Colombo is a prolific scholar, much of whose work can be easily grouped within the Christianity and the Law genre. So he’s well equipped to tackle a project like Petitionary Prayer.

Petitionary Prayer is a particularly ambitious interdisciplinary project. In it, Colombo argues that we can gain useful insights into the theology of prayer by examining it from a legal perspective.

To be clear, Colombo does not set out to prove that petitionary prayer works. Instead, he assumes arguendo that the mainstream Christian understanding of prayer is valid. He then asks whether statements such as “ask, and it shall be given you” (Matthew 7:7) can be understood as analogous to a legally enforceable promise.

The Chief Difficulty with Petitionary Prayer

Colombo identifies a dozen New Testament passages in which “the Bible records Christ telling his followers ‘ask, and it shall be given you,’ some variation thereof, or some advertence thereto.”1

The central difficulty with petitionary prayer is that God does not in fact always give us what we ask for. No matter how earnestly I ask God for a pony, it is highly unlikely that a pony will appear on my doorstep one morning.

Some commentators try to explain this apparent contradiction away by saying that “sometimes the answer is no.” But that really doesn’t work. After all, the promise is that if we ask, God will give.

Colombo’s Thesis

Colombo’s central insight is that the apparent contradiction between “God promises to answer prayer” and “prayers sometimes go unanswered” disappears if we look at petitionary prayer through a contract law lens.

The basic definition of a contract is “a promise the law will enforce.”2 Note that that definition implies that the law will not enforce all promises. That proposition is made explicit in the Restatement (Second) of Contracts’ definition of a contract, which is “a promise or a set of promises for the breach of which the law gives a remedy, or the performance of which the law in some way recognizes as a duty.”3

The law will not enforce a contract that is not supported by consideration, for example. The law will not enforce a contract if one or both of the parties lack capacity. The law will not enforce promises to commit an illegal act. And so on.

Mapping Petitionary Prayer to Contract Law

The basic claim of Colombo’s argument is that petitionary prayer usefully maps onto contract law:

Unless all of these elements of an enforceable contract are met by the petitioner, the promise was not broken.

The Question of Conditions

Although Colombo works through all of the basic elements of an enforceable contract, to my mind the critical insight has to do with the question of conditions.

The law will not enforce a promise that is subject to conditions that have not been satisfied. “A condition is an event, not certain to occur, which must occur, unless its non-occurrence is excused, before performance under a contract becomes due.”4 The Restatement offers the following illustration:

A contracts to sell and B to buy goods pursuant to a writing which provides, under the heading “Conditions of Sale,” that “the obligations of the parties are conditional on B obtaining from X Bank by June 30 a letter of credit” on stated terms. The quoted language is a term of the agreement (§ 5), not a condition. The event referred to by the term, obtaining the letter of credit by June 30, is a condition.

If B fails to obtain the letter of credit by June 30, the contract will be unenforceable.

Colombo asserts that Christ’s promise is a conditional one and identifies multiple conditions including faith, proper intention, perseverance, obedience, forgiveness, remaining in Christ, and conformity with God’s will. Thus, an unanswered prayer does not necessarily represent a broken promise by Christ, but rather may represent a failure by the petitioner to satisfy the promise’s conditions.

Some Questions

Is There a Bargain?

It seems to me that the paper’s chief vulnerability lies neither in its theological analysis nor in its statement of the law. Both are accurately and skillfully laid out. Instead, it seems to me that the core question is whether Colombo has adequately justified the move from theological promise → legal offer → enforceable contract.

Colombo argues that argues that Christ’s repeated statements—such as “ask, and it shall be given you”—satisfy the requirements of an offer because they communicate a willingness to provide what followers request. A conventional contractual offer is ordinarily understood as an invitation to enter a bargained-for legal relationship. But the pertinent biblical passages are embedded in religious teachings about faith, salvation, obedience, providence, and one’s relationship with God.

The idea of a bargained-for relationship with God is clearly apt with respect to God’s relationship with Israel in the Old Testament. It is repeatedly described as a covenant between God and Man. God promised Israel land and safety if the people follow His laws and warned of punishment if they break the Law.

Although Colombo devotes some attention to the question (see pp. 33-34), I’m doubtful that a Christian understanding of our relationship with God is one for which we have bargained with God. Indeed, at least as I understand it, Catholic theology rejects the idea that a human being can negotiate with, manipulate, or place God under a legal or financial obligation. Instead, Catholicism frames the divine-human relationship through the lenses of covenantal love, familial adoption, and the absolute primacy of unmerited grace.

I gather Colombo would respond that he’s talking about a specific aspect of our relationship with God not the entirety of that relationship. He would also point out that he argues at 33 that “bargained for” is a “legal term of art” that “does not necessarily connote haggling or similar such conduct colloquially associated with ‘bargaining.’” Rather, ‘bargained for’ means that the aforementioned benefit or detriment is what induced the promissor to make the promise in question.” In turn, he argues that God benefits because “God wants our prayers” and we suffer “[t]he detriment of perseverance in prayer . . ..”

Query, however, whether that approach is consistent with Augustine and Aquinas’ portrayal of petitionary prayer not as a way by which we supply information to God but rather as a means for our participation in divine providence and our own transformation.

Is the Framework Explanatory?

It’s fairly easy to identify the conditions on Christ’s promise. Some are stated fairly explicitly in the Bible, while others have been developed through the Magisterium. But this raises the question: Does the contractual framework genuinely explain unanswered prayer, or does it make virtually any outcome compatible with the original promise by continually adding conditions that cannot be independently verified? For example, “ask according to God’s will” is a recognizable theological qualification. But determining whether a particular request actually conforms to God’s will is extraordinarily difficult, as Colombo recognizes:

This is a factual question, and my inclination is, admittedly purely speculative, but it seems to me that few supplicants formulate their prayers “in Christ’s name” and maintain them with the proper level of perseverance.

I’m okay with that. After all, well-founded speculation is at the core of the academic enterprise.

I’m also okay with it because I don’t think Colombo is arguing that Christ’s promise is in fact a contract. Instead, I see Colombo as making an analogy-driven argument that contract doctrine provides a useful vocabulary for organizing theological explanations of unanswered prayer.

Conclusion

The paper’s most intellectually interesting move is not simply its comparison of prayer with contracts, but its attempt to transform a theological paradox into a question about conditional promises. Its considerable strength is that the legal analogy helps us to identify the qualifications already present in the biblical and theological material. Its principal weakness is that the legal analogy strains because crucial conditions—especially God’s will, salvation, and the ultimate goodness of an outcome—cannot be independently verified in the way contractual conditions ordinarily can.

Even so, I liked this paper a lot and highly comment it to your attention.

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Vice President JD Vance would seem to have little in common with J.D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), once the wealthiest man in the world. But the two Republicans have in common a belief that capitalism doesn’t work for the American people. Mr. Vance has little faith in market competition, which Rockefeller called “a sin.” …

Where Mr. Buchanan in the 1990s railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mr. Vance attacks free-market icons such as Milton Friedman. …

It’s telling that in his new book, “Communion,” … Mr. Vance says that while Friedman’s ideas might have worked “in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything,” they are ill-suited for our more secular age.

McGurn goes on to opine that it’s “especially curious to find such critics of capitalism on the right.”

In fact, however, conservative skepticism of capitalism is nearly as old as both capitalism and conservatism. And, IMHO, Vance’s economic views fit into a traditions older than that of Pat Buchanan. I see him as trying (probably subconsciously) to create a blend of early 20th Century Teddy Roosevelt-style progressive Republicanism and the Southern Agrarian perspective.

Kolozi’s Thesis

Peter Kolozi’s Conservatives Against Capitalism challenges one of the central assumptions about modern American conservatism: that conservatives have always been enthusiastic champions of capitalism. His argument is that skepticism about capitalism has been a recurring feature of conservative thought rather than an aberration. Over the course of American history, many prominent conservative thinkers have worried that capitalism, for all of its economic virtues, can erode morality, weaken communities, undermine tradition, and destabilize society.

My Overall Reaction

Kolozi’s book is (at least, IMHO) a thoughtful, well-researched, and generally fair account of this neglected intellectual tradition. Although Kolozi writes from a progressive perspective, he treats his conservative subjects with respect and takes their arguments seriously.

Where I part company with him is over his explanation for why conservatives ultimately made their peace with capitalism. Kolozi argues that conservatives embraced capitalism because it reinforces hierarchy and inequality. I think the better explanation is far less ideological: conservatives accepted capitalism because, despite its many shortcomings, it has consistently proven to be the least imperfect economic system available.

The Rising Conservative Discontent with Capitalism

One of the questions that motivates both Kolozi’s book and my review is the apparent contradiction between the Republican Party’s longstanding celebration of capitalism and the growing unease many conservatives have expressed about it in recent decades. Republican platforms in both 1984 and 2016 praised entrepreneurial capitalism as the foundation of American prosperity and liberty. Yet by 2016, Republicans were also denouncing “crony capitalism”—the cozy relationship between politically connected corporations and government that distorts markets and rewards favoritism rather than competition.

The financial crisis of 2008 further exposed this tension. Polling showed that a surprisingly large number of conservatives had developed negative views of capitalism, particularly as they watched Wall Street receive government bailouts while ordinary Americans struggled. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign amplified those concerns, channeling conservative frustration with globalization, multinational corporations, financial elites, and an increasingly disconnected political establishment.

Kolozi’s Explanation

Kolozi’s central insight is that these developments did not represent a dramatic break with conservative tradition. Rather, they revived themes that have appeared repeatedly throughout conservative intellectual history. On that point, I think he is exactly right. Modern observers often assume conservatism has always been synonymous with unqualified support for free markets, but the historical record is considerably more complicated.

Kolozi traces this tradition through six major schools of conservative thought. He begins with the antebellum Southern defenders of slavery, including John C. Calhoun, James Henry Hammond, and George Fitzhugh, before moving to Progressive Era conservatives such as Brooks Adams and Theodore Roosevelt. He then examines the Southern Agrarians, postwar traditionalists like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, Reagan-era neoconservatives, and finally modern paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan and Samuel Francis.

Recurring Themes

1. Capitalism and Materialism

Perhaps the most persistent conservative complaint is that capitalism encourages materialism by reducing people to little more than economic actors motivated by self-interest. That concern appears again and again throughout the conservative tradition. It also appears to drive at least part of Vance’s thinking.

The antebellum Southern writers—in their efforts to defend the indefensible; i.e., slavery—argued that the Northern system of wage labor was itself exploitative and socially corrosive. While I obviously reject both their conclusions and their proposed alternative, they laid a foundation for future conservative thinkers to view industrial capitalism as a profound moral problem rather than simply an economic one.

The Southern Agrarians made a similar argument from a very different perspective. They believed work ought to contribute to human flourishing, not simply maximize efficiency or output. Industrial capitalism, in their view, displaced meaningful work, weakened communities, and produced alienation alongside economic growth.

Nor were these concerns confined to Southern thinkers. Theodore Roosevelt criticized the selfishness and excessive materialism that he believed accompanied modern capitalism. Later, Russell Kirk argued that economic life should be “humanized” rather than organized solely around profit maximization. His admiration for aspects of Catholic social teaching reflected his belief that markets should serve moral ends instead of overwhelming them.

2. Markets Need Moral Limits

Closely related is another recurring conservative theme: economics is important, but it cannot become society’s highest value.

Traditional conservatives generally defended private property and market exchange. What they rejected was the notion that every human relationship should be governed by market principles or that every good should be bought and sold.

Russell Kirk expressed this point particularly well. He argued that certain things—including pornography and illicit drugs—should not simply be treated as commodities because markets must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good. Conservatives have long distinguished between economic liberty and moral permissiveness, insisting that a free economy still requires moral boundaries.

3. Capitalism’s Disruptive Effects

Many conservative thinkers also worried about capitalism’s tendency to disrupt established communities and social institutions.

John C. Calhoun believed capitalism fostered class conflict and social instability. Theodore Roosevelt feared that concentrated wealth undermined responsible civic leadership. The Southern Agrarians lamented the destruction of rural communities and traditional ways of life during the rapid industrialization of the early twentieth century. More recently, paleoconservatives have criticized globalization for weakening national identity, local communities, and long-standing cultural traditions.

These concerns point toward what I regard as one of capitalism’s central characteristics: what Joseph Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction.” Capitalism is extraordinarily innovative precisely because it constantly replaces old industries, firms, jobs, and even communities with new ones. That relentless process generates enormous prosperity over time, but it also produces continual disruption. It should therefore come as no surprise that conservatives, whose instincts generally favor continuity and stability, often view capitalism with considerable ambivalence.

4. Distrust of Big Business

One of the more surprising themes in Kolozi’s account is how frequently conservative thinkers criticized concentrated economic power. The familiar stereotype portrays conservatives as instinctive defenders of big business.

Indeed, that stereotype drives McGurn’s critique of Vance. But the historical record is considerably more complicated.

Teddy Roosevelt believed monopolies and excessive concentrations of economic power required restraint, to cite but one example. My hero Russell Kirk likewise criticized the rise of corporate oligopolies and never suggested that large corporations deserved automatic conservative support simply because they operated in a market economy.

Indeed, many of these thinkers distrusted both big government and big business at the same time. The Southern Agrarians feared that large corporations would inevitably capture an expanding administrative state, allowing each to reinforce the power of the other. Their preferred alternative was neither socialism nor corporate capitalism but a more decentralized economy built around smaller communities, local institutions, family farms, small businesses, and independent producers.

Where is Vance?

Of the thinkers described above, I would argue that JD Vance is closest to the Southern Agrarians of the 1930s, albeit with some important qualifications.

Like the Southern Agrarians, Vance is deeply skeptical of an economy organized solely around efficiency, GDP growth, and consumer choice. Like them, Vance emphasizes the importance of family, community, stable work, local institutions, and the social costs of deindustrialization. But, unlike the Agrarians, however, he does not romanticize agriculture or oppose modern industry. He wants a manufacturing-based industrial economy, not a return to a rural republic.

Having said that, however, Vance takes some aspects of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Republican thought. Vance shares Roosevelt’s economic nationalism, willingness to challenge large corporations, support for tariffs, and belief that government should shape markets in the national interest. Like Roosevelt, moreover, Vance rejects laissez-faire policies when they conflicts with national strength or the welfare of ordinary workers.

The Accommodation

Despite persistent criticism, nearly every conservative tradition eventually accepted capitalism. I think Vance does too and for much the same reasons.

Southern slaveholders opposed revolutionary attempts to overthrow market society. Roosevelt rejected socialism. Southern Agrarians accepted moderate industrialization despite their reservations. Cold War traditionalists gradually embraced democratic capitalism because opposition to communism united diverse conservative factions.

Even then, however, Russell Kirk continued advocating a middle course inspired by German economist Wilhelm Röpke that emphasized small businesses, family farms, artisans, cooperatives, and local communities rather than large corporations.

Why the Accommodation

Kolozi explains the accommodation by arguing that conservatism fundamentally seeks to preserve social hierarchy, making capitalism attractive because it reinforces inequality and allows dominant groups to maintain power.

I don’t buy it.

First, defenders of free markets argue that voluntary exchange benefits all participants rather than allowing one side simply to dominate another. The enormous improvements in global living standards over the past two centuries demonstrate capitalism’s productive capacity.

Second, conservatives generally value both order and social mobility. While they oppose revolutionary upheaval, they do not necessarily endorse rigid class systems.

Third, capitalism itself undermines hierarchy through creative destruction. Successful firms fail, new entrepreneurs emerge, industries disappear, and wealth constantly shifts. If preserving hierarchy were conservatism’s primary goal, capitalism would be an unusually unstable instrument for achieving it.

In my view, conservatives accepted capitalism because alternative economic systems—including socialism, communism, anarchy, and various utopian schemes—have consistently failed to deliver comparable prosperity and liberty. Capitalism survives because experience has repeatedly demonstrated its relative superiority.

The Failure of Conservative Alternatives

To the conservative mind the collectivism of socialism is abhorrent. Plus, as Michael Novak observed, major socialist nations, many of which were once net exporters of food, proved unable to feed themselves due to institutional and economic stagnation.

But what about the conservative alternatives to capitalism.

Only two conservative traditions seriously proposed comprehensive alternatives to capitalism:

• Antebellum Southern slavery.

• Southern Agrarian localism.

Both envisioned decentralized agricultural societies dominated by small farmers and artisans. And both are impractical and morally indefensible.

Slavery is ethically unacceptable. Full stop.

Southern Agrarian localism cannot realistically organize a modern industrial, technological, globally interconnected economy. Its nostalgic vision resembles Tolkien’s fictional Shire more than a workable twenty-first-century economy. Moreover, many Southern Agrarian ideas were intertwined with objectionable assumptions regarding race and class.

Improving Capitalism

I don’t deny that capitalism has serious shortcomings.

Income and wealth inequality have widened dramatically. Financial and technological elites have accumulated extraordinary wealth while many workers experience stagnant wages. Many forms of modern work have become increasingly dehumanizing. As far as I can tell, Vance agrees.

These economic developments contribute to social problems, including declining labor-force participation, substance abuse, and community decline. Economic displacement—not merely moral decline—helps explain many contemporary social pathologies.

My defense of capitalism is akin to Winston Churchill’s defense of democracy—it stinks, but it stinks less than all the other systems humans have tried.

So what we need is tinkering to make capitalism less odiferous. Instead of abandoning capitalism, conservatives should improve it by addressing crony capitalism, monopolistic behavior, and rent-seeking while preserving market dynamism.

In particular, and here I think Vance and Kirk would agree with me, markets require moral constraints. Religious ethics can help ensure markets serve human dignity, family life, and community rather than treating every aspect of life as a commercial transaction. In particular, conservatives should ponder Catholic social thought that, at its best, supports private property and markets while resisting the commodification of all human relationships.

Conclusion

Throughout American history, conservative thinkers repeatedly criticized capitalism for encouraging materialism, weakening communities, concentrating economic power, and undermining moral and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, those same conservatives generally concluded that capitalism remained preferable to available alternatives because it best combined prosperity with liberty.

Rather than abandoning capitalism, conservatives should recover older traditions emphasizing family, community, moral responsibility, meaningful work, decentralization, and religious ethics while preserving the productive strengths of market economies.

The future challenge is not choosing between capitalism and socialism but creating a version of capitalism that is economically dynamic, socially humane, morally grounded, and resistant to both corporate concentration and government favoritism. In my view, Kolozi’s historical survey provides valuable resources for that ongoing project, even if I ultimately rejects Kolozi explanation for why conservatives accommodated themselves to capitalism.

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Which inevitably prompted this:

I like it. A lot.

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In reciting the Nicene Creed, we affirm our belief in “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” If we recite the Apostles’ Creed, however, we affirm our belief in “the holy catholic church.” Let’s think about what the two great creeds have in common and how they differ.

One Church

Jesus prayed that his followers “may be one.”1 (John 17:22) He intended from the beginning that the Church be unitary. It is the Bride of Christ. Not the Brides of Christ.

Bishop Barron explains:

God is using the Church to draw the whole human family into the divine life. … In the Bible, God is presented consistently as a gathering force, drawing a people Israel to himself so that, through them, he might eventually gather in all the nations. (131)

Having said that, however, the Church is not a monolith. To be sure, as Marthaler observes, there is a tendency to confuse unity and uniformity.” (297) But Christ told us that “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” (John 14:2) There is room in the Church for a certain amount of diversity, just as there are a diverse assortment of cells in a body. To be sure, they must cohere into a single body, but within that body that are many different ways of experiencing and expressing the faith.

Or, as Marthaler puts it, “Ideally the church is called to mirror the tri-unity of God, the indivisible unity that binds Father, Son, and Spirit, and at the same time acknowledges the distinctive properties of each.” (298)

Sadly, of course, Christianity long has been divided in ways that call the single body metaphor into question. As the Catechism recognizes, “large communities became separated from full communion with the Catholic Church—for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame.” (817) Catholics accept as brothers and sisters “those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ.” (818) We pray for the ultimate “reconciliation of all Christians in the unity of the one and only Church of Christ.” (822)

We are thus gladdened by the ecumenical strides that have been made, especially in the post-Vatican II period.

A Note on Crossing the Tiber

In addition to great ecumenical efforts between the various churches, the unity of the church is also effected by individuals. As an adult convert to Catholicism from a sort of generic Protestantism, I have found inspiration in stories of others who have made the same journey:

• Thomas Howard, Evangelical is not Enough (AMAZON LINK)

• Evangelical Exodus: Evangelical Seminarians and Their Paths to Rome (AMAZON LINK)

• Scott & Kimberly Hahn, Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism (AMAZON LINK)

• Stephen Ray, Crossing the Tiber: Evangelical Protestants Discover the Historical Church (AMAZON LINK)

Holy

We know that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23 KJV) The Catechism thus recognizes that “All members of the Church, including her ministers, must acknowledge that they are sinners. In everyone, the weeds of sin will still be mixed with the good wheat of the Gospel until the end of time.” (827)

The priest abuse scandals of the last few decades have brought home that this is just as true of the highest officials of the Church as well as the laity. But, as Bishop Barron observes, “the holiness of the Church … is not dependent upon the vibrant sanctity and moral excellence of the baptized” or the lack thereof. (134)

The Catechism thus also teaches that:

... the Church gathers sinners already caught up in Christ’s salvation but still on the way to holiness: The Church is therefore holy, though having sinners in her midst, because she herself has no other life but the life of grace. If they live her life, her members are sanctified; if they move away from her life, they fall into sins and disorders that prevent the radiation of her sanctity. (827)

In other words, as Marthaler puts it, “The church’s holiness is the expression of divine love that will not allow itself to be defeated by human willfulness and weakness.” (302)

Catholic

Growing up in a Protestant church, I rarely recited the Nicene Creed (for reasons discussed below). Instead, we mainly used the Apostles’ Creed. Even so, having all too often been taught that Catholics were not saved Christians and that the Catholic Church was not a Christian church (I ran into a lot of the execrable Jack Chick tracts in those days), I thought it odd that we would recite a creed affirming that we were “catholic.”2

Of course, I later learned that there is an important difference between small-c and large-c catholic. The former does not mean Roman Catholic. It simply means universal. In turn, the unity and, hence, the universality of the church is inherent in The Great Commission:

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. (Matt. 28: 19-20)

Apostolic

As I grew older, I realized that the real stumbling block for most Protestants is not the word catholic but the word apostolic. Apostolic succession is the claim that modern bishops are part of an unbroken, continuous line of ministerial authority and leadership. Their authority traces back directly to the original 12 Apostles of Jesus Christ through the laying on of hands in ordination.

The Catechism thus teaches that, “in order that the full and living Gospel might always be preserved in the Church the apostles left bishops as their successors. They gave them their own position of teaching authority.” (77)

In order that the mission entrusted to them might be continued after their death, [the apostles] consigned, by will and testament, as it were, to their immediate collaborators the duty of completing and consolidating the work they had begun, urging them to tend to the whole flock, in which the Holy Spirit had appointed them to shepherd the Church of God. They accordingly designated such men and then made the ruling that likewise on their death other proven men should take over their ministry. (861)

Just as the office which the Lord confided to Peter alone, as first of the apostles, destined to be transmitted to his successors, is a permanent one, so also endures the office, which the apostles received, of shepherding the Church, a charge destined to be exercised without interruption by the sacred order of bishops." Hence the Church teaches that "the bishops have by divine institution taken the place of the apostles as pastors of the Church, in such wise that whoever listens to them is listening to Christ and whoever despises them despises Christ and him who sent Christ. (862)

Christ governs her [the Church] through Peter and the other apostles, who are present in their successors, the Pope and the college of bishops. (869)

To be sure, the Roman Catholic church is not the only church that accepts the principle of apostolic succession. The various Orthodox churches, the Anglican church, and Scandinavian Lutheran churches all believe their current bishops are successors of the apostles.

But Protestant denominations descended from the Reformation reject the notion of apostolic succession. They believe that the apostolic office ended with the death of St John (who they believe to be the last surviving of the original apostles).

Although most Protestants claim that the Bible does not teach apostolic succession, and it admittedly is true that apostolic succession is elaborated in the Tradition, there are in fact biblical bases for it. In Acts 1:21-26, for example, the remaining disciples elected Matthias to the office of apostle, demonstrating their ability to appoint successors. In 1 Timothy 1:6 and 4:14, Paul reminds Timothy of how the latter had been appointed as a bishop through the laying on of hands.

There is also the evidence of the Church Fathers, as Thomas Howard explains:

The history of the early Church makes clear that they all accepted this picture [of an apostolic lineage] and that these bishops, all around the Mediterranean as the gospel advanced, recognized each other as sharing in the unique apostolic ministry. The Church was “one” under them, scattered as the churches were, inasmuch as teaching and discipline had to be agreed upon by these bishops in council.

Conclusion

In his General Audience of June 14, 2000, Saint Pope John Paul II expounded at some length on the meaning of the phrase “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” breaking down the four component parts.

He concluded:

The one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is the People of God, the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. These three biblical images point to the Trinitarian dimension of the Church. In this dimension are found all disciples of Christ, who are called to live it ever more deeply and in an ever more intense communion. … In the Church, then, we find a magnificent epiphany of Trinitarian glory. Let us therefore accept the invitation which St Ambrose extends to us: "Rise, you who were lying fast asleep.... Rise and hurry to the Church: here is the Father, here is the Son, here is the Holy Spirit"

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In this post, I’m going to point you in the direction of some of my work in the area. In a future post, I’ll discuss some sources I’ve found very useful.

Bob Cochran on Law and Lawyering: A Catholic Perspective, 47 Pepperdine Law Review 371 (2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3421790. Like Bill Stuntz, my friend Bob Cochran was a towering figure in. the development of Christian legal studies. This essay was written for a festschrift in his honor. One strain of Law and Christianity scholarship focuses on normative critiques of substantive legal issues based on Christian theology. In other words, it seeks to make the civil law more moral; i.e., to conform Man’s Law to God’s Law. A second strain seeks to help lawyers deal with the difficulties inherent in being a Christian and a lawyer. As Cochran has put it, one might ask “whether there is a connection between religious faith and what ordinary lawyers do in ordinary law offices on ordinary Wednesday afternoons.” Cochran’s work has intersected both possibilities. In Part I of this Article, I tackle his analysis of the extent to which we should strive to harmonize God’s and Man’s Law. In Part II, I turn to Cochran’s analysis of the Christian lawyer’s vocation. In both parts, I come at his work from the perspective of a Roman Catholic called upon to give religious assent to both Christian scripture and, where I differ from Cochran, the Church’s Magisterium.

Christianity and Corporate Purpose (December 1, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3496850. I’m pretty happy with this article. I think it reflects a much more mature and much better informed perspective. The essay compares and contrasts the law governing corporate purpose with the pertinent Christian teachings from Scripture and Tradition, with a special focus on Catholic social thought.

Restoring Confidence in the Roman Catholic Church: Corporate Governance Analogies (2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3249236. This was one of the articles in which I looked at the implications of the law for the Catholic sex abuse scandals. Much of my work has been about how Catholic social thought and Christianity more broadly inform our understanding of the law. This article and its ilk point in the other direction; namely, what impact does the law have on the Church. I argue herein that the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis reflects not only failures of reporting but, more importantly, failures by Church leaders to act on reports they received. I propose anonymous reporting channels, stronger whistleblower protections, and mandatory reporting by priests, but my principal recommendation is to create diocesan and national disciplinary bodies led by expert lay members with final authority over abuse cases. Drawing on the corporate audit committee model, I argue that independent lay oversight would provide greater accountability than relying on the existing hierarchy.

The Parable of the Talents (August 15, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2787452. This is one of the pieces of which I’m proudest. I use the Parable of the Talents to explore the legal relationship between the master and his servants. Although the story focuses on the servants’ differing use of entrusted assets and the rewards or punishment that follow, I argue that it also raises important questions about their underlying duties, the legal rules governing their relationship, and how that relationship compares to modern concepts such as principal and agent. I also note that these issues have received surprisingly little attention in Anglo-American legal scholarship.

Must Salmon Love Meinhard? Agape and Partnership Fiduciary Duties (October 8, 2013). 17 GREEN BAG 2D 257 (2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2337659. This one was fun. Meinhard v. Salmon is one of my favorite partnership cases; actually, it probably is my favorite. I love teaching it. I wrote it for a conference on agape and the law, which was a great conference at Pepperdine sponsored by by friend Bob Cochran. In it, I imagine what partnership fiduciary law would look like if it were organized around agape, or self-renouncing love, drawing on Cardozo’s famous opinion in Meinhard v. Salmon. I conclude that agape is too demanding and indeterminate to serve as a legal duty, but it remains a valuable ideal because partners who act with trust and selflessness can reduce monitoring costs and strengthen their relationships. Agape therefore should not be imposed by law, but the law should encourage it as a best practice. (Which I suspect is the only time any best practice recommendation has invoked agapic love.)

The Bishop's Alter Ego: Enterprise Liability and the Catholic Priest Sex Abuse Scandal. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=901663. In this article, I touch on how law impacts not Church teaching per se but rather Church rules about how to structure the Church in civil society. Specifically, I examine whether victims of clergy sexual abuse can reach the assets of separately incorporated Catholic parishes and other diocesan entities through the alter ego doctrine. I conclude that, although courts are constitutionally permitted to apply alter ego principles to church organizations, the doctrine will rarely be appropriate because bishops typically lack the necessary day-to-day control over separately incorporated parishes and because religious-liberty concerns may weigh against expanding liability. I argue that other legal doctrines, especially fraudulent transfer law, are generally better suited to addressing efforts to shield diocesan assets from creditors.

Catholic Social Thought and the Corporation (October 22, 2003). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=461100. This brief essay explores Catholic social thought on corporate governance. Human dignity and freedom are central principles of Catholic social thought. This essay argues that preserving the economic freedom of corporations to pursue wealth is an essential part of effective means for achieving human freedom. To the extent prudential judgments about corporate regulation are required, the Church and civil society should strive towards a nuanced balancing of freedom and virtue.

The Bishops and the Corporate Stakeholder Debate (April 2002). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=308604. I wrote this article while going through RCIA (now called OCIA). Twenty-plus years later, I would be more sympathetic to the Catholic social thought arguments made by the Bishops. But I still think their pastoral letter on economic justice was really bad economics. In it, I critique the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ position on corporate social responsibility, focusing on their view that corporate directors should consider stakeholder interests alongside those of shareholders. I evaluate three possible ways to translate that position into public policy and conclude that none would improve existing law: one would be ineffective, another would raise agency costs, and the strongest version would be impractical, threaten economic liberty, or both.

Corporate Decisionmaking and the Moral Rights of Employees: Participatory Management and Natural Law (September 28, 1998). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=132528. This is another one that I’d like to go back and do over. I was still a Protestant when I wrote it (oddly enough, it was working on this article that first got me thinking about becoming Catholic) and I was too poorly versed in Catholic social thought to really appreciate it. In any case, in this article I examine participatory management as a major development in industrial relations. By participatory management, I mean systems that involve employees in corporate or workplace decision-making, an approach that thousands of U.S. firms have adopted in various forms. I suggest that participation may foster trust between employers and employees, promote workplace democracy, or protect employees against opportunistic behavior by employers. I conclude that only the anti-opportunism argument is genuinely plausible, but even that argument is insufficient. Although employee participation may help protect workers from employer opportunism, I do not believe this establishes a persuasive case for government-mandated employee participation in corporate governance.

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Bill was one of the smartest, most well read, insightful, thoughtful, creative minds I ever knew. He’s aptly been described as “an intellectual giant,” “an influential legal scholar known for his counterintuitive insights,” and “one of the most influential legal scholars in recent American history.” Yet, he was also one of the least egotistical legal academics I’ve ever known. In a profession with much more than its fair share of prima donnas, Bill was temperate, kind, considerate, and caring. He also was a Christian with a profound faith and a drive to share that faith. Our mutual friend David Skeel’s encomium to Bill notes how he blended the two as a pioneer in the study of the intersection of Christianity and the law. My own efforts to work in that area were inspired by Bill’s example.

Bill’s been gone for 15 years now, but I still think of him quite often. I often wish we had spent our careers on the same side of the country so that I could have seen more of him, but I am confident that we will have an eternity to catch up.

In any event, I got to thinking about Bill this week when I ran across an essay Bill wrote reviewing Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought (Yale University Press 2001) (AMAZON LINK), to which I contributed an essay on law and economics. Bill observed that:

Christianizing the legal profession might have a much larger effect on law practice than on law. To see why, consider Jesus’s occupation for most of his adult life: he made tables, or whatever it was that ancient Middle Eastern carpenters made.

Were the tables he made distinctive? Did he use different wood or a different manufacturing process than other carpenters used? The likely answer is no—at least, the gospel accounts offer no reason to think otherwise.

Now change the question: focus less on the noun and more on the verb. Instead of asking whether Jesus’s tables were different, ask whether he made the tables differently—whether his motivations and attitudes toward his work, the ways he treated his customers and his coworker, differed from the practices of other carpenters. The answer to that question is surely yes. (19)1

Reading that essay called to mind Gaudium et spes (literally “joy and hope,” but formally referred to as The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), one of the key documents to emerge from Vatican II. In it, the Council write:

They are mistaken who, knowing that we have here no abiding city but seek one which is to come, think that they may therefore shirk their earthly responsibilities. For they are forgetting that by the faith itself they are more obliged than ever to measure up to these duties, each according to his proper vocation. Nor, on the contrary, are they any less wide of the mark who think that religion consists in acts of worship alone and in the discharge of certain moral obligations, and who imagine they can plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from the religious life. This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age. Long since, the Prophets of the Old Testament fought vehemently against this scandal and even more so did Jesus Christ Himself in the New Testament threaten it with grave punishments. Therefore, let there be no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one part, and religious life on the other. The Christian who neglects his temporal duties, neglects his duties toward his neighbor and even God, and jeopardizes his eternal salvation. Christians should rather rejoice that, following the example of Christ Who worked as an artisan, they are free to give proper exercise to all their earthly activities and to their humane, domestic, professional, social and technical enterprises by gathering them into one vital synthesis with religious values, under whose supreme direction all things are harmonized unto God’s glory.

Secular duties and activities belong properly although not exclusively to laymen. Therefore acting as citizens in the world, whether individually or socially, they will keep the laws proper to each discipline, and labor to equip themselves with a genuine expertise in their various fields. They will gladly work with men seeking the same goals. Acknowledging the demands of faith and endowed with its force, they will unhesitatingly devise new enterprises, where they are appropriate, and put them into action. Laymen should also know that it is generally the function of their well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city; from priests they may look for spiritual light and nourishment. Let the layman not imagine that his pastors are always such experts, that to every problem which arises, however complicated, they can readily give him a concrete solution, or even that such is their mission. Rather, enlightened by Christian wisdom and giving close attention to the teaching authority of the Church, let the layman take on his own distinctive role.

I wonder what Bill would make of that passage. I think he would agree with much of it. Bill frequently made use of the example of Jesus’ work as a carpenter is discussing the vocation of the Christian lawyer and law professor. At one of the Christian law professor fellowship conferences, for example, I heard him say that Jesus doubtless took pleasure and an appropriate amount of pride in his work as a carpenter. He thought Jesus undoubtedly strived to master his vocation. Bill thus would certainly have agreed with the argument that we “should rather rejoice that, following the example of Christ Who worked as an artisan, [we] are free to give proper exercise to all their earthly activities and to [our] humane, domestic, professional, social and technical enterprises.”

I wonder, however, if Bill would have agreed with the statement that “it is generally the function of [the laity’s] well-formed Christian conscience to see that the divine law is inscribed in the life of the earthly city.” To no profession is the Church here speaking more directly that to our profession as lawyers and legal academics. Yet, as I read Bill’s work, I suspect he likely would be somewhat skeptical about the Church’s statement:

People fear the claim that right answers exist—that God is God, that he is sovereign, that Christ’s ownership of all time and space is total. Those are strong claims, and they are not readily susceptible to secular argument. The fear makes sense, though, only if another claim follows: that the speaker knows—really knows—what all the right answers are. The second claim does not follow from the first. The proposition that God’s agenda governs (the idea for which Scalia was castigated) does not entail the proposition that Christians know what that agenda is. Indeed, for Christians the real implication is nearly the opposite. My conclusions are suspect because the reasoning that produces them is tainted by my sin. My faith makes me less confident about my views, legal and otherwise, not more so. (25)

Bill and David Skeel refined those ideas in their article Christianity and the (Modest) Rule of Law.2 In it, they contended that there are “two kinds of law: one for hearts and minds, and the other for code books and courtrooms. Only God's law is fit for the former purpose. Law that operates in the latter territories must have more humble ambitions.” (812) As John Breen explains:

Arguing from an Evangelical perspective, they contend that the law is ill-suited to address a number of social ills to which it is frequently directed, including, conspicuously, the problem of abortion. They criticize the practice of enacting merely symbolic laws, a vice they term “legal moralism.” Because these sorts of laws are seldom enforced, they cannot teach the public the values that they purportedly embody. Moreover, because these laws often take the form of extensive moral codes, they undermine the rule of law as a whole by vesting an inordinate amount of discretion in the hands of public officials.3

So, I assume Bill would have doubts about the extent to which we can discern “the divine law” well enough to inscribe it into positive human law. And I am confident that he would argue that, even if we could do so, immorality and illegality are not coextensive:

So the positive law can forbid only a small fraction of what the moral law forbids, if the moral law is seen in Christian terms. Jesus made this clear by defining murder as anger and adultery as lust. A decent society could aspire to punish all murder, but all anger? Perhaps, in some imaginable society (though certainly not ours), law enforcers could punish adultery while avoiding selective prosecution. But not lust. (39)

...

The point is not that morals and law don’t mix. They plainly do. Rather, the point is that when morals are contested—when the populace is divided about the relevant rights and wrongs—the side that gets its hands on the law’s weapons often finds that those weapons backfire. Backlashes against this kind of legal moralism are not the exception in American history. They are the rule. That pattern suggests that moralists should usually target the culture instead of the law. (42)

...

Law may sometimes be an effective moral teacher, though I confess to having some doubts; I suspect that law follows the culture, not the other way around. Even if I am wrong, law surely teaches best when the relevant legal norms are enforced across the board, and when the moral precepts on which those legal norms rest are widely shared. In the spheres conservative Christians tend to emphasize most—reproduction, sexuality, physician-assisted suicide—the relevant morals are not widely shared. Where that is so, agnosticism—a poor moral stance, but often a wise legal posture—may be the law’s best option. (43)

I wonder whether there is something inherently Protestant about Bill’s approach to the question. (Bill was an evangelical who attended Park Street Church in Boston, a large and historic Congregational church.) I ask that because Gaudium et spes rather clearly thinks that there is a discernible Christian view, if not always an immediately obvious Christian solution.4

Note, for example, Bill’s suggestion that “law follows the culture, not the other way around.” As John Breen observes, “the Second Vatican Council made ‘culture’ a center point of the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes.” (338-39) According to Breen, moreover, John Paul’s thought likewise gives priority to culture over law: “legal doctrines and institutions … come into existence and are sustained in the legal and political order because of some set of antecedent values that subsists in the culture.” (347)

As Breen demonstrates, however, Catholic social thought does not teach that law should always be modest and/or agnostic. “John Paul recognized the ‘sometimes decisive role’ that law plays ‘in influencing patterns of thought and behaviour.’” (372) “John Paul knew that law had a crucial role to play in combating the ‘structures of sin’ and securing the dignity of every human being.” (373)

When in doubt, my rule is to go with JPII. Even vis-à-vis a Harvard man.

At the end of the day, however, I’m just a little ol’ country corporate lawyer. This sort of stuff is mostly argued at levels above my pay grade.

But even so, I wish Bill was alive so I could pursue this with him.

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In this post, I’m focusing on the portion of the Apostle’s Creed that reads:

He descended into hell; the third day He arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty.

The corresponding portion of the Nicene Creed reads:

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

As the Catechism explains (§ 512):

Concerning Christ’s life the Creed speaks only about the mysteries of the Incarnation (conception and birth) and Paschal mystery (passion, crucifixion, death, burial, descent into hell, resurrection and ascension).

And it further explains that it is through “the great Paschal mystery—his death on the cross and his Resurrection—[that Jesus] would accomplish the coming of his kingdom.”

What is the Paschal mystery?

The word Paschal comes from the Greek word pascha, which in turn came from the Hebrew word pesah (or pesach) and the Arabic word pascha, is usually translated as “passover.” In using the term Paschal mystery to describe Christ’s salvific sacrifice, the Church asserts that the preservation of the Israelites at the first Passover was a foreshadowing of the salvation to be offered all by Christ Jesus. Christ was the perfect sacrificial lamb foreshadowed by the lambs sacrificed by the Israelites at Passover, as Justin Martyr explained:

“The mystery, then, of the lamb which God enjoined to be sacrificed as the passover, was a type of Christ; with whose blood, in proportion to their faith in Him, they anoint their houses, i.e., themselves, who believe on Him. Justin Martyr Dialogue with Trypho Chapter XL

The word mystery also requires explication. Catholicism is not a Gnostic religion in which only believers have access to secret knowledge. When the Church refers to a mystery, it is talking about a revealed truth that we cannot fully understand or prove by human reasoning alone.

The Four Parts

The Paschal mystery has four key parts:

• The Passion: Jesus’ suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and his subsequent trial and crucifixion.

• The Death: Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice on the cross to bridge the gap between humanity and God, conquering the power of sin.

• The Resurrection: Christ’s triumph over the grave, offering humanity the hope of eternal life and proving that love and grace conquer death.

• The Ascension: Jesus’ return to heaven in his glorified body, opening the gates for all people.

The Emergence of the Term

The Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, one of the key documents of Vatican II, put the Paschal mystery at the heart of the liturgy, recognizing the emphasis laid on it during the liturgical reforms of the last century:

… for well-disposed members of the faithful, the liturgy of the sacraments and sacramentals sanctifies almost every event in their lives; they are given access to the stream of divine grace which flows from the paschal mystery of the passion, death, the resurrection of Christ, the font from which all sacraments and sacramentals draw their power.

But the term is not entirely new, as Father Daniel Eusterman explains:

Though the term “Paschal Mystery” was not widely known 100 years ago, the content of this term is not altogether novel to the history of the Church. Rather, by magisterially adopting aspects of the theology from the Liturgical Movement, the Church has recovered an ancient understanding of what is today named the Paschal Mystery.

The earliest known use of the phrase Mysterium Paschale goes back to a bishop of the second century, Melito of Sardis, who, like many of the Fathers, examined the life and death of Christ in light of the Old Testament types. Melito recognized in the life and death of Jesus the final and eternal fulfillment of the sacrifice of the Jewish Passover lamb.

The Paschal Mystery in the Liturgy

The centrality of the Paschal mystery to the post-Vatican II liturgy is suggested by the Catechism’s reference (art. 3.VI) to the Mass as “the Paschal Banquet.” In doing so, it reflects the Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, which stated that “the Church celebrates the paschal mystery every eighth day; with good reason this, then, bears the name of the Lord's day or Sunday.” (§ 106)

Accordingly, as Kately Javier explains:

At every Eucharist, the drama of redemption is made present anew as Christ offers his Body for the salvation of the world. The Paschal Mystery by which our redemption is accomplished is re-presented on the altar. … Christ commanded that we celebrate the Mass as an act of remembrance of the Paschal Mystery he was to undergo and by which he reconciled us with God the Father.

… At the Eucharistic celebration, the Paschal Mystery breaks through the limits of time, space, and even human reason as we are made present to the moments in which Christ suffers, dies, rises from the dead, and ascends into heaven.

Although we encounter the Paschal Mystery every Sunday in the Mass, the Easter Triduum is unique. Indeed, Easter is what Marthaler calls “the principal celebration of the Paschal mystery.”

As Father Eusterman notes:

Though the reality of the Paschal Mystery is present and accessible in all of the liturgies of the Church, it is during the celebrations of the Sacred Triduum in which the lines seem to fade away between our own personal histories and Christ’s saving event, fulfilled in history. The liturgies of Holy Week display the Paschal Mystery in word and gesture most explicitly. From Genesis to Jesus, the scriptural narrative invites us to walk (and even fall down) with Christ. Holy Thursday marks the free handing over of the Son as he institutes the saving Eucharist and Priesthood for sacrifice and service. Good Friday sets our own suffering on the redemptive way of the Cross, to witness the central act of self-gift of the God-Man in his Passion and death. Then, at the Vigil, with the Paschal Candle aflame and darkness in flight, the announcement of our glorious salvation in Jesus’ victory rings out: “This is the night, when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.”

These liturgies invite us, with St. Paul, the Church Fathers, and every century of the Church’s celebration, to actively participate in the reality of the Paschal Mystery made present and tangible within the Holy Mass.

A Note on the “Facticity” of the Death

By the by, Bishop Barron writes of the Death that:

Over the centuries, there have been fanciful attempts to show that Jesus did not die on the cross but swooned, only to be revived later. That a dreadfully wounded man, staggering half-dead out of his tomb, would ever be mistaken for the risen Lord is, of course, beyond ludicrous. The Romans were skilled executioners, and if there were any doubt that the cross had done its terrible work, the lance-thrust into the heart of Jesus should have eliminated it. It is interesting to note that the Gospels themselves and numerous summary statements of the Paschal Mystery throughout the New Testament make special reference to the burial of the Lord, presumably to hammer home the facticity of his death.

… Balthasar … means that the downward trajectory of the Incarnation reaches its limit here, in the tomb of Jesus, when the Son of God enters into the experience of having no experience, into the negation, the nonbeing, of death. Having hit rock-bottom, the Son of God finds solidarity with all those human beings who have come to that same awful place.

Put together, the Paschal mystery thus is the central act of Christ’s ministry on Earth. It is the sequence of events—each essential—that collectively constitute his salvific intervention in human history.

The Paschal Mystery and the Trinity

Marthaler makes an interesting observation by connecting the Paschal mystery to one of the other great mysteries of the faith; namely, the Trinity. Specifically, he argues based on the Pauline epistles, the Paschal mystery “is the work of the Triune God acting in concert.” (P. 198). The Father lifts up the Son, who is now seated at the Father’s right hand, and from whom proceeds the Holy Spirit.

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As an adult convert to Catholicism, I found this tweet deeply offensive.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree with the substance of Nichol’s critique of many of J.D. Vance’s pronouncements on the intersection of faith and religion. As many folks have observed, not just Nichols, Vance has a tendency to “mansplain” Catholicism to priests, bishops, and even the Pope himself. Not infrequently, moreover, Vance gets it wrong.

The trouble I have with Nichols—and many others—is the incessant harping not on what Vance says but when Vance became a Catholic. E.g.:

Why exactly does it matter when Vance learned the creed? Why do commentators like Nichols incessantly harp on Vance’s status as an adult convert? Why do they repost comments that feed into and perpetuate stereotypes about adult converts?

So let’s think about some of those stereotypes.

Stuff Cradle Catholics Say About Adult Converts

Charles Pierce:

It is considered axiomatic among cradle Catholics that adult converts are the worst. … [T]oo many adult converts see all of this incense-stained filigree as the real message of the gospels. And the American members of the species are also particularly interested in political power and the means to acquire it.”

Jana Bennett (herself a convert):

I have heard people complain that converts do not really understand Catholic theology because they bring Protestant habits with them about reading scripture, about discussing topics like God and that good old faith versus works debate; I have been privy to a few academic searches where people have discussed whether a convert would really be a good fit for a department; I have heard converts denounced as people who ruin the church because they are “more conservative” than the “real” Catholics.

Paul Chu and V. J. Tarantino in an open letter to JD Vance:

There is a familiar nostrum, applied to certain new converts to Catholicism – to wit, that they think that they’re more Catholic than the Pope. While such may not be a fair evaluation in most cases, let it be said that you have today, in this respect, set a new benchmark.

Lady Pent:

Being more Catholic than the Pope is annoyingly common behavior from converts, especially converts with Evangelical backgrounds. It’s very odd.

Some Data

Catholic converts are slightly more likely to attend Mass weekly, pray daily, and got to confession:

Those numbers are disappointing on both sides, of course.

With reference to the repost that started me on this discussion, note that the percentage of adult converts who regularly contribute to their parish is 16 points higher than that of cradle Catholics.

With respect to practicing what the Church teaches, adult converts are more likely to believe in a core teaching of the Church; namely, the Real Presence:

As noted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University, which was the source for the above data:

Why would adult converts be more knowledgeable and believing than other Catholics? Perhaps it was the eight months to a year they spent studying intensively in an RCIA program? … It appears that having an intensive religious education experience as an adult has a more lasting effect than relying on religious education in the childhood years alone.

The Point

My point emphatically is not that adult converts are better Catholics than cradle Catholics.

My first point is that the stereotypes about adult converts we encounter in social media and the news media are sweeping generalizations frequently motivated less by faith than by politics.

My second point is that maybe all of us who are Catholics—whether as adult converts or from the cradle—should think before we speak. We should emulate Christ, who prayed that his Church “may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us.”

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In this post, I take up a key line from the Nicene Creed:

[We believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages,
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father.

Compare that lengthy description of Jesus’ nature to the much simpler one in the Apostles’ Creed:

[I believe] in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord ….

The longer Nicene text was necessitated as a response to one of the Arian heresies circulating in the early part of the fourth century. Arius taught that Christ did not come into existence until after the events of Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth ....”). Instead, Christ was created by God thereafter. Arius regarded Christ as the “first born” of God’s creatures, but insisted Christ was a creature and therefore neither co-eternal with God nor partaking of God’s essential nature.

Most of the relevant passage speaks to the Arian heresy. “True God from True God,” for example, confirms that Jesus shares God’s nature as do the other statements. But I’ve always found the word “begotten” interesting in this context.

What immediately comets mind is the series of “begats” that begins Matthew. One function of the Creedal statement this is to affirm that Jesus was not begat of Joseph, but was begat of God the Father. More important, however, “begotten” also affirms orthodox (lower case o) Christianity’s rejection of Arianism. But to see why requires us to dig into the meaning of “begotten.”

The Greek word translated as “begotten” is monogenes, which some linguists argue connotes a unique relationship. “One of a kind.” This translation makes sense in this context, since it conveys the unique relationship between God the Father and God the Son.

Other linguists translate it as “to generate,” which in this context could be understood not as creation (bringing something out of nothing) but as the process of bringing something of of something. Hence, Jesus proceeds from the Father--is generated by the Father out of the divine essence.

Christ thus proceeds from the Father, but is of the same nature. Christ thus is simultaneously God but also a distinct person begotten by the Father.

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We know what we believe, so why the need to recite it every Sunday?

Malcolm Gladwell famously said that to master something, you must do it 10,000 times. (More, precisely, he said you must practice it for 10,000 hours.) Repeating the Creed every week is like practicing an instrument regularly, It helps us internalize the Creed and to make it as natural a part of life as playing the instrument. It becomes part of the muscle memory of our faith.

Why is it important for the Church to be able to point to scripture to back up the Creed?

Here’s a common Protestant take on Catholic beliefs:

… official Catholic doctrine is so far removed from biblical moorings the Catholic Church cannot be a true church. …

Because the Catholic Church has rejected fundamental Biblical doctrines such as justification, by faith alone, worshiping and praying to God alone, Christ as the head of the Church, and Christ’s sacrifice for all sins of his people, I believe the Catholic Church is a false church.

But Catholics in fact believe that Scripture is the divinely inspired word of God. While the Church teaches that God’s revelation did not end when the canonical order and content of the New Testament were finalized, no statement of faith or belief that is contrary to the Scripture can be regarded as truly orthodox. It is the touchstone against which our beliefs are measured.

What is the difference between the Nicene and Apostles Creeds?

There are some important differences between the two Creeds:

As Marthaler relates (83ff), the additional language in the Nicene Creed does not reflect a change in doctrine but rather a rejection of heresy. The authors of the Nicene Creed elaborated the Church’s theology of the Trinity and the Godhead by making it more precise, albeit at the cost of complexity. “Begotten of the father” rebuts the heresy that claimed there was only one God with three names or modalities. “God from God” affirms that Christ’s nature was fully divine, as does the statement that Christ was “begotten not made,” which reaffirms that he is God and not a creature. “Became man” confirms that Jesus was also fully human, while simultaneously being fully divine.

Hence, it seems to me that the Apostles’ Creed likely an earlier creed that was largely settled before the controversies to which the Nicene Creed is addressed.1 The Apostles’ Creed lacks the developed theology—especially the more fully developed Christology—that is present in the Nicene Creed. As a result, Unitarians accept the Apostles’ Creed because of its lack of an explicit Trinitarian statement. Likewise, Arians (if there are still any) can accept the Apostles’ Creed because of that absence.

Marthaler explains that “The Apostle’s Creed came to have more of a pedagogical than a liturgical function.” Given that we use the Apostles’ Creed in the liturgy part for the liturgical year,2 I initially found this unenlightening. On further examination, however, I take his point. The Nicene Creed functions as a detailed test of orthodoxy, while the Apostle’s Creed is better suited for teaching new converts and the young, because it gets across the basics without getting to deeply into into the complex mysteries of the Trinity.

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Steve, I have a rather unconventional question. I find a great void in life without the meaning that God and salvation give it. And I always want to believe this is the reality, but the very fact that I want to believe it makes me think I am biased when weighing the facts. So you tell me, how do you believe in God? These days, I need this more than ever.

Or, as one of my nieces once asked me, why do I believe in God?

I sort of stumbled through an answer, which I fear was not terribly coherent. But it’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I am quite sure that I believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. I am quite sure that I believe in the tenets of Christianity set out in the Nicene Creed. But why?

Starting With Lewis

People smarter than I and far more deeply versed in theology and philosophy have tried to make rational arguments for the existence of God. Works that I found particularly helpful in my own faith life include C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Among the various arguments Lewis advances in it, I found his so-called trilemma especially convincing:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Granted, there are those who assert various logical fallacies in Lewis’ argument, most notably the purportedly false dilemma, but I think those critics have been rebutted quite effectively.

Other Smart Folks

Other works I’ve found helpful include Paul Johnson’s The Quest for God and Jesus: A Biography from a Believer, Timothy Keller’s Making Sense of God, and Bishop Barron’s To Light a Fire on the Earth.

I will not try to recapitulate their various arguments here. But I point out the existence of such arguments first to counter those who claim there is no logical rason to believe in God and second because St. Paul told us that “Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.”

Belief is fostered through the authority and witness of others. We all have the ability to sense whether certain people are truthful and credible.

Apply that ability to what you read and hear. Whether we receive God’s message through written texts (such as those above) or spoken words (Bishop Barron’s YouTube videos are a great place to start), we gain access to truths that are rooted in trust—trust in what and whom we have heard and experienced firsthand.

Intuiting God Experientially

At the end of the day, however much merit the various rational arguments for God may have, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Ultimately, I think, we—or, at least I—intuit God experientially.

Put another way, my belief in God rests as much—if not more—on personal experience rather than rational discourse. Of course, skeptics have often vehemently opposed justifying faith solely through religious experiences, a stance that is understandable. Indeed, they raise a legitimate question: Can religious experience, without additional evidence, sufficiently validate faith? One must also acknowledge that relying solely on emotion, feelings, and personal experience can lead us astray into believing falsehoods.

Yet, I concur with theologian Alvin Plantinga, who drew on what John Calvin called the “sense of the divine” to argue that belief in God may be considered a “properly basic” belief. In other words, belief in God is a foundational belief requiring no further justification to be held rationally.

I also concur with St. Paul, who posited that the world around us reveals God’s “eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are” (Romans 1:20). In other words, St. Paul believed in the ability of the senses to reveal truths. He maintained that through philosophical reflection following sensory experiences, we could grasp God’s existence. Our senses guide us towards the ultimate reality—the singular God who exists in simplicity and infinity.

Begin with Beauty

I think this insight is what Bishop Barron has in mind when he argues that belief in God begins with beauty:

The pattern is more or less as follows: first the beautiful (how wonderful!), then the good (I want to participate!) and finally the true (now I understand!). A young man watches a skillfully played game of baseball, and it awakens in him a profound desire to play as well as those whom he admired; and then the actual playing of the game teaches him, from the inside, the rules and rhythms of baseball. A completely inadequate way of drawing a kid into the world of baseball would be to start with a clarification of the rules or with a set of drills. Rather, show him the beauty of baseball, and he will want to play, and having played, he will know.

Conclusion

I would not claim profundity for anything I just said. To the contrary, I would disclaim it.

It is simply the best answer I have today to the most basic question of life.

I hope it helps.

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I usually go on to mention journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, whose magnificent history, The Company (AMAZON LINK), contends that the corporation is “the basis of the prosperity of the West and the best hope for the future of the rest of the world.”

Lastly, I often invoke Michael Novak’s observation that the corporation gives “liberty economic substance over and against the state.”

Not infrequently, those comments get thrown in my face when I say something critical of a specific corporation. The throwers seem to think that they’ve scored some huge rhetorical point by positing that a leading defender of the corporate form pointed out that a corporation did something awful. Which I don’t understand. I’m well known as a fan of golden retrievers. Does that mean I can’t point out that a specific golden retriever shat on my doorstep? It strikes me as an example of the tu quoque fallacy.

What’s My Point?

I laid out all that because I’m about to criticize a specific corporation. One of the biggest and most famous. Does that mean I’m be a hypocrite because I praise the corporate form as the greatest invention since the wheel? No.

The Motivating Incident

Over on X.com, famed antitrust scholar Herbert Hovenkamp wrote:

The Case Against Walmart

Hovenkamp’s post called to mind something I wrote a long time ago about Walmart.

Hugh Hewitt Pokes the Bear’

Back in 2005 then Walmart CEO Lee Scott came to Los Angeles to give a tough response to the company’s critics and confirm his plans for Walmart to expand aggressively in Southern California.

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt loved it:

Resistance to WalMart opening new stores always amazes me. Really. Good jobs at good wages, many of them entry-level jobs with training and advancement possibilities. Excellent advantages for consumers, benefits for employees, and neighborhood redevelopment.

But the media loves to hate the giant retailer, and local small businesses always put up a predictable cry. When WalMart is blocked, you never hear about the folks who didn’t get jobs or the insurance plans that don’t get enrollees. The small stores are happy, but the next time an objection is raised, I’d love to see a report on the wages and benefits paid to employees of such mom and pop operations. There will be some exceptions, but the average worker who is not an owner would be better off at the WalMart.

I disagreed. I think there’s a strong conservative case to be made against Walmart.

Impact on Workers

The data show that entry of a Wal-Mart store into a community has only a very small positive impact on county-level employment. According to a study by Missouri economist Emek Basker, “in the first year after entry, retail employment in the county increases by approximately 100 jobs; this figure declines by half over the next five years as small and medium-sized retail establishments close. Wholesale employment declines by approximately 20 jobs over five years.” Note that the “typical Wal-Mart store employs 150-350 workers. These results suggest that employment increases by less than the full amount of Wal-Mart’s hiring, even before allowing other firms time to fully adjust to Wal-Mart’s entry.”

As noted below, entry of Wal-Mart typically results in exit by at least some local businesses, as suggested by the fact that the increase in employment is smaller than the number of positions Wal-Mart fills.

Impact on Communities

Objective data on the impact of Wal-Mart’s entry into a community on prevailing wages is difficult to find, but one suspects it is not positive. (Timothy Noah pointed out that Wal-Mart’s CEO distorted Walmart’s wage picture in his speech by using average rather than median salaries.)

The data also show that Walmart’s entry into a community has a downward impact on overall retail prices of certain core consumer commodities.

Even if the subsidies given Walmart by many local communities to encourage opening a store are not as large as Walmart’s critics claim, does anyone seriously doubt that Walmart often gets breaks on things like zoning, property or sales taxes, and other regulatory issues that small business competitors don’t receive?

So opening a Walmart has a small positive effect on consumer prices and employment for the community. The latter effect dissipates over time as Walmart drives competitors out of business or, at least, the area. In addition, many of these employees appear to be part-time, according to Basker’s study, who likely get smaller benefits and opportunity for advancement than full-timers. (Timothy Noah also pointed out that Walmart overstates the number of full-time employees by counting as full-time anybody who works more than 34 hours a week.)

Impact on Small Business Owners

But even if Hugh was right that “the average worker who is not an owner would be better off at the Walmart,” what about those owners?

In his article, Thwarting the Killing of the Corporation: Limited Liability, Democracy, and Economics, 87 Nw. U. L. Rev. 148 (1992), law professor Stephen Presser wrote eloquently about the role small business plays in our democracy. Presser explained that corporations were endowed with limited liability precisely so as to encourage the growth of small business:

The popular democratic justification for limited liability is rarely observed by modern scholars. Nevertheless, it appears that to the nineteenth-century legislators in states such as New York, who mandated limited liability for corporations’ shareholders, the imposition of limited liability was perceived as a means of encouraging the small-scale entrepreneur, and of keeping entry into business markets competitive and democratic. Without limitations on individual shareholder liability, it was believed, only the very wealthiest men, industrial titans such as New York’s John Jacob Astor, could possess the privilege of investing in corporations. Without the contributions of investors of moderate means, it was felt, the kind of economic progress states like New York needed would not be achieved.

The author of the most comprehensive study of New York legislative policy toward corporations in the nineteenth century concluded that New York’s policy of limited liability, and its policy of encouraging incorporation by persons of modest means “facilitated the growth of a viable urban democracy by allowing a wide participation in businesses that could most advantageously be organized as corporations.” “More importantly,” he suggested, New York’s general incorporation statutes “helped equalize the opportunities to get rich. The passage of general incorporation laws for business corporations was the economic aspect of the political and social forces that democratized the United States during the Age of Jackson, 1825-1855.”

Note carefully this line: the “policy of encouraging incorporation by persons of modest means ‘facilitated the growth of a viable urban democracy by allowing a wide participation in businesses that could most advantageously be organized as corporations.’” By trampling small businesses underfoot, through its mix of volume pricing and subsidies, Walmart and its ilk undermine the possibility of “wide participation in businesses.” Prospective entrepreneurs are thus pushed out of fields like retail.

Of course, maybe Walmart makes up for that by buying products from small entrepreneurs in places like China. But do we really want to encourage our nation’s superpower rival to continue building up its economy with massive trade deficits?

Aesthetics

Finally, there is an aesthetic/humanistic argument to be made. I come back here, as I do so often, to Russell Kirk’s description of his beloved Detroit:

All my life I have known the city of Detroit, called-during World War II “the arsenal of democracy.” ... In the shocking decay of that great city nowadays, we behold the consequences of an inhumane economy-bent upon maximum productive efficiency, but heedless of personal order and public order. Henry Ford’s assembly-line methods had much to do with the impersonality and monotony of Detroit’s economic development; and so, in some degree, did Ford’s concentration of his whole productive apparatus at the Rouge Plant; but of course Henry Ford had no notion, in the earlier years of his operation, of what might be the personal and social effects of his highly successful industrial establishment; nor did the other automobile manufacturers of Detroit. Indeed, they seem still to be ignorant of such unhappy consequences, or else indifferent to the consequences, so long as profits continue to be made. Consider the wiping out of Poletown through the unholy alliance of industrial, municipal, and ecclesiastical power structures, regardless of the rights and the wishes of Poletown’s inhabitants-all to build on the site of Poletown a new industrial complex, which already, far from supplying the promised increase in tax revenues for Detroit, is involved in grave difficulties.

Apropos of which, outside the most heavily urbanized areas, Walmart typically builds on the edge of town, putting up a huge (and butt-ugly) big box building surrounded by acres of bare concrete parking lots. There are few sights in the American scene less attractive or appealing to the eye.

Kirk further observed that “Detroit, during my own lifetime, has produced tremendous wealth in goods and services. But it has been a social failure. And so have nearly all of America’s other major cities.” I put it to you that Walmart contributed to moving those failures into small town America by shuttering local business and creating huge barriers to entrepreneurial entry into fields traditionally the province of local small business men and women.

Being a conservative is supposed to be about things like tradition, community, and, yes, aesthetics. If I’m right about that, it’s hard to see why a conservative should regard Walmart as a societal force for good even if Hugh was right about the job story.

Conclusion

I concluded that we must strike a balance between respect for private property rights and our other values. How? On the one hand, government should not legislate against Walmart and its ilk. On the other hand, government should not subsidize Walmart either through zoning or tax breaks. Walmart’s a big boy, so to speak, who can take care of itself. We ought to let it compete in a free market. And those of us with a bully pulpit out to use it to encourage Walmart to become a better neighbor and citizen.

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As such, I was steeped in biological sciences, including evolution.

Of course, I am also (and was then) a devout Christian who believes the Bible is the inspired word of God.

Faith and Science

As a Catholic, there is no conflict between my faith and my belief that the scientific account of evolution is correct.

The Catechism states:

The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers. With Solomon they can say: "It is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements. . . for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me." (§ 283)

Pope John Paul II thus declared “there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith.” Indeed, he recognized that “new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis.”

Catholicism thus does not teach the literal 6-day Creationism propounded by some fundamentalists. Instead, it adopts a form of theistic evolution.

The Creation Account

Catholics reconcile the competing claims of faith and science by viewing the Genesis account of creation as a theological and spiritual narrative rather than a literal, scientific history. Catholics thus do not interpret Genesis as a modern biology or physics textbook, but rather as divinely inspired truth told through poetry, metaphor, and figurative language. As Bishop Robert Barron has said, the Genesis creation accounts (there are two) should be understood “as they were meant to be seen: not as primitive science, but as exquisite theology.”

A Literal Adam?

Given all of that, I have long assumed that there was no literal Adam and Eve, setting aside the question of whether there was a single mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam.

But, the knowledgeable reader will ask, what about Pope Pius XII’s statement in Pius XII in Humani Generis?

For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.

Pope Pius is propounding what theologians refer to as monogenism; i.e., that Adam and Eve were the literal and sole progenitors of all of humans. As compared with polygenism.

Stumbling Across an Islamic Perspective

I tee up all of the foregoing as an introduction to an article I recently stumbled across offering an Islamic perspective on these questions. I cannot vouch for the validity fo the author’s interpretation of Islamic theology, of course, but I thought it was a very interesting treatment of an issue that I’ve occasionally pondered.

The gist of the argument is that:

… the physical substrate of humanity (bashar) developed through evolutionary processes documented by paleoanthropology and genetics, the essential qualities that constitute humanness—consciousness, volitional agency, and moral responsibility—were realized through a metaphysical endowment described in the Qur’an as nafkh al-rūḥ (the inbreathing of the spirit). This intervention did not contradict or supersede natural processes but rather completed them, transforming a biologically evolved organism into a morally accountable subject.

A Quick Catholic Digression

I note that this seems to be a similar argument to that made by Catholic scholar Edward Feser, who posits that:

There is nothing at all contrary to what Pius says in Humani Generis in the view that 10,000 (or for that matter 10,000,000) creatures genetically and physiologically like us arose via purely evolutionary processes. For such creatures -- even if there had been only two of them -- would not be “human” in the metaphysical sense in the first place. They would be human in the metaphysical sense (and thus in the theologically relevant sense) only if the matter that made up their bodies were informed by a human soul -- that is, by a subsistent form imparting intellectual and volitional powers as well as the lower animal powers that a Planet of the Apes-style “human” would have. And only direct divine action can make that happen ….

Supposing, then, that the smallest human-like population of animals evolution could have initially produced numbered around 10,000, we have a scenario that is fully compatible with Catholic doctrine if we suppose that only two of these creatures had human souls infused into them by God at their conception, and that He infused further human souls only into those creatures who were descended from this initial pair.

Back to Islam

As the quote above suggests, Ismayilov argues that Adam should not be understood as the first biological Homo sapiens, but as the first fully volitional and morally responsible human. Its central model distinguishes bashar, the evolved biological human organism, from insān, the ensouled human person endowed with consciousness, free will, symbolic thought, and moral accountability.1 In this view, biological evolution prepared the human body through taswiyah—proportioning or refinement—while nafkh al-rūḥ,2 the Qur’anic “inbreathing of the spirit,” marks a metaphysical transition from biological life to morally accountable personhood.3

Ismayilov presents this as a way to reconcile evolutionary biology with Qur’anic anthropology: evolution explains the bodily substrate, while revelation explains consciousness, moral agency, and spiritual vocation. Adam’s “firstness” is therefore metaphysical rather than biological: he is the first bearer of the divine trust and the prototype of humanity as insān.

Ismayilov is not trying to prove the soul scientifically. His aim is philosophical and theological; namely, to show that Islamic belief in Adam, divine creation, and human moral dignity can be interpreted in a way that remains compatible with evolutionary biology.

A major strength of Ismayilov’s paper is that he openly admits the model is not an empirical scientific hypothesis. He treats nafkh al-rūḥ as a philosophical-theological explanation, not something archaeology or neuroscience can directly verify. He also acknowledges unresolved problems, including the timing of ensoulment, the status of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and how his model fits with classical interpretations that treat Adam as the first biological human. The core problem, of course, is the difficulty of identifying where biological cognition ends and metaphysical moral agency begins.

Conclusion

In many respects, I found this paper quite illuminating. It struck me as a well thought out attempt to reconcile faith and science with respect to the core question of human origin.

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Canonization

Canonization is the process by which the Roman Catholic Church formally recognizes that an individual lived a life of heroic virtue and is now in Heaven. It is a four-step process1:

1. Initiation: The local bishop—usually of the diocese in which the candidate died—opens an investigation into the candidates life, collecting testimony and written records. If the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints agrees,2 the candidate is named a Servant of God.

2. Declaration. If the diocese’s and the Dicastery’s investigation finds evidence that the candidate lived a life of heroic virtue, they can recommend that the Pope declare the Candidate to be “Venerable.” Only the Pope has this power. Catholics can ask the Venerable to intercede with God on their behalf.3 Contrary to what some Protestants claim, we do not worship the Venerable (of a saint, for that matter). Rather, we ask them to intercede in Heaven on our behalf.

3. Beatification. If the Dicastery determines that a miracle—usually defined as a scientifically inexplicable healing—can be attributed to the Venerable’s intervention, it can recommend that the the Pope beatify the candidate. If the Pope does so, the candidate is now referred to as “Blessed.” A miracle is not necessary if the Dicastery determined that the candidate was a martyr.

4. Canonization. If the Dicastery determines that a second miracle can be attributed to the candidate’s intervention, it can recommend sainthood. If the Pope agrees, he can declare the individual to be a saint.

The Congressional Medal of Honor

Although there are separate statutes defining the conditions under which the President may award the Congressional Medal of Honor for each of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, and Air Force, they are all basically the same as the Army version (10 USC § 7271):

The President may award, and present in the name of Congress, a medal of honor of appropriate design, with ribbons and appurtenances, to a person who while a member of the Army, distinguished himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty:

(1) while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States;

(2) while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; or

(3) while serving with friendly foreign forces engaged in an armed conflict against an opposing armed force in which the United States is not a belligerent party.

Just over 3,500 individuals have received the Medal of Honor. Only nine of them have been chaplains.

Father Emil Kapaun

Emil Kapaun was born in Kansas in 1916. In 1940, after attending seminary, he was ordained as a priest of the Diocese of Wichita. In 1944, Father Kapaun attended the Army Chaplaincy School. He served in Georgia and Burma during WWII, rising to the rank of Captain.

After the war, Kapaun attended graduate school, but then rejoined the Army as a chaplain. In 1949, he was assigned as a regimental chaplain in the 1st Cavalry Division, which was then on occupation duty in Japan. In July 1950, the division was sent to Korea as part of the US-led response to North Korea’s invasion of South Korea.

Kapaun served with his regiment on the front lines both in the Pusan Perimeter and during the subsequent breakout.

On November 1-2, 1950, Kapaun was with his regiment during the Battle of Unsan. His Medal of Honor citation explains what happened next:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving with the 3d Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division during combat operations against an armed enemy at Unsan, Korea, from November 1-2, 1950. On November 1, as Chinese Communist Forces viciously attacked friendly elements, Chaplain Kapaun calmly walked through withering enemy fire in order to provide comfort and medical aid to his comrades and rescue friendly wounded from no-man's land. Though the Americans successfully repelled the assault, they found themselves surrounded by the enemy. Facing annihilation, the able-bodied men were ordered to evacuate. However, Chaplain Kapaun, fully aware of his certain capture, elected to stay behind with the wounded. After the enemy succeeded in breaking through the defense in the early morning hours of November 2, Chaplain Kapaun continually made rounds, as hand-to-hand combat ensued. As Chinese Communist Forces approached the American position, Chaplain Kapaun noticed an injured Chinese officer amongst the wounded and convinced him to negotiate the safe surrender of the American Forces. Shortly after his capture, Chaplain Kapaun, with complete disregard for his personal safety and unwavering resolve, bravely pushed aside an enemy soldier preparing to execute Sergeant First Class Herbert A. Miller. Not only did Chaplain Kapaun's gallantry save the life of Sergeant Miller, but also his unparalleled courage and leadership inspired all those present, including those who might have otherwise fled in panic, to remain and fight the enemy until captured. Chaplain Kapaun's extraordinary heroism and selflessness, above and beyond the call of duty, are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, the 3d Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, the 1st Cavalry Division, and the United States Army.

Although he had a chance to escape capture, Father Kaupan voluntarily remained behind with the wounded to minister to them.

His official Army biography explains that after his capture Father Kapaun continued to minister to his fellow prisoners:

Kapaun spent the next seven months in the Sambukol and Pyoktong prison camps, in what is now the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. With disregard for his own safety and comfort, Ch. Kapaun tended to the sick and wounded, scoured for food, built fires against guards' commands, and fashioned iron sheet vessels to launder the clothing of the wounded and purify drinking water. He also led prayers and spiritual services for the POWs, at the risk of punishment. For his outspoken resistance, Ch. Kapaun was feared by the guards and revered by his fellow POWs. Upon return, Pyoktong prison survivors told stories of Ch. Kapaun's courage, compassion, and spirit. They credited him with saving their lives, and hundreds more, before eventually succumbing to his own wounds and prison maltreatment.

Kapaun reportedly forgave the captors who took him away to die, offering them God’s blessings. Reportedly, he told his fellow prisoners “I’m going where I always wanted to go, and when I get there, I’ll say a prayer for all of you” and asked them to tell his bishop “I died a happy death.” He died of neglect in what was described as the camp’s death house.

In addition to the Medal of Honor, Kapaun was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross; Bronze Star Medal with "V" Device; Legion of Merit; Prisoner of War Medal; Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with one Bronze Service Star for Central Burma Campaign; World War II Victory Medal; Army of Occupation Medal with Japan Clasp; Korean Service Medal with two Bronze Service Stars; National Defense Service Medal; and United Nations Service Medal, making him one of the most highly decorated Chaplains in the history of the US Army.

Kapaun was buried in a mass grave, but in 2021 his remains were identified and repatriated to the US. He was finally laid to rest in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City.

The Archdiocese for the Military has a nice webpage with information and videos relating to the finding of Kapaun’s remains and their internment.

The Cause of Father Kapaun

The Diocese of Wichita opened the requisite investigation and in 1993 John Paul II named Kapaun a Servant of God. In 2025, Kapaun was declared as Venerable by Pope Francis.

According to the website on his Cause, the Diocese has “received testimony of several instances of alleged miraculous intercession by Father Kapaun. Some of these potential miracles date back nearly two decades, while others occurred very recently. One or two will be sent in detail to the Dicastery for Saints in Rome for review by both theologians and medical experts before papal approval is given.”

The Call to Duty

Father Kapaun once wrote:

When I was ordained, I was determined to ‘spend myself’ for God. I was determined to do that cheerfully, no matter in what circumstances I would be placed or how hard a life I would be asked to lead.

I find that an incredibly inspiring call to duty. His life is an amazing example of the sort of heroic virtue to which we should all aspire.

The Prayer for Intercession

Father Kapaun, I ask your intercession not only for these needs which I mention now, [list them], but that I too may follow your example of service to God and my neighbor.
For the gifts of courage in battle and perseverance of faith, we give you thanks O Lord.

Then recite one Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be.

Father John Hotze, Episcopal Delegate for Father Kapaun’s Cause, will be celebrating a novena of Masses the first 9 days of each month for those who have asked for Father Emil’s intercession. You can send your intention to the Cause via their website.

The Prayer for the Cause

Lord Jesus, in the midst of the folly of war, your servant, Chaplain Emil Kapaun, spent himself in total service to you on the battlefields and in the prison camps of Korea, until his death at the hands of his captors.

We now ask you, Lord Jesus, if it be your will, to make known to all the world the holiness of Chaplain Kapaun and the glory of his complete sacrifice for you by signs of miracles and peace.

In your name, Lord, we ask, for you are the source of peace, the strength of our service to others, and our final hope. Amen.

Venerable Emil Kapaun, pray for us!

Support the Cause

The Diocese collects offerings to support the dissemination of Father Kapaun’s story, the Cause, and his museum. I think it’s a very worthy cause (so to speak).

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The Original Post

SSRN Responds

Earlier today I received an email from SSRN management:

We at SSRN are aware of your recent Substack post and I just wanted the opportunity to share some additional context and clarity with you; please see SSRN’s Ongoing Commitment to Legal Scholarship – SSRN Blog.

Their blog post states, in part, with interspersed commentary:

We are aware that Professor Bainbridge raises understandable concerns about changes at SSRN, particularly given how central the platform is to legal scholarship. …

We would like to clarify a few specific points raised by Professor Bainbridge ….

I appreciate the recognition and the use of the word “understandable.”

Institutional research paper series will be closed on a rolling basis at the end of each institution’s existing term, or at the end of December 2026, whichever comes first. …

With the exception of some sponsored niche areas, existing areas of legal scholarship on the site and their associated email alerts will continue unchanged.

I take this statement mean that institutionally-focused email lists like the UCLA Law and Economics ejournal will be cancelled, but that the subject matter email ejournals will continue. If so, that is very, very good news.

For one thing, as noted in the earlier post, I rely on the subject matter ejournals to keep up to date with developments in my field (corporate law) and other areas of interest (such as law and religion). I am glad that I will be able to continue doing so.

As I noted in the earlier post, UCLAW plans to shift to the UC’s open access repository, eScholarship, as the law school’s default repository. But apparently we will be given the option of also having our work posted to SSRN.

I plan to select the option to have my work posted to SSRN, in large part because I believe the ejournals are a great way of having my new scholarship brought to the attention of others in the field. I suspect a lot of people are like me in using them as a way of monitoring our professional reading options.

Published work in legal scholarship will continue to be posted in most cases, except where prohibited by copyright, as we have done in the past.

Good.

While SSRN will introduce the ability to select a CC-BY license at submission later this year, options will include CC-BY, CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND, providing additional flexibility and choice for authors.

This is very good news. As I noted in the earlier post, the CC-BY copyright license, it is the most open and permissive Creative Commons license.

This change is another reason I will continue using SSRN. But I plan to opt for the CC-BY-NC-ND license. It is the most restrictive of the six main Creative Commons licenses. It allows others to download and share your work, but they cannot change it in any way or use it commercially, and they must always give you credit. I think that should help limit the use of my work my AI companies for training their models, although I recognize that they claim that fair use allows them to do so.

Final Thoughts

I’ve just hit the highlights of SSRN’s response. I urge interested readers to go check out the whole post.

I note that SSRN concludes:

Please continue to share your thoughts and concerns with us and thank you for your patience as we grow into the future.

I encourage you to do so.

In sum, I don’t know whether SSRN’s response is merely clarifications or if I managed to induce some changes in their policy.1 In either case, I appreciate SSRN management taking my concerns—which I believe were widely shared—seriously and seeking to accomodate them.

As noted, given these developments, I plan to continue using SSRN.

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In addition to providing a searchable depository of working papers and other scholarly items, SSRN also provided weekly emails of newly deposited papers in a wide variety of fields.

I use SSRN as my main depository for pre-publication drafts and, when permitted by the publishers, works as published. It’s been a considerable personal success. As of today, my papers have been downloaded 194,000 times. As a result, SSRN has contributed greatly to my visibility as a scholar. In addition, I’m ranked 13th out of 3,000 legal authors in total number of all-time downloads, which the law school has taken into account in various promotion and related decisions.

In 2016, the founders and other insiders took the Boeing,2 selling out to Elsevier. This resulted in what one observer aptly described as “much wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth, and the obligatory call for the community to pony up and create a true open piece of infrastructure.”

At the time, however, SSRN’s management team promised that:

Both existing and future SSRN content will be largely unaffected and … we’ll help researchers share post-submission versions of their work responsibly. Importantly, Elsevier respects our key values and core-proposition (free posting and reading) and commits that authors (or eventual publishers) will retain their copyright to any paper posted to SSRN.

And, in fact, I have noticed relatively little difference in the post-Elsevier SSRN.

Until now.

The UCLA Law Library has notified our faulty that SSRN has announced “significant and unwelcome changes,” including:

1. SSRN is discontinuing its Research Paper Series at the end of July.

2. Already-published papers and book chapters will no longer be eligible for posting on SSRN after July.

3. SSRN will require authors submitting preprints or working papers to select a CC-BY license. A CC-BY license permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the work, including for commercial purposes, so long as appropriate attribution is given.

The research paper series has been an incredibly useful way of staying on top of recent scholarly developments. It gives you a listing of recently posted works and, crucially, each work’s abstract. As such, you know whether or not the paper looks to be of sufficient interest to justify downloading and reading the whole work. I shall miss it greatly.

Disallowing published works means that open access to my publications will become more difficult. Many are available freely on the publisher’s website, especially in the case of law reviews, but there is no single searchable depository (but see below) where you can get them all in one palce.

As for the CC-BY copyright license, it is the most open and permissive Creative Commons license. It allows anyone—including AI providers—to copy, distribute, remix, adapt, or build upon a creator’s work, even commercially, provided they give the original author credit for the creation. Once applied, a CC-BY license cannot be revoked by the creator. The license remains valid for the duration of the copyright of that work. It guts the author’s ability to impose any more significant limitations.

In response, UCLAW has adopted a policy that faculty working papers will be submitted to the University of California’s open access repository, eScholarship, rather than to SSRN.

I agree with and support this policy shift, but there are several problems that will follow:

1. At the moment, the UC eScholarship repository is incomplete. In my case, for example, there are 30 of my papers on the UC site. There are 124 on my SSRN author page. I gather they will be moving all of them over at some point, but it will take a while.

2. The UC eScholarship repository lacks the single author page SSRN offers. That page contains contact information and links to all of my posted works. It acts as a single hub for accessing my scholarship.

3. The eScholarship site does not offer the same kind of disciplinary current-awareness eJournal service that SSRN has provided for newly submitted papers.

4. The UC eScholarship repository is a UC site. SSRN offered researchers a single location to access work by global scholars. Literally thousands of institutions are represented on SSRN, as well as thousands of independent, unaffiliated authors. According to SSRN, there are papers from over 2,750,000 authors on the site. As such, SSRN provided researchers with a literal world of sources to explore and gave authors the whole world as an audience. In contrast, how many people are going to go to the bother of looking at a single university’s depository, even one for a university as big as UC?3

5. Although eScholarship provides article-level usage statistics and can display an author’s scholarship within the repository, it does not provide SSRN-style aggregate author metrics or rankings.

Rob’s not the only one who thinks this a good idea.

Back in 2012, The Economist reported that:

. . . on January 18th the law school of New York University (NYU) held a discussion on a reform that would jolt the system: cutting legal education by a year.

The reason for the event was a recently published article by Samuel Estreicher, a professor at NYU, entitled “The Roosevelt-Cardozo Way: The case for bar eligibility after two years of law school.” Rules in almost every state require an undergraduate degree and then a three-year law degree from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association. Mr Estreicher wants students to take the bar before completing their degrees, and, if they pass, letting them practise—as Benjamin Cardozo (a revered judge) and Franklin Roosevelt did before the three-year rule became universal in the early 20th century.

The proposal was surprisingly well received. Many agreed that the third year is useful but not crucial. One panelist, Zachary Fasman, a partner at Paul Hastings, a big law firm, announced that he would happily hire eager and talented lawyers with just two years of law school, though colleagues might not. Others pointed out that the first year of work could be in effect an apprenticeship, during which the rookie would earn less and be billed to clients more cheaply. Law firms already have to train new hires on the job anyway; even three years of education does little to prepare lawyers for actual practice.

At the time, I asked “Why not make law an undergraduate major?”

At The University of Virginia, where I went to law school, law was originally an undergraduate degree. If it was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, why not for the modern legal profession?

As Rob notes, in most of the world, law is an undergraduate degree. As a Harvard report on the German legal system explained, for example:

German legal education consists of a four-year undergraduate degree completed following completion of secondary school and passage of the university entrance exam.

Students then take the First Examination, a comprehensive set of exams that emphasizes academic knowledge of the law. This is followed by a two-year practical training period. (Referendarzeit).

Students then must pass the Second Examination, a comprehensive set of exams that emphasizes practical legal skills. Upon passage, students are entitled to work in any legal profession.

But nobody thinks German lawyers aren’t perfectly competent.

So, why should this not be the case in the USA? Law schools could offer an undergraduate degree, which would qualify students to take the bar, a Masters degree akin to the MBA for students who want to practice at BigLaw firms, and a SJD, akin to a PhD, for potential legal academics.

The vast majority of lawyers would graduate with far less debt. In addition, a law undergraduate major might well be useful to a slew of students who never intend to practice law.

Of course, this is not a novel proposal. John McGinnis and Russell Mangas advanced this very same proposal in the WSJ. They argued that:

An undergraduate legal degree could be readily designed. A student could devote half of his course work to the major, which would allow him to approximate two years of legal study. There is substantial agreement in the profession that two years are enough to understand the essentials of the law—both the basics of our ancient common law and the innovations of our modern world. A one-year apprenticeship after graduation would allow young lawyers to replace the superfluous third year of law school with practical training. ...

The idea of learning law as an undergraduate discipline is hardly untested. Great Britain, for instance, educates lawyers in college, not graduate school. These college-educated lawyers appear to provide legal services on par with those of their American colleagues.

I remain genuinely puzzled as to why this idea doesn’t have more support. It would be better for students. It would integrate law schools into the larger university, which would be good for faculty. It just makes sense, which is probably the problem.

The last post was an introduction to Marthaler and the work.

This post focuses on the Trinitarian1 terminology in the Creed:

We believe in one God, the Father almighty …

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God …

And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.

Some theologians and believers in general prefer to speak of the Triune God using the names, “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier” rather than the traditional names of “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” The fact that the usage tends to be more common in progressive, mainline Protestant denominations leads many to assume that the nomenclature is a modern attempt to use gender-neutral, inclusive language. As one Episcopalian source observes, for example:

This formulation is—as far as I know—a construct of liberal protestant theology without particularly deep roots in Christian practice, especially in the ways it’s coming more and more into use.

Marthaler similarly observes that “some (many?) … feel that the father-figure has been used as a justification of the hierarchical organization of society and the source of many inequalities.” (44)

In fact, however, there is some evidence for a far earlier origin. One commentator traces it to the (unratified) 1689 Anglican Book of Common Prayer, for example.2

Yet, even if it is not a modern politically correct neologism, I am not convinced that the “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier” terminology is an improvement on the traditional “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” To the contrary, I think there are two serious problems with that formulation.

Scriptural Warrant

Granted, it is obviously desirable for the Church to be all-inclusive, so that all may be saved. Also granted, it is true that God “is neither male nor female” in a literal sense. (43)3

Nevertheless, it is not obvious (at least to me) that non-gendered language is appropriate when speaking the Triune God. The historical Jesus, after all, was indisputably male. At Jesus’ baptism by John, God spoke from Heaven, naming Jesus as “my Son.” Conversely, Jesus refers to God as “Abba” or Father. According to Marthaler, he does so 170 times in the NT. (42) So too do the writings of the New Testament and the early Church fathers.

The Catechism explains that:

By calling God “Father”, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. (¶ 239)

As the Catechism goes on to emphasize, of course, this does not exclude the important role of women in the Church nor does it gender God: “He is neither man nor woman: he is God.” Instead, as Marthaler suggests, this usage reflects the fact that we attribute to God “those ideal qualities we associate with fatherhood: the giving of life, love, faithfulness, continued care and protection, and wisdom that guides and instructs. (43)

Insufficient Monotheism

It has been aptly observed that:

Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer don’t work. They are about what God does not who God is. They are about operations not ontology.

… “‘Creator,’ ‘redeemer,’ ‘sustainer’ are operational or economic names. But trinitarian language is ontological language. It is the language of God’s being, not of God’s doing.”

Or, as another commentator observes:

The actions of God, outside of himself (ad extra), are common to all three persons. The Trinity creates. Therefore, the action of creation is common to all three persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Whenever we describe the action of one person of the Trinity, such as the work of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the other persons are always there. Pentecost is as much the action of the Father and the Son as it is of the Holy Spirit.

Accordingly, the commentator argues:

… to baptize in the name of the “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier,” as opposed to the “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is to do one of two things:

1. Imply that there are three gods: one is the creator god, another is the redeemer god, and the other one is the sanctifying god. [Or]

2. Imply that the one person acts in three different modes, that God is acting as creator, then as redeemer, then as sanctifier.

Both of which are heretical denials of the Trinitarian creed.

President Trump has alleged for years that his opponents weaponized the legal system against him and his supporters for political gain. On Monday, his administration created an extraordinary program to pay his allies back—with taxpayer funds.

The Justice Department unveiled what it called the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” backed by nearly $1.8 billion. It described the initiative as a resolution to a lawsuit and two administrative claims that Trump filed in his personal capacity against the government he now runs. …

[Later] the Justice Department expanded the deal to end all pending tax audits of Trump and his businesses.

In January, Trump filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, seeking $10 billion in damages for the illegal disclosure of his tax returns by a government contractor. He also had filed administrative claims against the government seeking millions of dollars stemming from a Federal Bureau of Investigation search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump faced several legal hurdles in prevailing against the IRS. Instead of defending the government, Justice Department lawyers reached an agreement with the president’s personal legal team to create the fund, overseen by a commission appointed by the attorney general and subject to firing by Trump.

If this strikes you as deeply corrupt, welcome to the club. If it doesn’t, please seek help.

There’s plenty of learned commentary out there on the deal (as well as a much larger amount of unlearned commentary), so I won’t be adding to it.

But this story did remind me of an amusing anecdote from my days as a judicial law clerk.

Internal Revenue Code (IRC) § 104 provides in pertinent part that:

(a) … gross income does not include—

(2) the amount of any damages (other than punitive damages) received (whether by suit or agreement and whether as lump sums or as periodic payments) on account of personal physical injuries or physical sickness;

IRS Regulation § 1.104(c)-1(c) provides “the term damages means an amount received (other than workers’ compensation) through prosecution of a legal suit or action, or through a settlement agreement entered into in lieu of prosecution” (my emphasis).

After. the Korean War, two young people—lets call them John and Mary—married and started a family. John was a skilled carpenter who worked in the building trades. Despite union work rules, John gradually added experience as an electrician and plumber.

In the mid-1960s, John struck out on his own by starting a home repair and remodeling business. John never incorporated the business. As for other business-related paperwork, such as fictitious business name filings and the like, John pretty much ignored them too.

Despite John’s lackadaisical approach to the legal niceties of running a business, John’s business succeeded and began generating a comfortable amount of income for the family. Up to this point, Mary had been a stay-at-home mom but as the business grew she began running the office work side of the business. Mary handled bookings, billing customers, paying suppliers and other vendors, preparing their taxes, and so on.

One day John was up on a ladder at a job site. He fell off and broke his right arm. John was in a cast for seven weeks and then had to undergo several weeks of physical therapy. John ultimately was unable to work for almost three months, resulting in a considerable loss of income.

As she was preparing their federal income tax return for the year in question, Mary noticed IRC § 104 and Reg § 1.104-1. She pointed them out to John and, at her suggestion, they went to see a lawyer.

The lawyer drafted a bunch of documents for John and Mary, including:

• A written partnership agreement. The first recital to the agreement stated that it reduced to writing and memorialized an oral partnership into which John and Mary had entered when the business was started.

  • The rest of the agreement was quite standard. It provided equal rights to profits and in management. Pretty basic boilerplate.

• A fictitious business name filing for, let’s call it, John & Mary’s Repair and Remodeling Company.

• A Form 1065 and Schedule K-1 for the relevant tax year.

  • John and Mark later went to an accountant who prepared Form 1065s for the previous three tax years, which he filed along with a Form 843 request for a waiver of late fees. The accountant also prepared amended and Form 1040s and Schedule K-1s for the previous three years.

• A written employment contract between John in his capacity as the firm’s sole worker and the partnership.

• A Settlement and Waiver of Claims. In his capacity as an employee of the company, John asserted claims of negligence, providing defective equipment, lack of supervision, and so on against the company. In their capacities as partners, John and Mary acknowledged their liability. The settlement was for $4 million to be paid in installments over a period of 20 years. The annual installment payment was to equal the company’s earnings for the year in question. So, for example, if in Year 4 the partnership had pre-settlement payment earnings of $100,000, that year’s installment payment would be $100,000,

You will see, of course, that John and Mary had thereby zeroed out their taxable income for what we likely to be the remainder of John’s working life.

This went on for some years until the IRS finally noticed it. They IRS promptly audited John and Mary and imposed an enormous amount of back taxes, penalties, and interest. When John and Mary objected, the IRS began making noises about criminal tax fraud charges.

John and Mary paid the IRS what they owed, but then—and this is my favorite part—sued in federal district court to recover their payments.

The case landed in front of my judge.

John and Mary acted pro se.

The judge held an evidentiary hearing on the IRS motion for summary judgment. John and Mary were remarkably cheerful and candid. The IRS attorney was a Cylon. No sense of humor. No suggestion that she thought John and Mary were cute (they really were an adorable couple). No willingness to budge an inch. She kept mumbling something about tax fraud indictments. Basically, she struck me as somebody who would have been one of Torquemada’s best inquisitors.

After the hearing, my judge barely made it back to chambers before he cracked up. He told me to turn my bench memo into a letter opinion ruling for the IRS, but only after saying he wished there was someway he could find for John and Mary. They were just so likeable and matter of fact about the whole thing.

1. Legal Ethics Question: If you had been John and Mary’s lawyer, would you have felt comfortable doing what their actual lawyer did? If you had done the same things for a client, would your state bar discipline you?

2. Partnership Law Question: The key preliminary issue is whether John and Mary had a valid partnership. If not, the whole scheme falls apart—setting aside the many other problems with the scheme. Did they have a valid partnership?

3. Prosecutorial Discretion Question: If you had been the head of the IRS enforcement division, would you have sued John and Mary or just let it slide?

4. Who would you rather have over for dinner? John and Mary or Trump?

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In the decade that Father Ed has been my parish priest, he has grown my faith immensely. He’s an amazing homilist. When I was growing up Protestant, I was told Catholics never talk about sin and salvation. Father Ed does every week. His messages inspire and encourage, but also challenge. You’ll see that in the videos linked below.

In addition to his duties as our parish priest, Father Ed runs a wonderful program Feed My Poor that provides meals for the homeless in Los Angeles. I urge you to consider donating to it.

Father Ed’s also started a website to evangelize the unchurched and catechize searchers and new Catholics on a website called SmartGuy:

There’s a lot of useful resources provided, including:

• Father Ed’s bio.

• A guided 30-day faith journey that provides daily videos “designed to help you experience faith, not just learn about it.”

• A link to their YouTube channel.

Father Ed’s not the only person using SmartGuy to get messages out. Rather, there seems to be a ton of self-help videos by other folks. As a result, I find the site somewhat difficult to navigate, which is why I provided the links above. If you stick to Father Ed’s content you’ll be in great shape.

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