Commonweal articles from August 2002

Commonweal archives from August 2002

To the editors. (Correspondence).
August 16, 2002... The final secret In his review of my book Why I Am a Catholic ("Where's the Beef?" July 12), Peter Steinfels proves that he is an ideal subject of the current pope when he writes that I have "discreetly" avoided having a Catholic public...

Preparing for war.
August 16, 2002... Saddam Hussein is an evil man. During the 1980s he used chemical weapons against Iraq's Kurdish citizens and against the Iranian army with whom he fought a decade-long war. In 1990 Iraq's army overran Kuwait, and though quickly defeated by a...

Voices of the faithful: some louder than others. (Notebook).
August 16, 2002... Twenty dollars got you in the door for a day-long conference on reforming a Catholic Church hobbled by its sex-abuse crisis. Five months ago, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) met for the first time in a church basement in a Boston suburb. On July...

India & the United States: two responses to a nuclear threat. (Of Several Minds).
August 16, 2002... The recent crisis between India and Pakistan which, at its height, prompted the governments of the United States, England, Japan, and several other nations to urge their citizens in both countries to leave, provided an eerie glimpse into the...

The jury's still out: capital punishment & democracy.
August 16, 2002... Since the death penalty in this country is reserved for "a narrow category of the most serious crimes," usually heinous ones, it is fitting that the murders involved in this summer's two precedent-setting Supreme Court decisions are no...

Yes to vouchers: the Supreme Court gets it right.
August 16, 2002... More than fifty years ago, John Courtney Murray, S.J., commented of the United States Supreme Court's church-and-state jurisprudence that "the First Amendment has been stood on its head." "In that position," he observed, "it cannot but gurgle...

The city is his beat: New York reporter Jim Dwyer.
August 16, 2002... After being part of a team of reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize at New York Newsday in 1992, Jim Dwyer went on to earn his own Pulitzer as a columnist in 1995. When New York Newsday expired in 1995, he landed at the Daily News, managing at...

The Dead Pianist, My Father.
August 16, 2002... The Dead Pianist, My Father So far being that distance, a star dance, a planetary excursion, one goes never coming down again. I dream him near, but this is not talk, this is not giving him words to be happy about. ...

Different climates: 'Road to Perdition' & 'Sunshine State'. (Screen).
August 16, 2002... It's nice when two talented directors serve up films from opposite poles of inspiration, like Sam Mendes and John Sayles, whose current movies form this summer's referendum on what you want from cinematic art. Road to Perdition, Mendes's...

In the vicarage.
August 16, 2002... Bad Blood Lorna Sage William Morrow, $24.95, 281 pp. Despite the proliferation of memoir in the past decade, it seems safe to say that there are readers still who prefer the manipulation of fact and fancy inherent in fiction over the...

`As God wills'.
August 16, 2002... The Monks of Tibhirine Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria John W. Kiser Saint Martin's Press, $25.95, 335 pp. The first Trappist monks arrived in Algeria in the nineteenth century in the wake of the French colonial army that took...

Making 'perfect' babies.
August 16, 2002... Our Post-Human Future Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution Francis Fukuyama Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, 256 pp. Francis Fukuyama first made a name for himself with The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which he...

Veiled realities. (The Last Word).
August 16, 2002... It was August, the height of summer. Over my Gap khakis and stretch T-shirt, I wore a flowing raincoat that skimmed the tops of my Keds. A scarf covered my hair. Our trip to Iran was a homecoming for my Iranian-born husband who had not been...