Charles E. Curran, Catholic Moral Theology in the United States: A History.

    

- Well written, comprehensive and authoritative survey of moral theology trends in the US and all the theologians who have made an impact on developments over the last sixty or so years. The US is the epicentre of contemporary moral theology at present, given its wide network of Catholic universities.

- Curran himself was a key player over this period and is highly regarded as a progressive voice. As to be expected the Vatican disallowed him in 1986 from teaching theology at any Catholic institution. He is currently 86 years old.                     

- The bibliography Curran provides at the end of the book is extensive. It’s a rich resource to guide further reading. 

- No analysis or opinions on gay marriage, which is disappointing. But the book was published in 2011, which preceded the US Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage, and the Irish and Australian referendums which saw a considerable majority of the populations vote in favour of it. 


- Here's my personal view:



- The current official position of the  Catholic Church on homosexuality/gay marriage simply has to be seriously reformed. To continue, in this day and age, to believe homosexuality is an 'ontological disorder' is profoundly ignorant and disrespectful. 

- LGBTIQ+ persons must be treasured and celebrated as an integral part of the rich spectrum of human nature and gender. 

- Gay marriages must also be celebrated, just as male/female marriages are, in the liturgy. With equal status. 

- Marriages are a covenant of love and commitment between two human persons, witnessed by the faithful. In Catholic tradition, a sacrament.

- Such sacred unions potentially create families as nurturing homes for children, whether by pregnancy, including artificial insemination, or adoption.

- The Church should also welcome the LGBTIQ+ community into the ministry, as ordained priests and religious. 

Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth.

- Most academics couldn't write clear English if their lives depended on it. A few can though. Paul Krugman has long set the standard, and now noted US economist Stephanie Kelton has joined him. It's been a long time since I've read a technical non-fiction title as exceptionally well written as this one. The prose is lucid and the organisation of the ideas highly logical. 

- Modern Monetary Theory is revolutionising the way we understand how economies actually work, but only if those economies have their own currency untethered to any other. Countries like the US, the UK, Japan, China, Australia and Canada belong in that group.

- These economies need not be fearful of debt or deficits under any circumstances. They can create or print or 'borrow' funds as needed without limits or obligations.    

- This book is as much about fiscal policy as it is about monetary policy. Kelton outlines in detail a revolutionary tax/expenditure dynamic that completely turns upside down the way these fundamental elements of economic reality are usually understood by conservative and progressive governments world wide. Our traditional obsession with deficits and surpluses, with taxing and spending, with austerity and extravagance, 'are all wrong'.  

- According to MMT fiscal surpluses suck money out of the economy, and fiscal deficits do the opposite. While ever there is unemployment or underemployment, even at relatively low levels, governments need to run deficits to stimulate growth and productivity by boosting demand. Deficit spending re-energises the economy to the maximum extent necessary, before inflation kicks in.

- The national debt poses no financial burden whatsoever, provided inflation is under control. And that will be the case while ever there are resources in the economy, such as labour, skills and services, that are under-utilised. 

- ‘MMT fights involuntary unemployment by eliminating it.’ There is no excuse whatsoever for unemployment.

- Each chapter addresses a range of current economic policy 'myths'. The chapter on inflation is excellent, as are the chapters on the role of governments in managing the economy, the notion of 'crowding out' the private sector, trade, social security, and whether future generations will suffer. The notion that our children will have to 'pay for it' is absurd.

- Kelton repeats over and over again ‘The national debt poses no financial burden whatsoever’. The sustainability of the debt is dependent on inflation remaining under control. Nothing else. Profoundly wrong thinking is expertly and passionately demolished. 

- A key idea of MMT proponents is that the government should directly fund employment for those without work. This ‘job guarantee’ will automatically kick in when anybody can't find work for any reason. The work would be productive and needed, and suitable to the worker's skill and experience level.  

- Is all this divorced from the real world? Are Kelton and her MMT colleagues indulging in an unforgivable naïvety? 

- No. 

Kate Grenville, A Room Made of Leaves

              

- In short two or three page chapters, Elizabeth Macarthur, the unhappy wife of wool baron John Macarthur, describes in a memoir her life and experiences in the early colony of NSW. ‘What I am writing here are the pungent true words I was never able to write’. 

- The memoir, recently discovered, is a fictitious construction by Grenville, but it is truly a magnificent and enlightening creation. Elizabeth is presented as an honest, insightful, highly intelligent and powerful woman. Her husband was a brutal, cold, unlovable man, who treated her as an insignificant chattel. He was a fundamentally weak and insipid, full of pretence and 'flummery', and subject to 'lunatic compulsion'. She sees right through him and masterfully manipulates him.

- Her words are eminently quotable. Here a few samples: 

To stay always within the bounds laid down is to remain a child. 
A flame had burned in me, to be bigger than those bounds. That should be no crime. 

...he was a husband of mechanical courtesies...he was blind to me as a person.

Mr Macarthur was an importunate husband with an excess of animal spirits...I cried out against it, there could be no mistaking the word NO!

Grandiose schemes were as necessary to Mr Macarthur as food and drink.

He had to transmute suffering into a blade, to punish the world that made him suffer. 

A man certain of his ground does not need to construct a sentence like a Turk’s head knot. 

She’s very astute in her assessments of people. In distilled, simple prose, she describes the life and conditions of the earliest years of Sydney and the officers, marines and convicts trying to make a liveable place out of it. It was a harsh and brutal environment and crime and corruption defined it. But Elizabeth learns quickly how to navigate the social order and seek harmony. ‘...discourtesy, in this too-small society, would have had consequences'.

- After the early years of struggle, including giving birth to seven children, two of whom tragically die, her longing to return to Devon starts to fade. John Macarthur is granted land in Parramatta, and his intention is to raise beef. But the ‘attacks and depredations’ by the natives led by Pemulwuy were constant. 

- Elizabeth begins to realise that another way to describe what is going on is to call it ‘defending a homeland.’ She shows empathy towards the natives and respects their insight and subtle humour. 'It was a shadow at the edge of my life, the consciousness that I was on land that other people knew was theirs’.

- A recluse Mr Dawes teaches her the basics of astronomy and botany, and introduces her to an Indigenous family. She relishes her growing enlightenment, becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the original inhabitants of the land and their languages and customs. And for a brief time she enjoys a warm and loving sexual relationship with Mr Dawes. 

- Cruelly, her oldest child Edward is sent by her husband to England for his schooling. She’s not even allowed to say goodbye. ‘I had allowed a terrible wrong to be done.’

- John Macarthur in the meantime allows his infantile obsessions to get the better of him and  is committed to two terms in jail in England - twelve years in all. Elizabeth successfully develops and grows the Merino wool business that history has credited to her failure of a husband. And it's his monuments that are littered throughout Australia.

Now, after so many years here, I know better than ever what has been done to the Gadigal, the Wangal, the Cameraygal, the Burramattagal, and all the others. Not just the turning-off from their lands and the damage to their old ways. Not just the cruelties inflicted. Not just the deaths. Behind all that is another, fundamental violence: the replacement of a true history by a false one.