Paul Ryan Outclasses My Profs

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Forgive the personal nature of the column, but after a week of cooling off, I cannot walk away from the asinine letter that nearly 90 Georgetown professors, including some of my very favorite former teachers, wrote to U.S. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan before his attention-getting April 26 speech on the Hoya Hilltop. The letter is arrogant, ignorant, puerile, nasty, and dishonest.

Others such as George Weigel and William McGurn have masterfully answered the professors' ill-informed agit-prop. But in a small sense at least, I was the one who started this flap, so I'll weigh in at the risk of doing so less impressively than Weigel and McGurn.

Background: My Georgetown undergraduate degree was in a Theology/Government double-major, the former earned under the guidance of (among others) letter signatories John Haught, James Walsh, S.J., William McFadden, S.J., and Anthony Tambasco. I have kept in touch with three of them, enthusiastically recommended Haught's books, and spoken glowingly of them on occasions too numerous to count. Collectively, they taught me not just the substance of Christian theology but also an approach to scholarship, sorely lacking in this letter, which encouraged polite disagreement and rejected intellectual rigidity.

In my senior thesis in Theology, I had the temerity (as a Catholic-leaning Anglican) to explicitly challenge the idea that Catholic theology necessitates any particular economics or government programs or policies. Partly along the lines of insisting on rendering to Caesar those things that are Caesar's, I quoted even liberal theologians to the effect that "the Kingdom of God is not a program of social reform." Our faith can (and should) inform our political and policy considerations, I wrote, but it hardly offers explicit directives about how to structure welfare programs or whether it is a good idea to finance a particular project. We cannot ignore broad religious imperatives to care for the poor, but how to best do so is a matter on which faith is ill-equipped to dictate.