There's a post by John Milbank at ABC Religion & Ethics on the UK riots. I thought it was pretty good but there was one element that especially caught my attention because it reminded me of the clerical sex abuse problem. Here's that part of the article ....
Riot and response: England's violent August
- by John Milbank
[...] most on the left have not dissented from the general chorus of approval for parents who turn their rioting offspring over to the courts. Yet the notion that such action is unquestionably right is a reversion to pagan norms for which the political order was the only sacred one. By comparison, Thomas Aquinas, for example, denies that that we have any duty to shop our family members to the power of the law ....... while religious people tend to see that malefactors and sinners are most of all to be pitied, secular political positions are bifurcated between a rightist and neo-pagan pure condemnation, and a leftist scientistic patronising of the wrong-doer as a sub-personal ineffective cog in a wonky machine.
I don't have any insights about the riots - about why people rioted or what should be done about it - but I wonder if this attitude perhaps contributed to the church not turning in priests who were suspected or known to be child abusers, and to covering up of such abuse.
