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Over at The Church Report, I have a piece discussing the sad case of a Pennsylvania couple who has been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of their two-year-old son. They advocated “faith healing,” and so were apparently opposed to medical care.

This case and others like it raise important questions because they involve an apparent conflict of rights—in this instance, a conflict between the right to religious freedom and the right to life. If the accusations are correct, the parents are in the wrong on both legal and theological grounds. On legal grounds, I argue that we should recognize a hierarchy of rights, with the right to life coming before every other right. After all, the right to property and religion presupposes the right to life. So the parents’ freedom of religion doesn’t trump their son’s right to life. Manslaughter is still manslaughter, even if done for deeply held religious reasons.

What they allegedly did was also wrong theologically—at least from a Christian perspective. Christians traditionally have believed that God can work extraordinary miracles—when he chooses to do so. But he can also work his will, including the healing of illness, through so-called “secondary causes.” That includes the work of physicians. So “faith healing” is in error when it presumes to tell God that he must work through extraordinary miracles rather than through ordinary means. Read the rest here.

The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual head of Greek Orthodox parishes worldwide, is in the United States advocating the cause du jour—environmentalism. He is apparently a strong advocate for environmental causes, and was given a platform in the October 26 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

Note the rhetorical context of the piece, which he makes explicit: “There are growing expectations that meaningful progress can be made in the United Nations Climate Change Conference scheduled to take place in Copenhagen this December.” So it’s not too much of a stretch to see his current activity, his call for “immediate action,” as an attempt to help move things in an Obamaish direction in Copenhagen.

Unfortunately, judging from his piece, “Our Indivisible Environment,” his thinking seems to be, well, fuzzy. This is especially troubling because of the prominence of his office, which is sometimes described as the “first among equals” of the Orthodox Patriarchs.

Environmental stewardship is a legitimate moral concern for Christians. But the Patriarch goes far beyond calling on Christians to be concerned. In fact, I think his argument, taken at face value, is misleading. Take the following two claims, which the Patriarch uses to justify Christian concern for the environment:

For if life is sacred, so is the entire web that sustains it.

Moreover, just as God is indivisible, so too is our global environment.

Let’s try to read these statements charitably. Perhaps his point is simply that life on Earth is connected and depends on its natural environment, and that since life has value in the eyes of God, so too does the natural environment on which it depends. Presumably all of creation has some intrinsic value (whether or not it’s part of our global environment) simply because God has created it. Scripture makes clear that God has purposes for his creation beyond human ken. As he asked Job: “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, Or loose the cords of Orion?”

But if that’s what Patriarch Bartholomew means, he could have said so more clearly.

In fact, the first statement, if not carefully qualified, might look like support for the radical, and anti-Christian, idea that every form of life is of equal worth. As PETA President Ingrid Newkirk famously said: “There’s no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all animals.” I’m sure the Patriarch would not assent to such an equation (but see John Couretas’s revealing piece at the Acton Powerblog for evidence of the Patriarch’s views on sanctity-of-life issues.) In any case, Newkirk’s attitude is a large part of the context in which the environmental debate takes place. One would think the Patriarch would construct his sentences to prevent that interpretation.

Next, he tells the readers of the Wall Street Journal: “Just as God is indivisible, so too is our global environment.” Huh?

This claim is a hopeless muddle. In fact, I don’t see how to make sense of it theologically. According to Christian theology, God, unlike physical creatures, is indivisible in the sense that his attributes and perfections can’t come apart. He can’t lose them. Whereas I might be loving just every so often, God’s love and justice are inseparable, eternal, and unimpeachable. To put it philosophically, there’s no possible world in which God is unloving, or ignorant, or unjust. He’s a perfect unity.

In contrast, however interconnected our global environment may be, it’s not indivisible “just as God is indivisible.” In fact, while the global environment is in some ways interconnected, it’s simply not true that every one of its features is essential to every other. The history of life is marked by all sorts of changes, extinctions, and disruptions. The global environment, and “life,” is apparently able to survive the deaths of entire classes of flora and fauna. To deny that is to deny the obvious. The idea that the environment always teeters on a razor’s edge—that any change is a catastrophe—is a dogma of the radical environmental movement, not of Christian theology. Again, Patriarch Bartholomew should choose his words more carefully.

For more detailed responses to Patriarch Bartholomew from fellow Orthodox Christians, read here.

In Stuart Taylor’s recent National Journal article “Selective Concern On Sex Imbalances” he writes:

It is an article of faith in the Obama administration, Congress, and much of the academic establishment that there are no innate differences between females and males in interests or cognitive capacities. From this dubious premise, they conclude that only pervasive, ongoing sexism and stereotypes can explain the huge gender disparities in academic fields—hard sciences, engineering, and mathematics—that are still male-dominated.

But advocates of this disparity-proves-discrimination dogma apply it quite selectively. They have shown virtually no concern about the small and shrinking percentages of males in colleges generally and in most academic fields.

Taylor concludes that amid the alleged “crisis” of gender bias in math and science departments, “The academic and political establishments treat as a non problem a real crisis that affects far more people: the ever-more-dramatic shrinkage in the percentage of males who graduate from college at all.”

In support of the sex imbalances in higher education that Taylor mentions, the graph and table below are based on recently released data that provide new evidence of the shrinking percentage of men graduating from college in general, and the female dominance in almost all academic fields at the graduate level.

The graph documents the complete gender reversal between 1970 and 2007 in the percentage of college degrees granted to men and women, from men earning 59 percent of all college degrees in 1970, followed by a gradual and consistent shift towards women, so that by 2007 slightly more than 59 percent of all college degrees were awarded to women (Department of Education data here). For the class of 2007, 144 women graduated with a college degree (at all levels) for every 100 men. The shrinkage of males in higher education that Taylor discusses is real and will continue to worsen each year—within eight years the Department of Education estimates that 167 women will earn associate’s degrees for every 100 men, and 148 women will earn master’s degrees for every 100 men.

The table above displays graduate school enrollment by gender in 2008 using data recently released by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). Women represented 58.9 percent of all graduate students in 2008, meaning that there were more than 143 women enrolled in graduate school for every 100 men. Further, women outnumbered men in 7 out of the 10 fields of graduate study tracked by the CGS, and were underrepresented in only three fields (business, engineering, and physical sciences). In the field of health science, women now outnumber men in graduate school by almost 4 to 1, and in both education and public administration graduate programs, there are about three females enrolled for every male.

As Taylor correctly points out, the gender activists seem relatively unconcerned about the huge and growing statistical gender disparities in favor of women for college enrollment and degrees in general and now also in almost every academic field at the graduate level, as they continue to narrowly focus only on the areas of math, science, and engineering. And it is this selectivity in concern about gender disparities that exposes the gender-equity cops as being intellectually inconsistent, unprincipled, and dishonest. Further, Taylor’s commentary suggests that the gender activists can’t have it both ways—if gender disparities favoring men in the sciences are the result of stereotypes and pervasive gender bias as they would have us believe, then doesn’t the growing overrepresentation of women in higher education generally and in seven out of ten graduate fields also have to be exposing pervasive, unexamined sexism against men?

Taylor frames his insightful column around the issues raised in the book The Science on Women and Science, a collection of ten essays edited by Christina Hoff Sommers, forthcoming from AEI. I hope both Taylor’s column and Dr. Sommers’s forthcoming book will bring some much needed attention to the gender activists’ selective and inconsistent concerns about sex imbalances in academia, and also to the fact that men have gradually become the second sex in American higher education.

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was originally created to provide a counterweight to the leftward lurch of the National Council of Churches. Unfortunately, in recent years, the NAE has, at times, seemed to be playing catch-up with the NCC. And in doing so, they’re pulling away from the denominations they claim to represent.

The most recent flap is over a resolution on immigration reform. Much of it would be easy for any Christian to agree to. It just summarizes universal Christian beliefs, such as the idea that all human beings are made in God’s image, and ought to be respected. It also notes, wisely: “The Bible does not offer a blueprint for modern legislation, but it can serve as a moral compass and shape the attitudes of those who believe in God.” Sounds right to me. In fact, I like the document, right up until it issues a “call to action.”

Alas, the resolution goes on to endorse various policies that are highly debatable, and that don’t follow obviously from any distinctively evangelical belief. The most controversial suggestion is an amnesty program for illegals: “That the government establish a sound, equitable process toward earned legal status for currently undocumented immigrants, who desire to embrace the responsibilities and privileges that accompany citizenship.”

I find it hard to believe that the NAE staff who wrote this resolution thought that they were speaking representatively of all the evangelical denominations who are NAE members. I happen to think we should have a pretty liberal legal immigration policy coupled with a rigorous program of cultural assimilation that resists the corrupting influences of multiculturalism and the welfare state. So on immigration, my views are pretty close to the NAE. Still, I’m acutely aware that such policy judgments are prudential in the extreme. I wouldn’t want my judgments to be made into an official resolution that claims to speak for a large body of Christians that had no say in the resolution. So while I mostly agree with its content, I still think the resolution represents poor judgment on the NAE’s part.

The Institute on Religion and Democracy seems to be thinking much more clearly than the NAE on this issue. See here and here.