Commonweal articles from April 2001

Commonweal archives from April 2001

To the Editors.(Letter to the Editor)
April 6, 2001... Medium is the message John O'Malley's recent article "Interpreting Vatican II: Version Two" (March 9) is wise, measured, faithful, and has a panoramic clarity that is born of meticulous respect for detail and nuance. His rhetoric embodies...

Stealth foreign policy.(the Bush administration gives no clear indication of who is in charge of foreign policy, or in which direction it is going)(Brief Article)
April 6, 2001... What is the foreign policy of the United States? And who's running it? * Is it still Clinton's? For the moment, many Clinton administration policies remain in effect--in the Balkans, in Europe, in China, in Colombia, in Iraq, against rogue...

ET CETERA.
April 6, 2001... Anyone here named Richard Cohen? n Pius XII's response to the Nazi extermination of the Jews is a notoriously contentious issue. In publishing Richard Cohen's positive review of two scholarly books criticizing Eugenio Pacelli ("Pius XII: Not...

LYRICS TO LIVE BY : What my children are listening to.(Brief Article)
April 6, 2001... My teenagers love music. Anand's taste runs to Aerosmith, Moby and Bon Jovi, while Cathleen prefers Savage Garden and the Backstreet Boys. The tapes are almost as available in India, where I live, as in Boston or Brooklyn. Both of them would...

THE BALKANS BOIL OVER : The U.S. ties NATO's hands.
April 6, 2001... One can debate the merits of interventionist versus noninterventionist foreign policy, but the worst policy of all is one that makes promises it fails to keep, backing off when things become difficult. Exactly this, on the part of Washington,...

QUARRIED STONES : And other spiritual facts.(silent witness of churches to ravages of Holocaust in Lithuania)
April 6, 2001... Urbs Jerusalem Beata dicta pacis visio Quae construitur in caelis Vivis ex lapidibus... The vespers hymn from the liturgy of the consecration of a Catholic church, one of the oldest surviving Latin liturgies, speaks of the blessed...

The Guess.(Poem)
April 6, 2001... He was learning so much from his last illness, it was almost unbearable. The wisdom of his body had been surfeit, the sinews in an oak. And love was at the roots. And he guessed all men were saviors--his hands...

CONTENDING WITH LIBERALISM : Some advice for Catholics.
April 6, 2001... What follows is an edited version of remarks by political philosopher William Galston made to a colloquium sponsored by Commonweal on "Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Pluralism." The colloquium is part of a project, titled "American...

AND THE OSCAR GOES TO... : A brief history of the statuette.(motion picture award)
April 6, 2001... In the 1960s and 1970s, shortly after Oscar night, the tonier movie critics such as John Simon would write articles scoffing at the choices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Simon, in particular, would go right down the list,...

The Heart Has Its Reasons.(Poem)
April 6, 2001... Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. Pascal, Pensees The heart has its reasons that the reason knows not of. The heart in its season flows both blood and tears. We are made to suffer that we may learn to...

CRIES FROM THE SCAFFOLD : Poulenc's 'Carmelites'.
April 6, 2001... Later this month, veteran conductor Julius Rudel will lead performances of Francis Poulenc's 1957 Dialogues of the Carmelites at New York's Juilliard Opera Center. Rudel, now eighty, conducted a memorable Metropolitan Opera production some...

Time stops for no mouse.(author Leon Garfield)
April 6, 2001... Is there anything lovelier than discovering a really talented, even famous writer by chance? That just happened to me with the British novelist Leon Garfield. As I browsed a local children's bookstore, my eye was attracted to a cover, and then...

A stay against inner anarchy.(Review)
April 6, 2001... Words Alone The Poet T.S. Eliot Denis Donoghue Yale University Press, $26.95, 326 pp. In 1990, Denis Donoghue published Warrenpoint, a marvelous hybrid of a book--part memoir of his Irish childhood, part collection of literary,...

EPILEPSY OR ECSTASY?(Review)
April 6, 2001... Lying Awake By Mark Salzman Alfred A. Knopf, $21, 181 pp. Central to the novel Lying Awake is an examination of conscience by a nun trained to judge her conduct under the Carmelite rule she prays will lead her to God. Although the...

CAN COURTSHIP BE REVIVED?(Review)
April 6, 2001... Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar Edited by Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass University of Notre Dame Press, $15, 636 pp. The cover of the September 25, 2000 issue of Time featured a familiar tableau of the modern broken home--the lonely only...

GOD'S BEST FRIEND.(communion rail as symbolic representation of church divisions)(Brief Article)
April 6, 2001... We humans practice symbiosis with a vengeance. We cultivate cattle, goats, pigs, ducks, chickens, rabbits, bees, monkeys, birds, cats, and a wide array of dogs. Some animals seek us out. Our heads attract lice, our small intestines tapeworms,...

To the Editors.
April 20, 2001... A merry man Your editorial "All Dressed Up" (March 23), about the recent consistory in Rome, characterizes New York's Cardinal Edward M. Egan quite inaccurately as having "yet to convey much warmth or pastoral vision, let alone Christian...

Whan that Aprill ...(People's Poetry Gathering)(Brief Article)
April 20, 2001... from March 30 to April 1 the glorious cacophony that is American poetry was on display at the People's Poetry Gathering in New York City. Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz presided over a meeting of folk, dub (reggae), political, formalist,...

ET CETERA.(women's basketball at Notre Dame)(Brief Article)
April 20, 2001... Numero uno * Sometimes it is worth the risk of reinforcing one stereotype to shatter another. It is, for example, a stereotype, now pretty faded, that American Catholics sit glued to their televisions (also radios), clutching rosaries (also...

SPIRITUAL SYMPTOMS : Does religion make you crazy?(psychologists should be more open to the spiritual)(Brief Article)
April 20, 2001... the shades of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, James Taylor, and Girl Interrupted hovered around the auditorium of McLean, the famed psychiatric hospital outside Boston--haven of celebrated patients. But I had been invited to speak to the staff...

U.S. MYOPIA : The world does not revolve around Washington.(anti-Americanism around the world)(Brief Article)
April 20, 2001... Anti-Americanism abroad preoccupies many Americans concerned with their country's place in the world, but the phenomenon is often misread in political and policy circles. This leads to misunderstanding of the nature and cause of...

WARRING STORIES : Israeli settlers & the Palestinians.
April 20, 2001... A recent appeal from the General Union of Palestinian Women relates the following story: "The latest victims of settler aggression have, unfortunately, fallen on the eve of the blessed Eid Al Adha (the Feast of Sacrifice). Ubai Darraj, yet...

MISPLACED NOSTALGIA : 'Ex corde' & the medieval university.
April 20, 2001... Ex corde ecclesiae will go into effect as church law for the United States on May 3, 2001. For most commentators, the fundamental issue concerning the implementation of Ex corde is the conflict between the ideals and practices of American...

FINDING 'THE CATHOLIC THING' : In Aquinas, Marx & Billie Holiday.(defining 'Catholic Studies' at university level)
April 20, 2001... Catholic studies programs seem to be springing up like mushrooms all over the country. Typically, these programs involve the awarding of a certificate or a minor, and in some cases bachelor's and master's degrees. They range from well-funded...

KEEPING THE FAITH ON CAMPUS : Not just how, but who.(spiruality of faculty at Catholic universities and colleges is key)
April 20, 2001... While public attention and debate have focused on Ex corde ecclesiae, a major change in Catholic higher education drifts along with little comment. The religious congregations that founded, shaped, staffed, and still sponsor the majority of...

Saint.(Poem)
April 20, 2001... Even the darkness I throw off can heal-- My shadow slips over dirt but snags on the lepers crowding this street; those men clawing for a piece of that darkness to keep for themselves. They want me to...

DREADED BLISS : 'Heartbreakers' & 'The Brothers'.(Review)
April 20, 2001... I recently went to two top-grossing new releases for a dose of marriage, money, and morals, Hollywood style. Maybe we're supposed to be relaxing after the high seriousness of the Oscar season. Or maybe it's just that times are flush, and that...

How to be loyal to Loyola.(Review)
April 20, 2001... Jesuit Education 21 Conference on the Proceedings on the Future of Jesuit Higher Education Edited by Martin R. Tripole, S.J. Saint Joseph University Press, $70, 544 pp. The volume at hand is the record of a conference held at Saint...

SENSATION & SENSIBILITY.(Review)
April 20, 2001... The Body Artist Don DeLillo Scribner, $22, 128 pp. Leave it to Don DeLillo to follow up Underworld with a slim novella that conceivably could be used as a bookmark for its hefty, much-acclaimed predecessor. Underworld famously jumped...

GOD IS GREEN.(Review)
April 20, 2001... At Home in the Cosmos David Toolan Orbis Books, $25, 257 pp. David Toolan, S.J., a former book review editor for Commonweal and now an associate editor of America, has written a rich and suggestive book, one with Olympian reach. At...

TURNING TABLES.(Review)
April 20, 2001... Christianity in Jewish Terms Edited by Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer Westview Press, $30, 438 pp. This collection of essays symbolizes a new stage in the long and usually...

THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE.(importance of the parish boundary)(Brief Article)
April 20, 2001... Father S. was a perpetually disgruntled pastor in the middle-American city I lived in some twenty years ago. He was in charge of Saint Joan's Church, located in a neighborhood perceived as being on the edge of decay. A veteran priest, he had...