Keep it to yourself

...O'Connor's opinion in Newdow illustrates a misplaced and disturbing hubris about the capacity of courts to identify, police, and contain "political divisiveness along religious lines...

...Or, as William James quipped: "In this age of toleration, [no one] will ever try actively to interfere with our JFELICIAN C O L L E G A CATHOLIC COLLEGE IN THE FRANCISCAN TRADITION • WWW.FELICIAN.EDU Online Graduate Religious Education • Earn a Master of Arts in Religious Education (33 credits), a Masters Certificate in Religious Education (18 credits), a Post-Master Certificate in Religious Education (is credits...

...Similarly, three decades earlier, then-Chief Justice Warren Burger reported in the landmark case of Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) that "political division along religious lines was one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was in-tended to protect...

...Neither approach survives deeper scrutiny, and Shelley's novel can pro-vide us with several "morals...

...4M/ 4t/44 44/4 A call to the Church in the United States to refocus on mission October 3-6, 2004 / Louisville, Ky...

...Blockbuster church-state rulings, though, were surprisingly and unusually absent from the term's dramatic conclusion...

...In his view, avoiding "social dissension" is more than a policy desiderT Commonweal 9 August 13, 2004 atum or a prudent aspiration...

...When Joshua Davey, a high-achieving student, declared a double major in pastoral ministries and business administration, the State of Washington withdrew his scholarship award...

...Those who crafted our Constitution believed that authentic freedom and effective government could both be secured through checks and balances, rather than standardization, and by harnessing, rather than homogenizing, the messiness of democracy...

...It is, somehow, a fundamental, judicially enforceable religion clause "principle...

...More particularly—and like the officials in Washington who pulled Joshua Davey's scholarship—California is em-bracing and enforcing an ideology of privatized religion...

...In our culture and in our courts, difference, diversity, and dissent are accepted—even celebrated—but the division allegedly fomented by religiously grounded claims is widely seen as cause for alarm...

...In fact, there is something unsettlingly undemocratic about the notion that the First Amendment authorizes courts to protect us from "confusion" or privileges judges' sense of political "urgency...

...This refusal, this magazine's editors appropriately charged, is a "blatant assault on religious liberty and freedom of conscience...

...Dictionaries tell us that the word "religion" comes from ligare, which means to tie or bind together...

...Father Robert Schreiter, Bishop William Houck, Joel Shorn, Rabbi Herman Schaalman, Father Frank Ruff, Dr...

...These demands could be heard in Locke v. Davey, the Court's other big-ticket religion clause case...

...In her mind, then, the pledge's permissibility hinged on the social disruption or political tumult it might or might not cause...

...we are, political guru Michael Barone tells us, "hard America" and "soft America...

...One side seemingly asks us to preserve nature against human tampering—as if nature "red in tooth and claw" could provide an unambiguous norm...

...Burger foresaw "considerable political activity" on the part of "partisans of parochial schools," and would have none of it...

...True, few contemporary epithets are as wounding, yet so tedious and vacuous, as the charge that a claim, proposal, or belief is "divisive...

...Justice Antonin Scalia, however, took a very different view, noting that Washing-ton's discriminatory policy "poses no obstacle to practitioners of only a tepid, civic version of faith" and warning that "one need not delve too far into modern popular culture to perceive a trendy disdain for deep religious conviction...

...Or contact Father Wil Steinbacher at 615-256-1905 or wsteinbacher@glenmary.org VI LLAN OVA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW announces the appointment of Patrick McKinley Brennan formerly Professor of Law and Vice Dean, Arizona State University School of Law as the first John F. Scarpa Chair in Catholic Legal Studies Villanova University School of Law is a Catholic and Augustinian institution that seeks to reflect the spirit of St...

...For more information: Visit www.glenmary.org and search "Mission Symposium...

...But the particulars of the ongoing GM food debate did send me back to Shelley's novel...

...Several months before, in Locke v. Davey, Chief Justice William Rehnquist had crafted a narrow, similarly cautious opinion reaffirming that publicly funded scholarship programs may include religious schools, but rejecting the far-reaching argument that, under the First Amendment's Free Exercise clause, they must...

...Like "controversial" and "partisan," the term seems to do little more than signal the speaker's disapproval...

...A perfection-ism that rejects or abandons what we cannot fully control (or what thwarts our expectations) is a flaw far deeper than a monster's ugliness...

...The opinions in these cases and the premises they reflect provoke challenging questions about religious commitment, pluralism, democracy, and "division...

...Thus, the mandate works "an intentional, purposeful intrusion into a religious organization's expression of its religious tenets and sense of mission...

...It is a mistake, though, to think that this "principle" can faithfully be "implemented" through a division-shy program of religious privatization or by endorsing what Justice Clarence Thomas has called a "most bizarre" reading of the First Amendment, one that "reserve[s] special hostility for those who take their religion seriously, [and] who think that their religion should affect the whole of their lives...

...we are, as commentator David Brooks and others have colorfully described, bobos and patio men, Left Coast and flyover country, latte and sprinkler towns, Wal-Mart and Zabar's...

...George Hunsberger...

...Presented by Glenmary Home Missioners In cooperation with the U.S...

...Leslie Hollon, Aminah McCloud, Sister Dianne Bergant, Edwina Gateley, Jack Jezreel, Father John Rausch, Father Derek Simons, Michael Warren...

...To be sure, the "separation of church and state" is crucial to any attractive vision of religious freedom...

...His worst crime was his refusal to show compassion and humanity to his flawed creation...

...We need humility in making judgments amid uncertainty, especially when competing values prove difficult to compare...

...And if we do proceed, we need to be open to-ward the always "imperfect" results of our own best intentions...

...It is no less worrisome for sounding strange: The law and the courts are imposing "di-vision," by insisting that faithful citizens dis-integrate their lives and that religious groups pull back from their missions, in order to protect the polity from "divisiveness...

...Shelley's monster, save for physical ugliness, was quite refined in his other initial capacities...

...Hubris is always a danger in pursuing scientific mastery...

...Augustine by the cultivation of knowledge, by respect for individual differences and by adherence to the principle that mutual love and respect should animate every aspect of the law school's life...

...Yet as Justice Janice Rogers Brown reminded her colleagues on the California Supreme Court, many churches have "never envisioned a sharp divide between the church and the world, the spiritual and the temporal, or religion and politics...

...In Elk Grove v. Newdow, the hot-button Pledge of Allegiance case, a bare majority employed the technical (but important) doctrine of "standing" to escape the delicate, politically charged task of confronting squarely an atheist's objections to the words "under God...

...Properly understood, the separation of church and state is not an antireligious ideology, but—in John Courtney Murray's words—a "means, a technique, [and] a policy to implement the principle of religious freedom...

...I admit that recent data showing the safety of GMs are encouraging, and I am open to proceeding cautiously...

...Commonweal I I August 13, 2004...

...Victor Frankenstein's greatest failure may not have been his ambitious desire for knowledge or his self-absorbed quest for creating life, serious as these sins might have been...

...Richard W. Garnett KEEP IT TO YOURSELF The Supreme Court on religious freedom he Supreme Court term ended in late June with an avalanche of headline-grabbing decisions...

...I think we should resist both extremes...

...And, we will not learn until the fall whether the justices will take up the California Supreme Court's Catholic Charities decision, which upheld a state law requiring most religious employers to include contraception coverage in health-benefit plans...

...Justice Sandra Day O'Connor suggested otherwise in her concurring opinion in Newdow...

...Catholic Mission Association Symposium presenters: Father John Fuellenbach, M. Shawn Copeland...

...We are, according to cultural critic Gertrude Himmelfarb, "one nation, two cultures...

...Commonweal readers will remember ("Uncharitable Interpretation," March 26, 2004) that California refuses to exempt from the state law's contraception-funding mandate those Catholic organizations that engage in activities other than worship and religious instruction, or that hire and serve people other than coreligionists...

...More and more, our law seems suspicious of those divisions that our Constitution actually protects—that is, the divisions that result when free people contend over difficult questions that matter—yet indifferent to the harm done to religious freedom by demands for the privatization of faith and its segregation from civic life...

...Technophobes readily embrace the cautionary tale about Dr...

...The Court declined even to review potentially explosive disputes involving a Ten Commandments monumentin Alabama's Supreme Court building and the Virginia Military Institute's traditional mess hall prayers...

...The justices announced important, even land-mark, rulings in cases involving police inter-rogation tactics, criminal-sentencing procedures, Internet pornography, public access to the decision-making process-es of high-level executive branch officials, and—of course—the rights of suspected enemy combatants detained in the course of the current wars...

...It is worth remembering, instead, with John Courtney Murray, that "pluralism [is] the native condition of American society" and that the unity toward which Americans have aspired—e pluribus unum—is the "unity of a limited order...

...Nevertheless, the claim that policies thought to cause "political divisiveness along religious lines" are for that reason constitution-ally suspect appears to be making a comeback...

...Accordingly, the "divisive political potential" of certain school-funding programs was enough to require their invalidation...

...Instead, this year's much-anticipated religion clause cases fizzled, revealing an uncharacteristic determination to avoid attention and sweeping, controversial conclusions...

...It was an enjoyable reunion, al-though I was struck by the differences between Shelley's "monster" and the bolt-necked ogre Boris Karloff immortalized on screen...

...Frankenstein while scientists too easily dismiss it...

...And, in concluding that it does not, O'Connor emphasized that the pledge "has been employed pervasively without engendering significant controversy" and "caused no political divisiveness prior to the filing of this lawsuit...

...the Rev...

...Although a federal appeals court agreed that this penalty violated the free exercise clause, a majority of the justices were spooked by the implications of this ruling, and reversed, concluding that "the State's disfavor of religion (if it can be called that) is of a...mild kind...

...Hardly a day goes by without bold-print reminders from pollsters and pundits that American society is fractured, split, divided—even "at war...

...Richard W. Garnett is an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School...

...Scientific enthusiasts, on the other hand, em-brace claims of unproblematic progress, thereby denying the mixed blessings of many technologies...

...For one, we need to temper the Promethean impulse referenced in Shelley's subtitle...

...She would have addressed and rejected Michael Newdow's argument that the teacher-led recitation of the pledge in his daughter's elementary school involves unconstitutional religious indoctrination...

...Second, we must un-derstand that our efforts to alter nature require not only humility, but openness and compassion...

...This expectation that religion and believers should avoid making a "public nuisance"—that they should stay in their place and steer clear, with judges' help, of "political divisiveness"—was also on display in the Catholic Charities case...

...all ONLINE • Ministerial Discounts of up to 50% offered to qualified persons plus an interest-free tuition payment plan • Courses offered Fall, Winter, and Spring For more information, contact Adult & Graduate Admission ;I )1) .' )-60 15 barcae@feiician.edu Commonweal I 0 August 13, 2004 religious faith, provided we enjoy it quietly with our friends and do not make a public nuisance of it...

...As the "noble savage," he turned to murderous rage only after Viktor Frankenstein, his creator, rejected himbecause of his physical flaws...

...In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), for example, Justice Stephen Breyer dissented from the Court's pro-schoolchoice ruling, emphasizing "the risk that publicly financed voucher programs pose in terms of religiously based social conflict" and highlighting the need to "protect the nation's social fabric from religious conflict...

...Accordingly—this side of heaven, anyway—we should, in Murray's words, "cherish only modest expectations with regard to the solution of the problem of religious pluralism and civic unity...

...The views and concerns of these justices seem to fit the times...

...At the same time, this year's leading church-state cases displayed the increasing willingness of our governments and society to impose a kind of "division" on religious believers, institutions, and communities...

...he was emotionally sensitive and had a quick mind...

...All that said, it is not clear why our political, cultural, and other "divisions" should be relevant to the legal question of whether a particular policy—say, school vouchers or the Pledge of Allegiance in schools—is constitutionallypermissible...

...Many today, though, regard faith's purported capacity and tendency to "divide" as its most salient and near-defining feature...

...Even Chief Justice Burger conceded in Lemon that "political debate and division, however vigorous or even partisan, are normal and healthy manifestations of our democratic system of government...

...Such activity, he feared, "would tend to confuse and obscure other issues of great urgency...

...Still, the Court's recent work in the church-state arena provides more than a case study in reticence, or evidence of newfound judicial humility...

...Unlike Rehnquist, for whom it was enough to recall that "patriotic invocations of God and official acknowledgments of religion's role in our nation's history abound," O'Connor asked whether the school's pledge policy "sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community...

...Judicial squeamishness toward messy politics is hardly a reliable constitutional benchmark...