Commonweal articles from April 2004

Commonweal archives from April 2004

Standing before the cross.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 9, 2004... John Coleman offered Commonweal readers an evocative and insightful Lenten meditation in his article, "Mel Gibson Meets Marc Chagall" (February 27). The major part of his reflection focused on the remarkable paintings by Chagall, centered on...

The author replies.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 9, 2004... Whenever I stand meditatively beneath a great painting, intuition and emotion reign. Language stutters--and ultimately fails--to translate image into word. Chagall's canvas suggests that Jesus symbolizes the great suffering of the Jews without...

Over the top.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 9, 2004... Congratulations on your March 12 issue, which I thought was truly over the top. I particularly appreciated Andrew Greeley's pertinent and deftly written article on "Reforming the Church" (Hope you are listening, Rome!), and Eamon Duffy's review...

Is anyone listening?(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 9, 2004... When Cardinal John Dearden called together the clergy and laity of the Archdiocese of Detroit shortly after he returned from Vatican II, he invited several speakers to address a steering committee for "Synod '69." One of them was Andrew...

Boycott for change.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 9, 2004... Andrew Greeley presents a fine analysis of the church's structural difficulties. The problem is that church reformers have very little leverage to make Greeley's changes happen. In government and corporate circles, citizens and shareholders...

Lawyers & the church.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 9, 2004... Robert Bennett, quoted in your editorial, says that "lawyers did a great disservice to the church" ("Beyond the Numbers," March 12). Maybe so, but clients usually get the advice they seek. It seems more accurate to say the bishops consulted...

St. Hans.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 9, 2004... Paul Lakeland makes a serious and sometimes successful attempt to dissect Hans Kung's memoir, My Struggle for Freedom ("Conflicting Diagnoses," March 12). Kung's life is nothing short of phenomenal: his struggle of faith, conscience, and...

Be nice.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 9, 2004... I wonder if Commonweal has recently decided to abandon its commitment to the Common Ground Initiative. In your February 27 editorial ("Mel Is as He Was"), common courtesy seems to have been forgotten. Whatever one thinks about Mel...

A pair of witnesses.(Commonweal)
April 9, 2004... Two federal employees, both with decades of distinguished government service, testified before Congress in the week of March 22, and each caused a storm. Richard A. Clarke, until last year President George W. Bush's chief of counterterrorism,...

Letter from Spain: after the bombings.(Notebook)
April 9, 2004... I watched the television coverage of the terrorist bombings in Madrid from a hotel room in Gibraltar. My wife and I were vacationing in Spain, and Gibraltar was the second stop on our itinerary. It was the only time during our trip that we were...

Money & elections: are the Democrats cheating?(Of Several Minds)
April 9, 2004... Harold Ickes has put reformminded Democrats in a spot--and on the spot. Ickes, a shrewd former top lieutenant to Bill Clinton, is the maestro behind the Media Fund, a group that is raising big bucks from wealthy donors to run ads against...

Meeting T.E.S.S.A.: an intern's hard lessons.
April 9, 2004... From the outside, T.E.S.S.A. (Trust Education Safety Support Action) looks like a bomb shelter. It is a windowless rectangular building hidden in a lower-class residential neighborhood in Colorado Springs. A small white sign out front reads,...

War is hell: a combat veteran remembers.
April 9, 2004... The early battles of the presidential campaign are now being waged, like a preemptive electoral crusade in which both sides promise to take no prisoners. Already we have been treated (or subjected) to a barrage of war talk, pitting a...

Ignorant Catholics: the alarming void in religious education.
April 9, 2004... Perhaps the religious illiteracy of so many otherwise well-educated young Catholics is too familiar to bear mentioning again. One has come to expect that even at elite Catholic colleges and universities, entering students will not know what is...

Needed: the vision thing; Rethinking the mission of Catholic primary schools.
April 9, 2004... Forty years ago, as Vatican II was nearing completion, lay educator and liturgist Mary Perkins Ryan published a book that provoked a vigorous and contentious debate. The subject was not married priests or contraception but the future viability...

The melancholy Dane: Lars von Trier's Dogville'.(Screen)(Movie Review)
April 9, 2004... There are no cast or crew credits at the beginning of Lars von Trier's latest film. Instead, a caption announces that Dogville will be "told in nine chapters and a prologue." When I read that, a question popped into my head: Am I going to be so...

Getting into Harvard.(Books)(Catholic Education in Protestant America: The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University)(Book Review)
April 9, 2004... Catholic Education in Protestant America The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University Kathleen A. Mahoney Johns Hopkins University Press, $42.95,347 pp. In 1893 the Harvard Law School drew up a preliminary list of...

Filling the gyms.(Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values)(Book Review)
April 9, 2004... Reclaiming the Game College Sports and Educational Values William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin Princeton University Press, $27.95, 490 pp. As a wide-eyed seven-year-old, I dreamt of dragging two giant tacklers (broken leg and...

Before the shooting started.(In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-63)(Book Review)
April 9, 2004... In the Presence of Mine Enemies War in the Heart of America, 1859-63 Edward L. Ayres W. W. Norton, $27.95, 480 pp. A few years ago I spent an afternoon reading the correspondence of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., winner of the...

Higher ed.(The Last Word)
April 9, 2004... Men for others." After teaching for seven years in three all-boy Jesuit high schools, I am used to hearing that motto. All three schools emphasize not only prayer and ethical decision making, but also the importance of Christian service. Yet...

Culture of death.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 23, 2004... I did not find John Garvey's comments in "Religion & Politics" (March 26) very helpful. I do not know why Catholics and other Christians insist on voting solely on the abortion issue. Neither political party seems to be truly "prolife." Yes,...

The abortion question.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 23, 2004... In his essay on religion and politics, John Garvey wants to have it both ways. He says "Let's not mix the two," but he still seems to insist on one exception: abortion. Can the social gospel of the Catholic faith be boiled down to this one...

A matter of conscience.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 23, 2004... Your March 26 editorial ("Uncharitable Interpretation") denounces the recent decision by the Supreme Court of California that Catholic Charities must comply with state law and include prescription contraceptives with its health-insurance...

Roots of 'The Passion'.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 23, 2004... Influence searching is a fair critical exercise, but your editorial attempt to smear Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ with anti-Semitism by linking it to the writings of Anne Catherine Emmerich does not work ("Gospel Truth?" March 26)....

A bare cross.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 23, 2004... In his "Mel Gibson Meets Marc Chagall" (February 27), John Coleman asks "How do Christians and Jews approach the Cross?" Well, put it this way, the Cross that this Christian approaches is empty. I have no need for crucifixes of the cinematic...

Some gift.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 23, 2004... I don't agree that celibacy is "a great 'gift' to the church" (editorial, "Beyond the Numbers," March 12). Who are the gift givers? Logically, candidates for the priesthood. But they are required to be celibate if they wish to be priests. They...

'Commonweal' & NFP.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 23, 2004... My husband and I are new subscribers to Commonweal. As lifelong liberal Democrats, and graduate-degreed professionals from public universities, we figured we represented Commonweal's typical demographic fairly well. While we agree with much of...

A senile church.(To the Editors)(Letter to the Editor)
April 23, 2004... In his article "Information Deficit" (March 12), Andrew Greeley describes an organism--the Catholic Church--that is detached from conditions around it, responds to imaginary threats, and dwells in memories of a monarchial past. If this organism...

Allowing to die II.
April 23, 2004... Speaking last month to an international congress of physicians and ethicists in Rome, Pope John Paul II declared that the "administration of food and water, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving...

Help!
April 23, 2004... Can you turn straw into gold? If so Commonweal needs you. We are looking for a business manager / wizard. A terrific job for a Renaissance person: someone with promotion and business skills committed to working with a small staff and a limited...

Prescribing prayer? 'Say the rosary & call me in the morning'.(Ethics Watch)
April 23, 2004... Increasingly, claims are being made about the positive effect of "spirituality" on the sick and even for the "proven" benefits of intercessory prayer. Some prominent voices in medicine are now urging that the spiritual values of patients be...

Good cop, bad cop: two approaches to terrorism.(Of Several Minds)
April 23, 2004... The dramatic events of the past month in Spain and Iraq show the difference between two approaches to terrorism. The first is the police-and-intelligence response. The second, the American, is the military reaction. Spain, relying on...

Cheaper & better: medical costs vary by region--why?
April 23, 2004... A recent article published in the New England Journal of Medicine (October 23, 2003) deserves the attention of both policy makers and a public suffocating under the expense of health care. It reports that during the last decade, the Department...

A bitter pill: American Catholics & contraception.
April 23, 2004... At its November 2003 meeting, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) endorsed the writing of what the New York Times described as "an easily understandable booklet" explaining why artificial contraception is always wrong. The project...

Scaling the depths: 'Touching the Void' & 'Eternal Sunshine'.(Screen)(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)(Movie Review)
April 23, 2004... In 1985, British mountain climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates scaled the twenty-one-thousand-foot Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, making a daring ascent up a treacherous and previously unconquered face of the mountain. On the way down,...

Looking East: 'Byzantium' at the met.(Art)
April 23, 2004... In 1997, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted an exhibit called "The Glory of Byzantium." It covered the period from 843 to 1261, the time stretching from just after the resolution of the iconoclastic crisis until the restoration of the...

Studies abroad.(Children's Books)
April 23, 2004... As international troubles mount, it becomes clear that our children will inherit a confusing, conflict-sundered world, one that needs them to be empathetic and engaged. But impediments to cultivating empathy abound--starting with the way we get...

The last warrior king.(Books)(Napoleon: A Political Life)(Book Review)
April 23, 2004... Napoleon A Political Life Steven Englund Scribner, $35, 543 pp. In 1840, Napoleon's body was brought back to Paris from St. Helena, the island where he died nineteen years earlier. Eventually the emperor's remains were...

Cantankerous common sense.(Books)(Citizenship Papers)(Book Review)
April 23, 2004... Citizenship Papers Wendell Berry Shoemaker & Hoard, $24, 189 pp. In 1977, Wendell Berry wrote a short essay in which he likened the plight of farmers and other citizens marginalized by corporations to the lives of those decimated...

That '70s show.(Books)(In the Cherry Tree)(Book Review)
April 23, 2004... In the Cherry Tree Dan Pope Picador, $14, 272 pp. You have to admire a writer who gets mileage from the word "the." That's one of the sly coups that up-and-coming author Dan Pope pulls in In the Cherry Tree, his witty and...

From the desk of Napoleon.(The Last Word)
April 23, 2004... Monsieur le president, From the tops of those ancient steles in Baghdad, three millennia of history look down on your presence in Iraq. You came to Iraq in 2003, as I came to Egypt in 1798. Like me, you won the day militarily; indeed you...