Commonweal articles from August 2008

Commonweal archives from August 2008

A sound decision.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 15, 2008... As one of the "self-described Catholics [who are] more accepting of homosexuality than members of many other religious groups," and as an academic who has taught constitutional law for three decades, I found the June 20 editorial ("Marriage,...

Homophobic?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 15, 2008... I was very disappointed by your editorial on the California Supreme Court decision. On no other issue would your journal appeal to tradition in so mealy-mouthed a manner. Celibacy, the ordination of women, collegiality, birth control--on none...

European model.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 15, 2008... The legal debate about same-sex marriage will be played out in voting booths and in the courts for a long time to come. Even if those of us who advocate same-sex marriage prevail, religious communities will not be forced to change their norms...

Tyranny of the majority.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 15, 2008... So "the voices of citizens, not judges, should be decisive." Really? Even when civil rights are involved? In the 1920s, Oregon voters over-whelmingly approved a ballot initiative that mandated every child had to be sent to a public school....

Lost in translation.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 15, 2008... In his exchange with Justus George Lawler ("Doctored Texts?" July 18), John Connelly cites my observation in The Pius War that Cardinal Pacelli with Pius XI "took control" of L'Osservatore Romano. In Connelly's view this means "Pius XI and...

Homily material.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 15, 2008... If only John Wilkins's "Bishops, Not Altar Boys" (June 6) could be read from every pulpit and printed in every diocesan paper. It voices in a careful but straight-forward way the distress many of us feel over the abandonment of the Second...

Winds of change.(From the Editors)(energy policy)(Editorial)
August 15, 2008... Some of the political ads on TV this summer have managed to sink to the level of the swift-boat attacks that torpedoed John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004. One, authorized by the McCain campaign, depicted a grinning Barack Obama next to...

Reasons for our hope: Why faith is not about certainty.(Columnists)(Column)
August 15, 2008... Many nonbelievers equate faith with certainty, or with a desire for explanations: how the world came to be, why the good suffer, etc. And it must be said that many unreflective believers make superstitious use of religion. But few of the...

General malfeasance: will GM betray its workers?(General Motors Corp.)
August 15, 2008... According to a new book, and an old theory, the reason capitalism is in crisis is that it spends too much on its workers. The central bankers and Western governments, together with the economic analysts, seem agreed that it would be a...

Health care for all: not easy, not cheap, but possible.(Issues 2008)(Viewpoint essay)
August 15, 2008... With prospects quite good for a Democratic Congress and administration in 2009, the United States is on the brink of joining all other industrialized nations in ensuring the provision of some form of basic health care for all Americans. ...

Opossum.(Poem)
August 15, 2008... Opossum Fatted on the secrets of households, he pretends to expire right where we can see him, round pink eyes, naked proto-hands snout out there beyond fur's ability to protect. Even running he is a being...

Turkey's dilemma: how secularism is threatening democracy.(Short Take)
August 15, 2008... Even if one cares little about Turkey per se, one should still pay close attention to the recent dramatic events in that nation, as they may play a key role in the development of a new approach to the Islamic world by the West. The Turkish...

Exposures.(Poem)
August 15, 2008... Exposures Weren't there signs of rain yesterday while heat wavered like water, didn't the blue drought of sky enlarge white stacks on horizons have the hill creeks surfaced at last over stones, their parched mouths...

Hope without illusion: a way through pain--not around it.(Articles)(Viewpoint essay)
August 15, 2008... In my London flat I have a copy of a striking depiction of the Crucifixion by the French artist Georges Rouault (d. 1958). A recent visitor stopped to study it. Then she turned away, repelled. "It is a man in pain," she said. The pain and...

Signs of life: a sociologist looks ahead.(reform in the Catholic Church)
August 15, 2008... By way of setting the assumptions: Don't expect real reform in the Catholic Church until the Roman curia is brought under control of local bishops. Vatican II was the most successful reform council in Catholic history--until the world's bishops...

Bare ruined choir: 'Brideshead Revisited'.(Screen)(Movie review)
August 15, 2008... The image of a living tortoise with diamonds affixed to its shell is one that tends to stick in the memory. This unhappy animal figures only briefly in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, but you will find him in all his glory in the new film...

'To stun the soul': J. M. W. Turner at the met.(Art)
August 15, 2008... We do not see light itself, but without it we see nothing at all. People speak of the golden light of Venice, the pale blue of Madrid, or the silver sheen of Cape Cod in September. What they are remembering is atmosphere illumined--the...

Myth Buster: American Catholics in the Protestant imagination.(Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion)(Book review)
August 15, 2008... Rethinking the Academic Study of Religion Michael P. Carroll Johns Hopkins University Press, $49.95, 240 pp. Last summer I was chatting with the old brother who serves as porter for the Jesuit house of biblical studies in Rome. I...

A grim tour: Lush Life.(Book review)
August 15, 2008... Lush Life Richard Price Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 464 pp. Best known for his 1992 novel Clockers, Richard Price writes gritty and urbane police procedurals whose nuanced realism is informed by modern sociology. In Price's...

From principle to policy.(The Option for the Poor in Christian Theol)(Book review)
August 15, 2008... The Option for the Poor in Christian Theology Edited by Daniel G. Groody University of Notre Dame Press, $35, 328 pp. United States Welfare Policy A Catholic Response Thomas J. Massaro, SJ Georgetown University Press,...

Other evils.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 15, 2008... Thank you for Gerald J. Beyer's thoughtful article "Yes You Can" (June 20), which does well to highlight the importance of the church's social-ethics tradition. The prolife movement must remember that there is life after conception and that...

Still a Democrat.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 15, 2008... That David Carlin's "Two Cheers for McCain" (May 9) would stir disagreement is not surprising, but the responses of three readers in the June 6 issue are remarkable. One wants to read David Carlin out of the Democratic Party ("Not a Democrat");...

Via media.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
August 15, 2008... Most of what is called Catholic in Shakespeare--references to saints' days, allusions to the Eucharist, historical interest in miracles--was part and parcel of mainstream English Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries....

The gift of incompetence.(The Last Word)(Column)
August 15, 2008... Becoming Catholic, said one convert, is like trying to become Japanese. I wholeheartedly agree. I may know the lingo and lots of facts about the church, but after eleven years as a Catholic I often feel as foreign as the day I was received into...