Commonweal articles from April 2006

Commonweal archives from April 2006

The church & end-of-life care.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 7, 2006... It seems Paul Lauritzen has rushed to judgment ("Caring at the End," March 10). John Paul II's statement concerning tube feeding for PVS patients is not as definitive as he indicates. First of all, when evaluating a prudential papal statement,...

Draft a living will.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 7, 2006... As a professional nurse who has been in practice since feeding tubes were first used, I am in complete agreement with Paul Lauritzen that "mere existence is not an ultimate good." Nor should it be the ultimate goal. When it is time to die, it...

Schiavo & double effect.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 7, 2006... Paul Lauritzen is right to point out that those who argue that Terri Schiavo was killed by the removal of her feeding tube are proposing a profound change in Catholic teaching. Their argument calls into question the appropriate use of the...

A moral dilemma.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 7, 2006... Paul Lauritzen's article on end-of-life care was a timely one for me. Just last September I faced a difficult moral dilemma during the quick illness and subsequent death of my father, a retired doctor who had composed a living will. Per his...

Schiavo & church teaching.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 7, 2006... I have to respectfully disagree with the thesis of Paul Lauritzen's article on end-of-life care. I do not think the Schiavo case undermines Catholic teaching--I think Lauritzen's article does. He writes, "To say that removing a feeding tube...

The altar of science.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 7, 2006... John Haldane's review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell is a gem ("Opiate of the Philosophers," March 10). Haldane succinctly explains and exposes the defects of the view that religion is merely the result of evolution. Dennett espouses...

A new look.(Letters)
April 7, 2006... Your new "Web look" is impressive--elegant, yet simple and understated. I look forward to its future. RICHARD KUEBBING Kennesaw, Ga.

Bush & India.(From the Editors)(Editorial)
April 7, 2006... In Congress's rejection of the deal that would have turned ownership of many of the nation's ports over to a company owned by the government of Dubai, the Bush administration reaped what it had sown. Having stoked people's fears since...

Who's in charge? How the president passes the buck.(Columnist)(Column)
April 7, 2006... Is President George W. Bush the leader of our government, or is he just a right-wing talk-show host? The question came to mind after his March 21 news conference, during which he sounded like someone who has no control over the government he...

Palestine's new bishop: a man of peace & action.(Short Take)(Elias Chacour)
April 7, 2006... As a priest and educator, the sixty-six-year-old Palestinian Elias Chacour has uncommon gifts, some inherited, others hard earned. Named by the Vatican and the Holy Synod of the Melkite Catholic Church in February to be the Greek Catholic...

Holy Thursday.(Poem)(Brief article)
April 7, 2006... Holy Thursday He can't fall like the tree soundless in the forest: somebody has got to witness. That's why the feet. A rolled cloth in an empty tomb leaves too much room, nothing for the mind to work on. So, the feet,...

Catholicism on campus: how the faith is presented at secular schools.(Education Issue)
April 7, 2006... On leafy Stockton Street, a short walk from the Princeton campus, sits the Aquinas Institute, home to the university's Catholic ministry program. Housed in the elegant residence once owned by the German novelist Thomas Mann, the institute has...

A Catholic presence: Duke's Wallace Fowlie.
April 7, 2006... For Catholics of any generation, the question of how to remain loyal to the age-old traditions of our faith while also engaging new ideas poses plenty of challenges. For college students squeezed between modernity and Catholicism, the struggle...

On the Cutting Edge.(Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine)(Book review)
April 7, 2006... Reclaiming the Body Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine Joel Shuman and Brian Volck Brazos Press, $19.99, 173 pp. The contemporary literature of bioethics, although vast, can often make for unsatisfactory...

Malnourished.(The Future of Christology)(Book review)
April 7, 2006... The Future of Christology Roger Haight Continuum, $27.95, 224 pp. Roger Haight's aim in The Future of Christology is to restate and expand, in a somewhat more accessible way, arguments he first made in Jesus Symbol of God (Orbis,...

Vision Quest.(On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene)(Book review)
April 7, 2006... On Seeing Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene F. Gonzalez-Crussi The Overlook Press, $23.95, 235 pp. F. Gonzalez-Crussi begins his latest reflective work, On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene, with Jules Michelet's...

Don't Worry, Be Happy.(How Not to Get Rich: Or Why Being Bad Off Isn't So Bad)(Book review)
April 7, 2006... How Not to Get Rich (Or Why Being Bad Off Isn't So Bad) Robert Sullivan Bloomsbury, $9.99, 95 pp. Robert Sullivan is the author of a trio of intriguing, highly regarded books--Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, and Rats--which though...

What would Jesus drink?(The Last Word)(wine)
April 7, 2006... One day I call a friend in San Francisco, the most erudite oenophiliac guy you ever met, a guy who knows more about wine and wine history and wine culture and wine production and wine marketing and wine details and wine quality and lack thereof...

Same-sex adoptions.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 21, 2006... Your editorial on adoptions by gay and lesbian couples overlooks the elephant in the living room ("Abandoned Children," March 24). The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's 2003 statement on homosexual unions argues that "experience has...

An unprecedented experiment.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 21, 2006... Your editorial on Catholic Charities of Boston and adoption by gay and lesbian parents faults both the bishops and the Massachusetts legislature. Are the bishops "gravely misguided" as you claim? I believe a negative answer can be found in the...

No litmus tests.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 21, 2006... John Dilulio and Paul Lauritzen's pleas to bring the "whole gospel, the complete Catechism," and the broadest vision of a culture of life into the public square are most welcome ("The Catholic Voter," "A Holy Alliance?" March 24). I was a...

Politics as usual.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 21, 2006... I appreciated Paul Lauritzen's timely article on the alliance between conservative Catholics and Evangelicals. However, I disagreed with him when he states that, while it is understandable why conservative politicians may be inclined to a...

Ensoulment redux.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 21, 2006... Cathleen Kaveny's column ("When Does Life Begin?" March 24) reveals the muddled state of prolife philosophy. The arguments of Germain Grisez and Paul Ramsey, as Kaveny describes them, both lead into fantastic realms, where biology and...

Human personhood.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 21, 2006... The terms "individual human life" and "human being" appear throughout Cathleen Kaveny's column. Nowhere, however, do I find the crucial term "human person." The question of when a person exists is essential to considerations of the early...

Defending life.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 21, 2006... Cathleen Kaveny writes about the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network's (CBCN) annual Paul Ramsey Award for Excellence in Bioethics. To be clear, the purpose of the award is to recognize those who have demonstrated exemplary achievements in...

McCormick was right.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 21, 2006... Back in 1992, the late Jesuit moral theologian Richard A. McCormick seems to have made a prophetic commentary on the purported shift in Catholic theology that Paul Lauritzen writes about in "Caring at the End" (March 10). Fr. McCormick wrote:...

Allowing to die.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 21, 2006... The discourse in your journal regarding the Terri Schiavo case has been disturbing ("Caring at the End," March 10). In grammar school, high school, college, and medical school (all Catholic institutions), I was taught the same things. The dying...

The wrong punishment.(From the Editors)(Editorial)
April 21, 2006... The federal trial of Al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, who was once thought to be the "twentieth hijacker," has entered the sentencing phase and seems certain to end in a death sentence for the hapless would-be terrorist. Moussaoui, the...

John Deedy, R.I.P.(Farewell)(Obituary)
April 21, 2006... On March 28, John Deedy, managing editor of Commonweal from 1967 to 1978, died at age eighty-two. Jack came to Commonweal at a tense moment and in delicate circumstances. The magazine was still riding high on the wave of postconciliar energy....

The kingdom & the flea market: why do people join churches?(Columnist)
April 21, 2006... There was a death in our parish not long ago. An old woman named Helen, who lived alone, died after a brief illness. When I first heard that she was in the hospital and then that she had died I was surprised. I'd given her Communion only a few...

Changing of the guard: report from England.(Short Takes)
April 21, 2006... The political landscape is altering here in Britain. The major parties are changing their leaders, and the remarkable dominance the Labour Party has enjoyed since Tony Blair became prime minister nine years ago is coming apart. Last December,...

Eugene McCarthy: poet & patriot.(Obituary)
April 21, 2006... The last time I saw Senator Eugene McCarthy, a week before his death this past December 10, I suggested that recent history may be repeating itself. I was referring to the fact that Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha's call for an immediate...

Agape.(Poem)(Brief article)
April 21, 2006... Agape How steeled am I to walk on by when I see the scream of the man in street asleep in fetal fashion, mouth agape like a fish on the beach wound down to its fins' last beat? --Tom Furlong

In his own footsteps: Benedict XVI: from professor to pontiff.(Articles)
April 21, 2006... It has been a year since Pope Benedict XVI first appeared in a white cassock above St. Peter's Square, and four months since he issued his first encyclical, Deus caritas est. Reading that encyclical, like seeing him above the crowds, I was...

The church & AIDS in Africa: condoms & the culture of life.
April 21, 2006... As a young physician, I often second-guess myself. In practicing medicine such self-criticism is warranted, even obligatory, because a wrong diagnosis can lead to misguided therapy and may end in death. After working at a Catholic hospital in...

Mean Streets: GAVIN HOOD'S 'TSOTSI'.(Movie review)
April 21, 2006... Tsotsi, the latest winner of the foreign-language-film Oscar (the language being a Sowe-to street argot called Tsot-si-taal, which means roughly Thug Talk), proves how gripping a stale story can be when it's filmed with realism and elan. ...

Searching for Bedrock.(Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers)(Book review)
April 21, 2006... Cosmopolitanism Ethics in a World of Strangers Kwame Anthony Appiah Norton, $23.95, 196 pp. Philosophy, John Dewey said, is not knowledge but wisdom, by which he meant the use of the best available knowledge to advance "a...

God's Pitchman.(The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America)(Book review)
April 21, 2006... The Man Everybody Knew Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America Richard M. Fried Ivan R. Dee, $27.50, 286 pp. The revelation that Jesus Christ was "the founder of modern business," a powerful executive who "picked up...

More Acts to Come.(Book review)
April 21, 2006... Shakespeare The Biography Peter Ackroyd Doubleday, $32.50, 500 pp. In 1998 the American academic Park Honan published Shakespeare: A Life, a modest biography that reminded the literary world that, alongside the mass of...