Commonweal articles from December 2007

Commonweal archives from December 2007

A troubling tenet.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 7, 2007... I too have met the Mormons (Mathew N. Schmalz, "Meet the Mormons," November 9), but my experience has been a lesson in religious discrimination. It's true that one will find the Mormons to be extremely polite and personable. But I discovered...

Dialogue is possible.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 7, 2007... As a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I appreciated Mathew Schmalz's candor and respectful observations of LDS doctrines and perspectives. His article encourages me in thinking that there are others who can...

Recipe for defeat.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 7, 2007... Kevin Mattson ("The Center Can Hold," November 9) does not seem to realize that "principled centrism" can include punching the other fellow in the face before he drives a shiv into your ribs. The Democratic Leadership Council's (DLC) strategy...

A tired perception.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 7, 2007... Denis Donoghue's "What Became of Wystan?" (October 26) repeats--and appears to endorse--those old, worn-out perceptions about Auden: that he fell apart after he "deserted" England and that he is not a great or original thinker (are poets...

The face of God.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 7, 2007... Timothy Shriver's "Silent Eugenics" (November 9) makes many excellent points. "Accepting unconditionally the full dignity of every human being," however, can also involve a subtle condescension. We need to remain humble. For the past nine...

The question of power.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 7, 2007... Richard Gaillardetz's "Between Reform & Rupture" (October 12) made a valuable contribution in analyzing Pope Benedict XVI's views on Vatican II. While I can't ask that Gaillardetz cover everything, he left out something important: the...

Utmost care.(From the Editors)(to prolong life in the case of serious illness)
December 7, 2007... It has long been the teaching of the Catholic Church that taking extraordinary measures to prolong life in the case of serious illness is not morally obligatory. Where such measures are judged by the patient or proxies to be futile or...

Dear Commonweal Reader.(Letter to the editor)
December 7, 2007... Dear Commonweal Reader, Over the years, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, I've told you something of the challenges of publishing a small magazine--skyrocketing postal rates, inexorable cost increases, even a tectonic shift of readers away...

How to raise taxes: a lesson in political candor.(Columnist)
December 7, 2007... Imagine a place where the leading politician pokes fun at those who "regard all taxes as a pestilence, a plague, or a disease." Imagine the same politician saying: "Not one of us wants to pay more in taxes. But you know what we want even less?...

A gringo's devotion: Our Lady of Guadalupe & me.(Short Takes)
December 7, 2007... I grew up in the Midwest as a Protestant Anglo in a small family with virtually no exposure to other cultures or religious groups. Even as a young adult I was "all white bread." The idea of devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe was as remote as...

Saved by the blood of Jesus: what I learned in San Quentin.(Short Takes)(excerpt fromthe book Doing Time: Finding Hope at San Quentin)(Excerpt)
December 7, 2007... West Block is one of the largest housing units in California's San Quentin State Prison, and it's still not big enough. Prisoners are bunked wherever there is room. Walking the wide passageway along the ground-floor cellblock, I can see a...

Self-Denoting.(Poem)
December 7, 2007... I point to myself. I who am my soul have no quarrels, no fights to pick; peace in the bone. My ego picks fights. It is up all night figuring. It lords it over its shadow, and tells the darkness where to go. It points at...

Preserving life? The Vatican & PVS.(Articles)(persistent vegetative state )
December 7, 2007... Last year, the Italian poet Piergiorgio Welby announced at a press conference that after battling muscular dystrophy for four decades, he would discontinue his ventilator as an act of "euthanasia." While the ventilator was being stopped, he...

Family planning: the trials of infertility.(Articles)
December 7, 2007... I've been having a lot of sex lately. Back when I was randy teenager this would have seemed like an impossible dream-come-true, but now that I'm thirty-seven--and my wife and I are still trying to fill our empty nursery--it's a bit...

Naked but not exposed: Edward Hopper at the National Gallery.(Art)
December 7, 2007... Edward Hopper shares his most famous subject matter with many artists of the first half of the twentieth century: commerce, alienation in the modern city, neon, anonymous women in public places, shop windows, and artificial light. But the...

Alice McDermott.(Christmas Critics)(The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, Einstein: His Life and Universe, City Lights, All Aunt Hagar's Children and The Tidewater Tales )(Book review)
December 7, 2007... This year's fuss over Harry Potter's grand finale serves as a reminder of both our longing to glimpse some magic behind the veil of the familiar, and literature's unquestioned right, and ability, to address that need. For all the children, and...

Paul Elie.(Christmas Critics)(The Stillborn God, Shelley, A Month in the Country and The Ongoing Moment )(Book review)
December 7, 2007... The twilight of the idols has been postponed." This epigrammatic line opens Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God (Alfred A. Knopf, $26, 352 pp.), one of several books this year that try to take the religious measure of the age. Lilla's occasion is...

Nicholas Clifford.(Christmas Critics)(Old Filth, Mao's Last Revolution, Paradiso and Einstein: His Life and Universe )(Book review)
December 7, 2007... Though the disparaging acronym drawn from "Failed in London; Try Hong Kong" is applied to him by British lawyers, it actually tells us little of the real Edward Feathers, the protagonist of Jane Gardam's Old Filth (Europa Editions, $14.95, 289...

Don Wycliff.(Christmas Critics)(Ralph Ellison: A Biography and Invisible Man)(Book review)
December 7, 2007... What's a jungle bunny like you doing in these parts?" Gore Vidal is said to have uttered that insult to Ralph Ellison in 1959, when Ellison was living in Saul Bellow's home in overwhelmingly white Dutchess County, New York, and teaching at Bard...

Ernest Rubinstein.(Christmas Critics)(Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust, The Master and Grief)(Book review)
December 7, 2007... My overarching reading for the past two years has been Proust. I read Remembrance of Things Past (six volumes, from Penguin Classics, in a new translation by Lydia Davis and others, between $16 and $20) on my morning commute, a perfect context,...

William Storrar.(Christmas Critics)(Touch and Go, Writing in an Age of Silence and Silent Heroes )(Book review)
December 7, 2007... Their stories have stayed with me, long after I stopped serving as their pastor in my native Scotland. An elderly woman recalled her lifetime as an unmarried domestic servant and then whispered to me its tragic source, her fiance's death in the...

El norte.(The Last Word)
December 7, 2007... It must be difficult for someone from the deserts of Durango or the jungles of Chiapas to get used to the Windy City. While Chicago's winds and snowstorms can be brutal, the weather has not stopped thousands of Mexicans from journeying north to...

Waterboarding & the law.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 21, 2007... The November 9 editorial ("Torture's Enablers") claims that "the Department of Defense has authorized waterboarding for use by U.S. personnel." In fact, the opposite is true. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 states, "No person in the...

A place for everyone.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 21, 2007... The sharp decline in Catholic practice that Rev. Paul Stanosz predicted in "The Other Heath Crisis" (November 23) is not inevitable. We must not be so depressed that we continue to do nothing to rein-vigorate the church. The solutions are...

Clerical intimacy.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 21, 2007... Although I left the active priesthood to marry fifteen years ago, a kind pastor recently permitted me to speak at a friend's funeral Mass, which was celebrated at the parish I left twenty-eight years ago. Recounting stories from my time there,...

Amnesty's good work.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
December 21, 2007... I am troubled by some bishops' split with Amnesty International, as described in Cathleen Kaveny's recent column ("Coopted by Evil?" November 23). Does that mean that when I receive the monthly Amnesty "Prisoners of Conscience" mailing, asking...

Correction.(Correction notice)
December 21, 2007... When Lois Spears writes about the death of Timothy Joe Souders ("Our Gulag," October 12), she says the autopsy report listed hypothermia as one of the causes. She probably meant hyperthermia (the opposite of hypothermia) since later in the same...

The gift of hope.(From the Editors)(Pope Benedict XVI's new encyclical, Spe salvi (In Hope We Are Saved))
December 21, 2007... Pope Benedict XVI's new encyclical, Spe salvi (In Hope We Are Saved), is a thirteen-thousand-word meditation that offers new insight and inspiration on every reading. It is a work imbued with the virtue it examines. Half lecture, half...

Surge & dodge: the president's fiscal mess.(Columnist)(President George W. Bush )
December 21, 2007... It's time we subject the Iraq war to the same cost-benefit analysis we are called on to impose on other government endeavors. We are supposed to repeal or revise domestic programs that don't work. Shouldn't a troubled war policy be treated the...

Housing the homeless: a program that works.(Short Takes)(Pathways to Housing)(Organization overview)
December 21, 2007... For the past dozen years, Pathways to Housing, a New York City nonprofit organization, has been helping to reduce the problem of chronic homelessness by a radical strategy: giving homes to people with histories of mental illness. Most of...

Take & read.(Short Takes)(The Faith of Our Fathers by Cardinal Gibbons)
December 21, 2007... My mother's conversion was that of a mystic. Love makes each one of our lives an exceptional life. In mine, my mother was the person who meant the most. She gave me the most. The most--that is to say, everything: love of life, even in its...

The Mary we never knew: new light from the Syrian tradition.(Article)
December 21, 2007... It's hard to maintain the spirit of anticipation that should mark the season of Advent when Christmas itself has become little more than an occasion for extravagance and consumption. We could all use some fresh inspiration concerning what...

New Year.(Poem)
December 21, 2007... The press of ice expanding wraps around Epiphany. When nature thus resumes its parabolic jest, sealed laughter blooms with uncontrolled response. As geysers spout from pressure pent below, it must burst out in joyful painting of the...

The haunting: 'no country for old men'.(Screen)(Movie review)
December 21, 2007... Sometimes the real auteur of a movie is the author of the novel it's based on. For instance, John Huston's triumphant 1941 directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, demonstrated undeniable skill with camera and actors, but, as Pauline Kael pointed...

The revolution will be amplified: Tom Stoppard's 'Rock 'n' Roll'.(Stage)(Theater review)
December 21, 2007... It's odd to imagine Tom Stoppard as a fan of classic rock. Post-Romantic orchestral works, or maybe Baroque fugues, seem a better match for his plays, which inevitably weave ideas into dizzying symphonic and contrapuntal patterns. Yet in...

What now?(Books)(The Idea That Is America)(Book review)
December 21, 2007... The Idea That Is America Anne-Marie Slaughter Basic Books, $25.95, 250 pp. Security First Amitai Etzioni Yale University Press, $27, 336 pp. I attended a concert about ten years ago at the Moscow Conservatory with a...

The knot.(Books)(Equality and the Family: A Fundamental, Practical Theology of Children, Mothers, and Fathers in Modern Societies )(Book review)
December 21, 2007... Equality and the Family A Fundamental, Practical Theology of Children, Mothers, and Fathers in Modern Societies Don S. Browning Eerdmans, $34, 428 pp. Whenever I try to incorporate Christian thought into the course on family...

Suburban paradise lost.(Books)(The Abstinence Teacher)(Book review)
December 21, 2007... The Abstinence Teacher Tom Perrotta St. Martin's Press, $24.95, 368 pp. Tom Perrotta likes to write about trouble in paradise, the snake in the grass which will expel you from Eden if you let it. The paradise of his new novel, The...

Bonobo business.(Books)(Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved and Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are)(Book review)
December 21, 2007... Primates and Philosophers How Morality Evolved Frans de Waal Princeton University Press, $22.95, 230 pp. Our Inner Ape A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are Frans de Waal Riverhead Books, $24.95,...

House of bread.(The Last Word)
December 21, 2007... Every fall, at the beginning of my undergraduate course "Exploring Catholicism," I ask students to compose a religious self-portrait. I invite them to consider their sense of God, their experience of liturgy, and their present faith stance. I...