The recent blogpost by my colleague Jordan Ballor discusses an op-ed written by law professor Stanley Fish. I am more familiar with Stanley Fish from his days as a literary theorist, and perhaps a quick review of a younger Fish will contribute to the conversation. Fish is known for, among other things, an idea of literary interpretation he called munities’ that suggests meaning is not found in the author, nor in the reader, but in munity in which the text...

Mr. Phelps takes issue with my characterization of Stanley Fish’s position as amounting “to a philosophical denial of realism.” Let me first digress a bit and place ment within the larger context of my post. My identification of a position that “words and texts have no meaning in themselves” is really just an aside within the larger and more important question about what measure of authority authorial intent has in the interpretation of documents, specifically public documents like the Constitution....

I’m not quite sure what to make of this local story: “Four people are charged for their alleged involvement in killing two bald eagles.” The details of the alleged crimes are as follows: “Prosecutors say two teenagers shot the eagles in the Muskegon State Game Area with a .22 caliber rifle in April 2004 and then chopped them up with a hatchet.” Since the bald eagle, one of the nation’s revered symbols, is an endangered animal, it is protected by...

Foreign Policy hosts this exchange on environmental issues and economics. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, gets the first word and Bjørn Lomborg, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, gets the last word. ...

John Paul II gave us all a tremendous gift by endorsing the terms Culture of Life and Culture of Death. But as with all great gifts, we must guard these terms carefully so as not to wear them out with misuse, robbing them of their relevance. Unfortunately, this is precisely what is happening in the current debate over CAFTA. A group called Catholics for Faithful Citizenship (PDF) claims the following: “Clearly, supporting CAFTA is inconsistent with upholding a culture of...

The Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have broken away from the plaining that the federation has focused too much on political activism in the face of declining union membership and influence. Dr. Charles Baird was a featured guest on yesterday’s edition of Kresta in the Afternoon on Ave Maria Radio, discussing Catholic perspectives on unionism and whether the modern American labor union movement patible with church teachings. Dr. Baird is Chair of the Department of...

The United Nations has released a report on the ongoing upheavals in Zimbabwe, where tyrant Robert Mugabe has been punishing his political opponents under the guise of “cleaning up” the country’s cities. The effect of Operation Murambatsvina (meaning either “Operation Restore Order” or “Operation Drive Out Trash,” depending on who’s translation you believe) has been to leave some 700,000 people homeless, jobless, or both. A downloadable copy of the UN report is available here. While the report does illuminate the...

S. T. Karnick over at The Reform ments on a recent suit filed against DuPont over Teflon, claiming that “DuPont lied in a massive attempt to continue selling their product.” Karnick observes that abuse of the tort system is rampant, in part because “it has been perverted into a proxy for the criminal justice system: a means of punishing supposed wrongdoers through the use of a weaker standard of proof—preponderance of the evidence instead of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”...

Close at Home The House of Representatives voted early this morning (12:03 am) to approve the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) after weeks of intense lobbying on both sides. The final vote was a close 217-215. My predictions: somehow, any dip in employment (if there is one) in the next six months will somehow be linked to CAFTA by its detractors. Detractors will attempt to take the moral high ground in American politics in ’06 and ’08, and even...

Slate features an article by Henry Blodget, a former securities analyst, which examines the investments of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts. In an analysis that has more than you would ever need to know about a person’s finances (and perhaps reads a bit too much into the investments), Blodget writes of Roberts, “His fortune is self-made, which suggests a bias toward self-reliance rather than entitlements and subsidies.” That sounds promising. HT: Fast Company Now ...

Following months of Zimbabwe’s brutal “Drive Out Trash” campaign, pleasantries exchanged between Mugabe and a UN delegation may have made some headway. The UN report on the situation, according to Claudia Rosett, began “with a delicacy over-zealously inappropriate in itself to dealings with the tyrant whose regime has been responsible for wreck of Zimbabwe” by describing Mugabe’s reception of the UN officials with a “warm e.” Despite the ings of the UN report with respect to policy solutions (more aid!),...

Here’s a great interview from the Marketplace Morning Report with Chris Farrell, in which he argues for the lifting of trade sanctions against dictatorial and oppressive regimes. pares the cases of Cuba and China, in which two different strategies have been used, with vastly different results. We need to “stop the policy of broad based sanctions against nations that we don’t like,” says Farrell. This is directly opposite of the view, for example, which primarily blames economic engagement and the...