ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Teach-Ins: Then & Now

2012-05-30T06:23:42-07:00

Ann Lockwood Romasco, Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis, and others at the Highlander Folk School [Photo: Highlander Folk School Collection, Emory University] Heretofore, I knew of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins largely by way of his tempestuous debate several decades ago with Gananath Obeyesekere. I was pleased to learn of his intellectual engagement and activism during the Vietnam War in David L. Schalk’s War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (2005 ed.) (which, in turn, cites a 1970 article from the New York Review of Books). In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. And it was Sahlins who invented the “teach-in as a method of conveying information about the Vietnam War and related issues.” The Wikipedia entry on “teach-in” does not mention this, although it does state, sans any citation, that a “teach-in at the...

Addendum to Vietnam War Bibliography

2012-05-28T00:01:28-07:00

Appearances to the contrary, and while not unrelated, this is not my Memorial Day post (for which, see below). I simply wanted to add some essential titles to the Vietnam War bibliography posted at Ratio Juris on May 18. Appy, Christian G. Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Bodard, Lucien. The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1967. Capps, Walter. The Unfinished War: Vietnam and the American Conscience. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2nd ed., 1990. Egendorf, Arthur. Healing from the War: Trauma and Transformation after Vietnam. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 1986. Falk, Richard A., ed. The Vietnam War and International Law, 4 Vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (sponsored by the American Society of International Law), 1968-1976. Fall, Bernard B. Street Without Joy: From the Indo-China War to the War in Viet-Nam. Harrison, PA: Stackpole...

Memorial Day: Arlington West in Santa Barbara, California

2012-05-27T19:42:59-07:00

This is a picture from Arlington West, in my hometown of Santa Barbara, California. This project is now under the auspices of the Santa Barbara chapter of Veterans for Peace. The introduction that follows is from the website of the Santa Barbara group. “The first Sunday of November 2003, a group of local activists erected 340 wooden crosses on the beach immediately west of Stearns Wharf, marking the death of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq. Outraged that the Bush administration had barred U.S. media from photographing returning coffins containing the war dead from Iraq, founder Stephen Sherrill, along with a small group of local activists, erected the first installation of what has become widely known as the Arlington West memorial. ‘I didn’t feel that the American people were mindful of the terrible price we were paying – and were about to pay – for the invasion and occupation of...

When Innocent Clients Plead Guilty

2012-05-25T13:11:07-07:00

At the Legal Ethics Forum (LEF), John Steele has a post on the Brian Banks story in the news the last couple of days. First, we’ll introduce the basics of the story, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times (May 25, 2012). What follows are the comments to date at LEF, where John asks, “The focus should be on Brian Banks, but I can’t help but wonder: what is it like for a lawyer to advise an innocent client to plead guilty?” “A Ten-Year Nightmare [for] Rape Conviction is Over” Brian Banks spent years in prison, branded a rapist. Then his accuser provided the key to getting his conviction dismissed. By Ashley Powers “Brian Banks logged onto Facebook last year, and a new friend request startled him. It was the woman who, nearly a decade ago, accused him of rape when they were both students at Long Beach Poly High School....

The Catholic Republican Elephant

2012-05-24T17:55:23-07:00

As the Catholic Church clamps down on Nuns and Girl Scouts (among others) while accenting its conservative credentials and becoming an arm of the Republican Party, there is increasing criticism. For example, Jamie Manson in the National Catholic Reporter (here) is moving from its place as a Church in the modern world to that of a sect. Unlike a Church, “A sect, ‘tends to demand more conformity in its members, is exclusive in its membership, distances itself from the concerns of the larger society, and also claims to be the bearer of religious truth.’ Sects are ‘exclusivist, inward looking, and in some tension with larger culture.’Examples of modern-day sects in our country would be the Amish or Hasidic Jews.” He continues: “The hierarchy is so caught up in ideology, it has forgotten that there are complex, human stories behind issues like contraception, women's ordination and same-sex marriage. It is no...

Wrongful Conviction(s)

2012-05-21T08:27:28-07:00

Yesterday we watched the 2010 film Conviction, based on a true story, with Hilary Swank as Betty Anne Waters and Sam Rockwell as her brother “Kenny” Waters. This called to mind several similar films I’ve recently seen, including The Hurricane (1999), and American Violet (2008). Conviction is an extremely powerful film, so much so I had it fresh on my mind upon awakening. My morning ritual includes reading the paper (the actual paper, not the cyberspace version) and, lo and behold, after scanning the baseball scores (the Dodgers won again!), I landed on an article about a new national database tracking wrongful convictions since 1989. I suppose this falls under the rubric of serendipity or synchronicity. I’ve pasted the entire article below, followed by a list of titles that help us begin to make sense of the disturbing number of (both documented and unknown) wrongful convictions. In other words, these...

File Under: “Unintentional but Beneficial By-Product Effects,” Or, “The Resuscitation of Prefigurative Politics” *

2012-05-20T08:55:00-07:00

[Arizmendi Bakery is a worker-owned cooperative specializing in morning pastries, artisan breads and gourmet pizza. They are located in the Inner Sunset, just two blocks from Golden Gate Park.] In today’s Los Angeles Times, Neal Gabler has an inspirational and incisive piece on the “do-it-yourself” approach of the youth today to progressive political change, an approach which has as its axiomatic premise the belief that the social transformation one wants to see take place, begins with oneself, in concert with others, such that the “means-ends” formulas typically intrinsic to conventional power politics are in some sense transcended. The aim, with Gandhi, is to “be the change we want to see in the world,” or with the anarchist tradition (at least its more philosophically-inclined and politically astute component), to build the new world within the shell of the existing—and decaying—order. As Richard D. Sonn writes in his introduction to the doctrine...

Bishops Investigate the Girl Scouts: Really?

2012-05-18T19:15:09-07:00

And here I thought it was a joke. Or a reductio. But no, the Bishops are investigating the Girl Scouts for their association with allegedly sinful organizations like Doctors Without Borders. The Bishops have mastered the art of looking foolish. Joan Chittister nicely puts this in its pathological perspective here. After tracing the Church's obsession with authority and control, the staggering decline in Church membership, and the leadership's willingness to preside over a purer, smaller, more obedient Church, Chittister suggests an alternative: "Maybe we ought to try the Gospel again, the one that understands people who lift their work animals out of a ditch on the sabbath, or get caught in adultery, or are shunned because of their leprosy, or decide that circumcision is only one culture's sign of commitment, not theirs, or are the wrong sex, as was the Woman at the Well, to preach the Word of God....

The Vietnam War: A Rather Select & Idiosyncratic Bibliography

2012-05-18T12:29:01-07:00

My bibliography for the Vietnam War is available for download at the Ratio Juris blog. I Returned to My Native Village O my native land—emerald in the shade of the coconut trees, I return today! A dream I never dared hope. So many of the ones I love have fallen on this earth. But here, everything still stood. I could see again the faces I loved. I looked, I stared, as if I were lost. My hands trembled, their hands clasped in mine. They burned with all the longing, the loss. I saw again—the old stretch of road I walked across in dreams. I could hear the distant cracking of hammocks. And the singing—“Ah!…how much I love, how much I miss” The white trang flowers. Like the purity and the steadfastness of your love. Like the carmine brilliance of your heart. The small river where I swam as a child...

Sincerity, Commerce, and Politics

2012-05-16T05:59:20-07:00

On an international flight last weekend, United Airlines offered me a choice of lasagna or chicken. I took the lasagna. Imagine my surprise when the plastic wrapper covering the lasagna revealed that the pasta was “homemade.” I suppose some passengers did not focus and got a warmer feeling (starting from a low point to begin with – we are talking about airline food) about the pasta they were about to consume. But for those who focused, what were we to think? Clearly, this mass produced food is not homemade. The airline knows it and we know it and the airline knows we know it. How are we to respect the communications of an airline that does not respect us? United Airlines is not special in this respect though this is a particularly blatant example of the commercial culture of manipulation in which we are embedded. Moreover, this culture carries over...

Five Reasons Drone Assassinations Are Illegal

2012-05-15T05:46:27-07:00

By Bill Quigley. Bill is a human rights lawyer who teaches law at Loyola University New Orleans and works with the Center for Constitutional Rights. A longer version of this article with sources is available. You can contact Bill at quigley77@gmail.com US civilian and military employees regularly target and fire lethal unmanned drone guided missiles at people across the world. Thousands of people have been assassinated. Hundreds of those killed were civilians. Some of those killed were rescuers and mourners. These killings would be criminal acts if they occurred inside the US. Does it make legal sense that these killings would be legal outside the US? Some Facts about Drone Assassinations The US has used drones to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But the government routinely refuses to provide any official information on local reports of civilian deaths or the identities of most of...

Palestinian Hunger Strike

2012-05-14T07:30:56-07:00

I suppose it’s to be expected, but no less lamented, that mass media coverage of a Palestinian hunger strike will be poor or nonexistent in this country in comparison, say, with the frenzied coverage of a terrorist act committed by a Palestinian or group of Palestinians. In fact, this is nothing new, as nonviolent Palestinian struggles generally have received scant coverage in the media, reminding me of the following from Todd Gitlin’s seminal study, The Whole World is Watching: mass media in the making & unmaking of the new left (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980): “[In our day,] …political movements feel called upon to rely on large-scale communications in order to matter, to say who they are and what they intend to publics they want to sway; but in the process they become ‘newsworthy’ only by submitting to the implicit rules of newsmaking, by conforming to journalistic notions...

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.: Violence & Nonviolence

2012-05-11T07:09:58-07:00

John M. Kang has published an intriguing article, “Martin V. Malcolm: Democracy, Nonviolence, Manhood,” (West Virginia Law Review, Vol. 114, No. 937, 2012) which examines the role of socio-cultural circumstances and conditions of one’s birth and upbringing (psychologically and phenomenologically speaking, as ‘personal life experiences’) as important factors in why leaders (and by implication, those they lead) choose violence or nonviolence as alternative means to accomplish their socio-economic and political ends. Kang contends that “By sifting through their words [i.e., those of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.], we may gain a better idea about why someone would choose nonviolence over violence (or vice versa). Through them, we also may understand better how personal life experiences, rather than formal study in ethics or philosophy, are responsible for shaping a person’s conception of democracy.” In short, “Malcolm’s defense of violence in furtherance of political action was, like King’s creed of...

Ministers Who Lose Their Faith

2012-05-08T11:26:19-07:00

The largest religious denomination in the U.S. is Roman Cathoilc, assuming you disaggregate the Protestants. The second largest denomination is former Catholics. For those Catholics leaving their religious home is no small deal. But NPR focuses on soul searching of even larger worldly consequence. Suppose you are a minister and after a long bout with doubt, you realize that you have lost your faith, that you no longer believe in God. Along the way who do you talk to? What happens when you reveal your loss of faith? For a moving account of one such minister and the difficulty in determining how many such ministers there are, see http://www.npr.org/2012/05/07/152197685/when-religious-leaders-lose-their-faith.

One More on Connolly: Agonistic Respect and Militant Pluralism

2012-05-02T05:54:25-07:00

Thank you, Taryn and Steve, for your kind words in comments to my previous post. As for favorite Connolly reads, maybe its like arguing over barbecue. We could argue over Kansas City versus East Carolina sauces, but why fight over multiple riches? Chapter Four of Identity/Difference is a marvelous read, especially as Connolly cautions against the cruel drive to attribute responsibility for trauma which Christians, among others, are often tempted towards (Augustine, for example, suggesting that the women raped during the sack of Rome may have been too haughty and thus were being 'humbled' by God!) What really won me over to Connolly was his remarkable response to a critique of his reading of Augustine by the feminist theologian Kathleen Roberts Skerrett. Rather than repeat the obvious criticisms of Augustine, which it is all too easy to do, (see above), he acknowledged his own tendency to over-react to Augustine, as...

Let's Blow Up a Bridge?

2012-05-02T05:25:15-07:00

No doubt, violence can play a role in revolutionary change. And, I would guess that confrontational politics whether violent or non-violent is ordinarily an indispensable part of such change. But I doubt that violence can be effective in bringing about such change in the absence of massive support. Without that support, violence is typically counterproductive. I would guess that the violence of the Black Panther Party (as opposed to other of its activities) and the Weathermen did more to hurt the cause of change than to help it. It is in that context that I read this morning’s news that allegedly five clueless youngsters were arrested for plotting to blow up an Ohio bridge in an effort to advance the cause of the Occupy movement which they thought is not violent enough. Societies for the most part rely on younger people to participate in demonstrations. Too often, however, when revolutionary...

Theology, Law, and Social Change: a response to Steve on William Connolly's recent Cornell talk

2012-05-01T18:37:23-07:00

I too was at the recent lecture here at Cornell by William Connolly, of whose writing I have long been an admirer. Connolly's talk of cowboy capitalism's imbrication with right-wing evangelicalism and the need for an alliance of secular-religious left bodies ought to be required reading for those seeking social change. For those on the religious left working in secular settings like Cornell's, his book, Why I am Not a Secularist is also invaluable. Connolly is worried about cynicism on the left, and seeks allies among theologians like Catherine Keller and complexity scientists like Stuart Kauffman, who like him, are seeking to cultivate what he calls 'little spaces of enchantment'. At the lecture, one questioner suggested, in a somewhat bemused tone, that at times Connolly, an avowed atheist, sounded almost mystical! Indeed, and for those of us schooled in the thought of Foucault, Derrida, Cixous, Peguy, as well as in...

Sundry Reflections & Proposals in Celebration of International Workers’ Day (May Day)

2012-05-01T00:00:10-07:00

“Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.”—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011) “In the Marxist tradition, self-realisation is the full and free actualisation and externalisation of the powers and the abilities of the individual.”—Jon Elster “Under suitable conditions, both [political democracy and economic democracy] can be arenas for joint self-realisation.”—Jon Elster The Capabilities Approach to Human Development “Considering the various areas of human life in which people move and act, this approach to social justice asks, What does a life worthy of human dignity require? At a bare minimum, an ample threshold level of ten Central Capabilities is required. Given a widely shared understanding of the task of government (namely, that government has the job of making people able to pursue a dignified and minimally flourishing life), it follows that a decent political order...

The Possibility of Revolutionary Change

2012-04-29T07:11:45-07:00

William Connolly, a distinguished Professor of Political Theory from Johns Hopkins spoke at Cornell on Friday. He has previously deplored the power of what he calls the evangelical neoliberal resonance machine on our politics. And he has hoped for a militant democracy in response. One way of looking at his talk would be that it answered the question whether a militant democracy (Connolly hopes for mass strikes around the world) is even possible. To put it in my words, Connolly elegantly argued that the historical political process is contingent, and frequently unpredictable, but bounded. He pointed to similar aspects in the physical sciences, and argued that human scientists have much to learn from the discussions of unpredictability and creativity in the physical sciences. It is not surprising that our “scientists” and seers did not predict, as Connolly argues, “The rebellions in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the...

Epistemology and the Necessity of Intellectual Virtues

2012-04-26T07:03:10-07:00

In the main, I’ve always found works in epistemology to be fairly and predictably insular in scope, abstract and idealized in a pernicious, not productive way, and thus often irrelevant (or at least not obviously germane) to other fields of philosophy, let alone the social sciences.* Ongoing debates in the field are typically structured among and between “externalists,” “internalists,” “reliabilists,” “coherentists,” and “foundationalists” (well, in truth, there’s very few of those left), perhaps with a few “Wittgensteinians” trying to be heard above the din. Of course there are some exceptions: for example (and my favorites), several works by Nicholas Rescher (as ‘pragmatic idealism’ or ‘cognitive pragmatism’), and a couple of books by Michael Williams, as well one by Meredith Williams which, while strictly speaking perhaps best classified within the “philosophy of mind,” is fraught with epistemological or epistemic implications: Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Towards a Social Conception of Mind (1999)....