Don't Blame the EPA for Luminant Job Losses; Blame Perry's Failed Deregulation

In the print edition of today's Houston Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy has a characteristically prescient take the lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency by Luminant, Texas' largest power plant operator.

Luminant, in bed with presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry, contends that the agency's stricter air quality standards will cause it to close two coal-fired power generating facilities and lay off 500 employees.  But Steffy suggests other culprits:

Given that NRG, the second-biggest generator in the state, says it will comply with the EPA regulations without any layoffs or plant closings, the Luminant job losses would not be caused by the EPA but by Luminant's financial problems.  And, unfortunately, those can be traced directly to Texas' failed attempt at deregulation of electric companies, championed by none other than Gov. Perry himself.

I have looked in vain for an electronic link to Steffy's column.  If one eventually becomes available, I will include it in a comment on this posting.

Rick Perry Has Put Texas in Debt $21 Billion to Build Roads--and Plans $10 Billion More!

Texas Governor Rick Perry has continued flitting around the country, proclaiming the superiority of the Texas economy over just about everyone elses and taking credit for balancing the Texas budget without raising any new revenues. He's also a constant conservative critic of federal spending and borrowing.

Nay-sayers have pointed out that Perry never acknowledges taking federal stimulus money to balance the state's previous budget--even though he could not have balanced it without the federal funds.

Now comes the revelation that Perry, in addition to gorging himself at the federal trough, has since 2001 also saddled Texans with $21 billion in indebtedness for new road construction -- and plans to raise the number to $31 billion during his current term!

Here's the story, from yesterday's Houston Chronicle, authored by Jim Dunnam, a former Texas state representative and senior fellow at The Texas First Foundation, which aims to put what is right for Texas ahead of partisan politics.

With all our attention focused on the federal debt-ceiling debacle in Washington, it is easy to ignore our own state debt crisis here in Texas. Texas' debt is increasing at a rate that rivals the federal government's, yet no one seems to know it.

We have heard how our new Texas budget cuts more than $4 billion from our schools and students, but not about our ballooning state debt.

Before Rick Perry became governor, Texas was a pay-as-you-go state for roads, meaning we used current gas tax receipts to pay for new road construction. Our forefathers set up a system where transportation needs were paid for then and now, not by passing the buck to future generations. Under Gov. Perry, all that changed.

Starting in 2001, Texas started borrowing money for new road construction, pushing that cost onto future taxpayers. In just a decade, this debt has grown from zero to $11.9 billion. With interest payments, future taxpayers and our children will need 20 years and $21.1 billion to pay off that debt. There is even more about to be borrowed. In all, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) has authority to borrow $17.3 billion, with a 30-year payoff of $31.1 billion, further shifting the burden to our children.

To make matters worse, new transportation debt is being secured by general state revenue, not just the gas tax. The exact same taxes we use to pay for public education, state universities and health care are now being diverted to make bond and interest payments on this debt. Imagine what future Texans could do without being saddled with $14 billion in interest payments over the next generation. They might not have to take money out of their public schools or health care. They might even have a real tax cut some day.

This debt is as potentially crushing on the future of Texas as the federal debt is for our United States. Texas' borrowing has gotten so bad that we are now spending more annually on debt service than we are paying for new roads. According to TxDOT's latest figures, we will spend $1.72 billion on debt payments over the next two years, compared to $1.28 billion for new roads. Just like Washington, Austin is borrowing and spending away our future.

Texas should have never gotten away from the pay-as-you-go system for roads. Our tax system is inefficient and broken. Instead of fixing our broken revenue structure, changing the 20-year-old gas tax methodology, or closing tax loopholes, nearly all of our future infrastructure needs are to be funded by borrowing from the future generation of Texans.

With infrastructure needs only expected to grow, TxDOT continuing to issue bonds is unsustainable. Soon, all funds will be needed just to service the debt and pay interest, leaving nothing for future needs. In fact, bond rating agencies are already looking negatively upon toll road debt in the states, so even that favored option of Perry's will be gone.

Texas' political leadership likes to flaunt our balanced budget and admonish the federal government for its lack thereof. But those leaders are living in a giant glass house and deceiving Texans. The balance in Texas' budget is achieved largely through accounting tricks and debt, both of which shift the burden to future taxpayers. Genuine equalization between revenue and spending levels is nowhere near the truth about Texas' budget.

Today's successful Texas politicians shout, "No new taxes," then cut public education and health care for children, use accounting tricks to delay bills and advance receipts, then pat themselves on the back for balancing the budget. In the meantime, they quietly saddle future generations with billions in new debt obligations. Their borrowing means our children will pay nearly double tomorrow for what they are unwilling to pay for our needs today. Our parents did not do that to us, and we should be ashamed for betraying that legacy.

Texas needs roads, and we also need education. We have to have an honest conversation about how we can balance these needs without extreme cuts and without simply putting it all off for others to deal with.

Most Who Get Government Benefits Fail to See Themselves as Government Beneficiaries

Clarence Page had a great column on July 20th that took off from the incongruity of Michele Bachmann ranting against government programs while her own family has benefited from them significantly. But the main point of the column was that Bachmann is not untypical of thousands of other Americans who also fail to see how much they benefit from government programs.

The only caveat I would raise is that there are many different kinds of government benefits -- from those to which people should feel entitled because they have specifically paid into them, to those that help people who have served their country in the military, to those which aim to promote home ownership and education, to those designed to help the poor through expenditure of other peoples' tax revenue. Given this variety, it is possible for people to value some of the programs more than others. But otherwise, Page's point stands. Some of his paragraphs follow:

A substantial number of Americans who say they support cutting government programs don't realize just how much they benefit from them.

Many who receive government benefits either don't believe or don't understand that they are government beneficiaries, according to a study last year by Cornell University political scientist Suzanne Mettler.

Those who incorrectly identified themselves as not receiving government help included 60 percent of homeowners who qualify for a mortgage-interest deduction, 53 percent of those who hold government-backed student loans, 47 percent of those who qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit, 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 40 percent of Medicare recipients and 27 percent of Americans receiving welfare or Medicaid benefits.

As a mortgage payer, I was not surprised to hear that homeowners and student loan borrowers were least likely to see themselves as receiving a government benefit. After all, we work hard to pay off our loans. That makes it harder for us to think of tax breaks and government loan guarantees as "benefits," a term that today's political conversations tend to equate with "handouts" — even in some liberal circles.

Cornell's Mettler refers to such popular programs and policies as "the submerged state," a social welfare system that is virtually hidden in a wide array of popular policies aimed at incentivizing and subsidizing incomes, education, home-owning and other productive activities.

The reasons for the camouflage are political and practical. For example, liberals and conservatives alike find the Earned Income Tax Credit to be more popular than welfare payments as a way to fight poverty, reward work and help the poor become economically independent. But it's still a government program, even if almost half of its recipients don't realize it.

Government Can Stimulate Demand--and Should--Rice's Baker Institute Says

The Houston Chronicle on July 24, 2011, posted an op-ed column entitled "Government can stimulate demand." The print version on July 25th carried the sub-head, "Now is not the time for fiscal prudence."

The analysis argues that the economy is in deep trouble, and there is only one entity that can help it grow:

"Consumption is an unlikely source of growth. Given high levels of unemployment and consumer debt, the household sector is not in a position to power a robust recovery. Neither is the business sector. Businesses are not going to invest without some convincing signs that expenditures by other sectors are increasing. It doesn't make sense to invest in additional capacity when there is no demand for the new output. Finally, the rest of the world is not going to bail out the U.S. economy. U.S. exports have grown a little over the past year, but with contractionary policies being pursued in many countries, including Europe and even China, exports cannot be counted on to drive the economy. Besides, if the U.S. economy does start to recover, its imports will increase, partially offsetting the stimulus effect of exports.

"That leaves the government sector."

This, of course, makes perfect sense to me. And it is something that Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has argued for years.

What is remarkable about the Houston Chronicle column is that it is authored by two scholars from the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. For scholars at a conservative Republican think tank to come to this conclusion is truly eye-opening -- and just another marker of the national Republican Party's total disconnect from fiscal and political reality.

Duplicitus Rex: Prayer-a-Palooza Perry Reprises "Let's Do the Flip-Flop Again"

Political columnist Lisa Falkenberg had an excellent commentary in yesterday's print edition of the Houston Chronicle on how often Texas voters have allowed Rick Perry to change his mind on important political issues over the last 20 years.

Unfortunately, since the Chronicle has thus far not seen fit to post the column on-line, we'll have to rely on my typing skills to give it the internet presence it deserves. The column is below, followed by a link to the Chronicle's take on Stephen Colbert's suggestion that the best running mate for Perry would be ... GOD!

The latest breathless dispatch from the Rick Perry presidential watch beat is that the governor told the Des Moines Register he's getting "more and more comfortable every day that this is what I've been called to do."

Now, if Perry really believes he's being called, I won't blame the Lord, whom Perry has falsely accused before. Recall that unfortunate Gulf oil spill that Perry famously blamed on "an act of God."

And there's always a chance the governor didn't hear quite right. It could have been a bad connection, like the time Perry prayed for rain and we got the worst drought since the 1950s.

That being said, it doesn't surprise me one bit that Perry would suddenly become"more comfortable" with the idea of leading a country he once flirted with seceding from.

If our governor is consistent about anything (other than good hair days) it's his penchant for changing his mind. Call it flip-flopping. Call it hypocrisy. But nobody does it better than our Perry.

It is, for me, the single most irritating thing about Texas' longest surviving governor. But it's also one of his best weapons. While other candidates may be bound by silly, old-fashioned things like truth, and principle and vertebrae, Perry -- the Democrat-turned Republican-turned Tea Party Darlin' -- is free to be whoever he needs to be in any given polling period.

He's an anti-government crusader who's a career politician who's collected a government paycheck for 20 years.

He's a fiscal conservative who called on lawmakers to make up a budget shortfall in the tens of billions by living within our means. Yet he's charging taxpayers $10,000 a month for a 6,386-square-foot rental mansion in the West Austin hills with seven baths and $1,000 Neiman Marcus window coverings.

He railed against federal stimulus funding, then took credit from a misinformed Fox news host who applauded him for not taking "any stimulus money," when, in fact, he signed a biennial budget in 2009 plugged with $12.1 billion in stimulus funding.

During the last gubernatorial campaign, Perry made a big do-to about so-called "sanctuary cities" like Houston when, by his own standards, he's the governor of a sanctuary state. Houston officers don't ask about immigration status in the field, but neither do troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Perry opposed the federal health care reform act, but considers it an "emergency" for government to force a woman considering an abortion to have a medically unnecessary sonogram.

While the governor is perfectly comfortable with government micromanaging women's wombs, he's appalled by such overreach in the form of, say, a bill that would have banned texting while driving. Our proudly "pro-life" governor saw nothing wrong with vetoing the anti-texting measure that would have surely saved lives.

The good Christian governor wears his faith like a campaign bumper sticker, and makes headlines with events like the upcoming prayer-a-palooza at Reliant. But when it comes to putting his money where his mouth is? The Chronicle's Gary Scharrer reported recently that, of the $2.68 million he's earned since he became governor, only half of a percent went to churches and religious organizations.

He's Fed Up with the federal government, and even wrote a book saying so. Texas can take care of itself, he says. He wants Washington out of his life, he says. Unless of course, he needs it. Like in the case of a wild fire, or when his political ambitions have grown too big even for Texas.

The subtitle of Perry's recent book is Our Fight to Save America from Washington. If Perry gets in, it'll be up to those of us who know him to save Washington from Perry.

http://blog.chron.com/believeitornot/2011/07/colbert-wants-to-see-a-perry-god-ticket/

Liturgist Writes Scathing Critique of New U.S. Missal Dictated by Rome

Christians devoted to authentic liturgy and the authentic exercise of liturgical authority should be grateful to the National Catholic Reporter for publicizing an experienced liturgist's "searing critique of the New Roman Missal translation set to take effect in November." The critique by Rita Ferrone, author of several books on the liturgy, appears in the latest edition of Commonweal magazine.

Ferrone blames the sad shape of the new English translation on misuse of authority by the Vatican, a questionable set of liturgical translation principles decreed by the last two popes, and above all a reactionary drive to reverse the most significant liturgical reforms promulgated by the world's Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council. Ferrone offers examples of the translation's failings, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and shows how they result inexorably from Rome's failure to respect the experiences of local Catholics at public prayer.

I'll join NCR is highlighting the three concluding paragraphs of Ferrone's critique, which nicely summarize her point-by-point indictment of Rome's abusive meddling in liturgical decisions that, according to Vatican II, should rightly be made only by local bishops and their national conferences.

Where is this new translation taking us? It is important to realize that negative responses to the new translation reflect both dismay at the wording of the text and disagreement with the principles that guided its production. Yet the conflict goes deeper than an argument over theories of translation. That the new translation of the Roman Missal should come to us replete with embarrassing gaffes, nonsensical passages, and a near-total lack of accountability is as clearly a symptom of the misuse of authority as it is the fault of the questionable set of translation principles enunciated in Liturgiam authenticam. Yet even the misuse of authority is not the root cause of the immense disquiet and even outrage that this translation has aroused.

Beneath the words of the new translation, one senses a drive to minimize the practical effects of Vatican II. The reforms of Vatican II prized clarity and intelligibility in the liturgy; they gave priority to the work of ecumenism and evangelization; they respected the local work of bishops conferences; they invited aggiornamento and engagement with the world. This vital heritage is being eclipsed by another agenda. We are seeing a wooden loyalty to the Latin text at the price of clarity and intelligibility. We are seeing a retreat from advances already made in ecumenism. We are seeing the proper role of local bishops and bishops conferences increasingly taken over by the authorities in Rome. We are seeing the liturgy reimagined as an event taking place in some sacral space outside of our world, rather than the beating heart of a world made new.

Yes, we can get used to the new translation of the Roman Missal. But we shouldn’t. The church can do better, and deserves better, than this.

David Brooks: GOP "Not Fit to Govern" If Their Fanaticism Causes Debt Default

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has decades-long credentials as a conservative but rationale Republican, took advantage of the 4th of July to repudiate the tea-bagger wing of the GOP as "an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation."

Brooks' verdict: "If the debt-ceiling talks fail... independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

"And they will be right."

The last three-quarters of Brooks' column follow. The paragraphs are the best multi-count indictment I have seen for detailing how completely the tea-bagger Republicans have separated themselves from reality and from the values that characterize America. And in a religious assessment I very much share, he finds their "sacred fixation" on never raising taxes nothing less than idol-worship.

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases.

A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.

The party is not being asked to raise marginal tax rates in a way that might pervert incentives. On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. Economists have identified many factors that contribute to economic growth, ranging from the productivity of the work force to the share of private savings that is available for private investment. Tax levels matter, but they are far from the only or even the most important factor.

But to members of this movement, tax levels are everything. Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol.

Over the past week, Democrats have stopped making concessions. They are coming to the conclusion that if the Republicans are fanatics then they better be fanatics, too.

The struggles of the next few weeks are about what sort of party the G.O.P. is — a normal conservative party or an odd protest movement that has separated itself from normal governance, the normal rules of evidence and the ancient habits of our nation.

If the debt ceiling talks fail, independent voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

And they will be right.

Vatican's Nostalgia for Eucharistic Adoration an Attempt to Return to "Ocular Communion"

The National Catholic Reporter yesterday posted Religion News Service coverage of Vatican attempts to inject new life into discredited practices of eucharistic adoration. It was heartening to read that several reputable theologians share my view that such devotions are inimical to a genuine understanding of the eucharist as a sacred meal. As a meal, it does not lend itself to being captured in a monstrance and worshipped as though it were a sacred thing or, even worse, the physical presence of Jesus himself.

Excerpts from the article follow. I eliminate paragraphs in which various right-wing Catholics try to defend eucharistic adoration. Those nostalgic for such theological claptrap can link to NCR's full coverage.

For seven centuries, Eucharistic adoration—praying before an exposed consecrated Communion host—was one of the most popular forms of devotion in the Roman Catholic Church, the focus of beloved prayers and hymns and a distinctive symbol of Catholic identity.

Following the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the practice fell from favor, especially in Europe and the U.S. But over the last decade, under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the church has strongly encouraged a revival of the practice.

Next week (June 20-24), the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome will host an academic conference on Eucharistic adoration, where the speakers will include six prominent cardinals, focusing on the rediscovery of the practice.

At the same time, however, some theologians object to adoration as outdated and unnecessary, and warn that it can lead to misunderstandings and undo decades of progress in educating lay Catholics on the meaning of the sacrament.

Eucharistic adoration by the laity originated in the 13th century as a substitute for receiving Communion at Mass, said Monsignor Kevin W. Irwin, dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America.

At the same time, he said, the church often encouraged a believer’s sense of “personal unworthiness” to receive the sacrament—which Catholics believe to be the body of Christ—so many resorted to so-called “ocular communion” instead.

Eucharistic adoration was also used as a teaching tool to reaffirm the doctrine of the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist, said the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a noted theologian at the University of Notre Dame.

For instance, McBrien said, devotion grew during the 16th- and 17th-century Counter-Reformation, in response to the arguments of some Protestant Reformers that the Eucharist was merely a symbol, not the actual body of Christ.

In the days when priests celebrated Mass in Latin with minimal participation by the congregation, the hymns and prayers associated with adoration gave lay Catholics an opportunity for public worship, Irwin said.

Liturgical reforms after Vatican II greatly increased the laity’s participation at Mass, which Irwin said satisfied the “felt need for participation in public prayer.” Irwin called that an “underlying reason” for the practice’s decline.

McBrien acknowledged that some Catholics find adoration “spiritually enriching,” but said many liturgists see it is a “step back into the Middle Ages.”

“It distorts the meaning of the Eucharist,” McBrien said. “It erodes the communal aspect, and it erodes the fact that the Eucharist is a meal. Holy Communion is something to be eaten, not to be adored.”

For that reason, McBrien said, the practice should be “tolerated but not encouraged.”

Perry's 'Day of Prayer' Violates Church-State Separation, Houston Clergy Say

Twenty-five Houston clergy said in a column in the Houston Chronicle today that Gov. Rick Perry's planned day of prayer at Reliant Stadium on August 6th--to which only Christians whom Perry approves of are invited--violates the separation of church and state. Their column follows. The signatories may be found at the posting on the Chronicle's website.

As Houston clergy, we write to express our deep concern over Gov. Rick Perry's proclamation of a day of prayer and fasting at Houston's Reliant Stadium on Aug. 6. In our role as faith leaders, we encourage and support prayer, meditation and spiritual practice. Yet our governor's religious event gives us pause for a number of reasons.

We believe in a healthy boundary between church and state. Out of respect for the state, we believe that it should represent all citizens equally and without preference for religious or philosophical tradition. Out of respect for religious communities, we believe that they should foster faithful ways of living without favoring one political party over another. Keeping the church and state separate allows each to thrive and upholds our proud national tradition of empowering citizens to worship freely and vote conscientiously. We are concerned that our governor has crossed the line by organizing a religious event rather than focusing on the people's business in Austin.

We also express concern that the day of prayer and fasting at Reliant Stadium is not an inclusive event. As clergy leaders in the nation's fourth-largest city, we take pride in Houston's vibrant and diverse religious landscape. Our religious communities include Bahais, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Unitarian Universalists and many other faith traditions. Our city is also home to committed agnostics and atheists, with whom we share common cause as fellow Houstonians. Houston has long been known as a live-and-let-live city where all are respected and welcomed. It troubles us that the governor's prayer event is not open to everyone. In the publicized materials, the governor has made it clear that only Christians of a particular kind are welcome to pray in a certain way. We feel that such an exclusive event does not reflect the rich tapestry of our city. Our deepest concern, however, lies in the fact that funding for this event appears to come from the American Family Association, an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The American Family Association and its leadership have a long track record of anti-gay speech and have actively worked to discriminate against the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. The American Family Association and its leadership have also been stridently anti-Muslim, going so far as to question the rights of Muslim-Americans to freely organize and practice their faith. We believe it is inappropriate for our governor to organize a religious event funded by a group known for its discriminatory stances.

As religious leaders, we commit to join with all Houstonians in working to make our city a better place. We will lead our communities in prayer, meditation and spiritual practice. We ask that Gov. Perry leave the ministry to us and refocus his energy on the work of governing our state.

Earth Needs: People Possessing Less, Working Less--and Birthing Less

Ten days ago New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had an excellent commentary spotlighting the views of Paul Gilding, an Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who has an insightful new book titled The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.

Gilding argues that we have reached a global population that is demanding the resources of 1.5 Earths--and that the longer we wait to tackle the problem, the more intractable will be the crises that we face. He sees the need for a growth model that will give people more time to enjoy living, but with fewer possessions. I wish I could share his optimism that "We may be slow, but we aren't stupid"--so that the size of the current problem and the obviousness of the antidote will cause global leaders to mobilize "as we do in war." We can certainly pray that Gilding is right.

Moreover, it seems even more obvious that 'possessing' fewer children is one of the critical things people will have to do to make his new model work. Friedman's column doesn't have Gilding saying much about that. But maybe his book does. Here are some excerpts from Friedman's column:

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornadoes plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once.

“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”

It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.”

But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.

“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

Elizabeth Warren: Why the "Big, Bad Banks" Are Very, Very Afraid--and Should Be

Houston Chronicle business columnist Loren Steffy posted an excellent analysis May 28th on why the "big, bad banks" have a bevy of reasons to be afraid of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard lawyer, University of Houston graduate and former University of Texas law professor who is charged with setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB) established by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.

A decade before the financial crisis, Warren grasped--and warned in scholarly papers and books--that banks are willing to bankrupt their customers for short-term profit and that their short-sighted greed would lead to economic collapse.

Steffy notes: "In 2006, two years before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, she warned that banks' attitudes had shifted so dramatically in the past 80 years that the greatest threat to the economy wasn't customers making runs on banks, but banks making 'a run on the customers.'

"Ruining customers through excessive fees and gimmicks, driving them into foreclosure, default and bankruptcy, would lead to the same economic collapse that bank runs did during the Great Depression, she warned."

Steffy spent the rest of his column mocking the efforts of the banks' Republican lapdogs in the current Congress to badger and embarrass Warren into weakening the CPFB:

The big banks are tough.

They can handle Dodd-Frank. They can handle being labeled a "vampire squid" in the pages of Rolling Stone. They can even outlast the threat of criminal prosecutions for taking the global economy to the brink of collapse.

But what scares them the most is Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who has spent years learning their secrets.

Last week, the banks' representatives in Congress grilled Warren over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a panel created in response to the financial crisis that might just give consumers a fighting chance against banks' exorbitant fees, debt spiral schemes and outright fraudulent lending practices.

Warren is a veteran of contentious congressional hearings, most recently ones she conducted as head of the oversight panel for the federal bank bailout. During those sessions, she squared off with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the government's handling of bailout funds and its claims that banks' balance sheets are sound.

So last week, when Warren didn't crumble under his badgering, Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican from Bank of America's home state of North Carolina, decided to try to humiliate her. Knowing she had scheduling conflicts that had already been discussed with committee staffers, he tried to delay the hearing and when she protested, he basically called her a liar.

The lack of decorum speaks to the desperation that the big banks feel over Warren and the CFPB, an agency that she is helping to establish and that would have broad powers to act on consumers' behalf.

In other words, the banks fear Warren because she knows their games and she has the data to expose them, and the prospect of Warren running the CFPB has fostered a growing desperation in the industry.

Last week, bereft of other arguments, the congressman from Bank of America resorted to name calling.

Elizabeth Warren isn't a liar. She's one of the few people in Washington with the courage to tell the truth.

And Today's Infallible Pronouncement Is . . . Whatever I Decide Is Infallible

Despite the efforts of two Vatican Councils to contain the ultramontanist view of papal infallibility, it continues to rear its ugly head in the official pronouncements of the current pontiff.

The ultramontanists--who held that the pope should be understood as "as if heaven were always open over his head and the light shone down upon him" and that opposition to him was the sin against the Holy Spirit--could conceive of nothing more beneficial than "an infallible statement at the breakfast table each morning with their copy of the London Times."

By insisting that infallibility could only be exercised ex cathedra, i.e. from the chair of Peter under the most stringent of conditions, the First Vatican Council tried to seriously restrict the ultramontanist view. The Second Vatican Council tried to dilute it still further, by recontextualizing papal infallibility alongside of the infallibility of the church's bishops when they taught together and the infallibility of the body of the faithful as a whole.

But since the papacy of John Paul II, guided intellectually by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who succeeded John Paul II as Benedict XVI, ultramontanism has been on the ascendant once again.

The latest manifestation was the claim, made by Benedict XVI in a recent letter dismissing an Australian bishop, that John Paul II “decided infallibly and irrevocably that the church has not the right to ordain women to the priesthood.”

On May 23, 2011, the National Catholic Reporter published two postings challenging the validity and accuracy of Benedict's claim--one an article quoting several theologians who said that Benedict was on very shaky ground, the other an editorial whose title speaks for itself: Ordination ban not infallibly taught.

The editorial states the case succinctly. John Paul II never said ex cathedra that the church had no right to ordain women. What he said was that such was the constant teaching of the church's bishops over several centuries. A few years later, Ratzinger (as the Vatican's chief enforcer of orthodoxy) issued a statement saying that because it was a constant teaching of the bishops, John Paul's edict had to be definitively held by all Catholics. Now, decades after that chain of events, Ratzinger as Pope Benedict translates his interpretation of John Paul's statement into an infallible pronouncement by John Paul! What is infallible is what I say is infallible. What could be more ultramontane?

Of course, what this illustrates above all is how slippery and untenable the notion of any infallibility really is. My dissertation shows on historical, linguistic and cosmological grounds why it is impossible for any church teaching to be irreformable. (Those who are interested in the documentation should click on the link to the right of these postings.) So the real problem is that when Vatican I, in partial deference to the ultramontanists, declared that the pope possesses "that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed His Church to be endowed," it gratuitously attributed infallibility to the will of Jesus Christ. What the bishops at Vatican I refused to consider is that Jesus Christ may not have willed his church or its leaders to be infallible at all--because such a wish contradicts the metaphysical structure of the universe and future actions by the living God.

So we can continue to fight about "creeping infallibility" and try to rein it in. But even if Benedict were to buy the argument that he has misrepresented what John Paul II said, all he would have to do to overcome the problem would be to mount the chair of Peter and declare ex cathedra what John Paul attributed (inaccurately) to the constant, universal teaching of the bishops.

What really needs to be addressed is how any kind of infallibility can be sustained--philosophically, linguistically or historically. The honest answer is that it cannot be sustained under any of those tests, and that continuing to adhere to a dishonest doctrine can only result in more dishonesty.

U.S. Clergy Sex-Abuse Report Ignores 'Arrogant Clericalism,' the Primary Cause

Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer and a long-time advocate of justice and compassion for clergy sex-abuse victims, says the recently released John Jay report on the causes of sex abuse by U.S. clergy misses the mark by blaming most of the abuse on the permissive sexual culture of the 1960s and 1970s--when several other reports have concluded, accurately, that the main causes were within the Catholic Church and that the pre-eminent one was 'arrogant clericalism."

Doyle posted his commentary on the website of the National Catholic Reporter May 21, 2011. Most of the critique follows.

In the last few days I have carefully read the entire 143-page John Jay report on the causes of clergy sex abuse in the United States and have again reviewed the executive summaries and conclusions of 17 of the 27 reports on clergy sexual abuse that have been published between 1989 and 2011.

Most of these are from official sources such as the U.S. grand juries, the three Irish reports (Ferns, Ryan, Murphy) or the two Canadian reports that resulted from the Mt. Cashel debacle of the eighties. Others are from Church sources such as the National Review Board Report of 2004, The Bernardin Report of 1992 or Church sponsored reports such as the Defenbaugh Report (Chicago, 2006) or the first John Jay Report from 2004. Most of the reports contained a section on causality. None of the reports said anything about the effect of the culture of the sixties or seventies as a factor of causality but every one of them pointed to the various kinds and levels of failure by the bishops as the essential cause of the phenomenon of sexual abuse of children and minors by clerics.

Some of the reports went into more detail about socio-cultural factors that had a causal effect but none of these factors included somehow shifting the blame to the “increased deviance of society during that time” as Karen Terry said in her statement released with the report. There was unanimity about the effect of culture, but it was not the culture outside the church but the culture within. Arthur Jones hit the nail squarely on the head in his NCR column on May 18 when he named arrogant clericalism as the culture that in many ways created the offending clerics and allowed the abuse to flourish.

There is a third source of information that perhaps provides the most accurate data on clergy sexual abuse in our era and that is the data obtained by victims’ attorneys in the six thousand plus civil and criminal cases from the U.S. alone. Add to this the information from similar cases in Canada, Ireland, Australia, the U.K. and several other European countries and you have a picture that is much different than that proposed in this latest John Jay report. The report refers to the sixties and seventies as the peak period with cases dwindling off after that period. This apparently fits in with what some of the cynics have called the “Woodstock Defense.”

Those who see the main conclusions from the Executive Summary as support for the bishops’ blame-shifting tactics are probably right. Yet these conclusions are only a part of the whole story and in some ways they are of minor relevance. The finding that the majority of cases occurred in the 1960s and 1970s can be quickly challenged. It is more accurate to say that the majority of cases reported in the post 2002 period involved abuse that took place in the period from the sixties to the eighties. Its way off base to assume that the majority of incidents of abuse happened during this period. Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald founded the Paraclete community in 1947 to provide help to priests with problems. From the beginning he was treating priests with psycho-sexual issues and in a letter to a bishop he said that 3 out of every 10 priests admitted were there because they had sexually molested minors.

Fr. Gerald wrote that letter in 1964. Unfortunately it is difficult if not impossible to do a study of abuse victims between the 30’s and the 50’s but Fr. Gerald’s information leaves no doubt that sexual abuse by priests was a significant phenomenon long before the free-wheeling 60’s and 70’s. The one constant that was present throughout the entire period from before the 60’s to the turn of the millennium has been the cover-up by the bishops and the disgraceful treatment of victims. The John Jay researchers were commissioned by the bishops to look into the reasons why priests molested and violated minors. They were not asked to figure out why this molestation and violation was allowed to happen. That would have been deadly for the bishops and they knew it.

Nevertheless the researchers could not avoid the blatant role played by the hierarchy. In this regard the report should not be written off as largely either irrelevant or enabling of the bishops’ never-ending campaign to avoid facing their responsibility square on. That’s why it’s important to read the whole report and not depend on the Executive Summary or Karen Terry’s statement or the statements of any of the bishops or church sponsored media outlets. Well into the body there is recognition of the real issues that have caused the anger and are the basis for the thousands of lawsuits and official reports. The section entitled “Mid-1990’s Diocesan Response” on pages 86-91contains a sobering antidote to the soft-peddling about priests who lost their way in the Woodstock Era. To their credit the research team included information critical of the bishops’ responses on several levels. A few quotes:

The failure of some diocesan leaders to take responsibility for the harms of the abuse by priests was egregious in some cases. (p. 89)

Parishioners were not told, or were misled about the reason for the abuser’s transfer (p. 89)

Diocesan leaders rarely provided information to local civil authorities and sometimes made concerted efforts to prevent reports of sexual abuse by priests from reaching law enforcement even before the statute of limitations expired. (p. 89)

Diocesan officials tried to keep their files devoid of incriminating evidence . (p. 89)

Diocesan leaders attempted to deflect personal liability for retaining abusers by relying on therapists’ recommendations or employing legalistic arguments about the status of priests. (p. 89)

Dioceses, the interviewee reported, would intimidate priests who brought charges against other priests; he reported that the law firm hired by the diocese wiretapped his phone and went through his trash. (p. 90).

The interviewee was a priest-victim who had come forward in 1991.

These citations do not represent exceptions. This was the operating procedure that was standard throughout the institutional Church until the public revelations that began in 1984 and reached a boiling point in 2002 caused widespread media attention, legal scrutiny and public outrage which in turn forced the bishops to change their tactics. The John Jay report refers to the organizational steps taken by the bishops in response to the “crisis” and points out that no other institution has undertaken a public study of sexual abuse and as a result there are no comparable data from other institutions (Executive Summary, p. 5).

The report gave short shrift to mandatory celibacy and the all-male environment of the clerical world. This will feed right into the defenses of those who try to claim that the problems are all from outside influences. Yet the influence of mandatory celibacy and the sub-culture of which it is an integral part play a major role in the socialization and maturation processes of the men who will eventually violate minors. The clerical culture should have been the subject of the 1.8 million dollar venture because if looked at closely and honestly it would have yielded information that not only provided believable reasons for the abuse nightmare but valuable though radical steps to take to avoid similar travesties in the future. That would have been much too dangerous for the hierarchical establishment though, because without doubt, it would point to needed fundamental changes.

There will be a variety of levels of both praise and criticism of this document. Among the more valuable will be the critical responses of other academic professionals, especially sociologists, which will help place the document in a more realistic and relevant light.

The report was released along with statements by Karen Terry, the lead investigator, Diane Knight, chair of the National Review Board and Blase Cupich, chair of the Bishop’s Committee for the Protection of Children. The most disturbing sentence of all of the documents presented with the report is from Karen Terry’s statement: “The problem of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests in the United States is largely historical, and the bulk of cases occurred decades ago.” I am quite certain that Dr. Terry had no idea of how offensive this statement is to the thousands of victims who were abused decades ago and who still live with the intense pain that never goes away. These people aren’t “historical” they are now. What happened to them years or decades ago is still real and still destructive in their lives.

While the bishops and their defenders bask in the illusion that this report validates their standard defenses and their self-affirmation for the procedures and policies they have created to try to heal the wound, the reality of the “phenomenon of sexual abuse” is something this report will not be able to answer. What is important is not why the thousands of clerics went off the tracks and raped and violated tens of thousands of innocent children.

What is important is what the institutional Church has done, or to be more precise, not done, to help heal the thousands of victims who still live in isolation and pain. More than anything else these men and women have had their very souls violated and in the words of some, murdered. Rather than go to such great lengths to try to exonerate themselves the bishops could have done what they should have done…..try, at least, to begin to understand the profound depth of the spiritual wounds inflicted on these many men and women, once innocent and trusting boys and girls. Abandon the insincere promises, the endless efforts to hide the secrets and the debasing legal strategies to pound the victims into submission. Once the official Church figures out how to authentically respond to its victims, and actually does it, then and only then will this abominable disgrace start to slowly move towards being historical.

Pope Fires Australian Bishop for 2006 Pastoral Letter on Priest Shortage

The National Catholic Reporter has posted an editorial angrily denouncing Pope Benedict XVI for firing the bishop of Toowoomba in Queensland, Australia, after local Catholic reactionaries questioned his loyalty to church teachings in an Advent 2006 pastoral letter. The letter said that his diocese might need to consider "other options" for dealing with its shrinking supply of priests than those so far endorsed officially by Rome.

NCR noted scathingly the pope's speed in firing a bishop for having thoughts, in contrast with his inability to fire any bishop who enabled and covered up priestly molestation of children. It shows, NCR said, where the pope's priorities lie. The editorial follows.

The Australian Catholic diocese of Toowoomba, encompassing more than 300,000 square miles, has just a relative handful of healthy priests to serve the church’s 35 parishes. So it came as no surprise to Toowoomba’s Catholics when the area’s bishop, William M. Morris, addressed the priest shortage in a candid but still cautious Advent 2006 pastoral letter.

“We do face an uncertain future with regard to the number of active priests in our diocese,” wrote Morris. “Other options,” he wrote, “may well” need be considered. These include:

1. “ordaining married, single or widowed men who are chosen and endorsed by their local parish community;
2. welcoming former priests, married or single, back to active ministry;
3. ordaining women, married or single;
4. recognizing Anglican, Lutheran and Uniting Church Orders.”

For these words, this week the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI has fired Morris. Eighteen years as bishop ended with the stroke of a papal pen. (Click here for original the news story about the Morris firing.)

Some obvious but necessary points need making:

First, it turns out it’s really not that difficult for the pope to give a bishop a pink slip. In the course of the quarter-century clergy sexual abuse cover-up, there’s been considerable hand wringing over just this question. Bishops don’t “work for” the pope, we have been told. Bishops are “fathers” to their flock – with all the unconditional love and commitment that entails – not employees subject to the whims, well-intentioned or otherwise, of the boss. Canonical procedures must be followed.

Apparently, that’s just so much hooey. If the pope and his advisers care deeply about an issue about which a bishop has publicly raised questions – such as women priests and optional celibacy – a way can be found to dismiss that bishop.

And – noteworthy because it goes to some underlying issues – a bishop who acts against church teaching and law related to sexually abusive priests apparently need fear no such reprisal.

Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali, for example, continues a life befitting a prince in splendorous surroundings, even as his flouting of church procedures (and perhaps civil law) resulted in nearly 30 diocesan priests facing administrative suspension and heat from local prosecutors.

And not to forget Cardinal Bernard Law, orchestrator of the Boston clergy abuse cover-up. His punishment? An extended Roman holiday and a healthy pension. Meanwhile, Morris gets the door.

The pope’s priorities are clear.

The pervasive intellectual chill in the church reaches beyond the towers of academia (note the recent chastisement of theologian St. Joseph Sr. Elizabeth Johnson) or to those who directly challenge the rules – Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois’ open support for women’s ordination a most recent case in point. (Bourgeois is facing excommunication for saying what he thinks on the subject.)

Now even those directly in the line of apostolic succession are forbidden to speak freely.

Note that Morris did not offer answers to the provocatively posed semi-questions on celibacy and ordination he raised that Advent. Instead, employing what one advocacy group terms the “progressive bishop’s style book,” he couched his concerns more obliquely. (No doubt to avoid Rome’s wrath. Lot of good that did him.)

Today, it seems, even such carefully couched queries are completely verboten; such so-called “open questions” (non-doctrinal in every sense of the word) such as the ordination of married men are grounds for dismissal. That the overwhelming majority of clergy (not to mention laypeople) think the failure to even consider options like married priests in the midst of a clergy shortage crisis goes beyond Dilbertesque mismanagement. It is, to employ the psychobabble of the era, completely dysfunctional.

As we prepare to celebrate the feast of the first pope next month, are we still permitted to remind church fathers that Peter was a married man? That this Holy Father was likely a human father? Or should Mrs. Peter and her progeny, like so many nettlesome Stalin-era apparatchiks, be airbrushed from history?

Because of Morris, we know that the dysfunction flows right from the top. Canon law may be more flexible than previously promoted, but a bishop’s dismissal cannot be shuffled to an underling, buried, as in Bourgeois’ case, in a bureaucratic chain of command. No, the canning of a bishop is a task only a pope can command.

And he has made his priorities quite clear.

While the reasons for Morris’ dismissal are relatively clear, the process remains an unholy mess, shrouded in secrecy.

Soon after Morris’ 2006 Advent pastoral was released, Benedict sent Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput to “investigate” the incident, which is a little like sending the fox to investigate the hens. Given his well-known views on the concerns raised by Morris (Chaput is more Catholic than the pope on these issues), we are skeptical that Toowoomba’s bishop got a fair hearing. There’s a relatively small number of right wing Catholics in the diocese (Morris and others call them the “Temple Police”) who have long been after the bishop. That Chaput gave them undue weight and deference seems more than plausible.

You know the type. In the U.S., they are the crowd that takes marching orders from The Wanderer, their time at Mass searching for a violation of a rubric rather than receiving whatever wisdom or grace might come their way. Then, having detected an “Alleluia” where an “Amen” was called for, they write letters to Vatican congregations, hoping for a sympathetic ear to their pathetic pleas.

Their Australian equivalents were, it appears, successful in transforming Morris’ molehill into a mountain.

But, we acknowledge, our skepticism is partly emotional, or perhaps ideological. We’re inclined to give Morris a break because we’re inclined to agree with him that the issues he raises require airing.

But, and here’s the point, we simply don’t know what Chaput found because no one’s talking. Not even Morris has received a copy of Chaput’s report (assuming something has been reduced to writing).

We presume, given the public nature of Morris’ offenses, that Chaput’s findings have something to do with the bishop brainstorming some remedies to the priest shortage in the face of the real crisis in his local church.

Did Chaput find something more dastardly, such as a bishop speaking like an adult to his church? Heaven forbid. We likely will never know. When NCR asked Chaput to respond to a series of questions regarding his apostolic visitation to Morris’ diocese, he declined to answer, explaining that “any apostolic visitation is governed by strict confidentiality. This is for the benefit of all parties involved.”

So are we to believe Morris has benefitted from being tossed out without ever having been allowed to defend himself against Chaput's findings, which were never shared with the Australian prelate? This is the kind of trial and judgement one more often associates with China or Iran. The Catholic church?

The real scandal to the faithful in this matter has nothing to do with the way Morris has conducted himself. It has everything to do with priorities and processes within our church today. It has much to do with the trampling of human rights and professed values of decency and charity by our church’s prelates, in this case including, sad to say, Benedict himself.

This is no way, shall we say, to set a Christian example – or manage the church.

In 2003, Fred Gluck, a former managing partner of McKinsey & Company who currently serves on the board of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, wrote a memo to church leaders. It’s crafted in managementese, but disregard the jargon for the moment and pay attention to the message.Wrote Gluck:

• “Your organization [the church] has no effective central point of leadership that can energize the necessary program change.



• “Your leadership is aging and also largely committed to the status quo or even the status ante.



• “Your tradition of hierarchy dominates most of your thinking about management.”



• “Coming to grips with this formidable set of challenges in an organization as historically successful as yours will be a daunting challenge, and can only be accomplished by a comprehensive program of change with strong leadership from the top,” he concluded.

No one in a position of authority paid any discernible attention to Gluck eight years ago. Sadly, we don’t expect that to change.

The pope has made his priorities all too clear.

Scripture Cannot Be a Guidebook for Sexual Morality, Boston Baptist Scholar Argues

Kudos to the Houston Chronicle for carrying a slightly abbreviated version of the following article in its weekly Belief section (print edition) today. It's by Cecile S. Holmes of Religion News Service. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a link to the article on the Chronicle's website. So here's the link to the complete article as posted yesterday by The Christian Century.

I want to learn more about the specific content of Jennifer Wright Knust's scriptural analysis, especially where it might dove-tail with the analysis of various church teachings on sexual morality discussed in Part III of my doctoral dissertation (see link at right).

Is the Bible good for your sex life, but bad for a sex ed class?

A Boston biblical scholar challenges widely held beliefs about the Bible and sex in her new book, arguing Scripture cannot and should not be a guidebook for sexual morality.

The Bible is a complex compendium of human experience including stories of love, prostitution, extramarital sex and more, Boston University religion professor Jennifer Wright Knust argues in "Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire."

Her book goes against most biblical conservatives' view that the Bible specifically prohibits sex outside of marriage and condemns homosexuality. From Genesis to the Gospels, Knust's research turns many traditional interpretations upside down.

She's also unafraid to get a little racy: a full-page ad for her book in the venerable ChristianCentury magazine asks, "Is it OK to pray for better orgasms?"

Exploring the love poetry of the Song of Songs, for example, she notes the text does not shrink from describing "sexual intimacy and climax." Its vivid and lurid details worried some church thinkers, including the ancient Christian theologian Origen.

Turning the Bible into a sexual rulebook doesn't work, Knust says, because it can be use to support an almost endless set of "interpretive agendas." Too often, she says, the holy book has been used to silence rebels, repress women and minorities, condemn homosexuals and even justify slavery.

Her intent, Knust says, is to move conversations about sex and the Bible past "polemical and shortsighted" claims using passages to support this or that particular viewpoint.

A good example is "the unfortunate history around biblical interpretation around the slavery issue," she says. "Slavery was natural and even believed to be divinely inspired by some" who used the Bible to support their outlook.

"When the abolitionists began to argue that the Bible was against slavery, they really tied themselves up in knots trying to cite certain passages in a certain way that supported their arguments." The same can be said for arguments over sexuality, she says.

Equally alarming to Knust are present-day situations in which political opponents on either side of an issue use biblical texts to underscore their outlook.

"I hate to see the Bible being employed as kind of a weapon against women, against girls, against lesbian, gay, and transgendered people," she said. "I've seen so many people injured by this kind of biblical interpretation. For example, I was talking with a really wonderful woman recently who was saying she wanted to get a divorce from her husband because he was physically abusive. The message she was getting from her church was that the Bible was against divorce and therefore she had no choice but to stay in the marriage."

As a child, Knust read Bible stories before school most weekday mornings. Seated on her family's big gold couch, she and her mother read from a two-volume illustrated book. Never once did her mother tell her it was "silly or bad" to ask questions about the stories.

Knust grew up to see the Bible as neither a collection of policy statements nor a treatise to enforce a particular point of view. Instead, the Bible offered "an invitation to think abut who God might be and what it means to be human."

Knust is an ordained minister in the American Baptist Churches USA, which generally has a more open approach to interpreting Scripture than the more conservative (and larger) Southern Baptist Convention. As a scholar, Knust is at ease talking about the Bible in both church and academic circles. And as an author, she writes with authority yet keeps the general reader in mind.

Her book demonstrates "the extraordinary range of scriptural attitudes toward the body," says fellow scholar Peter S. Hawkins, Yale University professor of religion and literature. It also shows "the impossibility of using any particular saying as warrant for a monolithic biblical teaching," he says.

Au Contraire, Mr. Ryan: You Can't End the Deficit Unless You Tax the Super Rich

I am grateful to National Catholic Reporter columnist Joe Feuerherd for his blog posting yesterday saying that the conservative blueprint for eliminating the federal deficit unveiled by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) "lacks seriousness," especially in comparison to the real budget balancing and actual budget surplus achieved by the Democratic Congress and the Clinton administration in the post-Reagan 1980s and 90s.

Feuerherd ticks off several reasons why Ryan's plan won't accomplish what it claims:

"Repeal of last year's health care reform bill...is simply not going to happen." Maybe. But the chances that Republicans will succeed in rendering it unfunded seem pretty high.

Seniors and the AARP will not buy Ryan's proposal, a reiteration of the one he and Alice Rivlin submitted to the bipartisan deficit commission, to change the single-payer Medicare system--"socialism that America's seniors have learned to love"--into a voucher system to help them buy private health insurance. I think Feuerherd is right about this.

Governors "already facing the most daunting budget challenges since the Great Depression, will fight the plan to convert Medicaid to a block grant." Unfortunately, several Republican governors were already cheering for block grants, even though their states would be getting less money than they do under the current matching-funds approach. What they want is relief from having to provide state funds as a condition of receiving the federal match.

But what I am especially grateful for is that Feuerherd pointed his readers to an excellent April 4 posting by Robert Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, who again supports what I have argued repeatedly here:

"The only way America can reduce the long-​term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich."

Reich lays out in painstaking, unassailable detail all the ugly reasons why this is the case. Those who are not super rich cannot afford more taxes. But those who are super rich have managed to pay higher taxes in the past and still remained ultra wealthy. It is a time for a country that desperately needs their financial support to stop coddling them and block their relentless drive to impoverish the rest of us.

The question is whether serious people, including President Obama, will pay attention--or whether they will continue to cringe in fear before the tea bagger know-nothings who dominate what currently passes for political dialog.

"A Truly Living Tradition...Must Always Be Recontextualized in the Present Moment"

The headline of this post could easily be lifted from my doctoral dissertation, The Creativity of Church Teaching: A Whiteheadian Alternative to the Notion of Development of Doctrine (1983). One of the central points argued there is that church teaching is a process and that the process moves forward by the continuous, endless interplay of scripture, tradition and contemporary experience.

In fact, however, the headline is a direct quotation from Dr. Richard Gaillardetz, a highly regarded Roman Catholic theologian, in his final Murray/Bacik lecture at the University of Toledo on January 27th, "The State of the Church, 2011." The link is to the website of the National Catholic Reporter, which published the complete lecture online, and the second half of it in its print edition of March 4, 2011. The lecture was his last in Toledo because starting this fall he begins his appointment to the Joseph Chair of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College.

For my money, the import of the Gaillardetz quotation is that it is part of his vision of how the exercise of authority in the church could be productively reformed. It comports very comfortably with the recontextualization model that my dissertation tried to articulate: the interplay of scripture and tradition with contemporary experience results in newer church teachings, which simultaneously take their place among the old and make the old teachings available in a novel context, thereby redefining the limits of the older teachings and redistributing the intensities among them.

The context of Gaillardetz vision is provided by the first half of his lecture, in which he traces the history of American Catholicism from the 19th century to the present, but with particular emphasis on the period since Vatican II. Agreeing with other commentators, he sees the tensions within the church as a struggle between those who remain inspired by the achievements of Vatican II, versus those who bought the very conservative, overly clerical interpretation of Vatican II which Pope John Paul II drummed into Catholics during his historically lengthy reign.

In this Gaillardetz explicitly distinguished his analysis from that of Catholic conservative George Weigel, in whose narrative "the church of the 70s and 80s was characterized by a flimsy and irresponsible application of conciliar teaching accompanied by an episcopal practice of cultural accommodation that needed to be corrected by John Paul II's insistence on fidelity to 'settled teaching' and his robust confrontation with the toxic cultural elements of our age." Instead, Gaillardetz argues that in the 70s and 80s "the bishops' conference was not concerned with cultural accommodation but with balanced critical engagement with a sensitivity to the need to moderate the authority claims of their policy judgments."

Gaillardetz suggests that reforming the exercise of authority in the church requires that pastoral leaders "recover the ancient conviction of St. Cyprian of Carthage that you cannot be a good leader and teacher unless your are a humble learner and listener." This would open the door to re-imagining ecclesial authority in three ways.

First, pastoral leaders would recognize that the legal or de jure authority of their offices is only a part of, and in fact quite secondary to, their larger leadership roll. They are called first of all to excel in the charism of leadership. And they are unlikely to achieve success with their de jure authority if they lack the charism of leadership. Thus the screening for candidates for priest and bishop should call forth those who actually possess that charism, rather than finding the most competent dogmatists and legalists.

Second, pastoral leaders need to see themselves not as museum curators controlling how dogmatic antiquities are exhibited, but more as gardeners, tending the living tradition of the church but also trying "to create the best possible conditions for healthy growth but [who] ultimately have to allow the growth process to act according to its own independent processes."

This is where Gaillardetz gets closest to my own thinking. And he can be about as scathing as I think he needs to be: "Too often a crass and antihistorical 'traditionalism' masquerades as a love of tradition. As Jaroslav Pelikan famously put it: 'Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.' If a religious tradition is a truly living tradition and not merely a preoccupation of those prone to nostalgia and love of antiquities, it must always be recontextualized in the present moment. With every new social context the tradition will have to, in some sense, assume a new form."

Third, Gaillardetz recommends his own version of Alfred North Whitehead's dictum, it is more important for a claim to be interesting that for it to be true. Church teaching advances, not by trying to resurrect "the juridical paradigm of command and obey" and not by insisting "on an uncritical and unswerving obedience to all church teachings," but by encouraging Catholics and Christians and other believers and even non-believers to wrestle with the tradition and at least take it seriously in their decision-making. This might not end in internal assent, but it at least allows the tradition to be entertained conscientiously by individuals and by a wide variety of groups. By contrast, a self-proclaimed dictatorship of religious absolutes will be dismissed out of hand.

My dissertation maintains that the only guarantors of the accuracy of church teachings are God and the future. God keeps luring forth new teachings and the future progressively sets them within new limits, provided by the context of newer teachings still. Gaillardetz ends with some sentences which resonate quite harmoniously with that view:

"The Venerable Bede once wrote: 'Every day the church gives birth to the church." Out of this present moment, a new church will doubtless be born. All Catholics should pray that we will be its humble and faithful midwives."

Time to Fire Philadelphia Cardinal Who Failed to Stop Priestly Sex Abuse

National Catholic Reporter blogger Michael Sean Winters makes a persuasive case that failure to remove 21 sexually abusive priests from active ministry in Philadelphia is way beyond embarrassing for the Catholic bishops of the United States. Illustrating that the bishops' 2002 norms on handling sexually abusive priests have failed, it constitutes dire episcopal malfeasance by Cardinal Justin Rigali--so serious that the Vatican should remove Rigali from office. Winters' posting follows:

It has been almost ten years since the clergy sex abuse scandal blew up in Boston in 2002. NCR readers, of course, had earlier been made aware of the issue but no one in the national media or in the country’s chanceries paid much attention before 2002.

That was when the revelations in Boston were so gruesome, with clear evidence that priests who had raped dozens of children were passed from parish to parish, always with the intent of keeping their horrific activities under wraps, that there was no possibility of containing the scandal.

The press and the people of God both demanded an accounting.

Cardinal Law was forced to resign, giving those clamoring for change a pound of hierarchic flesh, but the truth be told, Law did not do anything that other bishops and cardinals had not also done.

The centerpiece of the bishops’ response to the scandal was the adoption of the Dallas norms for the protection of children. The bishops of the United States essentially said to the Catholics of America: We recognize that we have a real problem.

Horrific attacks on children were called to our attention and we did not react with horror, we reacted with a defensive, self-protecting, overly legalistic response. Instead of caring for the child-victims, we cared more about the priest-predators, and more than either, we cared most about the Church’s and our own reputation. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

But the Dallas norms also did something else. They promised a change. Like the prodigal son, the bishops turned around from their former ways at Dallas. They adopted standards of reporting, guidelines for investigating, and independent review boards to look at the ways every diocese in America handled allegations of clergy sex abuse.

It was not only that they had repented, but they promised that the new measures would make any further cover-ups impossible. They got it, and even if they didn’t get it, the norms were in place to force them to confront this horrific sin and stain upon the life of the Church.

After Dallas, we had the most solemn pledge from our bishops that no priest against whom charges had been made would be in active ministry unless an investigation proved those charges to be groundless.

The announcement yesterday that 21 priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia were being placed on administrative leave demonstrates conclusively that the Dallas norms have failed. (Another five were either already retired or had left the archdiocese.)

Last Sunday, those 21 priests presided at Mass in their parishes. Last Sunday, those 21 priests were in active ministry. The charges against them had been examined before and...what? They were either wrongly exonerated or diocesan officials decided to look the other way.

And this is no ordinary diocese. It is led by a cardinal, indeed, by one of the most powerful cardinals in America given his active responsibilities as a member of the Congregation for Bishops. Over the past few years, the fastest way to become a bishop was to be a successful monsignor in Philadelphia.

But we now know the man at the helm was not only derelict in his duties, he completely misunderstood the nature and import of the promises made to the faithful at Dallas.

To be clear, the entire reputation of the entire American hierarchy, and that of the officials in the Vatican, is being weighed in the balance. There is nothing that has been done or said by SNAP, or by victims’ attorney Jeff Anderson, or by any of the Church’s critics that comes even close to the damage to the Church’s reputation inflicted by Cardinal Justin Rigali.

All of the warnings from SNAP about the lack of independence by the independent review boards have been confirmed. The Vatican must remove Cardinal Rigali and remove him now.

On a New Orleans radio show the other day, Archbishop Gregory Aymond said, “What has happened in Philadelphia, quite frankly, is embarrassing to us.”

That is putting it mildly, although Aymond gets credit for breaking the unwritten rule that no bishop criticizes a situation in another diocese. What has happened in Philadelphia eats at the very heart of the credibility of the American bishops as a whole.

If they can’t get the clergy sex abuse mess right, after all their protestations that they had taken steps to deal with the problem, and all their claims that the Catholic Church was now ahead of the curve on the issue, that our policies were such that the Catholic Church was the safest place for a child to be, nothing else matters.

The New Evangelization? Forget about it. Pro-life activities? Not a chance. Advocacy for the poor? It rings hollow. If the leaders of the Church cannot be trusted to keep their most solemn pledge to protect children, they cannot be trusted at all. If they fail to see this, their moral sensibility is not merely skewed, it is dead. It is not only that they cannot be trusted, it is that they should not be trusted.

I do not believe that Cardinal Rigali’s mishandling of this situation is the norm. I believe many bishops, even most bishops, have been faithful to the Dallas norms. But if those norms shifted the responsibility for the safety of children from the clergy to the bishops, and those norms have now been spectacularly breached, either the man who breached them must go or the norms will be seen to have no force.

The bishops and the Holy See can no longer place this scandal on the backs of the clergy. The issue is no longer pedophilia among the priests. The issue is episcopal governance.

St. Augustine taught us many centuries ago that evil is an absence. In Philadelphia, there has been a great evil, the absence of effective, Christian leadership. The culture of bowing and scraping, of “Yes, your Eminence” and “As you wish, your Eminence” has brought into question the credibility of the entire American hierarchy.

Cardinal Rigali has proved himself eminent in his arrogance, in his willingness to flout the standards of conduct to which he had pledged himself. For the good of the Church, no, for the survival of the Church, he must go and he must go in disgrace. No continued membership of the Congregation for Bishops. No sinecure. Let him go someplace quiet and repent of his sins.

Rigali’s brother bishops are said to be livid, as well they might be. But livid is an emotion, not an action, and the situation demands action.

Only the Holy See can remove a bishop from his diocese. The ball is now in the Vatican’s court. If they fail to move swiftly in Philadelphia, the people of God in Ireland and Germany and around the world will take note and the church will be seen to be unserious in its promises.

The day of reckoning in civil court will come, and the payouts to the victims of these priests in Philadelphia will be enormous. But, now, immediately, the Holy See must act to restore whatever credibility can still be salvaged.

The situation in Philadelphia is not, as one person put it, “Boston Reborn.” This is worse than Boston. After Dallas, there is no excuse.