Commonweal articles from August 2007

Commonweal archives from August 2007

Homosexuality, Scripture, & tradition.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 17, 2007... A REASON TO RENEW With so much to read and so little time, I recently decided Commonweal was an enjoyable but not essential part of my routine and intended to let my subscription lapse. Then the June 15 issue arrived. Luke Timothy Johnson...

Dialogue as theology.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 17, 2007... In her response to Luke Timothy Johnson, Eve Tushnet misconstrues Johnson's argument and in the process offers a false choice. According to Tushnet, Johnson argues that personal experience, which affirms the goodness of homosexual romantic...

Different joys.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 17, 2007... Reading Eve Tushnet was a great breath of fresh air. Her reflection was humble, empathetic, smart, honest, and searching. But at a crucial point, my own Christian experience parts ways with hers. As an ex-priest now partnered with a man, I meet...

Is celibacy necessary?(Letter to the editor)
August 17, 2007... Thorough or thoroughly confusing? "Homosexuality & the Church" was wonderfully challenging, but not as anthropologically grounded a treatment as the topic deserves. It merits more careful rereading and conversation. Tushnet's arguments,...

An intrinsic part.(Letter to the editor)
August 17, 2007... I am a gay, cradle Catholic who has tried to reconcile the church's teachings on homosexuality with the way God made me. My homosexuality is intrinsic to me; it is there whether it is expressed sexually or not. As both the Johnson and the...

A family matter.(Letter to the editor)
August 17, 2007... Eve Tushnet correctly reminds us that Catholic moral teaching deserves great consideration. Like Luke Timothy Johnson, she examines experience concluding, "But our human experience, including our erotic experience, cannot be a replacement for...

A sordid history.(Letter to the editor)
August 17, 2007... I find Luke Timothy Johnson's thoughts on the scriptural basis of church homophobia particularly illuminating and useful. One does not have to be a biblical scholar to recognize that the vilification of the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender...

Against literalism.(Letter to the editor)
August 17, 2007... As a gay Catholic, I found myself agreeing with Luke Timothy Johnson's view. Scripture is vitally important in helping us know the will of God, but a literal reading misses the spirit of its larger message. To read Scripture literally is to...

What about polygamy?(Letter to the editor)
August 17, 2007... Commonweal's recent attempt to address homosexuality and Catholicism suffers from a kind of provincialism. Luke Timothy Johnson writes as if the whole of Catholicism were limited to the Europeanized north. But to Christians of Asia and Africa,...

$660 million.(From the Editors)(payment to sexual abuse victims by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles)
August 17, 2007... In a recent column, Los Angeles Times reporter William Lobdell wrote movingly about covering religion, his Christian faith, and his attraction to the Catholic Church. Lobdell had been thinking of converting to Catholicism before he started...

The good place: why immigrants keep coming.(Columnist)(United States)
August 17, 2007... Immigration has been in the news, and the questions of how to deal with illegal immigrants and how to guard our borders are an important and complicated one. I will not deal with them here. What worries me is that so much the language...

The face of God: what benedict's 'Jesus' offers.(Continuing the Conversation)(Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth)(Book review)
August 17, 2007... You can read Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth (Dou-bleday, $24.95, 374 pp.) to learn about Jesus of Nazareth. Or you can read it to learn about Benedict XVI. Of course, it is not impossible to do both. In some respects, it is impossible...

The old rite returns.(Articles)(Tridentine Mass)
August 17, 2007... Four Views Widening Our Hearts Pope Benedict's Summorum pontificum and its accompanying "Letter to the Bishops," issued last month, will the oretically make the so-called Tridentine Mass more widely available than it has been since...

A step backward.(celebration of Tridentine Mass)
August 17, 2007... Pope Benedict XVI's Summorum pontifficum gives broad permission for the celebration of the Tridentine Mass, The motu propria also permits use of preconciliar liturgical rites for all the sacraments, with the exception of ordination. It lays the...

One cheer.(Pope Benedict XIV's decree on the Tridentine Mass)
August 17, 2007... One is tempted to begin, Parturiebant montes, so great were the fears on one side and the expectations on the other concerning Pope Benedict's long-awaited motu proprio on the Tridentine Mass. In the end, while the motu proprio proved more than...

Getting the history right.(liturgical movement )
August 17, 2007... Pope Benedict XVI's Summorum pontificum, issued motu proprio (as an executive order), universally permits celebrating the sacrifice of the Mass according to the Roman liturgy that was in existence prior to the reform of 1970. This means that...

All too real.(Screen)(A Mighty Heart)(Movie review)
August 17, 2007... 'A MIGHTY HEART' A Mighty Heart is a work of pathos, with politics simmering in the background and occasionally thrusting itself into the foreground but never taking center stage. That center is occupied by conjugal love, undone on earth...

Not Well.(Books)(How Doctors Think)(Book review)
August 17, 2007... As the first waves of baby boomers hit their sixties, the inexorable upward march in the nation's median age is inexorably expanding the role of doctors in most people's lives. Medical interactions also become more angst ridden, as thickening...

Friend of the dark.(Be Near Me)(Book review)
August 17, 2007... This is a very powerful novel, sad and bracing to an equal degree. Andrew O'Hagan tells the story of a fifty-six-year-old Catholic priest in contemporary Scotland whose career and vocation collapse when he yields to an infatuation with a...

Flawed but indispensable.(The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations; The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power)(Book review)
August 17, 2007... Few today remember the exhilaration with which people across the globe, including Americans, greeted the signing of the San Francisco Charter and the founding of the United Nations in 1945. There had been two massive military convulsions in...

Attention, Democrats.
August 17, 2007... In If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear, veteran reporter Melinda Henneberger concludes that women-particularly Catholic women who are Democrats like her-want (ta dah!) "everything." But she also...

Power outage.(The Last Word)(teaching in the Honduras)
August 17, 2007... In the United States, we live in a world of many fulfilled expectations. I turn on the kitchen tap and water comes out. When I mail a letter, it usually gets there. In Honduras, where I've been teaching this past year, it's impossible to live...