Sonia Sotomayor

Female, Hispanic and a strong personal narrative - Obama's decision to nominate Sonia Sotomayor has certainly pressed all the right buttons in the liberal movement, politically speaking. What we don't have a clear picture of at the moment, however, is what impact her judicial philosophy might have on the future shape and direction of the Court.

The Liberal reaction has been fairly predictable but with Sotomayor nominated much of the spotlight will now fall on the GOP to see how they will play her nomination in the Senate.

The Conservative reaction on the blogs has been varied. Crunchy Con Rod Dreher declared that,

"Whatever there is to say about her judicial philosophy, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this moment, and what Judge Sotomayor said here. This is a great country."

David Frum over at New Majority was less than impressed however,

"What Obama did not do: pick the most learned or intelligent or wisest lawyer available to him. What he did do: pick the justice he deemed most likely to secure him a demographic constituency in 2008. This is pure Chicagoland politics, using one of the president's most important powers for the most narrow partisan purposes."

Mark Steyn at National Reviews the corner stated boldly that, "Justice Sotomayor will not be good news for the United States constitution."

However, John Mark Reynolds at the Scriptorium has offered Republicans some sound advice on how to play the Sotomayor nomination:

"Unless conservatives learn something new about her those who favor a less activist court might as well keep their powder dry for another fight.

Why?

First, conservatives have very limited power in Congress. This is not a fight conservatives can win unless something new comes out about Sonia Sotomayor.

Second, stopping Sonia Sotomayor would just lead to a different appointment that will probably be worse. While she was not really the choice of President George H.W. Bush, she was the choice of Senator Daniel Moynihan (in a deal with the first President Bush over New York appointments) and Moynihan was a reasonable person who was unpredictable in some of his left-of-center views.

Of all the appointments President Obama was likely to make (imagine the horrific governor of Michigan on the Court!), this one has the best chance to pull a reverse-Souter (a drift right) and present some pleasant surprises to conservatives. Of course, Sonia Sotomayor is likely going to be a conventional liberal, but she has staked out few opinions on hot-button social issues.

Third, Sonia Sotomayor is unlikely to change the intellectual drift of court opinions. She replaces Souter, a left-of-center mediocrity, and is, from all reports, smart, but not an ideological “difference maker” in her opinion writing. If Souter can sit on the Court, then why can’t Sonia Sotomayor?

Fourth, opposing the first Latina on the courts is bad politics with no possible gain.

Fifth, there are other big issues before Congress right now where conservatives can make a difference. Hugh Hewitt has pointed out medicine as one such area. Limited resources should be used in winnable fights."

Perhaps Obama has calculated that the GOP wouldn't be so stupid tactically and strategically as to oppose an Hispanic, Female nominee who most swing voters are probably going to support.

Frum and Steyn might be right in their analysis but it cannot form the basis of a GOP Senate strategy to deal with the nomination. They simply don't have the numbers.

I don't agree with her judicial philosophy but this is a good political move by Obama.

Community must always be real, not abstract

"We would all like to be part of a safe, prosperous and healthy community. A community where everyone has the right to the same opportunities, freedom and respect. Somewhere we can be proud of."

Who could disagree with the above statement? (Taken from the Department of Communities website) But what does it mean? The voices in the wilderness who spoke about such things as community, cohesion, social capital and fraternity have found, in the context of a severe global economic downturn, a new landscape for the expression of these ancient ideas.

But too often, we are guilty, of talking about community as if what it meant were self - evident. We engage in abstract philosophizing or abstract policy discussion without thinking about what community means in practice.

Over at Front Porch Republic, Patrick Deenan has republished his essay, which first appeared on his own blog about the rebirth of community. He points to an article in the Washington Post about the revival of community in Glenmont - a suburb of Washington DC, as a response to the global recession. We are told that, "as the neighbors got out of their homes and started talking to each other, the sense of connection grew. They learned one another's names and began to say hello at the nearby Giant."

This is real community, not abstract community.

Indeed, Deenan makes my point,

"What the community of Glenmont has discovered is something that was the norm in most towns, villages, cities and communities for most of human history: people gather together because we are partial and needy, and we can only achieve the good life together through the effort to achieve together and in concert a shared conception of the common good. Moreover, such common good is not the product of pronouncements of distant government or abstract philosophy, but derives from the lived experience, common concerns, shared history and interlinked destiny of those people who live together."

Beautiful words.

Since my wife and I moved to the Antrim area in 2007, we have been involved in a constant and ongoing search for practical, not abstract community. Not only are we not from the area but we knew virtually no - one before moving there. For us, we found belonging and roots in a faith community in our local Church of Ireland Parish, for us that worked - for others it won't. The question we ask ourselves, is how do we belong - not out of striving for acceptance, but out of a search to be part of something bigger. Joining a church, a gym and shopping locally have helped us to do that.

Burke is not my favourite conservative, never mind my favourite political theorist but he got it right when he said,

“What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation, I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics.”

To paraphrase him in this context, what is the use of discussing our abstract sense of community, when the question is how we build it - in that discussion, give me my neighbour not the professor of metaphysics.

The stubborn death of neo - liberalism? The rediscovery of authentic conservatism?

I'm experiencing my first recession. It's painful. No - one said it would be like this. Just been through a remortgage - even more pain. The impact of this economic crisis is felt everywhere.

Much ink has been spilled, some of it informed, some of it sensationalist, on the reasons for the current predicament we all find ourselves in. Human nature instinctively looks for someone to blame. It couldn't be our culture of consumption? Could it? Someone else is responsible. Banks? Property developers? Credit Card companies? Deregulated markets? Neo - liberalism?

This once dominant doctrine is under sustained economic, political and philosophical attack from the left, right and others in between.

We are often told that traditional ways of looking at politics are redundant - caught in limbo somewhere between Fukuyama's end of history and Huntington's clash of civilizations but in the words of Danny Kruger, "the terms stubbornly persist". Indeed it is both the right and the left who are the intellectual wolves fighting over the wounded carcase of neo liberalism

From the right, Philip Blond has articulated a robust critique of the effects of neo - liberalism not just in economic terms but its wider effects on the polis generally - in particular the loss of that ever elusive phrase 'community', which neo - liberalism has presided over.

For anyone wanting a fuller exposition of Blond's position, you could no worse than visit his essay in February's prospect magazine. Blond joins a noble of tradition of philosophers such as Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre who start from the premise that liberalism's encouragement of excessive individualism must be challenged. Anyone, really interested should listen to this BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast on Blond last weekend.

Before Easter, two intellectual giants from the left in Britain Eric Hobsbawm and Martin Jacques declared the end of ideology (neo liberal that was).

Writing in the New Statesman, Jacques said "the end of the neoliberal era is surely cause for some celebration." He did go onto admit that such a world view cannot disappear over night - especially when the neo liberal paradigm is so pervasive in contemporary political discourse.

Hobsbawm, in many ways, makes the same point as Jacques but his tone is more balanced. As he argues "we don't yet know how grave and lasting the consequences of the present world crisis will be, but they certainly mark the end of the sort of free-market capitalism that captured the world and its governments in the years since Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan."

A new consensus is slowly emerging that taking neo - liberalism to its logical conclusion in the affairs of the state, the market and society might not be a good thing after all.

The unravelling of neo - liberalism, of course, won't happen overnight. Indeed, we should be sceptical of those who use this economic crisis to speculate on its immanent demise.

I take this position, not because I extol the virtues of neo - liberalism or its more refined cousin, classical liberalism but because there is something profoundly unconservative about such an endeavour.

Implicit in much of the criticism directed at neo - liberalism is a wider critique of conservatism - after all wasn't it the governing philosophy of 'conservatives' such as Thatcher and Regan who took neo liberal ideas and popularised them at the ballot box?

These oblique criticisms, however, fail to recognise two important points: (1) An authentic conservative tradition, true to its intellectual roots has little to do with neo - liberalism - economically or philosophically. (2) The problem with the neo - liberal paradigm is about much more than the economy.

The growth of the neo - liberal paradigm has come at the expense of authentic conservatism. The terms neo - liberal and Conservative over the past 25 years have been used interchangeably. In people's minds it is hard to decouple conservatism from neo - liberalism.

Thankfully, conservatism is a rich tradition - with deep intellectual and philosophical roots capable of bringing it beyond the false connection with neo - liberalism. Indeed, the challenge presented by the stubborn demise of neo - liberalism is an opportunity for the rediscovery of authentic conservatism.

As a 'letter from a traditional conservative' put it recently on Front Porch Republic:

"Traditional conservatism steps radically outside this theory. It rejects its fundamentals and its consequences. Man is intrinsically a social or political animal; his individual identity is formed by, tied to, and fulfilled only in, community. To speak, therefore, of the “interests of the individual” as if they stood in tension with those of “State” or “society” literally makes no sense; it creates separate entities and interests to describe what in fact is something organic. Community is organic because it has distinguishable parts, but none of those parts is in any meaningful sense separable from the whole (it would no longer be itself were it not part of something bigger than itself). It is organic also in that all of its parts have not only a present unity, but they exist for the same end: the good life for man, who is himself capable of seeking the Good. Thus, the first argument of this position is to reject the “going” anthropology of the last two-and-a-quarter centuries."

Two meditations for Easter Saturday

From the confessions of St Augustine:

"And he departed from our sight that we might return to our heart, and there find Him. For He departed, and behold, He is here."

From Bishop NT Wright:

"What God did for Jesus that explosive morning is what He intends to do for the whole creation."

"You get the impression he’d hammer in the nails if they asked him"

"But the carpenter's son from Nazareth - this man stumbling to this death - he is remembered. And of all the things we remember about his life and teaching, it is this event - his dying - that we remember most...He is face to face now with our barbarity. He carries the cross, and he treads a path of suffering, step by painful step, that is the suffering of the world."

These are the words of the Bishop of Reading, Stephen Cottrell from his small book of meditations for holy week 'The things he carried'.

As more than a via suggested Holy week is above all else a narrative, not a time for abstract propositions.

As a narrative the story of Jesus's last days on earth are a powerful and compelling tale of betrayal, despair, murder and injustice but above all else it is a story of hope and joy.

The Archbishop of York, writing in today's Telegraph, said that we look to the hope embodied in Christ's triumph over death on the cross as "our God-given opportunity to reawaken the best in us."

Despite all the misery of the Last Supper, the arrest in Gethsemane, the trial, the flogging and the cross, that is not where the story ends. On Easter Sunday we celebrate victory on the cross - the centrepiece of the Christian faith. Indeed as the Anglican theologian John Stott writes, "there is no authentic Christian faith or life unless the cross is at the centre."

Reflecting on the Cross, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams has said that, "when Jesus faces the final, uncompromising, violent rejection of the religious and political powers of his day, we can say that he embodies not only the purposes and possibilities of God but the effects of the self - destructiveness of human beings"

In the story of Holy Week, we see no - one as self - destructive than Judas who betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss and yet it is the other self destructive character in the story, the Apostle Peter who perhaps we have more to learn from.

Peter or the 'fellow on the boat' as Times columnist Gerard Baker called him plays a central, but maybe often overlooked role, in the Holy Week narrative:

"It was Peter who, on that Thursday and Friday, most captured the weakness, the sheer hopeless irresoluteness of humanity — fiercely promising one minute to fight and die with Jesus, impetuously slashing off the ear of the High Priest’s servant in the garden, bravely ready to take on all comers. And then, within hours, the same, shivering, cowering, feeble Peter frantically denying to everyone his very association with the criminal. You get the impression he’d hammer in the nails if they asked him. "

Some theologians would argue that Mark's Gospel puts Christ's suffering on the cross at the centre of his narrative. Mark also contains more references to the Apostle Peter than any other Gospel narrative. It is thought Peter was a close friend of Mark and so his Gospel tells us much about the bumbling, irreverend and often outspoken Apostle

But, just as our hope lies in the cross, it also lies in the lessons of Peter's restoration. Peter walked with Jesus, witnessed His miracles and was part of His inner circle and yet still he denied the Lord, just as He predicted. As the cock crowed he remembered what Christ had foretold and he wept bitterly.

But Peter tasted God's grace and we learn that, despite the depths our bodies and souls descend too, the cross offers a way back.

In his own words,

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.”

Show Me the way - obedience

From Friday of the Fourth Week in Lent,

"Fellowship with Jesus Christ is not a commitment to suffer as much as possible, but a commitment to listen with him to God's love without fear...

"He came to include us in his divine obedience. He wanted to lead us to the Father so that we could enjoy the same intimacy he did. When we come to recognise that in and through Jesus we are called to be daughters and sons of God and to listen to him, our loving Father, with total trust and surrender, we will also see that we are invited to be no less compassionate than Jesus himself. When obedience becomes our first and only concern, then we too can move into the world with compassion and feel the suffering of the world so deeply that through our compassion we can give new life to others."

Henri Nouwen, 'Show me the way', pp 84 - 85

Show Me the Way - a change of heart

Today's reading from Henri Nouwen's 'Show me the way': Saturday of the third week in lent,

"Living a spiritual life requires a change of heart, a conversion. Such a conversion may be marked by a sudden inner change, or it can take place through a long, quiet process of transformation...

Our conflicts and pains, our tasks and promises, our families and friends, our activities and projects, our hopes and aspirations, no longer appear to us as a fatiguing variety of things which we can barely keep together, but rather as affirmations and revelalations of the new life of the Spirit in us...

This does not mean that the spriritual life makes things easier or takes the struggles and pains away. The lives of Jesus' disciples clearly show that suffering does not diminish because of conversion. Sometimes it even becomes more intense. But our attention is no longer directed to the 'more or less'. What matter is to listen attentively to the Spirit and to go obediently where we are being led, whether to a joyful or a painful place."