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March 2012

03/30/2012

I guess I'm old fashioned, but I am not attracted to a movie that features teenagers killing each other as part of a "game" designed to show the ruthlessness of a dominant regime even though the movie is purportedly well made.  But if I needed a reason not to see the movie I could not find a better one than to learn that Lionsgate the maker of the movie "has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Harry Potter Alliance's Imagine Better Project over the charitable campaign, 'Hunger is not a game.'  The studio believes that the group, which is supporting Oxfam’s GROW food sustainability project, is 'piggybacking off of' the marketing for its latest box-office hit The Hunger Games."  Lionsgate threatens a law suit though it is unlikely it will follow through.  In addition, Liongate invites it's fans to come to their site and join in its efforts to combat hunger in its cooperation with other charities.  Of course, I will be right over.  To read more, see http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/hunger-games-lionsgate-sends-lawyer-harry-potter-alliance-303839. 

03/29/2012

If the Affordable Health Care Act is declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court we will be able to say that Republican justices intervened to decide a Presidential election, overturned long-standing congressional campaign finance legislation in favor of its own twisted conception of democracy, and served up a half-baked interpretation of more than fifty years of commerce clause precedent in order to invalidate congressional legislation that had been a significant goal of the Democratic Party for many decades.  Republicans claim to be apostles of judicial restraint while accusing Democrats of being judicial activists.  If the Affordable Health Care Act is overturned, the Court will properly be accused of implementing a partisan ideology.  It will become impossible to suggest with a straight face that this partisan court is guided by notions of judicial restraint.  Its reputation will be forever sealed in the court of history. 

03/26/2012

May the communion of Thy Holy Mysteries be neither to my judgment, nor to my condemnation, O Lord, but to the healing of soul and body.  Amen. ( The last part of the prayer said before Holy Communion in Orthodox Christianity)

[R]itualization not only involves the setting up of oppositions, but through the privileging built into such an exercise, it generates hierarchical schemes to produce a loose sense of totality and systematicity.  In this way, ritual dynamics afford an experience of ‘order’ as well as the ‘fit’ between the taxonomic order and the order of experience.—Catherine Bell

Perhaps all one can aspire to in relation to ritual is what Paul Ricoeur suggested a believer could achieve in relation to religious faith: a ‘second naiveté,’ a sophisticated, adult, reflective affirmation of ritual that never lets go of a necessary, corrective suspicion.—Sudhir Kakar

Inspired by Steve Shiffrin’s post on Catholic and Protestant approaches to Eucharistic ritual, I thought it might be of some interest to point out a few things about the specifically ritual component of holy communion, about “ritual meaning” generally (which of course cannot be divorced from any specific doctrinal or traditional meaning).[1] The various dimensions of a religious worldview might be analogically and metaphorically compared to the multifaceted jewels at the vertices of “Indra’s net,” each dimension: experiential and emotional, doctrinal, mythical, narrative, ethical, ritual, aesthetic and so forth, reflecting the others such that examination of any one jewel severed from the net, leaves out the necessary interdependence of the jewels within the net.  Nonetheless, as the jewels are multifaceted and reflect all the other jewels, a close study of any one dimension (say, ritual) of religion within the net cannot but help reflect the other (doctrinal, mythical, experiential…) dimensions of spirituality.  I rely here largely but not exclusively on the works of one of the foremost scholars of ritual, the late Catherine Bell.* 

What follows may in part apply as well to “profane” or secular rituals, as not all rituals are necessarily religious in the conventional sense.  The Confucian tradition in fact serves to efface the usual boundaries between the sacred and profane on this score, hence the title of Herbert Fingarette’s classic study, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1972).[2] Its conception of li, ritual propriety, was widened and deepened in application by Confucius to refer to far more than holy rituals or sacred ceremonies proper, bringing within its compass social norms, conventions, etiquette, rituals, gestures, in short, the myriad forms of scripted or patterned behavior performed on a routine basis in daily life thought sanctioned by tian and indicating the proper ways (daos) of living exemplified by cultural ancestors: According to Ames and Rosemont, ‘Li are those meaning invested roles, relationships, and institutions which facilitate communication, and which foster a sense of community [and common good].  The compass is broad: all formal conduct, from table manners to patterns of greeting and leave-taking…from gestures of deference to ancestral sacrifices, all of these, and more, are li.’  An animating assumption here is thatsocial behavior should be choreographed according to divine or sacred archetypes (e.g., tian) or models as practiced by the Sages of the past and exemplified by the junzi.  Generally speaking, li is the proper or right way to do things given a proper consideration of tradition by the right kind of person.  Everyday social interaction can be suffused with a holiness or sacredness that comes with the actualization of dao provided it is correctly—harmoniously and spontaneously—performed by individuals possessed of ren.  This results in human behavior being in accord with the rhythms and patterns of tian, with its sacred cosmological and natural processes (or daos).  Li performed by individuals lacking in the requisite amount of ren is akin to mindless habit, it is lifeless, mechanical, meaningless, awkward, self-conscious or egocentric and profane.  Li without ren,dao and yi accounts for the fetters or shackles of tradition, of the veneration of tradition for tradition’s sake.  More specifically, processes of reification or ossification will infiltrate li performed by individuals not committed to self-cultivation, hindering the truly personal and creative appropriation of tradition.  Li are a social grammar learned through (1) socialization and acculturation (beginning with the family), (2) through the emulation of the right kind of persons (e.g., the junzi and the Sage), and (3) through informal and formal appropriation of the material found in the ‘Five Classics’ (Odes, Documents, Rites, Changes, and Spring and Autumn Annals).  The junzi critically and creatively appropriates the li of tradition assessed in the light of ren and yi (morally right or appropriate), a process that entails making the tradition one’s own.[3] Because of the integral relation between li and ren, it seems one might speak of the moralization of human behavior with Confucius, in other words, the scope of ‘the ethical’ is not confined to infrequent or special situations or acts but refers in some sense to the entirety of one’s conduct, insofar as all of one’s behavior is capable in differing degrees of influencing, shaping, or contributing to an ethical disposition, to ethical character.  Confucian li may in fact have many of the conceptual resources necessary for constructing a normative model of ritual action and behavior apart from religious ritual proper that is transcultural or cosmopolitan as well as humanistic in a spiritual sense. 

Holy communion strikes me as having some mythical and historical continuity with ritual animal sacrifices (which fall under the heading of ‘rites of communion and exchange’), a view reinforced by the fact that the ritual begins with the Passover Meal, which itself was established after the destruction of the Second Temple in Judaism (the latter including the sacrifice of salvation or peace—zevah shelamin—‘in which part of the animal was burned, the blood poured out on the altar or earth, and the remainder consumed in a communal meal,’ the non-human animal a substitute for the life of the human offeror).  Like other such rituals, they both embody and symbolize complex relations between “the human” and “the divine” as part of a larger “grammar of devotion” (Diana Eck).  The “communion” component is what sets the ritual apart from earlier sacrificial rituals, as it closes the gap, as it were, between the divine and human worlds, indeed, it effects a “union” between them, in Catherine Bell’s words.  Nonetheless, continuity is evidenced in several dimensions, not least of all in the process of “consecration” or “sacralization:” “Consecration or sacrilization can make the offering participate in the divinity of the god to whom it is being given, even to the point, in some cases, that the offering may be thought to become the god itself.”  As Catherine Bell further explains, not only is this seen in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and Luther’s notion of “sacramental union” (‘consubstantiation’), it is found in “the offering and ingestion of the intoxicating sacred drink belché to feed the gods of the Lacandon Maya of Chiapas; the ritual consumption of peyote among some Native American tribes; and the Aztec sacrifice of prisoners of war to their sun god.”  A process of “transubstantiation” generally is seen in rites of passage, when a person is said to change from one kind of being or person into another. 

Ritual repetition in general, after Mircea Eliade, is said to provide an existentially necessary counterweight to the individual and collective experience of inexorable historical change understood as linear and teleological process, for ritual (as a ‘rhythm of imagery’) is close to if not emulative of the seasonal rhythms and patterned process of nature itself, defined by a tangible personal and communal experience of cyclical renewal and continuity.  Stanley Tambiah uses the categories of the synchronic, continuous, and traditional in contrast to the diachronic, changing, and historical.  The ritual process binds together a sociocosmic order, the natural order, and the communal order, and the belief that the human order should be an intrinsic and deliberate—meaningful—part of these larger and progressively surrounding orders.[4] This also resonates with Levi-Strauss’ argument that ritual seeks the resolution of the inherent conflict between nature and culture.  The meaningful nature of ritual praxis as connecting individuals and communities to these various “orders” is clearly evidenced in the fact that, as Sudhir Kakar informs us, that “there is a widespread agreement among scholars in ritual studies that rituals are important to the formation of identity on cultural, social and personal levels.”  Kakar fills out this commonplace yet possibly volatile function of ritual, the study of which must be sensitive to both its conservative and transformational functions in the formation, protection, and transformation of personal and communal identity:

“Psychologically speaking, the value of a ritual lies in the degree to which it contributes to strengthening a person’s sense of identity.  This contribution can be to the individual aspect of personal identity, for instance, in rituals that encourage us to look and lend significance to our life cycle by emphasizing its beginning, transitions, end, as also its connection to nature and the cosmos.  Or the strengthening may be of the group aspect of personal identity through rituals that accent our connection to others who belong to our family, caste, creed, tribe, nation and so on.  These teach us our group’s sanctioned ways of doing things, heightening the sense of ‘us’ while at the same time excluding outsiders, ‘them,’ who do not know the right way.  Another psychological classification can be between those rituals that defend or protect our sense of identity against a perceived danger by closing the psyche, and others that augment personal identity by opening the psyche to novel experiences. [….]  The protective, conservative rituals can, of course, degenerate into rigid compulsions such as persistent hand washing while the enhancing, transformative rituals are in danger of slipping into delusional grandiosity.” 

The formality and repetition (which is more than a matter of habit or mere routine) of ritual is testament to its significance, to its memorial power, to its links to hierarchy and authority.  And this memorial power is enhanced by use of the human body in ritual, be it literally, symbolically, metaphorically, or mystically, for we are not acquainted with anything more intimate than our own bodies.  In holy communion, we find a simple and brief aesthetic repertoire of sacred movements, gestures, and utterances: “the restriction of gestures and phrases to a small number that are practiced, perfected, and soon quite evocatively familiar can endow these formalized activities with great beauty and grace” (Bell).  Holy communion is a microcosmic sacred performance with macrocosmic intimation and instantiation, at once a process of symbolic totalization and condensation.[5] As Bell explains, “The performative dimension frames a particular environment—such as an altar, arena, or stage—usually as a type of totalizing microcosm.”  Ritual performance as formal patterns of behavior and action, often involves the performative uses of language (e.g., blessing, praising, purifying, consecrating).  And the performance within a particular frame sets the ritual apart from the everyday and routine, marking off the sacred from the profane: “Acting ritually is first and foremost a matter of nuanced contrasts and the evocation of strategic, value-laden distinctions.”  The value-laden distinctions are intrinsic to a ceremonial form which serves to deepen the individual’s ties to nature, the community, and the sacred[6] Ritual allows us to act in a way so as to go beyond “the narrow, mundane world of daily existence:” “For a brief period of time, it lets us transcend what the Irish poet William Butler Yeats called the ‘desolation of reality’” (Kakar).  This temporal transcendence might be conceptualized in spatial or ontological terms as well insofar as ritual transactions permeate or cross boundaries between the visible and the invisible, or simply the seen and the unseen.  It is for these and other reasons that rituals are often said to “abolish” time (e.g., ‘Jesus Christ is risen today’) and space (e.g., any stream in which baptism occurs ‘becomes’ the river Jordan, in which case ‘space’ is abolished, but so too is historical time, or at least historical time becomes mythical or sacred time).  Finally, “in the fixity of the ritual’s structure lies the prestige of tradition, and in this prestige lies its power. ”[7]

* Catherine Bell’s memorial notice is found on this page (scroll down). 

Notes:

[1] Charles Taliaferro has rightly remarked, “It is regrettable that mainstream, contemporary philosophy of religion has largely ignored the role of ritual in Christian life and practice.  Very few standard anthologies today in philosophy of religion contain any material on prayer, the sacraments, meditation, fasting, vigils, religious hymns, icons, pilgrimages, the sacredness of places or times, and so on, and yet these play different roles in much religious life.  A neglect of this terrain results in an excessively intellectual or detached portrait of religion.”  Taliaferro proceeds to present us with an account of the religious virtues found in eucharistic liturgical practice.  See his essay, “Ritual and Christian Philosophy,” in Kevin Schilbrack, ed. ( 2004). 

[2] I therefore agree with T.C. Kline III, that, “For the study of ritual, few sources are as rich as the writings of Confucian philosophers.  From the beginning of the tradition, Kongzi (Confucius) describes the good human life in terms of ritual practice.  He focuses on the way participation enables us to become fully human.”  Please see his essay, “Moral Cultivation through Ritual Participation,” in Schilbrack, ed. ( 2004). 

[3] Here we might consider Michael L. Raposa’s argument that “religious ritual is very much about the way that human beings pay attention.  Ritual organizes and directs the attention of its participants, supplying a distinctive frame for human experience.  At the same time, the repeated engagement in ritual activity can be a discipline of attention, allowing participants gradually to develop certain power of perception.”  See his essay, “Religious Inquiry: the pragmatic logic of religious practice,” in Schilbrack, ed. ( 2004). 

[4] Hence Kevin Schilbrack’s observation that a “ritual is a metaphysical inquiry…to the extent that it aims at increased knowledge of being in the world authentically, that is, being in the world in the way authorized by the very nature of things.”  On this account, ritual metaphysics means performers will act so as to sense they are “participating in the very patterns and forces of the cosmos.”  See his essay, “Ritual Metaphysics,” in the volume he edited (2004). 

[5] Nick Crossley states accordingly that “the value of the ritual, qua body technique [i.e., embodied forms of practical reasoning], is its capacity to ‘condense’ meaning and circumvent verbal negotiation.  The meaning of the handshake, funeral rite, the wedding ceremony, etc.  are multiple and complex.”  See his contribution, “Ritual, Body Technique, and (Inter)Subjectivity,” in Kevin Schilbrack, ed. ( 2004).  I’m tempted to say that ritual is to praxis, or perhaps better, to tradition, what metaphor is to language. 

[6] Thus Crossley informs us that “many rituals manifest…an understanding of the social world to which the agent belongs, that is, of its values, beliefs, distinctions, social positions, and hierarchies.  Furthermore, at the same time, they constitute the practical know-how necessary for the reproduction of the social world.” 

[7] After the Confucian philosopher Xunzi, we could say that this “prestige” is wholly deserved owing to the fact that tradition is a repository of the rituals necessary for a process of moral cultivation that is sensitive to the various somatic, affective, and cognitive aspects of our open-ended human nature and moral psychology.  It is ritual that allows us to overcome the unrestrained pursuit of our spontaneous inclinations and uninhibited (unreflective) desires, the root causes of chaos and conflict.  It is ritual praxis that serves as a restraint on and a vehicle for the transformation of dispositions and desires, teaching us how to appropriately express our emotions and understand the nature of suitable desires.  Learning through rituals, allows us to discipline our speech, gestures, and movements, all of which carry symbolic value, and all of which are integral to our learned capacity to act harmoniously with others and the cosmos itself.  See Kline in note 2 above. 

03/25/2012

The following is a list of ten essential works on “the emotions.”  Of course the belief that they are fundamental is the judgment of yours truly, although the authors listed here often cite each other, which speaks to their respective assessments of what is worthy among the plethora of titles now available on this topic.  I have focused on philosophical approaches, yet all of the authors could be said to be cognizant of the relevant research in the natural and social sciences.  I’ve left out the few titles one can find on the emotions in English from the vantage point of Asian philosophies, and several excellent works that treat the emotions and aesthetics are also conspicuously absent.  Should anyone want the latest version of my bibliography on the emotions you can write to me for a copy. 

03/21/2012

In Catholic theology the Church maintains that the bread and wine at the Mass is changed by the Holy Spirit through the Priest into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.  The taking of communion then is unmistakably a sacred affair. 

Protestant churches do not accept this doctrine of transubstantiation.  The conceptions of the meaning of taking communion vary and are open to differing prayers supported by different theological assumptions.  I am struck by the beauty of a prayer recently used at the Protestant Cooperative Ministry at Cornell.  It is taken from the Iona Community Worship and is said by those receiving communion as they surround the table.  Notice that the first paragraph could appear in a Catholic service (though, if approved in the liturgy, it would be said by the Priest and would not be addressed to Christ); the second paragraph could not be said in a Catholic service.  It takes a powerful and sacred, but different approach:

03/19/2012

Robert George has a post on Mirror of Justice that reads, in its entirety, as follows:

Jesuitry

From the New York Times, 17 March 2012:

In a letter to the president of Georgetown University, John J. DeGioia, 66 members of the law school faculty said Friday that the University should address Ms. Fluke's concerns and consider providing contraceptive coverage in the student health plan. " The current policy puts student health at risk," said M. Gregg Bloche, a professor at the law school, "and with our Jesuit tradition, we should be concerned about that." 

Res ipsa loquitur. 

Professor George certainly has the right to speak his mind, and perhaps I am being overly sensitive, but to me titling the piece Jesuitry seems to be using language often associated with anti-Catholicism to criticize fellow Catholics.  The title, and indeed the entire post, make me uncomfortable. 

03/13/2012

The nation's Roman Catholic bishops will make an important decision this week: Do they want to defend the church's legitimate interest in religious autonomy, or do they want to wage an election-year war against President Barack Obama?  And do the most conservative bishops want to junk the Roman Catholic Church as we have known it, with its deep commitment to both life and social justice, and turn it into the Tea Party at prayer? 

03/12/2012

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the crisis of authority in the Catholic Church than the percentage of a congregation who receive communion.  The leaders of the church attempt to police communion.  They say that those who are in a state of mortal sin (including, for example, the entertaining of impure thoughts) and those who stubbornly and obstinantly refuse to accept teachings of the Bishops that are part of the Magisterium (viewed as increasingly broad by the Bishops) should not receive communion.  Given the percentage of Catholics who strongly disagree with the Bishops on a variety of important issues, one would expect a modest percentage of Catholics to receive communion.  In the 1950’s when the overwhelming majority of Catholics agreed with church teachings, a sizeable percentage would not receive communion either because of a failure to fast or a belief that they were in a state of mortal sin.  Today, very few Catholics do not receive communion. 

Easter is a good example of this phenomenon.  Most Catholics present are in a state of mortal sin because they have failed to regularly attend mass on Sundays; nonetheless they receive communion without going to confession.  I am not sure they do this with a sense of guilt, but they are certainly not respecting the authority of the church. 

In contrast, most Protestant churches engage in little or no policing of who should receive communion.  The idea is that Jesus is inviting all (or all baptized) to come to the table including sinners and those of dwindling faith.  Here is a prayer used at a recent Protestant service I attended.  It is adapted from the Iona prayer book:

03/10/2012

“Reported memories are (to be sure) directly causally connected with the experiences they describe, and what is at least as important, no memory qualifies as a memory unless it is veridical.  But every reported memory is an interpretation of the original experience: memories as they live and breathe come in phrases and visualizations rather than in propositions.  They are emotionally charged, infused with fears and desires: and cannot be separated from the purely cognitive or verifiable aspect of what is remembered from a vast array of other tonalities of what is imagined, fantasied, hoped. ”—Amélie Oksenberg Rorty in Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (1988) (cf.  Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931)

“In the 1970s the initial enthusiasm for the computer as a psychological metaphor and simulation as a scientific tool gradually gave way to realism.  The flood of computer simulations in the early days of AI and cognitive science had an unintended result, quite opposite to that expected.  It was established that psychological processes, even the ‘higher ones,’ have a much less rectilinear and rational course than was presupposed in the simulations.  Thinking and reasoning turned out to be mosaic-like processes, in which intuitions and suppositions played equal parts as logical deductions and statistically sound deductions.  Gardner called this result the ‘computational paradox:’ the intensive attempts to simulate mental processes emphasised the differences rather than the similarities.  The paradox applies in its full extent to memory.  The memory of the computer is too good.  Its infallibility is its principal short-coming.  Human memory is an instrument which, if the need arises, lies and deceives.  It distorts, sifts and deforms, takes better care of some things than others.  Unlike the computer memory it disobeys commands. ”—Douwe Draaisma in Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind (English tr.,  2000)

“Contrary to the claims of many neuroscientists, full-blown memories, such as you and I experience all the time, and more broadly the explicit temporal depth of our lives, cannot be captured by a neural account of the mind. [….]  When I remember something I have experienced, the memory is not merely a recurrence of the experience.  Nor is it, as the philosopher David Hume suggested, a ‘pale’ or less vivid copy of the experience.  No, when I recall something that is past I am aware that it is past; remembered red is not just like a present experience of faded red.  I have a sense of place in time, outside the present, in which what was experienced, what the memory is about, took place.  Supposing I remember that yesterday you asked me to do something.  Although my memory is necessarily a present event it is aware that it is about something that is not present.  The memory is not only the presence of something that is absent but also the presence of something that is explicitly absent.  When I remember your request, however clear my memory, however precise the mental image I might have of you making the request, I am not deceived into thinking that you are now making the request.  Your request is firmly located in the past.  As for the past, it is an extraordinarily elaborated and structured realm.  It is layered; it is both personal (memory) and collective (history); it is randomly visited and timetabled; it is accessed through facts, through vague impressions, through images steeped in nostalgia.  This realm has no place in the physical world. 

The physical world is what it is.  It is not haunted by what has been (or, indeed, by what it might become): by what was and will be.  There are, in short, no tenses in the material world.  This is beautifully expressed by Albert Einstein in a letter written in the last year of his life, to the widow of his oldest friend, Michael Besso: ‘People like me,’ he said, ‘who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future, is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’  Tenses are not, of course, illusions, unless the only reality that is accepted is the world as revealed to physics.  But they have no place in the physical world.  And they therefore have no place in a piece of the physical world: a material object such as the brain.  The only presence that the past has in the material present is in virtue of the contents of the present being the effects of the past. [ And]…being an effect of past events does not of itself amount to being the presence of the past. ”—Raymond Tallis in Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (2011)

Sacred—

In Sanskrit: smrti, “remembrance, reminiscence, thinking of or upon, calling to mind, memory.”  In Hinduism, the term is used in reference to non-Vedic religious texts and customary laws, including several senses of the term dharma (the first authority for dharma being śruti-texts).  In Buddhism, it is used in reference to “mindfulness” (Pali: sati).  In Deuteronomy 8:18 we read, “Thou shalt remember the Lord your God,” and in Judaism the Shema crystallizes the obligatory consequences of such remembance.  In Christianity, the icon is used by way of a tangible support of contemplation, to help one remember God, calling God to mind as it were, or simply the spiritual prototype or what the icon represents: “the image directs his mind to a higher contemplation.”  In Islam, the lay devotee and the Sufi are distinguished by the practice of dhikr, the remembrance or recollection of God (performed in silence or aloud), for the Qur’ān (33:40) states that one should “recollect God often,” and that such recollection “makes the heart calm” (13:28). 

03/08/2012

[That's the title of the "feature article" in this week's edition of The Tablet: The International Catholic Newsweekly (published in London).  The article is multiauthored, consisting of three short contributions by "three of Britain's leading Catholics".  You can read the contributions below the page break.] 

Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s strident intervention this week in the debate over gay marriage brought centre stage the Catholic Church’s absolute opposition to any possible change to the law.  Three of Britain’s leading Catholics here debate the increasingly fraught issue

The Wall Street Journal has a sobering article on the plight of LGBT homeless youth.  Although I understand the impulse of the Church and the LGBT community to take positions on marriage equality, it is deeply saddening that more resources are not spent protecting children.  As a Catholic, I am particularly concerned that public political discourse by both the laity and the clergy contributes to a culture that considers these children disposable.  Although this consequence is generally not intended, a distorted view of Christianity sometimes provides the basis for abusing or abandoning LGBT young people. 

03/07/2012

Benefits to be extended to same-gender domestic partners

At their March 3 meeting in Philadelphia, the directors of the Board of Pensions voted to extend spousal and child benefits to same-gender domestic partners of Benefits Plan members, beginning January 1, 2013.  To qualify, a member will have to verify that he or she has a civil license or certificate evidencing a civil marriage, civil union, or domestic partnership from a state or foreign jurisdiction. 

The directors voted on the matter after receiving a report of recommendation from the Special Committee on Domestic Partner Benefits.  The committee, drawn from the board of directors, studied various issues surrounding the matter for more than a year.  Study began after the 219th General Assembly (2010) approved a resolution urging the Board to extend spousal and dependent benefits to same-gender domestic partners on the same basis as it does for opposite-gender married couples. 

The Board of Pensions will formally present its decision to the 220th General Assembly (2012).  The directors’ vote is binding, so no further action will be needed.  After making its presentation to the General Assembly, the Board will begin notifying members about enrollment details, well in advance of the January 1, 2013 effective date. 

The Benefits Plan will be amended to include a new relationship definition: A qualified domestic partner "is an individual who is in a legally sanctioned same-gender union with a Member affording rights of inheritance under the laws of the jurisdiction where the union occurred."  The plan’s definition of spouse will be revised to read "an individual who is legally married to a Member in a marriage that conforms to the definition of marriage in the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)." 

The 219th General Assembly (2010) had authorized the Board to increase employer dues by up to 1 percent to compensate for any rise in costs connected with adding the new participants.  The Board determined that a dues increase was not needed at this time, but it will continue to monitor the situation, according to Robert W. Maggs, Jr., Board president and chief executive.  Because there was no immediate dues increase, the board of directors did not design a Relief of Conscience mechanism. 

“The members of the Special Committee invested more than a year in discernment of this matter,” Mr. Maggs said. “ It was a demanding assignment, which they accepted graciously and with the high level of commitment that it required.” 

03/05/2012

Soraya Chemaly appeared on Talk of the Nation today to discuss a column she wrote for the Huffington Post explaining why she left the Catholic Church.  The Church’s views about women were primary in her thinking.  For a link to her powerful column and the podcast, see here. 

03/01/2012

“I should think that the distinctive task of a science of consciousness would be a credible and systematic account of the manner in which knowledge, desire, belief, and judgment come to be integrated into action plans by entities that have and that take an interest in themselves and in others.  Put another way, the distinctive task pertains to what is distinctive about human life, which is not merely or primarily ‘subjective experience.’  What is distinctive about it is its amenability to rhetorical sources of motivation, to desires grounded in moral precepts, to forms of art and play, belief and conviction, and hopes and intuitions, by which ‘behavior’ rises to the level of personal responsibility. ”—Daniel N. Robinson

Daniel N. Robinson’s Consciousness and Mental Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) is an excellent historical and analytical treatment of the more intractable if not “timeless” topics in philosophy of mind concerning the “mind/body” problem, physicalism, and consciousness.  Among the conclusions for which we find succinct yet impressive arguments: “Emergentism, supervenience, and epiphenomenalism, which, collectively, deny the immateriality of consciousness, offer no argument or evidence that seriously challenges dualistic alternatives.  It cannot even be said that they are working hypotheses, because a working hypothesis is one that will rise or fall with the evidence, and there is no ‘evidence’ as such that could tell for or against ‘hypotheses’ of this sort.  They are not scientific hypotheses, though they are phrased as if they were.” 

Robinson demonstrates how “Cartesianism” is often a predictable straw man in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science, the irony being “that much of the anti-Cartesian labors of the day recover what is explicit in Descartes’ own work and that the more weighty criticisms were advanced by Descartes’ celebrated contemporaries. ‘ Anti-Cartesianism’ is now largely ‘code’ for a defense of physicalism no more credible and no more coherent than what Descartes had attempted to defend.  His was very a form of ‘cognitive neuroscience’ that would be surprisingly at home in today’s major centers of thought on these matters.”