Margaret A. Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics

 

Put simply, this is a magnificent book. It's taken me a long time to get around to reading it. However over the last six months or so I have been determined to educate myself on current Catholic moral theology, just to see whether sensible and intelligent voices were addressing the major issues we all face each and every day in our contemporary personal, social and political lives. 

Each of the half a dozen or so books I've read all referred to Farley's Just Love as a classic in the field.

She is a world renowned and highly respected ethicist and theologian who taught at Yale for many years. This book, published in 2006, is her major and groundbreaking work.

She is a very liberal and progressive voice across the whole spectrum of moral theological issues, and is the polar opposite of the reigning conservative, reactionary, stale, and frustratingly stupid official positions of the Catholic Church hierarchy. So angry were the Vatican officials they condemned the book and banned it from being used as a text or reference in Catholic universities across the world. That of course made it a best seller!

The book explores marriage, divorce and re-marriage, same sex relationships, gay marriage, and other important contemporary issues, and all from a perspective of love, desire, human nature and frailty, and the stresses and strains of living a full life in today's world. 

Her perspective is anthropological and in clear, non-academic prose she digs deep into the debates from four overarching perspectives : scripture, tradition, secular traditions of knowledge (science), and contemporary lived experience. She never references papal encyclicals or hierarchical determinations or documents at all. She is way beyond that, and her thinking is in no way constrained by it. That's so refreshing.

I highly recommend this liberating tome. Every educated Catholic should read it.

Zephyr Teachout, Break ‘Em Up

 

- Zephyr Teachout teaches law at Fordham University, and is a political activist who campaigned for New York attorney general in 2018. She was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, the New York Times, and many others. Sanders wrote the Introduction to this just released book.

- The book is well written and an unapologetic polemic against the enormous power of mega-corporations in the US and globally, particularly Facebook, Amazon and Google.  

- She is persuasive at times, although far too frequently way over the top. Her summaries of how Big Tech operates are too negative for my liking. The obviously bad and even appalling aspects of their operations are outlined in detail but they are all she focuses on. The sweeping demolition is her shtick. The positives never get a look in. To me Google Search, for example, is one of the greatest inventions of the last 100 years. And, personally, I don't mind being 'targeted' for advertising. We're being bombarded anyway, and have been all our lives.

- She also displays a fair bit of commercial naïveté. Amazon taking 35% commission from third party traders she castigates as 'excessive'. As any retailer in the physical world would know it certainly isn’t. As for its favouring suppliers who also advertise on its site - welcome to the real world. She also completely misrepresents Amazon’s legitimate pushback a few years ago against publishers Hachette and Macmillan over their anti-consumer ebook pricing controls. 

- Teachout also makes some outrageous claims: Zuckerberg still holds more power over the 2020 elections than any person in the country...Bezos is still consolidating power over all consumer goods sales in the country while dreaming of life in space...Google has a poisonous business model...It's a privately owned Big Brother...Facebook and Google have deliberately, radically poisoned the way we read and the way we relate to one another...they are Mafia-like rivals to public government.

- The book is far more persuasive when she delves into the realities of political power - the increasing power of big corporations through the confected process of private dispute 'arbitration', rather than public court cases; the enormously well funded Super PACS that back party candidates that match their business interests; huge trade associations and their intense lobbying. 

-  Monopolisation has grown aggressively since the 1980s and is a cancer. Monopoly turns out to be a major driver of inequality...Private corporations with too much power raise prices for consumers, depress wages for workers, choke off democracy, and regulate all of us....corporate government will lead to tyranny...the laws against ‘predatory pricing’ are not being enforced. 

- Consumers who engage in personal boycotts (‘ethical consumerism’) are virtually powerless in monopolised economies. Radical political action is the only way.  

- That I certainly agree with.

Victoria Hannan, Kokomo.

 

                                                          

- I was disappointed in this just published novel, after a long wait since Hannan won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in January 2019. 

- Elaine is the mother, Mina the daughter, Bill the father who has died. The funeral is described in microscopic, tedious detail.          

- The whole premise seems rather silly: Elaine hasn’t left the family home for 12 years, since Bill's death. And she refuses to engage or even talk to her only child and daughter, Mina. So Mina goes and works in London, refusing to come back home. 

- Hannan is totally obsessed with the colour pink. Everything is pink, possibly a refection of the colour of Mina's ex-boyfriend's penis. Which we meet on page one. Other colours, like green, very occasionally get a look in, but mainly it's pink. Pink.         

- She's also beer obsessed. Day and night the young 20-somethings skull beers. (Although, thankfully, she uses the cliche 'drunk' only once!)     

- The novel is divided into three sections - Mina, Elaine, Mina. Elaine’s section is the most interesting and compelling. After being married to Bill for two years she meets Arthur, a chef  at a Chinese restaurant. She instantly falls in love with him with an intensity that's rather melodramatic. In fact it becomes a bit creepy. She engineers that she and Bill buy a house opposite Arthur and Valerie's place in suburban Melbourne. She's not unfaithful to Bill '...But somehow she knew that if she just kept waiting, everything would reveal itself. She knew that if she waited, he'd come. And that when he did, it would be worth it. All of it would be worth it'. 

- Unfortunately there's little depth to this novel. It’s a simple family tale, with an interesting generational contrast between the sacred bond of marriage and sexual fidelity in the older generation and the fickleness of relationships in the current one. Mina's mother and grandmother knew what love was, but Mina is still, in her early thirties grappling with the concept.

James F Keenan, A History of Catholic Moral Theology in the Twentieth Century.

           

- This book is an excellent summary of the major developments in moral theology over the last century, and the individual theologians who made significant contributions .

- The rediscovery of scripture, history, human experience and life in the real world, and the formulation of essential concepts such as ‘the sanctity of life’ and ‘preferential option for the poor’ have been critical. 

- The old, medieval tradition of 'manuals' listing all the sins and giving all answers finally gave way to the centrality of contemporary experience and reflection. Moral theology was becoming trivial and irrelevant. 

- The turning point was Bernhard Haring's publication in 1954 of his magisterial three-volume The Law of Christ: Moral Theology for Priests and Laity. It was a landmark contribution which had a major impact on Vatican II, particularly through Haring's offical position leading the committee that drafted the revolutionary document Gaudium et Spes.

- 'Revionist' theologians like Charles E. Curran were heavily influenced by Haring and embraced his vision. French theologian Philippe Bordeyne argues in his work on the moral theology of Gaudium et Spes that here the Church conveyed a deep sympathy for the human condition, especially in all its anxieties, and stood in confident solidarity with the world. The entire experience of ambivalence that so affected the world in its tumultuous changes of the 1960s was positively entertained and engaged. 

- English theologian Kevin Kelly saw in Gaudium et Spes...a watershed moment in the Church's teaching...Vatican II's personalist approach spoke of children as the 'fruit' of married love, not its purpose.

- It was not to last however. The powerful conservative voices in the Church fought back.The progressives were cast aside and Rome again took control. The hierarchy were still committed to the centuries old tradition of thinking of truth as 'propositional'. Popes and bishops considered themselves as the authorities on all moral matters such as birth control, abortion, pain relief, life support, ectopic pregnancies, homosexuality, and a host of other issues. 

- As Keenan says: By the end of the twentieth century, bishops saw the pope and his curial officials (and themselves) as competent to decide moral matters...moral truth became identified with papal and episcopal utterances.

- The papacies of John Paul II and Benedict VI cemented that paradigm. 

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.