Commonweal articles from April 2007

Commonweal archives from April 2007

Distilling Darwin.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 6, 2007... I find myself utterly perplexed as to the point of Peter Quinn's "The Gentle Darwinians" (March 9). Certainly an awareness of the eminent scientist's connections to the eugenics movement is worthwhile, but the point of Quinn's essay seems more...

The author responds.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 6, 2007... I join Bobbi Dykema Katsanis in being utterly perplexed. Nowhere did I question the theory of natural selection; I accept it as scientific fact. What I did question is the eagerness of those--Darwin foremost among them--who have used evolution...

Why I stay Catholic, too.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 6, 2007... Jerry Ryan's "Why I Stay Catholic" (February 23) could almost be this reader talking to himself. I too have wondered why I remain in the Catholic Church and have often thought that if I had been born Protestant, or in any other non-Catholic...

A failure to listen.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 6, 2007... Commenting on the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq and on its extraordinary capacity for self-deception, your March 9 editorial ("Not Again") mentioned the administration's flimsy excuse: "After all, they argued, if they had been...

Jews & Christians.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 6, 2007... Ernest Rubinstein's careful review of Jeremy Cohen's Christ Killers ("Stories Have Consequences," March 9) is on the mark. But the review also invites consideration of other views. Joseph Tyson's new book Marcion and Luke-Acts gives a...

An incomplete review.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 6, 2007... When I finished Celia Wren's review of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia (March 9), I had a deep suspicion that she wrote her review based on two things: having seen only part 1 of the trilogy, and having perused the well-prepared biographical...

The reviewer responds.(Letters)
April 6, 2007... I have seen all three parts of The Coast of Utopia, and I think the remarks in my March 9 column hold good. In the interest of covering this limited-engagement show in a timely fashion, and given the strictures of Commonweal's production...

A telling error.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 6, 2007... The photo chosen to illustrate John Connelly's review of Jan Gross's Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz ("Ordinary Poles," February 23) may have unintentionally reflected one of the review's points. The photo of a moving memorial...

Another Polish paradox.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 6, 2007... On reading "The Polish Paradox" (Piotr Mazurkiewicz, January 12), I detected a glaring omission. I reread the article and its references to Polish history and the Catholic Church in Poland, and I was still puzzled. Three pages and not a single...

Doubting & hedging.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 6, 2007... John Garvey's column on doubt and the community of believers ("Here I Stand," February 23) has much to say to Christians. But two things trouble me. First, Garvey's notion of faith seems to look askance at "hedging your bets" by doubting. Would...

What ails us.(From the Editors)(United States health care crisis)
April 6, 2007... It pays to take your medicine, especially beforehand. That's what some employers who provide their workers with medical coverage have discovered. Groups like Pitney Bowes, Mohawk Industries, and the State of Maine now supply free prescription...

Why people leave the church: don't blame the Zeitgeist.(Columnist)
April 6, 2007... We have grown used to people who have problems with "organized religion" and "the institutional church," who say that they are spiritual but not religious, and who pick and choose from things as light as aromatherapy and the less demanding...

Easter in technicolor: the Ukranian craft of 'pysanky'.(Short Takes)
April 6, 2007... On late winter evenings in Ukraine, women huddle in front of candle flames to recreate ancient designs on the most delicate of all canvases, a raw fertilized chicken egg. They are working to create pysanky (pee-SAHN-kee), finely decorated eggs...

Downsizing: what the 'surge' really means.(Short Takes)
April 6, 2007... War, we must always remind ourselves, is the continuation of politics by other means. Understanding any war requires first understanding that war's political basis. What brings the parties into conflict? What are they fighting for? The...

The faith of a doctor: learning to see beyond the symptoms.(Education Issue)
April 6, 2007... As a young physician, I often struggle with how I am supposed to "see" my patients. History-taking, physical examination, diagnosis, and treatment: a physician tries to see patients with a dispassionate gaze, so that he or she can sort out the...

That Stillness.(Poem)
April 6, 2007... Lazarus How to explain what I do not remember? For though my body was undone in death, My spirit was there, like a holy fly in amber, Underneath my rotting burial cloth: To be called by him. My state was both not-real And real....

Spring Planting.(Poem)
April 6, 2007... We mean to plant. We are equipped, trowelled and gloved to rifle last year's dirt. Search the acorns out, I tell the girls; be bold with larvae and unbudging roots this March. The youngest one, to whom the nicest things don't always...

Buried treasure: why Catholics should learn more about Scripture.
April 6, 2007... Does biblical scholarship benefit the church? Such a question seems ridiculous at first glance, yet it has often given me pause. While the church has placed a premium on learning, and the work of Catholic philosophers and theologians over the...

A book of surprises.
April 6, 2007... After forty years of teaching Scripture, I still wonder why people keep showing up. Not for the credit classes I teach at the local community college, but for the weekly classes I offer at the parish. I started teaching on the parish level...

Under the mask: 'Breach' & 'the lives of others'.(Screen)(Movie review)
April 6, 2007... In Breach, playing the traitor Robert Hanssen, Chris Cooper looks and behaves like all of Graham Greene's tormented Catholic heroes rolled into one: the compressed lips and narrowed eyes that accuse and self-accuse; the slightly stooping but...

Good Habits of mind.(Books)(Book review)
April 6, 2007... The Robert Bellah Reader Edited by Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton Duke University Press, $27.95, 555 pp. Few runs in American intellectual life can rival the long and prolific career of sociologist Robert Bellah. Author of...

Leveling the field.(Books)(Book review)
April 6, 2007... Making Globalization Work Joseph E. Stiglitz W. W. Norton, $26.95, 384 pp. Recently America's moral standing in the community of nations has dropped, reflecting rash and preemptive actions abroad--taken against the advice of...

An American voice.(Books)(Book review)
April 6, 2007... Hart Crane Complete Poems & Selected Letters Hart Crane Library of America, $40, 864 pp. With this volume, Hart Crane joins Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens in the Library of America publications of...

Individuals first.(Books)(Book review)
April 6, 2007... Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government Charles Fried W. W. Norton, $24.95, 224 pp. The ancients and the moderns are at it again. This time, though, the combatants are not texts charging from the shelves of Jonathan Swift's...

Religion booknotes.(Book review)
April 6, 2007... Today, every decent-sized museum displays one or two examples of those lavish medieval compendiums known as Books of Hours. With their beautiful illuminations and finely rubricated calligraphy, these books continue to be prized by collectors,...

Christ in the classroom.(The Last Word)(Jesus Christ)
April 6, 2007... Every now and again, I reflect on teaching and the relevance of the methods used by Jesus. Even without the miracles and the content of the message, some of Jesus' pedagogical principles continue to stand out. Here is my list. Integrate...

Christianity & eugenics.(Letter to the editor)
April 20, 2007... Peter Quinn argues compellingly that Darwin subscribed to the racism of his time ("The Gentle Darwinians," March 9), but he fails to ask how Darwin's Christian contemporaries looked on race and eugenics. I worry about a piece where critical...

No simple category.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 20, 2007... Peter Quinn's essay dispelling the myth of Darwin's saintliness needs a bit of demythologizing itself. Darwin was neither a teddy bear nor a preincarnation of Dick Cheney. He was a loyal citizen of the British Empire, a believer in progress and...

A Freudian slip?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 20, 2007... Is it ironic that Peter Quinn, after asserting that Freud's "prescriptions for curing the world's ills" have been "discounted or discredited," identifies with Freudian authority Darwin's famous bouts of illness as "psychosomatic"? Wasn't...

The author responds.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 20, 2007... John Connelly misses the point of my article when he writes that I am merely contending "Darwin subscribed to the racism of his time." My argument, based on Darwin's own writing, is that far more than subscribing to prevailing prejudices--as...

Bishops & their critics.(From the Editors)
April 20, 2007... President George W. Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq was initially supported by a host of liberals, among them New Republic editor Peter Beinart and New Yorker writer George Packer. These commentators were convinced that Iraq posed an...

How others see us.(Editorials & Comment)
April 20, 2007... Lent and Easter bring out the usual rash of news stories about Christianity, and especially about the Catholic Church. If it's not the promotion of the latest Gnostic gospel or secret about Mary Magdalene, it can be, like this year, the alleged...

Abortion politics: an interview with archbishop Chaput.(Columnist)(Interview)
April 20, 2007... One of the findings of my new book, If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear, is unlikely to rock readers of Commonweal: In interviews all over the country, I met not a few Catholic women who are longing to vote...

The right to unionize: a basic Catholic principle.(Short Takes)
April 20, 2007... There are few economic issues on which Catholic social teaching is clearer than it is on the value of organized labor. In the church's view, unions are both an expression of workers' associative rights and an indispensable counterbalance to...

The Dawkins Delusion: Britain's crusading atheist.(Short Takes)(Richard Dawkins)
April 20, 2007... While many Americans know Oxford professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for The Selfish Gene, the 1976 science bestseller that portrayed all life as a struggle to propagate DNA, they may be less familiar with his other identity as...

Necropolis of Hierapolis.(Poem)
April 20, 2007... Sickly rich Romans once flocked to the healing spring close by. Those that lost reside on this ridge covered with hundred of tombs with a view of the shimmering wheat fields. Into one cool chamber climb my son and I-- it smells of...

Vengeance time: when abuse victims squander their moral authority.(Articles)
April 20, 2007... In November of last year, the Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware, released the names of twenty former priests about whom the diocese found "credible or substantial complaints of sexual abuse of minors." Most of the twenty are dead. Edward M....

The Deaf Dog.(Two Poems)(Poem)
April 20, 2007... The deaf dog is shocked by our appearance, lately thinking us more cunning in our ways, our cotton footsteps. Ears mad as ants, snap and flex, ache to hear the paper slap the porch, the mail in deadfall through the door. Yet with...

Acoustic Shadow.(Two Poems)(Poem)
April 20, 2007... Precisely this instant: half a moon popped above the old castle, music flickered up from the traverna, heard Germans speaking. We sat at the quay, our toes danced over the edge, turned and found the shock of eyes, rhyme. Later...

Signs of our times: the photographs of Sam Fentress.
April 20, 2007... Fifty years after Flannery O'Connor took a few words from a road sign encouraging the use of seatbelts and made them the title of a story she had written ("The Life You Save May Be Your Own"), the side of the road is still a place that calls...

Driven: 'The Hoax' & 'An Unreasonable Man'.(Screen)(Movie review)
April 20, 2007... Do you remember the Clifford Irving scandal of long-ago 1971? The episode by now is little more than a footnote on a page of dreary American history, with Vietnam reaching its crisis and Watergate soon to come, but it was notorious at the time....

Europe at the crossroads.(Books)(Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance)(Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror)(Book review)
April 20, 2007... Murder in Amsterdam The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance Ian Buruma Penguin, $24.95, 288 pp. Sacred Causes The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror Michael Burleigh...

A hard act to follow.(Books)(Them: A Memoir of Parents)(Book review)
April 20, 2007... Them A Memoir of Parents Francine du Plessix Gray Penguin, $16, 544 pp. The hardcover dust jacket of Them: A Memoir of Parents features a glamorous couple dancing, an arresting photograph taken in soft focus but reproduced...

Solution postponed.(Books)(The Struggle for Celibacy: The Culture of Catholic Seminary Life)(Tested in Every Way: The Catholic Priesthood in Today's Church)(Freeing Celibacy)(Book review)
April 20, 2007... Freeing Celibacy Donald Cozzens Liturgical Press, $15.95, 128 pp. The Struggle for Celibacy The Culture of Catholic Seminary Life Paul Stanosz Crossroad, $29.95, 280 pp. Tested in Every Way The Catholic...

Family secrets.(The Last Word)
April 20, 2007... I spent the first eight years of my life in a Catholic orphanage. My birth mother became pregnant at fifteen, and her father sent her to a home for pregnant girls and insisted that she put me up for adoption. Although my family was not...