Commonweal articles from April 2008

Commonweal archives from April 2008

Practiced, when preached.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 11, 2008... In "The Empty Box" (February 29), Rev. Raymond Mann gives his view of why the practice of confession has fallen off. I have a different take on the matter. In the parishes where my priests promote confession, there are no empty lines. Where...

No longer credible.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 11, 2008... In response to Raymond Mann's article on confession, I would like to suggest a deeper reason for the decline in the practice of the sacrament. As a hospital chaplain, I am often in situations where the sacrament of penance is possible. I find...

A good preparation.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 11, 2008... When I saw the cover of your March 14 issue, I thought to myself, "That's College Church!" And reading Dennis O'Brien's article ("The Saga of St. Joseph's") brought back fond memories of my time at St. Joseph's from 1955 to 1959. I was...

A lost generation.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 11, 2008... I read with great sadness your editorial on the results of the recent Pew Forum's survey ("The Missing," March 14). If the church were an individual facing an annual job-performance review with such dismal numbers, it would be placed on...

Catching the drift.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 11, 2008... According to your editorial on the Pew survey, one in three Catholics has "drifted away." In the same issue of Commonweal there was an article by Dennis O'Brien about successes in Catholic higher education. Among my family and friends one can...

Obama & race.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 11, 2008... Just when I feared that the sentiments expressed in Robert Bellah's fine essay ("Yes He Can," March 14) had been eclipsed by the fracas over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary remarks, Barack Obama gave a masterful and daring speech about race....

Faith without reflection.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 11, 2008... People attend college to learn to think. Yet letter-writer Robert Ramser ("Defending the Flock," March 14), who supports Bishop Edward Braxton's refusal to let Luke Timothy Johnson speak at a Newman Center, believes college students should...

Of poems and pogo sticks.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 11, 2008... I loved John Savant's wonderful "'You Come Too'" (March 14). Its delicious use of language (the bishop on a pogo stick, images lying about like empty luggage), coupled with its elegantly built argument for understanding poetry's "formal...

Askance but not down.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 11, 2008... In my review of Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter ("Tale of Two Mothers," February 29), I wrote: "As her mother looked down on the Czech relatives, so young Patricia looks down on her chain-smoking, self-dramatizing mother..." ...

Bad connection.(From the Editors)
April 11, 2008... Since 9/11, Congress has acceded to nearly every administration demand when it came to weighing civil liberties against intelligence-gathering in the "war on terror." Last month the House of Representatives finally said no. Following the...

Shell game: the subprime mortgage swindle.(Columnists)
April 11, 2008... The international reaction to the present credit crisis, the most serious since 1929, reveals a curious disposition to accept what has happened as if it were an act of nature, the economic equivalent of a tsunami or a typhoon. No one should be...

Touching the untouchables: the life of Baba Amte.(Columnists)
April 11, 2008... When Baba Amte died here in India in February, at the age of ninety-three, he was remembered as the champion of people affected by leprosy. The morning of his funeral, my husband Ravi was on his way to Nagpur, an hour from Anandwan, the ashram...

They're getting warmer: religion, politics & climate change.(Issues 2008)
April 11, 2008... In past elections, voting guides for Catholics, written from both ends of the political spectrum, have focused on hot-button issues like abortion, gay marriage, war, and economic justice. The environment, if mentioned at all, has been an...

Mystery or mystification? The limits of Latin in the liturgy.(Short Take)
April 11, 2008... A couple of years ago I received two requests. The first: to preside at a Latin novus ordo Mass, the post-Vatican II rite in Latin. The second: to say a funeral Mass from the Missale Romanum of 1570. In the first case, the Latin language and...

King Lear Had Alzheimer's.(Poem)
April 11, 2008... King Lear Had Alzheimer's The great feral novel every human is in is ruthless. It exists to involve and deflate. It is the meek talking. The great feral novel is published, not written (science bits may be written). Media...

Why not? Scripture, history & women's ordination.(Articles)
April 11, 2008... Why are women excluded from being deacons, presbyters, and bishops in the Catholic Church? Are the reasons given reasonable and convincing? What can be learned from the testimony of Scripture and tradition? And what can be learned from the...

Sealed in, yet soaring: anchoresses in the Middle Ages.( )
April 11, 2008... In Victor Hugo's 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris (known also as The Hunchback of Notre Dame), there is a chapter called "The Rat Hole." The term refers to a hermit's cell in medieval Paris. For twenty years, writes the novelist, a woman lived in...

Behind enemy lines: 'the counterfeiters'.(Screen)(Movie review)
April 11, 2008... The opening scenes of the Oscar-winning Austrian film The Counterfeiters take us to Monte Carlo right after World War II. The desolation of the streets, the strange solemnity of the Riviera, and the presence of respectably dressed beggars and...

The Lord & Taylor.(Books)(Book review)
April 11, 2008... After God Mark C. Taylor University of Chicago Press, $35, 416 pp. When I was a student at Williams College in the 1990s, Professor Mark C. Taylor was the big man on campus, the intellectual figure to reckon with. If a book had...

Aggiornamento adjourned.(Books)(Book review)
April 11, 2008... After Forty Years Vatican Council II's Diverse Legacy Edited by Kenneth D. Whitehead St. Augustine's Press, $20, 330 pp. Vatican II Did Anything Happen? Edited by David Schultenover Continuum, $16.95, 185 pp. ...

Material guy.(Books)(Book review)
April 11, 2008... The Really Hard Problem Meaning in a Material World Owen Flanagan MIT Press, $27.95, 288 pp. Philosophers of mind these days don't usually have much to say one way or the other about religion. This is because most of them...

Beyond utterance.(Books)(Book review)
April 11, 2008... Quest for the Living God Mapping the Frontiers in the Theology of God Elizabeth A. Johnson Continuum, $24.95, 234 pp. Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is is a foundational text for feminist theology, and thus for theology in...

Body language.(Books)(Book review)
April 11, 2008... Creation and Covenant The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage Christopher Roberts T. & T. Clark, $130, 266 pp. In his new book Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, the Dominican Fergus Kerr...

Difference without division.(Books)(Book review)
April 11, 2008... Communion and Otherness John D. Zizioulas T. & T. Clark, $34.95, 315 pp. In his foreword to Communion and Otherness, Rowan Williams, the arch-bishop of Canterbury, calls it "a great book and a converting one." Williams warns that...

Exit plan.(The Last Word)
April 11, 2008... Let's face it, we all negotiate with God. When we're stricken with an illness, or have a child in jeopardy, or find ourselves in the trenches--where, as we're told, there are no atheists--we strike some bargain with God. Get me out of this...

Eucharist & the soldier.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 25, 2008... I agree with your editorial that "even those who fight in a just cause are implicated in that sinfulness" ("Stop It," March 28). However, I cannot agree with Peter Dula that it would be right and proper to deny Communion for a year to soldiers...

War, a political act.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 25, 2008... Andrew Bacevich's insights into the crisis of U.S. military policy are profound ("The Great Divide," March 28). But another aspect of the problem needs to be addressed. The senior leaders of the defense establishment have traditionally held...

The best we can do?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 25, 2008... After reading Andrew Bacevich's "The Great Divide," I was left wondering where our imagination as Christians has gone. Are the continually abused and inadequate just-war tradition, a policy of containment, and a citizen-soldier the best we can...

Contradictory verses.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 25, 2008... The Rev. John T. Pawlikowski has written a welcome survey of recent Catholic-Jewish relations and the pertinence of the new Good Friday prayer issued by Pope Benedict XVI ("Praying for the Jews," March 14). Yet in the course of Fr....

Cause for wariness.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 25, 2008... Thanks to Cathleen Kaveny for her thoughtful column, "The 'New' Feminism?" (March 28). I agree that the comments about women in the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia and those of John Paul II in Mulieris dignitatem are cause for wariness. My first...

Teach the adults well.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
April 25, 2008... Thanks for the fine Last Word by Rita Ferrone ("After School," March 14). It was a concise and timely plea by a gifted colleague for church leadership to take to heart what we know about how best to carry out the ongoing formation of adults in...

Pregnant pause.(From the Editors)
April 25, 2008... There was nothing surprising in the testimony given to Congress earlier this mouth by General David H. Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker. "We haven't turned any corners, we haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel,"...

Found, not made: what the Incarnation means.(Columnists)
April 25, 2008... One of the advantages of living in my Queens neighborhood is that on weekday mornings I get to watch little children heading toward their elementary school with their parents or grandparents. The school is a block from our apartment, and seeing...

Olympian hurdles: China, the torch & Tibet.(Columnists)
April 25, 2008... The International Olympic Committee's decision to grant China the right to organize the 2008 summer games was another unfortunate case of unwarranted faith in the power of good intentions: that treating China as a "normal" twenty-first-century...

A stirring at the border: immigration as the sleeper issue of the November election.(Issues 2008)
April 25, 2008... In the upcoming presidential election, the defining issues for the Democrats seem to be the economy, health care, and Iraq; and, for the Republicans, the economy, taxation, and immigration. Turn these into a single list and immigration might...

Pomp & piety: passing on the faith after passing on the faith.(Short Take)
April 25, 2008... Recently my son made his First Holy Communion. I use capital letters because everything about the event seemed to demand formality. All of the girls appeared in stunning white silk dresses, lace veils, satin shoes, bright nervous smiles....

Reforming the Vatican: what the church can learn from other institutions.(Articles)
April 25, 2008... Too often when someone proposes the reform of church structures, the reformer is attacked for borrowing from the secular political field, as if this were necessarily a bad thing. But throughout history the Vatican has often imitated the...

The cult of capitalism: Hayek, Novak & the limits of laissez faire.(Articles)(Friedrich von Hayek, Michael Novak)
April 25, 2008... When laissez-faire economists believe in God, they are usually certain that he is one of them. The invisible hand of the market is, they think, also the hand of Divine Providence, which anoints and protects those who manage to provide for...

Warriors' code: Kimberly Peirce's 'stop-loss'.(Screen)(Movie review)
April 25, 2008... The opening sequence of the new Iraq war film, Stop-Loss, portrays a U.S. Army squad caught in a terrifying fire-fight in the streets of Mosul. Where was this scene shot? I wondered as I watched. The answer turns out to be Morocco; and it may...

Anecdotal evidence.(Books)(Book review)
April 25, 2008... They Knew They Were Right The Rise of the Neocons Jacob Heilbrunn Doubleday, $26, 336 pp. The rise(s) and fall(s) of neoconservatism is an oft-told tale. So why do we need to hear it again? Three decades ago, Peter Steinfels...

Weighed & weighted.(Books)(Book review)
April 25, 2008... A Treatise of Civil Power Geoffrey Hill Yale University Press, $16, 64 pp. Geoffrey Hill's new book takes its title from Milton's Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659), but it might just as well be called Recent...

Critical mass.(Books)(Book review)
April 25, 2008... Edmund Wilson Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and '30s Library of America, $40, 958 pp. Edmund Wilson Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and '40s Library of America, $40, 979 pp. Edmund Wilson is one of...

Rice guy.(Books)(Book review)
April 25, 2008... Fieldwork Mischa Berlinski Picador, $14, 368 pp. Rice would appear to be an innocuous food, fluffy and colorless, with a taste that does not exactly overwhelm. But readers who've finished Mischa Berlinski's canny, diverting first...

Moving the soil.(Books)(Book review)
April 25, 2008... Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? 23 Questions from Great Philosophers Leszek Kolakowski Basic Books, $20, 223 pp. Many books meant to serve as introductions to philosophy tend to have roughly the same effect as the...

Luke acts.(The Last Word)(Luke Live! )(Theater review)
April 25, 2008... Catholics with long memories know the pre-Vatican II parish "mission." On for two or three weeks, it had a portion for children, a week exclusively for women, another for men alone. Segregated assemblies, presided over by several visiting...