Faculty Writing: Catholicism, Judaism, Liberalism
In Mosaic Magazine, Nathan Shields discusses the curious case of Eduardo Mortara, a Jewish boy secretly baptized by his family’s Catholic maid and later seized by the Catholic Church. With the publication of Mortara’s memoirs, a debate has reopened, among Catholics and others, encompassing “fundamental questions about the present-day Church, its claims to authority, its relation to the Western liberal political order, and—inextricable from the rest—its relation to Judaism.”
At the Stanford University Press blog, Suzanne Schneider recounts British attempts to impose secularized, a-political educational policies on segregated Arab and Jewish schools in Mandate Palestine–policies that exacerbated the very nationalistic fragmentation that colonial Britain sought to prevent. “The attempt was always to insulate education from the corrupting influence of mass politics, which was of course impossible given [Palestine’s] prolonged descent into civil war. Then as now, the question cannot be how can we shield schools from politics, but rather how can education become part of the kind of politics we want to have.”