Commonweal articles from August 2005

Commonweal archives from August 2005

Cardinal George & Christendom.(Letter to the Editor)
August 12, 2005... Thanks to William Wood for taking on Cardinal Francis George ("Back to Christendom," June 17), and thanks to Cardinal George ("Correspondence," July 15) for offering a vigorous and civil response (although he could not help reminding readers...

Sacred Shakespeare.(Letter to the Editor)
August 12, 2005... Many thanks to Clare Asquith for her article on Shakespeare's Catholicism ("The Catholic Bard," June 17). Everything Asquith wrote and much more I learned from Ermin Schneider, OFM, my German teacher at the Franciscan Prep High School Seminary...

Defending Dr. Johnson.(Letter to the Editor)
August 12, 2005... Clare Asquith's article on Shakespeare was enlightening and stimulating, serving as an excellent companion piece to an essay by Adrian Hastings on the same topic in the Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. But one hates to see Dr. Johnson...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
August 12, 2005... The June 3 "Religion Booknotes" misstated the location of the Menninger Clinic at the time Henri Nouwen trained there. It was in Topeka, Kansas.

The Catholic Queen?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
August 12, 2005... Clare Asquith provides a useful summary of some of the recent scholarship on Shakespeare's possible Catholic sympathies. However, while some of the individual allusions Asquith identifies are plausible, her extended readings of The Merchant of...

Orthodox relations.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
August 12, 2005... Thank you for Margaret O'Gara's article on Pope Benedict XVI and the future of ecumenism ("Ecumenism's Future," July 15). Regarding relations with Orthodoxy, there is a passage in one of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's books that offers some...

The nuclear option.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
August 12, 2005... Regarding "Misleading photos" (June 17): there are some instructive parallels between stem-cell research and atomic research and proliferation. Although many who consider nuclear weapons immoral have worked to curtail their development through...

Surgically precise.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
August 12, 2005... Celia Wren's elegant review of House, the Fox Television show about a misanthropic wounded healer, was one of the finest critical pieces I have read ("What the Doctor Orders," July 15). Her skill is surgical, every stitch in place. Only Dr....

How conservative?(John G. Roberts)(Editorial)
August 12, 2005... Should Judge John G. Roberts be confirmed by the Senate, he will become the fourth Roman Catholic sitting on this Supreme Court, joining Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas. That the Court, long a bastion of the nation's...

Inaction on Darfur.(ET CETERA)(Brief Article)
August 12, 2005... Another area where Catholics and evangelicals have shown joint concern is over ending the long-running civil war in southern Sudan, and, more recently, the genocide in Darfur, the western portion of that huge African nation. In the past two...

Unconscionable: Bush's plan for the welfare state.(George W. Bush)(Column)
August 12, 2005... The problem with liberals, conservatives often say, is that they are too committed to old programs. This is an odd criticism coming from conservatives who regularly hail the low-tax, small-government policies of Calvin Coolidge as a model for...

'Intelligent' design? Relax, God is stranger still.
August 12, 2005... There has been some debate, even at local school-board levels, about the theory of evolution vs. creationism and the more recently offered idea of "intelligent design." Now Cardinal Cristoph Schonborn has weighed in with an op-ed piece in the...

Defining 'dad' down: are sperm donors fathers?
August 12, 2005... For some time now, sperm banks have trolled college campuses looking for good-looking, athletic, high-IQ men over 5 feet 9 inches to sell their seed. For the guys who apply and qualify, it's an attractive no-strings-attached way to get some...

Catholics & IVF: the next big battleground?(Short Takes)(in vitro fertilization)
August 12, 2005... For several years I have used a cartoon in my course on the ethics of reproductive technology that depicts protestors in front of a stem-cell research lab condemning those who work there as antilife. The protestors hold signs that read, "Baby...

Conscientious objector: when a GOP senator breaks ranks.(Republican senator George Voinovich)
August 12, 2005... I love and respect the president. He knows my heart. I don't think he questions my motives. --U.S. Senator George Voinovich (R-Ohio) ...

Celibacy & the future of the priesthood: priests should be married.
August 12, 2005... Years ago Austin Flannery, then editor of the Irish theological journal Doctrine and Life, asked me to write an article called "A Married Layman Looks at Celibacy." "We unmarried priests are always telling married laypeople about marriage," he...

Celibacy & the future of the priesthood: why celibacy makes sense.
August 12, 2005... There is a very bad argument for celibacy that has appeared from time to time throughout the tradition and is, even today, defended by some. It runs something like this: married life is morally and spiritually suspect; priests, as religious...

Celibacy & the future of the priesthood: seminarians today.
August 12, 2005... Sociologists Dean Hoge and Jacqueline Wengerhave recently reported that young priests are increasingly likely to view themselves and their peers as "men set apart," essentially different from laypeople (Evolving Visions of the Priesthood....

Celibacy & the future of the priesthood: John Paul II priests.
August 12, 2005... When 163 priests of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee signed a letter in 2003 urging that the discipline of priestly celibacy be made optional, the media response was overwhelming. The letter provoked similar letters in other dioceses, such as one...

The sisters of Shanghai: a congregation of nuns flourishes in China.(Sisters of the Presentation of Mary)
August 12, 2005... By 10:15 a.m. the pews in Shanghai's immense Xujiahui Cathedral are nearly full for the 10:30 Feast of Ascension Mass. The few remaining seats are reserved for the Sisters of the Presentation of Mary. Today eight young women of the congregation...

Strange invaders:"War of the Worlds" & "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".(Screen)(Movie Review)
August 12, 2005... H. G. Wells was a Darwinian but he wasn't smug about it. His novel War of the Worlds portrays humankind's panic at discovering it is not at the top of nature's hierarchy. Martians invade earth and quickly, almost casually, brush aside all our...

The Pope of Hudson County.(Mysteries of My Father: An Irish-American Memoir)(Book Review)
August 12, 2005... Mysteries of My Father An Irish-American Memoir Thomas Fleming John Wiley & Sons, $24.95, 341 pp. Over the past several years, Irish-American writers have produced a bounty of well-written, insightful memoirs. They range...

Ahab Beckons.(Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature)(Book Review)
August 12, 2005... Sacred and Secular Scriptures A Catholic Approach to Literature Nicholas Boyle University of Notre Dame Press, $22.50, 299 pp. Nicholas Boyle, a professor of German language and literature at Cambridge University, may not be a...

Darwin & the Cardinal.(The Last Word)(Charles Darwin)(Cardinal Christoph Schonborn)
August 12, 2005... Many Catholics would be surprised to hear that the Darwinian theory of evolution is incompatible with Christian faith. Yet this was the central contention of a recent New York Times op-ed piece by Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna...