{"id":6,"date":"2010-06-04T11:18:11","date_gmt":"2010-06-04T11:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/souters-consitutional-spirituality.html"},"modified":"2010-06-04T11:18:11","modified_gmt":"2010-06-04T11:18:11","slug":"souters-consitutional-spirituality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/souters-consitutional-spirituality.html","title":{"rendered":"Souter’s Constitutional Spirituality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"souter_harvard_commencement_2010.JPG\"<\/span>There’s a spiritual dimension to last week’s commencement speech<\/a> at Harvard by retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter. As celebrated by the liberal likes of E.J. Dionne <\/a>and Linda Greenhouse<\/a>, the speech constituted a sharp critique of the originalism of Antonin Scalia et al. Souter rejects what he calls their “fair reading” approach, in which constitutional judging is imagined to be a straightforward process of looking at the text as the Founders are presumed to have intended it and applying that to the facts of the case. “The Constitution,” said Souter, “is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are
\nhard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the
\ncases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another.”<\/p>\n

Behind the originalists’ “simplistic” critique, Souter continues (in a sympathetic mode), “there lies a basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the
\nfair reading model seems to promise. And who has not felt that same
\nhunger?” But it is important, he suggests, to put away such childish things. <\/p>\n

Where I suspect we differ most fundamentally is in my belief that in
\nan indeterminate world I cannot control, it is still possible to live
\nfully in the trust that a way will be found leading through the
\nuncertain future.  And to me, the future of the Constitution as the
\nFramers wrote it can be staked only upon that same trust.  If we cannot
\nshare every intellectual assumption that formed the minds of those who
\nframed the charter, we can still address the constitutional
\nuncertainties the way they must have envisioned, by relying on reason,
\nby respecting all the words the Framers wrote, by facing facts, and by
\nseeking to understand their meaning for living people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

That is how a judge lives in a state of trust, and I know of no other
\nway to make good on the aspirations that tell us who we are, and who we
\nmean to be, as the people of the United States.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From a gentle man, these are very tough words. In Souter’s view, Scalia et al. suffer from a failure of nerve. They cannot abide an indeterminate world that cannot be controlled, and so look for simple rules to control it. They do not trust that a way can be found to resolve the uncertainties the Framers saw–one that addresses the facts and meanings of the present time. They do not make good on our
\naspirations as a people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a spiritual dimension to last week’s commencement speech at Harvard by retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter. As celebrated by the liberal likes of E.J. Dionne and Linda Greenhouse, the speech constituted a sharp critique of the originalism of Antonin Scalia et al. Souter rejects what he calls their “fair reading” approach, in which…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nSouter's Constitutional Spirituality - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/souters-consitutional-spirituality.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Souter's Constitutional Spirituality - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There’s a spiritual dimension to last week’s commencement speech at Harvard by retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}