Latest news with #KarenSwallowPrior
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Protecting Life Means Protecting Death
From the Dispatch Faith on The Dispatch Hi and welcome back to Dispatch Faith. Multiple U.S. states have considered or are considering medical assistance in dying (MAiD) laws this year, while a yearslong debate over physician-assisted suicide is playing out in the United Kingdom too. For today's newsletter, Dispatch Contributing Writer Karen Swallow Prior focuses on one group's criticism of the UK MAiD proposal—that of advocates for women who have been victims of domestic abuse and violence. That group's particular vulnerabilities can serve as a 'magnifying glass' for what makes everyone who faces end-of-life decisions particularly vulnerable and what the death with dignity movement misses, Prior argues. The dying are uniquely vulnerable. This is true even in the best of circumstances. Last year when my mother was dying—we didn't know she was dying, but we knew something was terribly wrong—there was a moment one afternoon when she lay atop her bed at home, too weak to get up. I came into the room and sat down at her side. 'I don't want to live like this,' she said, looking up at me. Her eyes were full of fear, her voice full of quiet anger. 'I know, Mom,' I said. Then, after a sliver of a second and with as much lightness as I could muster in the heaviness of the moment, I added, 'But I'm not going to put a pillow over your face, you know!' That made my mother almost-laugh, and we smiled at one another. 'I know,' she replied. I knew that wasn't what she was asking of me. At least, I was pretty sure. My family didn't know what lay ahead for her or for us. But this was settled: Whatever was ahead, we were committed—by our Christian beliefs and our belief in one another—to facing it together. Not all who to whom death is drawing near have such a strong system of support. And for those in circumstances lacking such safety nets, laws allowing medical assistance in dying or euthanasia add layer upon layer of vulnerability. This is why proposed legislation in the United Kingdom that would give the terminally ill the right to choose to end their own life is receiving quite a bit of pushback on multiple fronts. Some disability rights advocates argue that assisted dying devalues the lives of the disabled, perpetuates systemic inequalities, and relies on all-too-fallible medical predictions and decisions. Others think more resources and attention should be given to palliative care. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, speaking against the legislation last year, drew from his own experience with the death of his infant daughter in voicing his opposition. 'The experience of sitting with a fatally ill baby girl did not convince me of the case for assisted dying; it convinced me of the value and imperative of good end-of-life care,' he wrote. One particular group, advocates for victims of domestic violence and abuse, have also voiced unique criticisms. An open letter released in April by the British think tank Theos in response to the Terminally Ill Adults Bill warns that the proposed law lacks safeguards necessary to protect those at risk of being coerced into ending their lives, particularly the poor and the disabled. Those at higher risk of being pressured into suicide also include women who are members of highly controlling religious communities who are susceptible to having their religious beliefs weaponized against them so abusively that death seems like the best way out. Representing women from a range of faith traditions and backgrounds, the letter's signatories hold varying views on medical assistance in dying but share a common commitment to protecting women and girls from domestic violence and abuse. Citing statistics around suicide, domestic violence, and spiritual abuse, the letter cautions that abuse victims are at greater risk of being pressured into assisted death. The group also cites an alarming new report showing an increased rate of suicide by victims of domestic abuse. And because poverty and other inequalities increase the risk of violence being committed against women and girls, they write, these populations are more at risk for receiving lower-quality health care in the first place, then being coerced into opting for aid in dying when faced with terminal illness. 'If assisted dying is seen as a response to alleviate suffering, without addressing the underlying structural issues that make life difficult and safeguard against harm,' the group argues, 'it could put undue pressure on vulnerable women to choose death over inadequate care.' Moreover, the letter points out that it is those with the most power who tend to make these decisions for those with less power: Much of the debate inside and outside parliament has been conducted by those empowered to speak of the importance of personal choice, without consideration of those who struggle to be heard in the public square. It is the voices of the unheard, ignored, and marginalised that we are compelled by our faith traditions and scriptures to listen and draw attention to, in the pursuit of good law–making for the common good – legislation that considers and protects the most vulnerable, not just those who speak loudest. To protect the lives of the most marginalized and powerless, the law must protect their deaths, too. Abuse victims who are terminally ill or disabled must be protected from any pressures by their partners to choose a hastened death rather than continued care. Those who are poor or otherwise marginalized need more support to receive medical care that could improve their quality of lives rather than the efficiency offered by self-imposed death. In thinking through these arguments on behalf of the most vulnerable among us and considering their further implications, there is something to consider for all of us who are facing end-of-life decisions for ourselves or our loved ones. Indeed, the acuteness of the situation for victims of abuse who are choosing whether to live or die offers a magnifying glass for all of us who will someday face difficult end-of-life decisions. The end of life makes us all vulnerable: the powerful as well as the powerless, the majority as well as the minority, the centered and voiced as well as the marginalized and silenced. Laws that legalize euthanasia—no matter how merciful they purport to be—simply fail inherently to protect human life at one of its most vulnerable stages. They harm—lethally and irreversibly—rather than help. They eliminate the sufferer, not the suffering. Painted in the most idealized strokes, medical aid in dying (which is becoming legal in more and more countries across the globe and is currently under consideration in New York) allows a terminally ill person to choose the time and manner of death—supposedly—freely, without pain, and without external pressures. Such an ideal does not really exist, however. To be dying is to be constrained. It is to experience pain, and in so doing even cause others pain. Even seemingly self-imposed pressures are contingent upon one's relationships with others and circumstances in the world and therefore come, at least in part, from outside ourselves. No man (or woman) is an island, as John Donne reminds us. By expanding safety nets, options for palliative care, and support for carers, we can greatly expand the opportunities for the dying to exert agency and make choices freely that stop short of the intentional taking of life. It is human to fear and to seek to avoid death. It is human to fear and to seek to avoid suffering and pain. It is human to fear and to seek to avoid causing those we love to suffer. And yet, it is the essence of our shared humanity to bear these burdens with one another. Not one of us bid ourselves to come into the world. Not one of us needs to or ought to bid ourselves or another out of it. It is easier to end a life than it is to care for a life nearing the end. 'The compassion of the wicked is cruel,' as Proverbs 12:10 (CEB) says. This is why great care must be taken, not only for the more obviously vulnerable, but for all of us who will someday approach the end of life. To care for the dying undeniably requires inconvenience, self-sacrifice, unfathomable heartache, and more. To offer these gifts to those who suffer is a basic tenet of the Christian faith, one woven throughout scripture, church practice, and the testimony of history. Some of the earliest hospitals were established by the early church, a legacy that has continued into modern times with the rise of the nursing profession, the modern hospice movement, and the ongoing leadership of Christian medical facilities today. We are to care for the vulnerable, which includes the aliens in the land, the widows, the orphans, the unborn, the prisoners, the sick, and the dying. And perhaps there is no one more vulnerable than the dying. What lies ahead for the dying—as well as the living—is certain pain and suffering, helplessness and dependency, fear and uncertainty. It is not possible to live without suffering. But thanks to palliative and hospice care, choosing death isn't the only means of ending the pain of living. In a world of limited time and resources, all the energies that go into legalizing medical aid in dying are ultimately diverting resources that could improve and expand end-of-life care. Those last weeks, days, and hours of my mother's life (and her dying) were ones nothing had prepared us for. But the human body and modern medicine are miraculous things. The body knows what to do to ease the pain. We learned what to do, too, because of the trained professionals who supported and helped us. Love, too, is miraculous. The more my mother's body shut down and the pain medication gave her relief, the more the suffering was ours. We gladly bore it for this woman we loved and who loved us. The law, of course, cannot force us to love. But it can help us to live free from harm at human hands. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, a case that will decide whether a virtual Catholic school in Oklahoma can become the country's first religious charter school. For our website, Contributing Writer Andy Smarick broke down how oral arguments went. State charter school laws have been around for more than 30 years. They enable nonprofits to operate public schools free of many rules that apply to the traditional government-run public schools. That list can include policies related to calendars and schedules, teacher pay and certification, curriculum, teaching methods, and more. From the very beginning, all charters have been secular. That's been required by state laws. But a Catholic-affiliated applicant in Oklahoma put those provisions to the test, essentially arguing that it is anti-religious discrimination for a state government to allow any nonprofit other than faith-based groups to operate a charter consistent with its beliefs. The likeliest battle line, I thought, would be whether charters are 'state actors' (quasi-governmental entities). If so, they must be secular. But if they're private nonprofits partnering with the government, they might be allowed to be faith-based. But if the five more conservative justices (Justice Barrett is not participating in this case) quickly revealed that they believe charters are not state actors, I suspected the battle line would shift to possibly reviving some kind of 'status-use' distinction. Oklahoma and the progressive justices would, I thought, tacitly concede that faith-based groups can operate charters while arguing that states had a right—to keep church and government separate—to prohibit those charters from using state money to do a variety of religious things. The third possibility would come about, I thought, if the conservative justices made clear that religious groups must be allowed to run charters consistent with their faiths' teachings. In this case, Oklahoma and the progressive justices would retreat for a final standoff, trying to preserve some ability of states to limit the scope of faith-based chartering. This might include narrowing the ministerial exception (the legal doctrine protecting religious entities' key staffing decisions from government interference), ensuring state nondiscrimination statutes apply to religious charters, and/or preventing a maximalist view on faith-based groups' participation in government programs. Read the whole thing. Nearly a century ago, famed preacher Aime Semple McPherson walked out of a hotel room barefoot and disappeared. Five weeks later, she returned with a story that became as controversial as it was fantastical. For The New Yorker, Casey Cep recounts this story and McPherson's legacy as she reviews a new biography of McPherson written by Claire Hoffman. 'It was May 18, 1926, and the thirty-five-year-old McPherson was known to critics and champions alike as 'God's Best Publicity Agent.' McPherson rose to prominence during the golden age of P.R., when Ivy Lee was talking up the Rockefellers and the Democratic Party and Edward Bernays was selling everything from Dixie cups to the First World War. In keeping with the times, McPherson used mass media to make herself into a master of soul craft and self-promotion, laying hands on thousands of sick parishioners and preaching practically seven days a week to thousands more until her death, in 1944. Her sermons featured elaborate sets and musical numbers, borrowed from the nearby and nascent film industry, including boxing rings in which she knocked out the Devil and a motorcycle that she wheeled across a stage with sirens wailing while calling herself one of the Lord's patrolmen. 'Half your success is due to your magnetic appeal,' Charlie Chaplin once told her, 'half due to the props and lights.' More recognizable than the Pope, McPherson was often besieged by followers, but the ocean offered an escape from their attention, and she liked going to the beach to read Scripture and to write, and then to take a break from both to swim. That May afternoon, she chose a title for her sermon, 'Light & Darkness,' and wrote for almost an hour before wading into the water. Jonah was swallowed by a whale on his way to Tarshish, and St. Paul was shipwrecked off the coast of Malta, but no one knows what happened to McPherson after she wrote the following in her notebook: 'It had been that way since the beginning. The glint of the sun, gleaming light, on the tops, and shadow, darkness in the troughs. Ah, light and darkness all over the earth, everywhere.' More than a month later, and two days after her own memorial service, the lady preacher reappeared, still barefoot but now wandering around a Mexican desert, hundreds of miles away.' On Friday, President Donald Trump announced he would seek to end Harvard University's tax-exempt status because of what he sees as the institution's antisemitism, which is sure to trigger a legal battle. Last month for Religion News Service, as talk of such a move heated up, Jack Jenkins and Bob Smietana reported on the federal government revoking the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in the 1970s over the evangelical school's prohibition of interracial marriage among students. Such a move against Harvard may be inherently political, but it and the wider legal debate are also shot through with religion. 'Some evangelical Christians worry Trump's attempt to revoke Harvard's tax exemption could backfire. Conservatives have long voiced concerns that Christian groups that oppose marriage for same-sex couples and LGBTQ+ rights on religious grounds might find their tax exemptions at risk. That worry was prompted by the 2015 Obergefell decision, in which the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. During oral arguments for that case, then-U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said faith groups who opposed could find their tax exemptions at risk if it were legalized. Chief Justice John Roberts cited those remarks in his dissent. 'Unfortunately,' he wrote, 'people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.' Those concerns led Christian groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Family Association to oppose the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, a federal law that recognized same-sex marriages. When that law was signed by President Joe Biden, Alliance Defending Freedom said it 'intentionally threatened free speech and religious liberty.' [David] French said the IRS' Bob Jones ruling to punish nonprofits over LGBTQ+ rights has long been the Christian right's 'nightmare scenario.' He warned that if Harvard loses its tax exemption, that could open the door for the Christian right's nightmare to become reality.'
Yahoo
23-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The False Battle Between Justice and Mercy
From the Dispatch Faith on The Dispatch Hi and happy Sunday. Paramount in so many conversations about religion's role in the public square these days seem to be understandings of both justice and mercy—and how to balance them. Take immigration, understandings of human sexuality, or the use of the death penalty—just to name a few. Author Karen Swallow Prior argues this week that the West's rich history of virtue ethics can inform those conversations and understand the proper way to employ some virtues—seemingly in tension—at the same time. A minister begs a leader to show mercy toward outcasts and is accused of having 'toxic empathy.' A politician argues that rightly ordered love demands we take care of those closest to us before giving to those further away, and the pope himself offers a correction. A failure of justice leads to the murder of an innocent young woman, and neither justice nor all the compassion in the world can bring her back. If you were to base your understanding of mercy and justice on reading recent headlines, you'd get the distinct impression that they are two teams competing in a cosmic Super Bowl and the rest of the world is just placing bets, with one winner taking all. But the countervailing demands of the virtues of justice and mercy do not present a zero-sum game. Justice without mercy is not just. Mercy apart from justice is not merciful. If we understand the nature of virtue in general—particularly by considering the long tradition of virtue ethics set out by Aristotle, Aquinas, and modern philosophers such as Josef Pieper and Alasdair MacIntyre—we can better understand how these particular virtues are mutually dependent, and how we can achieve one only when we achieve the other. A virtue consists of the proper balance of a particular quality between its excess and its deficiency, and a vice is too much or too little of an otherwise good quality or characteristic. Too much confidence, for example, is the vice of vanity. Too little is the vice of timidity. Healthy pride embraces the human dignity that belongs to us all. Lack of effort is sloth, and too much effort is frenzy, but moderation between these two extremes achieves the virtue of diligence. A lack of courage is the vice of cowardice. An excess of the same quality becomes brazenness or recklessness. Doing harm through recklessness, even in the process of attempting to do good, fails the test of courage. Similarly, justice and mercy require avoiding both excess and deficiency. Mercy means compassion. It moderates between the excess of permissiveness or over-indulgence and the deficiency of apathy or lack of empathy. Mercy gives us what we don't deserve, but only true justice can tell us what that is. Justice means fairness. It moderates between selflessness (having less than one's share) and selfishness (having more than one's share). Where justice is deficient, it enables more harm. Where it is excessive, it becomes the vice of vengeance or injustice. Since justice means that everyone gets what is due to them, desiring it requires actually caring about others. And caring requires the virtues of compassion and empathy. Thomas Aquinas observes that excessive punishment, an outward act, actually derives from inward the vice of cruelty—in other words, lack of mercy or empathy. Thus the two virtues of mercy and justice—and their corresponding vices—are inextricably connected. They are like two sides of the same coin. They naturally balance one another. Moreover, virtue ethics teaches that no good quality remains virtuous if it is severed from the other virtues. Diligence is a vice when done in service of evil rather than good. Loyalty toward an evildoer is not a virtue; it is the vice of complicity. So, too, both justice and mercy must be oriented toward the good in order to be virtuous. The fulfillment of this delicate proportion of justice and mercy is a central teaching of Christianity. The Bible is replete with admonitions to pursue justice and to be compassionate and merciful. Religious leaders confronted Christ for breaking the religious laws in acting mercifully. But Christ explained to his followers that he came not to abolish those laws but rather to fulfill them, which required both justice and mercy. Justice was fulfilled when, as Christians believe, he offered his life as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of others—he paid the penalty that was due. But that in itself was merciful to those who believe in his sacrifice. This teaching fully embraces the tension between justice and mercy yet perfectly balances the two. It makes sense then that so many Christians have been vocal and invested in public conversations and political policies connected to the virtues of justice and mercy. But of course, justice and mercy are demands made by all religions, placed on all people and all societies. Simply knowing proper definitions won't in itself help us to achieve these virtues, of course. But knowing what they are—and what they are not—orients us in the right direction. Nor do definitions of the virtues of justice and mercy offer exact formulas for what is fair or merciful in any given situation. Determining that is the real work. And it is that work—that practice, that habit, that way of being—that cultivates virtue in each of us as individuals and in our society. We will never achieve perfect virtue, but the more we pursue and practice it, the more virtuous we become. Shakespeare grappled with these questions brilliantly in The Merchant of Venice, a play that demonstrates just how difficult it can be to address the claims of both. Near the end, Portia has disguised herself as a man to pose as a lawyer in court to argue on behalf of the defendant who will lose his life if the plaintiff, Shylock, collects what is legally due him. In arguing for mercy rather than justice, Portia offers a memorable soliloquy about mercy: The quality of mercy is not strained;It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavenUpon the place beneath. It is twice blest;It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomesThe throned monarch better than his crown:His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,The attribute to awe and majesty,Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;But mercy is above this sceptred sway;It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,It is an attribute to God himself;And earthly power doth then show likest God'sWhen mercy seasons justice. Portia links mercy with the power and character of God and suggests that when the balance between mercy and justice must tip, it is more godly to lean that balance toward mercy. Because it is the villain in the play who demands justice, it would be easy to misread the play as offering a simple, black and white picture of justice vs. mercy. But Shakespeare presents a much more complicated—and realistic—portrayal of the competing and complex demands of justice and mercy. Shylock, an outcast Jew, is the first in the play to have been the recipient of cruel injustice. And the 'mercy' Shylock receives for his own treachery—not only forgiveness but a forced conversion at the hands of a Christian state—is an imperfect form of mercy in the end. But it is one of Shakespeare's gifts to us to offer dramas that help us cultivate virtue by seeing truths his characters couldn't see. As Shakespeare poignantly shows, it is exceedingly hard to get this balance right. But he also shows—in depicting the long-term persecution of Jewish people in Europe, personified by the suffering Shylock—that failing to get it right has ripple effects for generation upon generation. Because neither true justice nor compassionate mercy can exist apart from the other, we cannot really talk about one apart from the other. Nor, perhaps, should we listen to those who call for one and not the other. We may disagree on what constitutes justice or mercy in any situation, but we ought to be able to agree that we cannot achieve one without the other. Earlier this week we published reporting from Senior Editor John McCormack on the Trump administration's newfound antipathy toward religious groups, at least those working in the realm of immigration. As John reports, the first Trump administration and congressional Republicans previously seemed supportive of the same groups and initiatives they've recently come to vilify. 'Indeed, the federal government has been asking religious nonprofits to care for unaccompanied minors for decades. The Trafficking Protection Victims Act, passed in 2000 and reauthorized in 2008, establishes special protections for minors who arrive from countries that do not share a border with the United States. Under that U.S. law, minors from Canada and Mexico may be quickly deported if there are no signs of trafficking, but the removal process for minors from other countries goes through a lengthier adjudication. Sometimes the government relies on nonprofits to shelter, feed, and educate those unaccompanied minors, or help reunite them with their family members. If the children are allowed to stay, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act requires home studies to ensure those minors are going to a safe place, and the government often relies on religious nonprofits to do that vetting. During Trump's first term, his administration gave hundreds of millions of dollars to secular and religious groups to care for unaccompanied minors, and Melania Trump visited one of the Lutheran charities caring for unaccompanied minors in 2018. When the arrival of unaccompanied minors first reached crisis levels during the second term of the Obama administration, Republicans viewed religious nonprofits as part of the solution to the humanitarian crisis. 'I want to thank Catholic Charities that are working to care for these children and care for these families,' Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz said during a 2014 visit to McAllen, Texas.' John caught up with Cruz recently and tried repeatedly to press him on his views of such groups now. 'Asked a second time if he now thinks charities are a cause of the border crisis, Cruz said before stepping into an elevator: 'There are more than a few NGOs that were actively complicit in the invasion of our Southern border, and it is why it is Democrat policy to funnel billions to the NGOs where in many ways Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were the last mile of the human trafficking network that resulted in such egregious abuses.'' Part of the zeitgeist for some religious writers on the right has included a questioning of the so-called 'postwar consensus' that has shaped moral and political commitments in the West since World War II—such as the concept of universal human rights. Critics of the postwar consensus, such as First Things editor R.R. Reno, have argued that its commitment to ideal such as secularism undermines the whole project. But in the journal Ad Fontes, John Ehrett argues that much of the postwar consensus—while by no means perfect—sprang from Christian thought seeking to correct errors made by Christians rationalizing the horrors of fascist regimes. He does so by mining both contemporary arguments against the postwar consensus and writings of German Christians seeking to make their peace with the Third Reich: 'To connect the dots: on this account, God's will becomes coterminous with the will of the political collective, with the collective's striving toward a common end. That is a theological problem. It is a problem which follows from confusing, tacitly, two different conceptions of that which is divine: transcendent authority, and the bond by which the collective coheres. The deep theological ambivalence of this latter—the-sacred-as-collective-effervescence—is something which the 'postwar consensus' rightly reacted against at the level of principle. In Christian terms, absolutizing the latter sacred can (and did) lead to idolatry: divinizing, as the 'Will of God,' a particular constellation of historically contingent Völker, and denying any possibility of exit or critique. This was not the faith for all once delivered to the saints. Construing Nazism (and the German Christian movement, and its sympathizers) as a specifically theological problem can help explain why, in the postwar period, so many players understood the emergence of the postwar consensus in specifically Christian theological terms—as a theological correction of deficient theology. It may come as a surprise to those highly invested in denouncing the 'postwar consensus' today, but as legal historian Samuel Moyn has recently argued in great detail, the regime of 'human rights' so basic to this postwar consensus was, in fact, elaborated as an integrally Christian project—as a response to the way in which Nazi 'theology' went awry.' Reports of young people turning to older Christian traditions such as Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism have been part of the recent milieu, but for Religion News Service, Richa Karmarkar writes that similar occurrences are happening with Hinduism. 'Amid confusing times, says devotional musician Gaura Vani, Generations Z and X have found a way to articulate their complicated emotions and feelings through the call-and-response style of kirtans, the devotional songs commonly associated with the Hare Krishna faith. 'This is almost a miraculous thing to say, but in this world of social media and phone addiction and all that, the kids in the Krishna community are doing the craziest thing: Without anyone telling them to, they will find a weekend where everyone's free, they will dress to the nines together, and find a temple or a space where they will do kirtans for, like, 10 hours straight,' he told RNS. 'It's crazy. It makes no sense in the modern world, but they're doing it.'' For The Pillar, Filipe D'Avillez profiles a Christian tattoo shop, Razzouk, that has operated in Jerusalem for hundreds of years in a story that underscores the complexities for so many communities in the Holy Land. 'Razzouk's roots date back to 1300, in Egypt, and is still in the hands of the same Coptic Orthodox family whose ancestors came on pilgrimage to the Holy City, centuries ago. These days, the family's patriarch is Anton Razzouk. At 84, Anton no longer tattoos, but the family art continues with his son Wassim and his nephew Chris. … 'We are Copts, originally from Egypt, and our ancestors who first came to Palestine came on pilgrimage. At that time, one would come for a long time, perhaps even a year, so they had to work while they were here. My forefathers knew how to make tattoos,' he tells me, in reference to the longstanding tradition that Copts have of tattooing small crosses on their wrists. Razzouk is — and has been for centuries — the preferred destination for pilgrims who want a permanent reminder of their trip to Jerusalem.' The tattoos his family creates are 'keys to heaven,' Anton told D'Avillez. ''What do I mean by a key to heaven? When you have a Christian tattoo, let's say a Jerusalem cross or a Coptic cross on your palm or on your wrist, this can be a sign that reminds you not to sin. Suppose you have an enemy and you want to slap him, or somebody disturbs your peace, and you want to hit him, or defend yourself. Seeing your Cross is a reminder of the commandments.''
