When I was fresh out of graduate school I didn’t believe in anything.  I did my job, but I did have a certain difficulty teaching -- for what could I possibly have to say to my students, and what could it possibly matter?  Here I was, teaching Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the other greats, and I would sometimes want to weep for the beauty of the appearance of truth.  But I would hold all that in, telling myself that it was an illusion.

The cure was to return to the faith I had abandoned years previously.  People often suppose that faith and reason are opposites.  What I found was just the opposite:  Until I rediscovered faith, I couldn’t trust reasoning either.  Recovery of the belief that the mind is ordained for knowing truth made it possible to believe that teaching is a meaningful activity after all.

You would think that would end my trouble with teaching, and it did for a while, but then it produced a new problem.  The new problem would have been impossible for me in the old days when I hadn’t cared about my students, but now I had begun to love them.  And so now, if they were indifferent to learning -- if they were in college just to have a good time, to please their parents, or to get their tickets punched -- it was crushing to me.  So few of them did show that spark of wanting to know what is true that for a few years I burned out on teaching.

This cure this time was charity.  I had burned out by learning to love a little; I recovered by learning to love a little more.  Everyone is called to care for what is true, but not every student is called to the intellectual life, and I learned to make the distinction.  I tried to do what I could for my students no matter their situations, and took to heart St. Paul’s advice “admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all.”  It turned out that more of them wanted to learn something than I had thought.

The last difficulty developed as a consequence of the deepening realization that modern universities no longer believe in their vocation.   If the universities are in a death spiral, as it increasingly seems that they are, then what could I do?

The cure for this final trouble was hope.  I had been thinking of the decline of the universities as though my job were to make everything right.  No, the day’s worries are sufficient for the day; my job is to do what I can in my place.  Don’t I still have a classroom?  Don’t I still have students?  Despite everything, don’t some of them still want to learn?  If at times, teaching is like throwing a stone into a still pool so that it strikes the surface and vanishes, what of that?  I don’t have to see the results in this life.  Sometimes I do, and that is a blessing.  But He sees, and that is enough.

“So faith, hope, love abide, these three”; and curiously, they are pedagogical necessities.

In a conversation with grad students the other day, I suggested that all other things being equal, adoption policy should give preference to couples.  Though a few of them agreed, others objected that such a policy would amount to “punishing singles.”

I found that an interesting expression.

In the older view, duties come before rights.  The important thing is the well-being of the children; parents have rights to care for their children because this is best for the children themselves.

In the newer view, rights come before duties.  The important thing is what grown-ups want; anyone who wants a child has a right to be given one, and the state has a duty to hand one over.

Those who take the newer view don’t push it all the way.  They usually accept some minimum level of competence as a prerequisite for the right to adopt.  For example, most would agree that children should not be given to singles who are drug addicts.  So another element of the newer view would seem to be that singles are just as competent as couples to raise children.

It is an interesting take on the natural order of the family.  Mothers are dispensable.  Fathers are dispensable.  One person of either sex is enough.  At least – as one of my students suggested -- if there is wealth enough to hire a nanny.

Well, sometimes one parent really is the best one can do.  Some mothers, and some fathers, must raise a child alone through no fault of their own.  I salute them, just because their lot is so hard.  The task requires heroic virtue.  One must try to be a mother and father all at the same time, which is impossible.

But to say that I, as a single, have a right to adopt is to say that I should have the power to inflict a missing parent on the child:  To make some little soul fatherless or motherless, though he could have had a mom and a dad.

New lecture video:  True Toleration

The logician’s wife is having a baby.  As soon as the baby is born, it is placed in the father’s arms.  The mother asks, “Is it a boy or a girl?”  The father replies, “Yes.”

Next post:  Punishing Singles

See also The Leffian Quagmire – and Others

What a curious mixture of ideologies drives the conversation at law schools.  When I speak about natural law in these venues, I find that the same questioner will often be a pragmatist at one moment, a utilitarian the next, then a relativist, then a subjectivist, then an evolutionist, then a conventionalist.

Listening to this sort of thing is like being dipped into philosophy stew that has been sitting on the counter too long.  It goes something like this.

Truth is whatever works and so the only truth is survival and adaptation and so the end justifies the means.

There aren’t any universal moral truths accessible to all persons and so law should not legislate morality and so everyone must obey the new morality.

What’s right and wrong are different everywhere and so what’s right and wrong depend on what one wants and so the law is whatever judges say it is.

Law students exposed to this kind of talk from their professors respond in various ways.  Some don’t notice a problem.  Some are confused.  Some want to grapple, but find it hard to get a hold on all that slipperiness.

And some begin talking the same way.

I’ve tweaked last Saturday’s post, “Just Like Me (Take 2)” to make its purpose clearer.  As a convert, I’m fascinated by the differences between Catholic and Protestant culture, which are often misunderstood.  For instance, Catholics go to Mass for the Sacrament, not to socialize, which sometimes leads Protestant visitors to assume that Catholics are cold and that their parishes aren’t communities.  This isn’t even remotely true, but Catholic community doesn’t manifest itself at the door of the church as it does in Protestant congregations.  It manifests itself in the multitude of ongoing ministries; that is where you meet people and form spiritual friendships.  The cultural quirk I discuss in last Saturday’s post is another of those interesting differences.