The two sides are pitching this case in different ways, but the issues themselves are far more complex. This gets into the “Citizens United” case that established that corporations are people.
- Christianity Today
- Slate
- When Corporations get saved
- Mother Jones: Are you there God? It’s me, Hobby Lobby
The most well-publicized and controversial element of the case is Hobby Lobby’s assertion that a for-profit corporation can have the constitutionally protected right to the free exercise of religion. It’s a strange notion, but the court opened the door to this argument when it ruled in Citizens United that a corporation has First Amendment rights. So now the justices will have to consider whether corporations can pray, believe in an afterlife, and thus, be absolved of ACA’s contraception mandate. But that’s hardly the only thorny issue the court has to grapple with.
To summarize a complex argument, Polanyi (and more recently, Brad Gregory in his masterful work, The Unintended Reformation) described how economic arrangements were “disembedded” from particular cultural and religious contexts in which economic arrangements were understood to serve those moral ends—and hence, that limited not only actions, but even the understanding that economic actions could be considered to be undertaken to advance individual interests and priorities. As Polanyi describes, economic exchange so ordered placed a priority on the main ends of social and religious life—the sustenance of community order and flourishing of families within that order. The understanding of an economy based upon the accumulated calculations of self-maximizing individuals was largely non-existent, and a “market” was understood to be a part of the whole, an actual physical place within that social order, not an autonomous, even theoretical space for the exchange of abstracted utility maximers.
“Show me a man with his needs satisfied, and I’ll show you a man in serious trouble.” 
The Death of God
“God is Dead” has no meaning in the Dyadic World
The Prodigal Son Asks How
In this video from his speech to the national endowment of the humanities Walker Percy talks about the dyadic and the triadic modes of being in terms of understanding what science can and cannot address. There are no cats in this 50 minute lecture given by an old, mumbling man, just some clever common sense if you are patient enough to listen carefully to his words.
Dyadic and Triadic
Maybe a good way to think about the difference between the dyadic and the triadic is a little story.
A Jewish son pauses after he realizes he’s coveting the slop he’s feeding to the pigs and asks “How did I get here?”
The dyadic will explain the laws of physics by which the man walked from his home into this far off country. The dyadic will explain how his levels of blood sugars have dropped causing his brain to register the pain of hunger making even discarded food look desirable.
Almost all of us know, however, that this isn’t the question the man is asking. “You walked” or “you haven’t eaten for a couple of days” are not the answers he’s looking for. Why is this Jewish boy attending to the welfare of hogs? What has driven the lad to wish to eat the food discarded by other human beings?
He doesn’t for a moment consider the idea that he is simply a smarter hog.
The dyadic world talks about the physics of his walking and his blood chemistry. The triadic world engages the demand “give me my inheritance!” and what that simple sentence has meant for him. One has governed the other. The triadic governs the dyadic.
The Vain Hope of Science Continue reading →