“To Live a Common Life” ft. Boston College’s Cathleen Kaveny I Saturdays at Seven Ep. 48 (The Legal Vocation: Part Five of a Six Part Series)

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In the forty-eighth episode of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Cathleen Kaveny, the Darald and Juliet Libby Millenium Professor of Theology and Law at Boston College. Ream opens by asking Kaveny about her efforts concerning interdisciplinary scholarship, how such efforts break down siloes often defining academe, and how the challenges plaguing society often transcend those siloes. One critical component of interdisciplinary scholarship that Kaveny stresses is the full appropriation of questions that arise from any set of relevant disciplines. Doing so, however, demands the exercise of various virtues including humility and the recognition that one may need to seek the assistance of colleagues. Ream and Kaveny discuss Kaveny’s education and the freedom she found to transcend those siloes as an undergraduate at Princeton as well as a joint J.D./Ph.D. student at Yale. Kaveny then explains the debt of gratitude she owes to several teachers as well as Judge John T. Noonan for whom she clerked for how they shaped her sense of vocation.

• Cathleen Kaveny’s Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square (Harvard University Press, 2018)

Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.

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Our guest is Cathleen Kaveny, the Darald and Juliet Libby Millennium Professor of Theology and Law at Boston College. Thank you for joining us.

Cathleen Kaveny: I’m delighted to be here and look forward to our conversation.

Todd Ream: With perhaps only a few exceptions, none of the challenges we face as a society fit neatly into the disciplinary categories that often define the academy. Despite rhetorical support we often give interdisciplinary scholarship, the National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters once quipped, “Interdisciplinary scholarship has been a phantom.” Winters, however, also argued that your work is an example that interdisciplinary is not only possible but can produce dialogue that yields real insights. To start our conversation today, how do you define interdisciplinarity?

Cathleen Kaveny: That’s a hard question. I guess I would define it at its core, as a willingness to take questions from different disciplines, not just answers from different disciplines. I think that’s what makes it both really challenging and really fun. 

Sometimes people think of interdisciplinary work as bringing in, say, one philosopher or one scientist or one economist as a support for their own argument as an authority. Well, here’s my view on economics. And here’s an economic economics professor that I think is great. And conveniently, they agree with me. So I’m going to cite them as an authority for my position. And that’s a start, right? I mean, that’s a start. But it isn’t really interdisciplinary work.

Interdisciplinary work isn’t just bringing in somebody to make a guest appearance in your field’s television series. Interdisciplinary work is spending a fair amount of time studying the other discipline so you can understand how they see the world, how the other discipline asks the questions, and where I find it’s really fruitful where the dialogue is really fruitful, is where you can say, well, what questions is my field asking, and what questions are the other field asking, and how do the questions come together? That’s what I think it is.

Todd Ream: Thank you. What limitations then, if any, should scholars keep in mind when pursuing interdisciplinary work?

Cathleen Kaveny: Well, I think the first thing to say is that it takes a lot of humility to pursue it. You have to make yourself a student of the other discipline, not just like a raider of the lost Ark, right? know, you just don’t go in and grab two or three things and then run back to your safe discipline. You have to spend some time kind of getting the conceptual framework, understanding the history of that discipline, and then trying to see yourself as a student. 

So, and I think the problem with the academy at this time is there’s just not a lot of incentive or time for people to do that. Right? Because we’re so organized in a silo way. We’ve got philosophy departments. We have theology departments. We have law schools. We have economics departments. 

And then that sets up a framework where really, you know- I always think of it if I could do a, a departmental university cartoon, like the New Yorker’s view of the world for each discipline, and you know that it’s got New York and Manhattan and a tiny little California way in the distance. I think every discipline in academia has its own New Yorker cartoon view of the world, theology, and then math way over there, or economics and humanities and a cloud, because who really knows what they view. 

So you have to really take seriously the fact that there are other people nearby working on questions and then value that in terms of the way you allow people to spend their time.

Todd Ream: I’ve often thought of the university along these lines as like a trip to the zoo and you had different sort of regions as the animals are often then you have within those regions different animals in different cages, so to say some who work and play well with others and some who don’t and and mix them that way.

Cathleen Kaveny: And the other problem is as in academia, or at least in the humanities, I don’t think it holds true of the sciences we’re all kind of independent contractors. We’re cats, if you want to use an animal image, rather than dogs. We don’t really run in packs very well, you know? 

And so you’ve got a whole bunch of people who are trained, especially through the process of the dissertation, to work on their own and respond maybe to a dissertation advisor’s suggestions or a reader’s suggestions, but not to work collaboratively. And I think that that’s another problem too, because the best way to learn about another discipline, unless you’re actually going to go get the dual training, is to work with somebody on an ongoing basis for whom that discipline is their first language.

Todd Ream: Well said. In the case of your work then, how do you conceptualize the relationship shared by theology and law?

Cathleen Kaveny: Well, it’s sort of interesting that’s changed over time, and maybe the best way to explain it would be kind of to indicate how I got into this strange combination in the first place. 

So I was an undergrad at Princeton University and I was what was called a religion politics bridge major. So I was taking politics courses, including constitutional law, and then I was studying with religious studies professors, particularly some tremendous ethicists who happened to be there at the time. Namely I’m thinking of Jeff Stout you know, and Paul Ramsey, who were my co-advisors on my senior thesis, which was an important project back then. 

The religion department at Princeton, I dedicated one of my books to it to what the lounge was, what they had there. So there was just this conversation constantly going on and the text, what was, what was in the New York Times on a particular day and how do you analyze nuclear war or how do you think about Roe v. Wade and the, and the, and the Supreme Court’s decisions about it later on, or how do you think about economic justice?

People were arguing and in that era, and I say this in the nicest possible way, you got no quarter for being ignorant and 18. They would just say that argument doesn’t make any sense. And here’s why. And boom Paul Ramsey flattened your argument or Victor Preller flattened your, or Jeff Stout, but they did it in the most respectful sort of way like you can do better than this and we’re helping you do better than this. And so that kind of conversation about ethics was going on, but it always had a practical implication. 

And then I was taking courses in con law. So as an ethicist at Princeton, I thought, well, my main questions are about the relationship of morality and law. If something is immoral, should it be illegal? How do we think about that? I was very interested in questions of medical ethics euthanasia, assisted suicide, surrogate motherhood. 

What’s the relationship between your religious belief on the one hand, a kind of common morality in the Catholic tradition that would be called a kind of natural law approach. We have a common morality or a natural rights approach. And then what do you do about law in a pluralistic society where not everybody has the same religion or even the same view of what’s part of the common morality? So that was my first set of questions. 

And so I decided, well I’m 5’2″. If I stand up straight, nobody’s going to draft me as the center on a basketball team. So what am I going to do? School’s been good to me. I’ll continue with school. Seems to be a good thing. So I ended up at Yale you know, in the doctoral program in ethics and in the law school. And the best thing about that program, and I again, I say this in the nicest possible way was benign neglect. 

As long as you were willing to stand in line once a semester and tell the registrar, oh no, don’t bill me for the law school, I’m in the theology or in the religious studies this semester or no hold off on my fellowship, I’m in the law school this semester, you could integrate law and ethics or in the religious studies department, or for that matter, law and history or law and and philosophy. They were fantastic at Yale about letting you build a program that worked for you. 

But as I got interested in studying law, and got more deep in the study of Christian theology, it’s not that my interest in questions of the relationship of morality and law diminished. It’s just that other questions came to mind. And those questions were, how do you reason in the context of an authoritative tradition that has to change if it’s going to survive? And how do you have changes that count as authentic developments rather than, you know running off the rails and betraying your fundamental concerns? So those were the questions that I pursued and, and that still fascinate me. 

Todd Ream: Thank you. In what ways do you believe interdisciplinary efforts, the kind that you pursue, provide for dialogue that comes closer to grappling with the depth of what is actually at stake in the issues that we’re dealing with as a society?

Cathleen Kaveny: I think it’s absolutely essential but I think it’s more about, as I said before, getting the questions from the other discipline rather than seeking the answers because I don’t think that you can get at the truth without having the right question, right? I mean, so you have to be able to ask the question. And so I don’t think we can pursue truth as, as Christians or, and as ethicists, which I am, without actually seeing what questions other people are asking in other disciplines. 

You know, and, and also understanding how it operates, I think. You know, so I think questions in the financial sector, Christian ethicists are very concerned about Matthew 25 and, and, and, and about the poor, in that, well, how do you operate this? How does the economy work? So understanding economics, understanding how technology is developed and regulated and distributed, understanding how all of that works is crucial, if we want to say something that’s both rooted in our faith but directed toward the real world. 

Todd Ream: Thank you. You mentioned some of the components of your educational background, having studied at Princeton as an undergraduate and then Yale through the joint PhD-JD program, I wanted to ask you about at what point did you realize that you would need the resources that were organized into various disciplines? Was there a point at which that came or did it just sort of grow organically through the collaborative sort of efforts that you experienced both as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student?

Cathleen Kaveny: I would say it’s a little bit of both. My decision to go to law school, I think, was an inchoate sense that I needed the disciplines of both fields. I mean, I suppose I started out really my heart is, and frankly, my fundamental normative framework still comes from the framework of Christian ethics, right? And so I probably did instrumentalize law and my legal education when I first went to law school. 

But then as I experienced law school, I saw the richness of the tradition and the nuances actually in the moral reasoning especially in the common law courses. And criminal law, contract law, tort law. How do we organize ourselves as a society? How do we pick up the pieces when people break contracts or wrongly invade one another’s private space? Or what’s even worse, commit a violent act against one another. 

You know, human beings in the Christian tradition have tremendous potential, but we also have tremendous potential to sin. And the law takes seriously that side of things, and it takes it seriously that side in a very nitty gritty way. So as I went through law school, I began to really not see law as sort of a secondary partner in this, but as a way of human beings reasoning together about how to live a common life, taking seriously both the aspirations and the drawbacks of human nature. So that was one thing. 

But then I got to the end of law school and I’m trying to think, well, what am I going to do? Like, okay, I gotta get out of school at some point. I need to get a paycheck. You know, how am I going to frame this? So I just sort of did things a little bit incrementally. 

And the most graced gift of my life after my education—and I had the best range of professors, both as an undergrad in law school and in doctoral work that you could possibly imagine and I can talk more about them later if you want. But what I did was I applied to one federal judge for an appellate clerkship after law school, and that was the Honorable John T. Noonan, Jr., because he had done what I was aspiring to do, which was integrate this tremendous knowledge he had of the Roman Catholic tradition. 

You know, he’d written books on usury and contraception and, and you know the law of marriage, with an absolutely stunning legal education and acumen and written on religious liberty, written on topics like bribes. He was just a towering figure who integrated everything I wanted to integrate. And he was acting as a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. 

I was fortunate enough to be able to clerk for him. And that was a transformative experience because his writing, which is historically contextualized and talks about development and even devolution of tradition, is the big framework that I use. So he’s the practical. 

In terms of the theoretical framework I use for thinking about tradition, which is, it’s Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of historically constituted inquiry as, as a tradition. So MacIntyre’s After Virtue, MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Dependent Rational Animals, that’s the theoretical frame I use. How do we develop? How do we understand that context matters? That history matters, that we can’t just look at ideas apart from practices and institutions. All of those have been my questions throughout my career.

Todd Ream: Yeah. If I can ask you a question then along these lines, would you say a little bit more about your dissertation now which the subtitle is Liberalism is a Living Tradition. What do you mean when you say, and when you wrote liberalism is a living tradition? Um, most of us unfortunately tend to think of tradition as staid or stagnant or inflexible, but you’ve got a different definition that you’re working with drawing from individuals such as Alasdair MacIntyre and so on.

Cathleen Kaveny: I laughed when I saw your question about my dissertation because I had to write my dissertation very, very quickly because I had a hard deadline of going to clerk for Judge Noonan and I knew that if I didn’t finish the dissertation before I went there—so you actually triggered a traumatic memory like oh my gosh, did the computer—back then it was like little Apple computers and you saw the little bomb of terror when it lost the file but thank you all these years later somebody’s asking about the dissertation.

Well, I think of tradition not as a dead practice. It’s a living practice. It’s the living arguments about our heritage. So MacIntyre defines tradition as, as an argument about the goods internal to the tradition and the practices that embody them. So I think part of what I was trying to argue back in my dissertation was that liberalism isn’t simply an ahistorical commitment to certain values, individual dignity, the importance of autonomy you know, and a staid conception of rights, but that this is something that we’ve been arguing about.

We’ve been arguing about the practices that protect them, the institutions that are necessary to pass them on, and therefore, they have been critiqued and revised over the years. And that’s part of what it means to be, I think, in a broadly liberal tradition. And, and one of the things we argue about is what sort of rights do we give minority communities, especially minority religious communities, whose full worldview is not capturable within a liberal worldview.

And so I was looking at some of the religious liberty cases back then. Yoder, Wisconsin v. Yoder, where this that was kind of a apex of religious liberty where said that the Amish had the right to take their kids out of high school because they were going to give them an education at home that would certainly keep them off the streets, but would also enable them to be members of the community.

When I wrote that dissertation, I was very much influenced by Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer and a kind of communitarian understanding, both of our nature as individuals, but also of the nature of religion. You know, in many Supreme Court cases, not all of them, there was sort of an individualistic conception of religion that you could see where it was just my isolated religious belief and, and and you know, more of a kind of mainstream Protestant view and that was not something that fit the Amish or fits many other branches of Christianity, including other Protestant branches. So I was trying to emphasize communitarianism.

Todd Ream: Yeah. In what ways would you then argue such an understanding of liberalism as it’s developed would prove beneficial to the United States, especially considering the social and political challenges that we’re facing right now?

Cathleen Kaveny: Well, I think it’s important to recognize that liberalism has always been an argument and a discussion about certain values, and many of them are in tension, right? You know, and what we’re trying to do is to balance them. So we’ve got one way is liberty, equality and fraternity or siblinghood, if you want to be gender inclusive about this, which I think we are increasingly gender inclusive. 

So how do you balance your autonomy with your responsibilities to other people? And one of the things I worry about, ironically, in the current Supreme Court litigation on on the part of Christian conservatives is it’s say in the Hobby Lobby case or in the where they’re trying to protect their religious freedom, not to participate in health care plans that cover contraceptives or abortions or all of it. All of that’s very important. And you’ve got a framework within the law that you have to consider that. 

But I really wish there would be more consideration within Christian circles of what we owe not just what are my rights, but what do I owe, say, employees who don’t think like I do? What do I owe other people? Not just what do I claim, but what do I owe? 

So the problem with the the American language right now and the litigiousness is it encourages both liberals and conservatives, both religious and secular folk to peel off and say, I’m going to claim my share rather than thinking, okay, you disagree with me on this very fundamental issue, what do I owe you?

Todd Ream: And that sort of, I’m going to call it a sort of a communitarian or leaning toward that sort of understanding of how we intersect with others and interact with others. Yeah, thank you. 

After clerking with John Noonan with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, you served as an associate for the Boston based law firm of Ropes and Gray, and then as a faculty member with the University of Notre Dame School of Law. Would you please describe the discernment process that led you from San Francisco to Boston, then to Notre Dame, Indiana?

Cathleen Kaveny: Sure. It’s sort of funny. So when I got to clerking for Judge Noonan, I think I could admit this 30 out, 30 plus years later, I was not fully—I had been writing a dissertation, right? So I didn’t have all the latest all the legal skills at my, the tip of my fingers or the tip of my brain. And I was very grateful to my co-clerks Jim Shannon and Robert Brundage, for helping me remember how to use Westlaw and Shepardize and do all the things you needed to do if you were a law clerk. I’m like, oh, I know I knew this once. Do I know it now? So they were very great.

But in the course of clerking for John Noonan, I decided I really did want to not just have a JD. So having a JD is one thing. Being an actual lawyer is something else that I was in for a penny, but I was also going to be in for a pound. So I wanted to actually have the experience and the learning of being a practicing lawyer. 

I’m from Cumberland, Rhode Island so Boston is the big city near where I grew up. And Ropes and Gray is a wonderful firm. Now, I, by happenstance, I applied to work in the health law group at Ropes and Gray and that was just because, well, all right, I’m in, what am I going to do? I know something about biomedical ethics, I know something about—maybe health law is a good way to go.

So I just sort of picked it by happenstance, but it was also a very fortunate choice because in a big law firm, the way things normally work is you do one sort of thing for a range of clients. So if you’re a litigator, you litigate for a big tech company for another type of corporation you litigate. If you’re a merger and acquisition person, you merge and acquire all sorts of businesses, but you do the same sort of thing for a different range of clients.

At the time I was in the health law group at Ropes and Gray, it was a different organization. They worked for large Boston teaching hospitals, mainly, and also small community hospitals. But you did a range of work that was client-based. So I had the opportunity to do some merging and affiliation of hospitals. I mean not do it. I was a very low associate, but to see that and to do some litigation work to do some work that was, you know, dealing with Medicare, Medicaid issues. I had a very broad education in three years of being a lawyer, and I’m tremendously grateful to Ropes and Gray for that. And for the lawyers I worked with. 

So I not only learned a little bit about law, I, my mindset, I think was changed to some degree because if you’re a scholar, you’re really in your own head, right? You know, you’re walking around thinking about the issues that are important to you. I really did not, I think, when I started at Ropes and Gray, fully appreciate what it meant to have a client-centered perspective. I’m like, well, this is a really interesting question. They’re like, well, that’s, that may be an interesting question, Cathy, but that’s not what the client is paying for, you know? So I took a little while to shift my perspective. So that was one thing I learned. 

And then the other really important thing I learned, I think I became a better thinker and writer because of working with some of the people I worked with at Ropes and Gray. You know, John Chesley was great. There were other people that were there and they just couldn’t get away with some of the abstract puffery that we tend to rely in academia from time to time.

You know, it was not considered impressive if you were writing in a way that was unintelligible because what they were what the client was paying for was, was intelligibility and clarity and a direction. And I think that has stood me in good stead as a writer later on. So that was how I got to Ropes and Gray.

And then how I got to Notre Dame was sort of, I wasn’t—I knew I would think about getting into academia later on because I did realize that the best lawyers, practicing lawyers that I met did have an unselfish brain, in the sense that they really liked it when people came to them and they could solve their problems. You know, they liked having somebody say, well, I’ve got to merge this or I’ve got to do this. Here’s a puzzle, solve it, you know? 

And I realized, frankly, I have a selfish brain. I really, I mean, I don’t think I’m a selfish person, but I have a selfish brain, which is my brain really does like to think about questions it thinks up itself and the problems it thinks up itself and and interesting angles. You know, the PhD work had really shifted how my brain operated. So I thought I love law. I don’t think I want to practice law. I think I’m better off being a scholar.

And then I got a phone call from, I remember he called me at 7:30 in the morning, like almost constantly for about like you know, a month, Bob Blakey Robert, G. Robert Blakey is a very famous lawyer. He was at Notre Dame. He wrote the racketeering act. So anytime you hear anything about Rico, he was on TV. He also ran the Kennedy assassination investigation. So we were all very impressed with him and he’s a very good person and really fun. Though, nobody really wanted their office next to his, right? Cause like if you write the law that brings down the mob might I’d like to be on the other side of the building from Professor Blakey, you know?

But he reassured me that the mob wasn’t going to go after him because they respected that he was doing his thing and they were doing theirs. I don’t know if I fully believe that.

Todd Ream: I’d get that in writing.

Cathleen Kaveny: It was funny. But he they were trying at that point to bring a new generation of Catholics who were academics to Notre Dame Law School. And, and, and I was one of the people they tried to recruit. And so I ended up going there and really they were a tremendous law school to work with because they basically said, you write what you want, just write. So I could write law. I could write in theology. I could write in whatever I want. And they gave me tenure and I’m grateful for that. 

And the thing I would recommend though, to anybody considering interdisciplinary work is do not get a joint appointment until after you get tenure. Father Bryan Hehir of Harvard was the person who told me that. And that was the best advice cause you don’t want two groups of people deciding if they like you or not, right. You know, cause sometimes an interview, it could be the Crips and the Bloods, right. And the only thing they agree on is they don’t like you. You don’t want that kind of situation coming up for tenure.

Todd Ream: So then tell me about your joint appointment now at Boston College, how it came about and how you share your time and invest your time? 

Cathleen Kaveny: I’m a New England girl and I’ve got family here and, and, and I really without casting aspersions on Notre Dame, I’m really very sympathetic to and in accord with the Jesuit mission and so a friend of mine, Vincent Rougeau, who is now president of Holy Cross, became the dean of BC Law about 10 years ago. No more than that, 2012, something like that, you know. 

And then a couple of years later, he said, hey, Cathy, would you like to think about coming to Boston College? And I have tremendous friends as well in the theology department, people I really respect, Lisa Cahill, Jim Keenan, Andrea Vicini, just a wonderful set of colleagues there. And I thought yeah, I think I would. I think that there are opportunities in Boston and, and through the Jesuit networks that would be really fruitful to consider. 

And as impressive and wonderful as Notre Dame is I need like—the thing I love most in the morning is walking out of the house, even though I live in Chestnut Hill and just feeling the ocean air and so for family, existential, and mission oriented meeting reasons I thought it was good to to move to BC. And I’ve been delighted here. I’m so grateful to Father Leahy for making this happen, for seeing the importance of interdisciplinary work and to my colleagues in law and theology for putting up with me. 

Because any interdisciplinary person is always going to be disappointing to the discipline, right? Because you’re only going to be at half the faculty meetings, right? You know, on the logistical basis, if you spend all your time doing you never get anything else done. 

You have to recognize that you don’t know twice as much as anybody else. They all know more in one field and more in another. And you’re just sort of in the middle of the Venn diagram. So it requires a certain amount of humility and a willingness to ask questions of your colleagues. Well you know, to be honest. I don’t know this. What do I need to read? Please help me. 

And that’s actually something I learned from practicing lawyers, believe it or not. So, you know what I saw at Ropes and Gray was that you’d have a health care lawyer and they would you know, have there be a tax question. Well, go talk to so and so about the tax issue. You wouldn’t try to do it yourself. You’d go get the best person and you’d say I don’t know. Can you help me? And they would because it was a partnership. It was a team. It was a firm and so that helped me. 

And when I moved back into academia to think about how to think about my own academic life. I really depend on brilliant scholars in each of the fields that I have a department home in.

Todd Ream: Thank you. To date, you’re the author of over a hundred articles and four books, including most recently, Ethics at the Edge of Law. Of your books, is any one of them more representative than the other three, in terms of the voice that you’ve sought to develop as an author and as a scholar? 

Cathleen Kaveny: In a way, it’s kind of asking you to choose between your intellectual children, which one’s your favorite. So I won’t say that one is more representative. I will say that one was more born of anguish. Um, and that’s Prophecy Without Contempt. It’s, it was a book I tried to write in order to understand what was going on in American discourse and religious discourse in the American context, the culture war issues and how people could have such deep opinions, such passionate opinions upon about issues and yet be unable to convince one another of their point or even their kind of moral worth. 

Because when you get into a culture war, you often tend to get into dualistic thinking: we’re the side of the angels and you’re the side of the devil, you know? We’re right and you are all really, really wrong. So I thought, well, in order to understand this, and maybe this kind of gives a sense of how interdisciplinary work is never done. In fact, I don’t have the tools in either law or in theology to understand what’s going on. I need to really broaden my thinking and my understanding.

And it broadened into two areas. One was rhetoric and the other was history. And I suppose the third was, although it is connected obviously to Christianity and you know, scriptural reasoning. So what I did was I started by looking at the rhetoric of fiery condemnation and noticed how it was really rooted in Scripture, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah. And in fact, it’s so rooted in Scripture that its common name is the jeremiad, after the prophet Jeremiah, because he was the one who got an A+ in practicing that kind of rhetoric, right? So he did that. 

But then I looked at the condemnations there. And I noticed how in American Puritanism the first settlers in Massachusetts, really use that kind of sermon where the preachers would condemn the sins of their community. And, and they saw themselves as really stepping into the shoes of the Jewish people. And that just as God responded to both the good behavior and the bad behavior of the Jews with rewards and punishments in Scripture, so in real life in America in the 17th century, God was responding to the faithful or the unfaithful behavior of the Puritans.

And so there were all these sermons condemning bad behavior, but what I thought was interesting about it was the Puritans loved it. They thought this was great preaching and great behavior and I thought well, why would anybody like this kind of sermon? And studying it, I came up with two things. 

One, the preachers were condemning behavior that everybody agreed was wrong. So they were behaving like prosecutors. If you’re prosecuted by the state of Massachusetts for going 105 miles an hour on 95 South you may be kind of upset you were busted by radar, but you’re going to agree it was against the law. And fair enough. And so the Puritan preachers were condemning behavior that even if people practiced it, they agreed was against the law in their community. That was the first thing.

The second thing is that the Puritan preachers always put themselves in the role of to use the Bible again, the oracles against Israel rather than the oracles against the nations. So if you go back to Scripture, biblical scholars will say that the prophetic indictments are kind of grouped into two categories. One is the oracles against Israel, where the prophets are condemning the behavior of their own people, but in order to provoke reform so that God will not rain destruction down upon them. It’s for their own good, really. 

But there’s another set of condemnations in Scripture, which is where the prophets condemn the behavior of the enemies of Israel like the Babylonians or the Assyrians. And that often calls for total destruction and doesn’t really give much hope. The Puritan creatures were using the oracles against Israel as a model, so they were always calling for reform, a renewed relationship. And it wasn’t as harsh it’s reform for your own good. 

In our era, the use of rhetoric doesn’t have those two salutary features. Very often, people use prophetic indictment to condemn behavior that they think everybody should agree on abortion or torture or economic injustice. And people just have different views on that. And just as you are not going to respond well if you are indicted for behavior that the prosecutor just thinks should be against the law, so people don’t respond very well to being indicted for behavior that they don’t agree is part of the moral consensus already. That’s a limitation of the rhetoric. 

And then the other thing is very often with the culture war framing, people use the oracles against the nations as the way of engaging with other people. Like you are evil. You should be destroyed. You don’t agree with me on X, Y, and Z. You know, you, you should be in a city where not even a hoot owl is found just to echo a little bit of some of the prophetic rhetoric against the nations. So I really tried to figure out how we got to this point in our discourse. And I realized ethics and law couldn’t help us, but we needed to study history and rhetoric and Scripture as well.

Todd Ream: Published in 2016, if my memory serves me well, this book is arguably far more relevant now, perhaps even, than it was. It was relevant when it was written, but it’s certainly relevant in the age in which we live today.

Cathleen Kaveny: It hasn’t gotten any better in terms of rhetoric. Although what I would say, if I were writing a you know, kind of a sequel to it is we need to study even more types of rhetoric. So if you go back to the Aristotelian categories, we have deliberative rhetoric, right. You know, we’ve got our normal policy rhetoric and I argued that a prophetic rhetoric was the rhetoric of law. It was forensic rhetoric. It was an indictment.

But when Donald Trump came along, I think we got a different type of rhetoric. And if you look at how he operated, it was more epideictic rhetoric. He tended to use the rhetoric of praise and blame. You know, mocking people, praising, oh, this guy’s a good guy, really like this guy. Or she’s good. He’s bad. Making fun of people that he considered bad, really fulsome praise of people he considered good. So we moved in a way in the era of Trump from prophetic rhetoric to epideictic rhetoric. 

Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. As we move toward the close of our conversation, I do want to ask you though, when you think about your career and how it’s evolved, how has your understanding of the academic vocation developed and perhaps changed?

Cathleen Kaveny: And that’s a really interesting question. Thank you for asking that. You know, I don’t come from, I come from an educated family, but not a family that we’re scholars. I really saw the possibility of doing this thanks to my professors in graduate school and an undergrad, Jeff Stout, Paul Ramsey, but also others John Gager, Albert Raboteau. I mean, I could just name a whole bunch of people at Princeton and at Yale, Gene Outka, George Lindbeck, Hans Frey, and Margaret Farley. 

So what you become as an academic, you look at other people and you say, well, how am I like them? How is my vocation like theirs? And where am I distinct? So developing a voice is kind of, it’s all, it’s not so much that you go off and find your unique piece as much as you create a quilt that draws on certain aspects of people you’ve had the honor of working with. And I think that that’s what I’ve done. 

I think earlier in my career I was more of a polemicist. I saw my job as really trying to make an argument on behalf of or against a particular position. Now, I think having been in the field a long time, I see my job as not as, as more teaching, right. Maybe when I was younger, I can’t remember if it was Nagel or Nozick or who said this, but you know, an argument so powerful, it would set up reverberations in the brain, either the reader would accept the conclusion or their brain would explode. I saw that as kind of what I wanted to be able to do. 

As I got more mature, you realize that people have freedom and people have to make up their own minds. And the best way to help somebody see what is true is to give them the arguments in as unbiased a way as you can, but with also rhetorical freedom to accept or not accept what you’re saying. So I don’t view it as my job to train people to think like me. I view it as my job to train people to think and then to decide for themselves. 

And, as a teacher, you have to give up instant gratification. I don’t know how I will affect somebody. I don’t know what will shape them in their mind or heart later on. I can just do the best I can to say, well, here are the best arguments on this side. Here are the best arguments on this side. Here is where I come out and why. But you have to come to your own judgment. 

So I see myself more as a teacher as well as a scholar now. When I was in grad school, I didn’t see that.

Todd Ream: Yeah, there’s a lot of wisdom in that in terms of part of what we’re investing in is increasing their own sense of agency by doing it in a way when we genuinely enter into a relationship and a conversation with them, but part of that is that we don’t eclipse that or assume that their agency is entirely the same as ours would be.

Cathleen Kaveny: No, but I do have like I do not go in and say, you know to the ethicist, oh, you’re absolutely wonderful. You’re fantastic. The world needs your voice right now. I say what was said to me, which is, you have a lot to learn. I still have a lot to learn and we’re going to learn together. 

And for what you say to be valuable, you have to study the Christian tradition, you have to study philosophy, you have to study the internet. We’re not interested in, or I’m not interested in prophetic indictment right off the hip right out of grad school. No, you got a long career and this is your accumulation phase. This isn’t your dissemination phase.

Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In what ways, if any, do you believe the academic vocation is defined by a commitment to engage the public, whether society as a whole, the Church wherever the need may be felt? 

Cathleen Kaveny: Well, I think David Tracy kind of had that, right. He said that at least for theology, there are always three publics. You know, one is the academy. The other is the Church. And the third is society at large. And I think different people may concentrate on different aspects of that public. 

You know, I think that any one scholar can engage all three publics. The key is to think about communication, right. You know, if I’m talking to somebody who’s just a general member of the public, what do I need to give them as background so that they can enter into this conversation on equal footing as an equal term. You know, when you go into a Church context where do I have to show that there are points of common ground and common commitments so they will take what I’m saying seriously and, and understand that I’m doing this as a way of building up our common commitments.

And in academia, I think part of what you need to show is rigor and also kind of an independence of question. So my next project isn’t something that I don’t think very many people are interested in in academia right now. I hope it stays that way because I got to finish this book and I’m not going as fast as I can. Don’t be interested in it yet. Be interested when I write my book on the ethics of nostalgia. If you look around we see all sorts of nostalgia everywhere.

And I think that this is a really interesting topic and it’s an interesting topic for Americans, but it’s also an interesting topic for Christians because how do we think about time and redeemed time? You know, how do we think about appropriating the past in a way that recognizes the value of tradition, but still, as Jesus said, let the dead bury their dead, right? You know, so how do we have an appropriate attitude toward the past that isn’t nostalgic in a bad sense but still values what’s good? 

So that’s my latest project. And it’s nothing like my earlier, I don’t tend to go back to, I tend to do something and think, okay, if this was helpful, it was helpful, but you know, the thing I hate being more than anything else is I’ve told my colleagues is bored, so I tend to move on from a topic.

Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask you about the responsibility, if any, that the university has to cultivating an understanding of the academic vocation amongst the scholars that join in their community, and then perhaps what responsibility the Church may have?

Cathleen Kaveny: Well, I think they both have responsibilities and I think they’re a little bit different. You know, universities need to survive and we’re about hitting on a baby bust, right? You know, so the whole context for academic work is shrinking, right? I mean if people aren’t filling positions that were filled, particularly in the humanities, lots of students are going to school so they can get good jobs right out of school. 

I think the general value of a broad liberal arts education is beginning to be questioned. And I think ChatGPT isn’t really helping if you say, well if I don’t need to learn to write an essay, I can just ask it to write an essay. Why do I learn to write it? I’m just gonna look at these TikToks of cats, you know? That’s just as well as ChatGPT writes my essay. 

So I think we need to make a better case for not just external goods, and now I’ll go back to MacIntyre, but the internal goods of studying, of learning another religion, of transforming your brain to appreciate more complex things. I mean, and what I would say to the undergrads and, and the parents is, you don’t know what the world is going to be like in 40 years when your kids are running the world, right. So you need to prepare them by giving them as broad and flexible an education as possible that will allow them to ask the right questions.

And I think what the churches need to say, and I think what academics need to say is what academics have is the luxury of time. So I don’t have to give a fast take. I don’t have to have an op-ed up tomorrow. I can say well, actually the deeper question is nostalgia and I’ll have a book for you on it in 18 months. You know, but I’m not going to have an op-ed on it tomorrow. 

You know, we’ve talked about slow food, slow living, slow thinking is important too. And I think for the Church to recognize that coming to terms with its future involves deeply appreciating the great figures of the past, but also recognizing like, like Augustine did, like Aquinas did, like Martin Luther did, that we’re in a new time and that those frames or those questions have to be appropriated, not just in a fast way, but also in a learned way. And so the Church has to pay attention to scholarship and give it the time and space it needs. And scholars, people who have that vocation, need to be courageous about pursuing it, but they also need support.

Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much. Our guest has been Cathleen Kaveny, the Darald and Juliette Libby Millennium Professor of Theology and Law at Boston College. Thank you for sharing your insights and wisdom with us.

Cathleen Kaveny: I’m delighted to have had this opportunity and thank you for asking me.

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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.