadly speaking, at least in this country, conservative Catholics tend agree more with conservative Protestants (or atheists for that matter) than they do with liberal Catholics (and vice versa) concerning those issues which people seem to care about most, that is those issues which are most hotly debated. In light of this, a few questions come to mind:

1.It seems that this is the case because we are no longer formed by the authentic Christian witness of our liturgical communities, which is also to say that most of us are not primarily formed by the Word of God, but rather are formed by our secular/political communities. What effect might this have on ecumenical and/or evangelical effort? What might be changed to reverse this trend?

2.We see church’s splitting over some of these issues on which conservatives and liberals tend to disagree: ordination of women/female pastors, gay marriage, etc. Is it possible that Catholics and Protestants can agree with these issues while disagreeing with members of their denomination because these issues are now more important to them than are issues of justification and the like?

The Defense of Torture as a Pro-life Position

There are worse fates than death even for those whom death has not yet claimed. Better to die a hero or a saint than to live a permanent villain or a devilish slave to sin. Life, then, ought not to be our chief concern or ultimate care. What we do in life’s promotion and defense may make us heroes or make us villains depending precisely on what we do. A true pro-life disposition orders one towards life, but not life as the ultimate good, not life as the greatest of all things. It is a perversion of the pro-life disposition to uphold life at the expense of all else.

We see this perverse disposition in the justification of torture and other forms of coercion among pro-lifers. The argument begins with the premises that the value of life demands that we do everything necessary in its defense and that torture and other coercive techniques are necessary for national security. Such pro-lifers therefore support barbarism in the name of life—in the name of keeping us safe and secure. They support torture because they are pro-life, yet in their hierarchy of values, they place human life above the dignity of the human person, a ranking that allows them to act against human dignity in the defense of life, to sacrifice one for the sake of the other. However, as human life is not the most valuable of things, and not of greater importance than human dignity, a pro-life disposition that sacrifices human dignity in the name of national security is a perversion of the true pro-life virtue.

On Reading

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur compared reading a text to the execution of a musical score, an analogy that highlights the plurality of possible readings while keeping those readings situated in the text. Just as each musical performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto differs from all others, even those others performed by the same musician, while still remaining true (or false) to the score, so too will each reading of Moby-Dick differ and realize new semantic possibilities of Melville’s novel. Each reading of a text and each execution of a score involves interpretation; each interpretation brings forth more than the intended and inherent meanings of the text and sheet. What the author and composer write functions more as a guide for interpretation than a dictator of meaning. Nevertheless, the reader has no more liberty to make the text mean anything he wants it to mean than the musician has the liberty to play impromptu melodies when performing Chopin. Reading is an exercise of pluralism, not relativism. It gives birth to a surplus of meaning, not its absence.

The Personhood Initiative

Deal Hudson at Inside Catholic wrote recently about the divisions in the pro-life movement over the Personhood Initiative, a nation-wide effort to legally define “personhood” as beginning at the moment of conception. The testing ground for the initiative was Colorado, where the movement’s founder, an admirable 19 year-old by the name of Kristi Burton, hails from. The lowdown, according to Deal, is that,

Colorado voters turned down the amendment by a stunning 73 percent to 27 percent, in spite of support from Focus on the Family, American Life League, and legal advice from the Thomas More Law Center. But the effort had failed to gain the support of either National Right to Life (NRTL) or the Colorado Catholic Conference.

Whether or not that extra support would have resulted in a less unbalanced result, I cannot say. For those wondering why the Catholic Conference, and many American bishops are hesitant to embrace the PI, the concern was apparently that if it were taken to, and shot down by, the Supreme Court, it would have the effect of “actively reaffirm[ing] the mistaken jurisprudence of Roe.” According to Deal, however, some Catholic bishops are reconsidering their position on the PI.

Not long ago, in the context of the debate over the efforts of Bart Stupak and the pro-life Dems, I wrote about pro-life pragmatism. I argued that the much-derided “incrementalism” is actually the most viable way of winning the long-term war against the abortion industry in light of the facts about where the American electorate stands on abortion. With respect to the PI, and with all due respect to the founders and supporters of this movement, I must reaffirm that position.

Coercion and Torture

Despite my disagreement with his position on interrogations, I have to give credit to Marc Thiessen for at times using the term “coercive interrogations” for those controversial methods he believes do not reach the level of torture. Unlike the adjectives “enhanced,” “aggressive,” or “harsh,” which tell us next to nothing definitive about the interrogation methods, the adjective “coercive” has a clear-cut meaning.

Coercing someone differs from motivating someone, even when painful possibilities or realities are used as instruments of motivation. Motivation works with a person’s will. Coercion works to undermine it. Coercion forces one to act involuntarily, without volition or will. It forces a one to act contrary to their nature as a person, as a free moral agent.

We can distinguish coercive interrogation techniques from torture not because torture doesn’t involve coercion – it does – but because not all coercive techniques involve the infliction of severe physical or mental pain. Torture is one type of coercion.

Contrary to Thiessen, I oppose all coercive interrogation techniques, whether or not those techniques fall into the category of torture. Why? Because coercion is a sin against the person; it reduces the one coerced into a mere means to an end, and does so by stripping him of his capacity to make free, moral decisions. To be sure, we may take away a person’s liberty by putting him in prison, but the prisoner is for that imprisonment no less of a free, moral agent, capable of making free, moral decisions. But to coerce a person is to render them less than a person.

Thiessen would call me a radical pacifist for holding this position, a label I wouldn’t be quick to shake off, but he would be more accurate to call me a personalist. Personally, I think a society that disrespects the person is not long for the world.

Interactive Bible?

Experience the Bible like never before.

That is the promise of Glo, the worlds newest, most technologically advanced interactive Bible.

But what makes it so different from a standard biblical text?

The multi-faceted computer-based creation does things a conventional Bible cannot, bringing the Word of God to life through HD video images, animations, maps, 360-degree virtual tours and more.

With thousands of photos and encyclopaedic articles, there is a diverse array of visual imagery to accompany the Bible’s text.

Glo also allows you to read through the Word of the Lord, in anyway you see fit. You can look up where a biblical event took place, check out timelines for the Bibles events or use the search tool to find specific topics or themes.

MyGlo, you can take your personal Biblical experience to a new level by setting up reading plans and goals. Or simply type in your mood for the day and Glo will pull up passages tailored to your own emotions.

H/T to Fr. Steve.

The Glo Bible can be purchased for $59.99 or 2 for $99.99. It sell in stores for $89.99

What do you all think of this? It could be a great tool, especially for classroom use. But I am very wary of introducing technology into a regular experience of the bible. Multimedia seems to often work against real prayer and reflection, distracting and entertaining instead.

Troubles with NFP: Part 2

In Part 1 I reflected on the disillusionment and frustration suffered by those who, through misinformation, thought that NFP would require little sacrifice. Here I shall more closely consider a second, probably smaller group of people who, we shall assume, have an adequate perception of all that NFP entails, but have encountered extra-ordinary issues with discerning or charting fertility, problems which are often biological in nature. These issues can place great strain on their marriage and may require different types of ministry. How can we offer support to those who must exert incredible effort in order to properly practice NFP while remaining faithful to what they have discerned to be responsible and prudent family planning?

Before attempting to answer our question we ought to more clearly describe these extra-ordinary issues.

Troubles with NFP: Part 1

Several months ago I wrote a post in honor of National NFP Awareness. One of the commenters, Brett from Vox-Nova, asked me to discuss the issues which arise when couples who are sold all the praises of NFP wind up experiencing great difficulties in putting it into practice. They often struggle to discern fertility and become weighed down by guilt as if they were doing something wrong. Some couples who are using NFP out of obedience and do not understand Church teaching on the issue may be tempted to reject Church teachings over their difficulties and abandon NFP. Brett is “convinced we need to do some serious ministry to those who struggle with NFP.” I concur, and now that I have a few spare moments I hope to offer my own reflections based in part on personal experiences and on those of friends and acquaintances.

It seems there are two separate but related issues.

Death, Eternal Life, and Final Fantasy Villains

A series of recent events has returned my thoughts toward the literary significance of the Final Fantasy videogames. My nieces and nephew received a Playstation 2 for Christmas, routine and repetitive duties at work called for some soul-lifting melodies courtesy of Nobuo Uematsu, and three weeks without home Internet access, while giving me an opportunity to get some book reading done, did invite the temptation to break out Final Fantasy XII and complete a few still awaiting side quests. I did spend more time reading than playing. Really.

Each game in the series, with an exception or two, has its own world, cast of characters, themes and plot. Each presents an anachronistic blend of futuristic technology, magic, monsters, medieval weapons and armor, and names referencing myriad mythologies from East and West. In pretty much all the games, though, the villain is marked by the desire to become a god, usually by means of some dark magic that involves mass murder and mass destruction. Chaos, the clownish and mad Kefka, the consummate soldier Sephiroth, Exdeath, the sorceress Ultimecia, the summoner Yu Yevon, Vayne Solidor: each, in his or her own devilish way, threatens the world in a murderous pursuit of false divinity. They seek eternal life through the death of others. The heroes, on the other hand, show real grace by their sacrifices of love and loving willingness to give their own lives. Aeris comes immediately to mind, of course, but I’m thinking also of Zidane, Balthier, Terra and others.

While organized religion plays into some Final Fantasy stories more than others, religiosity is a theme central to them all due to the aims and methods of the villains and the responses of the heroes. Indeed, the religion of Final Fantasy is not foreign to the story of Christianity. Where I hear the villains shouting, “We will be like gods,” I hear the song of sacred self-giving love in the struggled breaths of our heroes.

A Morally Relativistic Gospel

Mark Shea directs my attention to a defense of torture by Rep. Aaron Schock, who doesn’t muddy the waters with euphemisms, but says plainly, “I don’t believe that we should limit waterboarding – or, quite frankly, any other alternative torture technique – if it means saving Americans’ lives.”  Shea draws out some flesh and blood ramifications of this sort of thinking.  Of course, if physical salvation really is the greatest good, as it is all too often positioned, then anything of lesser value, everything really, can and should be sacrificed in its name.  The saviors of Americans’ lives raise all manner of sins to virtuous and heroic deeds.   Relativism reigns, as our saviors and their defenders, such Rep. Schock, posit a realm – acts intended to save Americans’ lives – as free from the applications of morality.  If anything is justified as long as it saves American’s lives, then there is no moral truth that applies in all places, time, and circumstances.  This is the ethic that accompanies the gospel of political and material salvation.

What the Post-VCII Church needs…

Von Balthasar on how Erich Przywara’s thought anticipated some of the conciliar teaching, but also offered the corrective which may have prevented some of the unintended results and upheaval following the council:

[Przywara] had long anticipated the opening of the Church to the world [das All] that came with the Council, but he possessed in addition the corrective that has not been applied in the way that the Council’s [teachings] have been inflected and broadly put into practice: namely, the elemental, downright Old Testament sense for the divinity of God, who is a consuming fire, a death-bringing sword, and a transporting love. Indeed, he alone possessed the language in which the word “God” could be heard without that touch of squeamishness that has led to the tepid, half-hearted talk of the average theology of today. He lives like the mythical salamander in the fire: there, at the point where finite, creaturely being arises out of the infinite, where that indissoluble mystery holds sway that he baptized with the name analogia entis.

from Von Balthsar, “Erich Przywara,” in Tendenzen der Theologie im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Jürgen Schulz (Stuttgart and Berlin: Kreuz Verlag, 1966), p. 354f.