Moral duties in a muddied world

Columns

May 17, 2012

Moral duties in a muddied world

By Kathryn Jean Lopez/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Thu May 17, 2012, 09:43 AM CDT

VATICAN CITY — In an election season in which the White House has instituted a policy that puts unprecedented limits on the constitutional right to freedom of religion, questions of conscience, duty and spiritual and moral obligation are of critical importance.

A conference at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences had some related thoughts and warnings. The Vatican think tank was founded in 1994 and is meant to facilitate a continuing dialogue between faith and reason, between the social sciences and the social thought of the Church.

To an American sitting in on the conference, some of its sessions amounted to a warning siren.

“A religion of the absence of God is currently destroying and demoralizing the West,” warned Pierre Manent, a professor of the Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron, describing a world that has little tolerance for religious views it considers merely as outmoded obstacles. “This is not simply a fashion or opinion trend; it is a genuine large-scale project for governing the world through international rules and institutions, so that nations, losing their character as sovereign political bodies, are henceforth only ‘regions’ of a world en route to globalization.”

His sounding of the alarm came at the same time as a full-scale examination of budgetary matters began to get under way in the United States. Republican House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan has engaged in a debate over “social justice” that has long been a wholly owned subsidiary of the left.

This is important and relevant because we do live in a country that has long safeguarded religious freedom, believing it to be a central part of a healthy democracy and just society. But current government policy suggests something else. The Obama administration has demonstrated a marked hostility to the free exercise of religion in the public square.

“Pacem in Terris,” the 1963 papal encyclical that the Vatican City conference evoked, was concerned with world peace. But it recognizes that at the heart of any such endeavor is peace within our hearts: reconciliation about who we are and how we conduct ourselves in the world.

“There is no more powerful source of moral development for everyone than concern for the common good,” Manent explains. But Manent goes on to stress that this concern cannot be legislated from above, cannot be transformed into a rigid set of rules delivered by government fiat — instead it has to spring from the “enlarging of our being,” an inward process that moves outward, but needs unfettered freedom in which to manifest.

“If we keep growing government in debt, we will crowd out the civil society — those charities, those churches, those institutions in our local communities that do the most to actually have a human touch to help people in need,” Paul Ryan recently said, in defense of his budget. “That’s what we want to empower. That’s what we want to improve on.”

In an even larger sense, Manent agrees. “The deployment of the human virtues,” he said, will take “a unified action regarding the members for which we feel ourselves responsible. ... If we lose that, we will have nothing left to orient ourselves by but a general idea of humanity, which will be powerless to draw us away from the passivity of private life.”

Making these decisions, these moral priorities, requires what Manent calls “a serious effort of discernment.” As we enter election season, serious moral discernments should be made before we vote: how we should live, what we should be required to do. Keeping the human person at the center of our civic acts is an important part of keeping our freedom intact. Will we heed the warnings?

(Kathryn Lopez can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com)

Text Only

Columns

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

March 20, 2013
More Columns Headlines

Columns

Search Results

Moral duties in a muddied world

Site Map

Contact Us