Tag Archives: Christianity

Anatole Lieven on “The Woke Left”

Posted on by under activism, cancel culture, Fatwas, moralism, Neutrality and Complicity, Notes on the Anti-War Movement, Palestine, War with Iran

Consider a lapse (or two) into senselessness in a generally sensible piece by a generally sensible author, Anatole Lieven. The thesis:

By their shameful, spineless stance on the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran, European leaders have doomed whatever remained of their global influence and their pretensions to promote a “rules-based international order.”

They are also helping to dig the graves of their own political parties, and quite possibly of European democracy.

Fair enough. Now for the first lapse: Continue reading →

The Carlson-Huckabee Interview (1)

Posted on by under Palestine

There are many things to be said about Tucker Carlson’s remarkable interview with Mike Huckabee, too many to say all at once. So I’m going to take my time to say them, and say them in bite-sized portions.

There’s a distinction in ancient Greek philosophy that’s useful here, between virtue and skill. A virtue is a specifically moral disposition to thought and action, like honesty or justice. A skill is a pragmatically useful but morally neutral sort of know-how, like knowing how to play the guitar or ride a bike or swim. The possession of a skill is not the possession of virtue, and virtues in turn aren’t reducible to the possession of a skill or sets of skills. They’re just categorially different things. That said, both virtues and skills are objects of praise, just not the same kind of praise. They’re both achievements, just achievements of different kinds. Continue reading →

Rome If You Want To

Posted on by under Fatwas, migrant defense, Palestine

Here’s a parlor game anyone can play. Familiarize yourself with the controversy about the “ICE manger” at St Susanna’s Church in Dedham, Massachusetts. Then get into an argument about it with any specifically Christian critic of the parish and/or apologist for ICE. Then count how many minutes it takes before they sacrifice both Baby Jesus and the Holy Family to Herod, Caesar, and the Roman Empire. In my experience, it takes about two.

Continue reading →

Dreaming Murder

Posted on by under Fatwas, Palestine

Every now and then I’ll run into a Muslim who sees the kuffiyah around my neck and starts up a conversation about Palestine. Much anguished hand-wringing takes place in these conversations, often with quasi-religious overtones, and not a few pious tears are shed. Why don’t “the Muslims” do anything? Why have the Muslim armies not intervened? Where is our Saladin?  Continue reading →

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries

My mentor Alasdair MacIntyre died this past Wednesday, at the age of 96. The last time I spoke to him in person was 2008, on the occasion of my dissertation defense. It had taken me seventeen years, from matriculation to defense, to finish the degree, and even at the defense itself, it was very far from clear whether I would actually finish. A minor civil war broke out within the defense over the merits of my work, but after tense negotiations, I passed. MacIntyre, amused by the fracas, described my having completed the degree as the best of the arguments for the existence of God: only a God, he said, could have ensured that Khawaja crossed the finish line. I laughed at first, but was then given pause. And that, in microcosm, describes my relationship with Alasdair MacIntyre. Continue reading →

How to Keep Christ in Christmas: A Parable

Posted on by under Memorials and Obituaries

A couple of weeks ago, during Advent, I decided to do something ostensibly “nice” for myself. I decided that it was time, despite my newly-found vocation as a perpetually depressed and isolated widower, to get out and do something enjoyable for a change. Music is something I enjoy, and so, I reasoned, I ought to get out and see a musical performance. In grad school at Notre Dame, I made it a habit each week on Sunday afternoons to watch a classical performance that took place right by the library where I did my studies. “Right by the library” literally meant a few paces from the library, so while the concert took place in the middle of the afternoon–premium study time–I couldn’t easily appeal to transit costs as an excuse for not going. Continue reading →

Bishop John Shelby Spong, RIP

Posted on by under Health Care Series, Memorials and Obituaries

I was saddened to learn today of the death of John Shelby Spong, Bishop Emeritus of the Newark, New Jersey diocese of the Episcopalian Church. Though I can’t claim to have known Bishop Spong very well, he was a close friend of my parents’, and a constant presence in our family home. He was for decades Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Christ Hospital in Jersey City, where both of my parents worked–my father for forty, and my mother for thirty years. So we knew Bishop Spong less as a bishop than as a hospital trustee. The stories–or legends–I heard about him for decades were about health care, not theology.

Spong speaking in England; photo credit: David Gibson/RNS

Christ Hospital started its life as an Episcopalian institution. It later merged (or attempted to merge) with St Francis Hospital across the city, a Catholic institution. The merger initiated an apocalyptic sectarian battle for the mortal souls of both hospitals, a battle in which (I’m told) Bishop Spong did a fair bit of the fighting. Eventually, after a series of Jesuit-worthy legal complications I’ve never been able to grasp, Christ Hospital was consumed by the godless and soulless CarePoint Health System. By then, Bishop Spong had had the good sense to leave the hospital behind; Jesus Christ may or may not have been resurrected, depending on your theology, but Christ Hospital was not going to be resurrected, at least not in the form it originally took as an urban community hospital in the Episcopalian tradition.

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A Dilemma for Reasonable Acceptability?

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Estlund’s Democratic Authority makes much of the idea of acceptability requirements for political justification. Acceptability requirements come in different versions, and one respect in which those versions can differ is what they are requirements for. They might be requirements for laws, policies, procedures, constitutional structures, the kinds of reasons that citizens or certain officials can give in certain public fora, and so on; they might also require acceptability as a condition for justification quite broadly, for political or legal authority more narrowly, or for political legitimacy — i.e., the moral permissibility of a government’s enforcement of its laws by coercive or punitive means. For Estlund, as for many, the most important application of acceptability requirements is to legitimacy, since coercion raises peculiarly urgent questions of justification. The rough idea of an acceptability requirement on legitimacy is that laws backed by coercion must be acceptable to the citizens that they purport to govern, and must be acceptable to them despite their deep moral, religious, and philosophical disagreements.

Discussing the views of Joshua Cohen, Estlund writes:

For Cohen the fundamental tenet of a deliberative account of democratic legitimacy is the principle that coercive political arrangements and decisions are morally illegitimate unless they can be justified in terms that can be accepted by citizens with the wide range of reasonable moral, religious, and philosophical views likely to emerge in any free society. (Democratic Authority, 91)

Earlier in the book, Estlund cites Rawls describing what he calls the “liberal principle of legitimacy”:
Continue reading →