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Jean Bethke Elshtain, an American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual, died Sunday, August 11th after suffering from a debilitating heart condition. She was 72.
Elshtain, who was the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago where she also had appointments in Political Science and the Committee on International Relations, taught at the University of Chicago for 18 years.
Involved with the Lumen Christi Institute for Catholic Thought at the University of Chicago since its founding and a frequent lecturer in its programs and conferences, Elshtain served on its Board of Directors from June 2008 until her death.
Noel Moore, Chairman of the Board of Directors, found her presence remarkable: “She was a great admirer and friend of the Church…and a longtime contributor to the Lumen Christi Institute and its Board. She possessed an extraordinary capacity for friendship, scholarship, and humility—combined with strength and courage. I am grateful to have known her and served with her.”
Renowned for her work on religious ethics, war, the family, feminist theory, democracy, and modern political thought, she “cared deeply about the common good, and she recognized that faith, family, and patriotic solidarity ennobled the lives of ordinary people,” wrote First Things Editor R. R. Reno.
Born in 1941 in a small town in Colorado, Elshtain earned her BA and MA from Colorado State University and a PhD from Brandeis University, writing her dissertation on “Women and Politics: A Theoretical Analysis.” She went on to teach at the University of Massachusetts and Vanderbilt University (where she was the first woman to hold an endowed professorship in the history of that institution) prior to coming to Chicago.
Her contribution to political philosophy was wide-ranging and substantive. Her most notable works were Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought; Meditations on Modern Political Thought; Women and War; Democracy on Trial; Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World; Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy; Augustine and the Limits of Politics; and Sovereignty: God, State, Self.
She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served on the Boards of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the National Humanities Center. On the Feast of All Souls, 2011, she was received into the Catholic Church.
In 2006, she delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, joining the ranks of such eminent Gifford lecturers as William James, Hannah Arendt, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr. In 2011, she was honored with the Democracy Service Award, which had previously been bestowed on the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel, among others.
In recognition of Professor Elshtain’s body of work, the University of Chicago Divinity School organized a series of four conferences between 2010-2013 under the title, “Jean Bethke Elshtain: The Engaged Mind.”
As mentioned above, Elshtain played a significant role in the life of the Institute. As early as 2002, she took part in a book symposium on “Traditional Religion and the Contemporary Mind: A Symposium in Honor of the Publication of Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier” with Leon Wieseltier, Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., and David Novak.
She most recently participated in two major events: a symposium titled “God, Freedom, and Public Life” with Hans Joas, Martin Marty, and Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I. on the occasion of the Cardinal’s publication of God in Action: How Faith in God Can Address the Challenges of the World and the Institute’s April 2013 conference on “Pacem in terris After 50 Years.” She attended and spoke at the latter despite weakness due to illness.
“Jean Bethke Elshtain was a scholar and a believer, a woman of deeply held principles,” said Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I. of his longtime friend. “Her many academic accomplishments were integrated into her personal concerns for family, for the public life of women in society, for good and just government, for religion’s contribution to the common good. Her talent for friendship drew out the best in others, who began their acquaintance with respect that then progressed to love.”
Thomas Levergood, Executive Director of the Lumen Christi Institute, remarked: “As many have noted, Jean Bethke Elshtain was one of the remarkable Christian scholars of her generation. Drawn more and more into the Catholic tradition by her study of the thought of John Paul II, she had entered the Catholic Church intellectually years before her formal entry into the Church. Still, she remained ‘catholic’ in continuing to cherish Protestant thinkers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had been and remained her teachers and, if one may say, her colleagues as well.”
Elshtain earned the respect of her fellow thinkers who appreciated her tenacious approach to academic inquiry balanced by an affable nature.
French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion said of his friend and colleague at the University of Chicago Divinity School: “Jean Bethke Elshtain had a tough-thinking mind and a friendly open heart, while most people—in the academy as well as outside it—are the reverse: weak in thought, hard in feelings. Her books on (just) war, gender and feminism, culture and democracy were not only able to raise the level of discourse, fuel fierce debate, and engage vigorously the most well-received idols of our days, but they also gave back to moral and political philosophy a renewed dignity as serious science.”
Her faith animated her scholarship, as well as her relationships.Marion explained: “Christian faith gave her enough certitude to display radicality in thinking, unlimited energy in interacting with interlocutors, colleagues and students, and an obviously deep and sincere friendship for all. In her presence, I was proud not only to teach and work with her in Swift Hall, but also to share the same creed.”
Given all the exposure you now have to unpredictable real-life situations, what are the common misconceptions that academics have about developmental and economic problems on the ground?
The most common misperception is the impression by certain academics that development work is mostly practice without theory and data verification. While there is much room for improvement, large-scale development work often has to present its theory of change and provide assessment of its work. The information collected covers many projects over decades of work by different agencies affecting hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries. I have seen a number of academic presentations based on work with only one or two communities and from which conclusions were drawn.
Very briefly, what were your impressions of the Moral Economy conference? Were you introduced to any new ideas? Did you meet people who inspired you to think about a problem in a different way?
I thought the best paper was presented by Cardinal George: it inspired me to think about the transcendent nature of humans created by God and how our human activities (including economic transactions) must not lose this transcendence.
You have said that you have three older sisters who didn’t go to college and that the Chinese way was to marry well. Given that in your background, opportunities for women were limited, what does it mean for you to be so involved in public life? What does it mean especially since many of the countries in which CRS functions, women have a limited societal voice or role?
The opportunities and success that I have enjoyed make me realize how important it is that EVERYONE has opportunities to flourish and to come into his or her full potential. There are all sorts of barriers and not just against women. While much progress has been made with respect to the progress of and equal treatment for women, girls and women are still not valued, not respected, not empowered in certain countries and cultures. But there are other obstacles that hold back the education and development of individuals: extreme poverty, stunting that diminishes intellectual development, conflicts that disrupt education, violence that compromises healthy brain development and cognitive functioning, under-estimation of people with mental disabilities or writing off of youths in gangs. I have now met many people, for different reasons, who are sidelined from reaching their potential. Education provides the key and access to knowledge, to opportunities, to livelihoods, to certain social standing in society, to the levers of change, and ultimately to a voice and a place in formal structures.
What are your thoughts about the role of laity in the Church given that you were one of the first lay members of the CRS Board prior to your assuming your current role as president and CEO?
I think all would agree that the invitation to lay members to the CRS board significantly expanded the breadth of professional experiences. These have included expertise in governance, audit, financial administration, investments, communication, law, administration of highly complex organizations such as universities and hospitals and approaches to problem-solving. The lay members also opened our eyes, minds and hearts to the immense needs of the world and the inspiring commitment of the Church to step up to these problems through aid, advocacy and solidarity. Laity and the clergy together comprise the Body of Christ who calls us to be His eyes, hands, and feet on earth, to bring His love and His bounty to everyone, to take care of each other and to remember that He is with us and in us. We all have our unique gifts to bring and our part to do. This is a big task and we need all hands on deck working shoulder to shoulder for the kingdom of God.
Lumen Christi brings the light of faith to young intellectuals and aspiring and current academics. What do you see as the relationship between intellectual formation and living the faith? Does it help to have an informed faith? How has your knowledge of the faith inspired you to help others? How does it sustain you?
Wow, that is a big question! In second grade, I learned my catechism and there was a set of answers I memorized about God from the abridged Chinese version of the Baltimore Catechism on mimeographed sheets. The answers have not changed, but what they mean to me, what they call me to do and why I believe have continuously deepened due to life experiences, interactions with people of faith and the intellectual tradition of the Church. Faith calls us to seek the truth in all its realms: physical, intellectual, relational, and spiritual. For me, the gift of the Church’s intellectual tradition is to put into words and therefore greater clarity of the transcendence, which I and perhaps everyone experiences but cannot name. I think as much as possible, our faith needs to grow with our level of intellectual maturation. Otherwise we would deploy a second grade or eighth grade level of understanding to the decisions and experiences of our lives in a highly complex world.
“I first got interested in Flannery O’Connor in 1980 because I started doing work on religion and literature and everyone asked me if I had read O’Connor and I hadn’t,” says Richard Rosengarten—former Dean of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago and now Associate Professor of Religion and Literature. “All I knew of her was that I saw somewhere this book with a big peacock on it.” From a sense of professional obligation, he decided that it was time for him to get acquainted with the twentieth-century Southern Gothic writer.
O’Connor’s stories charmed him. “I couldn’t stop reading them, and I couldn’t make any sense of them. They were disturbing and odd, and I found myself laughing at points when I was uneasy about myself for laughing, and I wondered about that.”
He read everything she wrote, including her letters. “I fell in love with her stories; I fell in love with the woman who wrote those letters.” He was immediately captivated by her odd mix of humor and hard-bitten realism.
Ten years later, he decided he would write a book about her. But when he appraised the field, he realized that there was already a whole “Flannery O’Connor industry” out there, and that she was being used as a “football in the Catholic culture wars.”
“She didn’t deserve to be kicked around in it. I thought, what can I say about O’Connor without getting involved in those wars?”
It was frustrating. He decided to take a different approach—one in which he could debunk the myth that the First Vatican Council was anti-modern, and the Second Vatican Council pro-modern.
In his mind, O’Connor didn’t fit the mold of a person that lived between the Councils. But he felt that to say something substantive, he had to involve O’Connor in a conversation with her contemporaries.
That is why the book he is now working on includes O’Connor, but also two other women—the artist Frida Kahlo and the philosopher Simone Weil—who used Catholicism to mediate a deeply complex engagement with modernity.Rosengarten loves that these women were deeply loyal, but also deeply critical. He calls them “the Teresas of Avila of the twentieth century.” They thought about the tradition in complex ways. They didn’t glibly resort to equating modernity with evil, but neither did they think that modernity was unambiguously good. The book is simply titled Styles of Catholicism: Flannery O’Connor, Frida Kahlo, Simone Weil and should be ready for publication sometimes next year.
After all these years of research and getting to know O’Connor and her work, Rosengarten seems still freshly amazed by her ability to fictionalize the ineffable. Whereas tens years ago he was fascinated by her violent, disturbingly witty prose, he is struck now by the way in which her stories attempt to explore “what a moment of grace would be in a world that is insipiently inattentive to it.”
O’Connor really wanted to understand what grace meant, how it looked in a dark and gritty reality with everyday folk who were blind to it. “O’Connor was interested in the disjunction between the modern world and good news of grace,” Rosengarten explains. “What would it mean for the one to confront the other?” To this end, she brings together violence and humor, very different emotional valiances—all in the service of describing both the world and God’s grace accurately.
Rosengarten points out that O’Connor’s understanding of the faith was a simple yet profound one. Though she read Thomas Aquinas every night before bed, he says that people are stunned to learn that the book that most deeply shaped her understanding of Catholicism was the Baltimore Catechism. “She knew it cold. When asked about the ten most important books she read, she listed it as number one.” While O’Connor was unambiguously orthodox, his favorite line of hers is when she says that in the Church, “it’s always about the wrong man for the wrong job.”
It was as an artist—as well as a woman of profound faith—that Flannery O’Connor engaged with the ambiguities and contradictions of modernity. Through fiction—her local realism, her sense of mystery, her ability to see people the way they are, her deeply spiritual vision—O’Connor created entrancingly gruesome yet ultimately redemptive worlds.
Of all her stories, Rosengarten likes “Revelation” best. She completed the revisions for “Revelation” on her hospital bed, just before she died of lupus in 1964. “I can’t read the end of that story without being moved,” he says. “So many of her stories capture that moment of grace with the death of the protagonist. But Ruby Turpin doesn’t die. In one of her letters, she writes that Ruby Turpin ‘could go on to great things.’ She doesn’t kill Ruby Turpin. She marches out of the story a changed person, changed to the core of her being. I find that extraordinarily moving.”
On October 11th – the day the universal Church celebrated the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council – Fr. Edward Oakes, Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, gave a lecture for the Lumen Christi Institute on the famously misinterpreted document Gaudium et spes, or the “Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World.”
Since “the document as a whole implies throughout…that the era of the ‘fortress mentality’ Church is over and done with,” many have taken this to imply that the Church is wholeheartedly embracing the world, even those contemporary trends that directly contradict its teachings.
Oakes argued that “far from countenancing a gushing wonderment at the achievements of the modern world (impressive as they undoubtedly are), Vatican II explicitly endorses an active political engagement by Christians, based on Church teaching, to counter what John Paul II would later call the culture of death.”
Interestingly, two experts who had great influence on the drafting of the document – French Jesuit priest and theologian Henri de Lubac and French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain – later diagnosed the problems that would beset the Church after the council, namely a “neo-modernist fever” that would capitulate to all the “pathologies of the modern world” and a failure to announce the salvation that comes from Christ, what de Lubac called, “the betrayal of our obligation to the world.”
Both de Lubac and Maritain had indirect connections to the work of the Lumen Christi Institute, as de Lubac taught philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, and Maritain gave lectures as a guest of the University of Chicago’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought.
Oakes concluded his talk saying that though Gaudium et spes includes important doctrinal teaching (influenced by de Lubac and Maritain) about the centrality of the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s Death and Resurrection for determining the final end of man, and the need for an independent secular sphere, ironically its very purpose “will inevitably make it the least enduring of the major documents of the council, precisely because it was meant as a reading of the ‘signs of the times,’ and of course these times have much changed since then, requiring a new reading of new signs.”
