I see in the news that the government is clamping restrictions on the use of electronic parts supplied from abroad for use in our electrical power grid. The purpose, of course, is national security. One would not want the grid to be hacked by a hostile foreign power.
"So, J., what do you think is the bare minimum a person must believe for salvation?"
Thus my new friend began our first serious conversation, the moment he passed through my door. That was a quarter of a century ago. We were both Protestants. He still is.
CYA, short for Covering Your Anatomy, is the strategy of choosing one’s course of action in such a way that if it goes wrong, someone else gets the blame. Dealing with the problem at hand may take second place.
We all know that CYA can affect governmental policy. What’s not so often noticed is that it can also affect the Constitutional balance of power.
In view of the efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, I had thought of writing a post about how pastors, priests, and bishops should be imaginative instead of supine, finding ways to administer the sacraments without having to pack large numbers of people into small enclosed spaces.
One of my natural law students told me this week of a conversation with his six-year-old sister.
He had been learning that according to Thomas Aquinas, a command, in order to be a genuine law rather than an act of violence, must be reasonable, for the common good, made by competent public authority, and promulgated to all.
Though I disagreed with the late Justice Scalia about a variety of things, I have always liked his quip that he didn’t believe in a “living” Constitution, but in a dead one.