Commonweal articles from February 2001

Commonweal archives from February 2001

To the Editors.(Letter to the Editor)
February 9, 2001... A clarification In my letter inquiring about the church's agenda regarding a sexual orientation that it considers objectively disordered, the editors of Commonweal replied, "We doubt that the official church is supporting research to...

Taxing rhetoric.(Brief Article)
February 9, 2001... To the surprise of many Americans, George W. Bush delivered an elegant inaugural address on January 20. In calling for civility, courage, compassion, and character, he spoke to the desire of many for greater national comity and citizen...

ET CETERAS.(Brief Article)
February 9, 2001... There will always be an England n British Prime Minister Tony Blair is soon expected to call elections. To energize working-class Labor Party members, he introduced a bill banning fox hunting with hounds, a leisure-time activity of the gentry,...

SANCTIONS ON IRAQ : Ten years & counting.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
February 9, 2001... Last month, a wave of medical concern raised a hot debate in Western Europe. It was related not to mad cow disease but to depleted uranium-tipped shells fired by NATO in Bosnia (1994-95) and Kosovo (1999). Did they cause a growing number of...

CATHOLICISM & ANTI-SEMITISM : An evening with James Carroll & Mary Gordon.(Brief Article)
February 9, 2001... When it comes to Catholic bashing--and especially pope bashing--the novelist Mary Gordon is in a class of her own. I caught her last month at the Interfaith Center of New York. (No small irony in the title of that venue.) Gordon was there to...

Corporal punishment Natural & other disasters in India.(Brief Article)
February 9, 2001... Just minutes before the January 26 earthquake hit Gujarat, India--we live in Dehra Doon, north and east of that state--I was thinking about earthquakes. I had read a novel earlier that week in which one of the characters explained how she...

REPORT FROM ROMANIA : Ceausescu's legacies.
February 9, 2001... Eleven years after the end of Communist rule, Romanians still try to fill the gaps and resolve the contradictions created during four decades of repression and isolation from the West. And sometimes, as in last December's election to the...

SCHOOL CHOICE : Has the Supreme Court changed its mind?
February 9, 2001... Choice has become a key word in public opinion, politics, and the nation's jurisprudence. But parents have been limited by their economic status in choosing the kind of education they want for their children. The affluent can afford the high...

THE FILMS OF ROBERT BRESSON : The Mozart of French cinema.
February 9, 2001... The December 1999 death of Robert Bresson at the age of ninety-two represents the virtual end of the post-World War II era of internationally known film directors. Although Bresson never found the broad audience that made Ingmar Bergman and...

HALLUCINOGENS FOR ALL : 'Chocolat' & 'Traffic'.(Review)
February 9, 2001... Lasse Hallstrom's Chocolat takes us to a village in France in 1959, where a mysterious woman named Vianne (Juliette Binoche) shows up with her young daughter and opens a sumptuous chocolaterie. Sounds innocent enough, yet soon the village hums...

STOP THE PRESSES : Start your own.
February 9, 2001... A few centuries ago, most important writers were strictly local heroes. The future pillars of Western art and sensibility were guys (occasionally gals) from the neighborhood who stayed put, at least when they were allowed to. The ultimate...

Eyewitnesses to history.(Review)
February 9, 2001... Our Vietnam The War, 1954-1975 A.J. Langguth Simon & Schuster, $35, 766 pp. Michael Herr's justly celebrated book of war reportage, Dispatches, ends with the words: "Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there." It is one of those...

YOUR ARMY NEEDS PRIESTS, TOO.(Brief Article)
February 9, 2001... The Army has a critical need for priests to serve full-time in the Army or part-time in the Army Reserve (usually two days a month, plus two weeks a year). As an Army priest, you minister to soldiers, spouses, children, and retirees. You also...

LOOK BACK IN ANGER.(Review)
February 9, 2001... A Personal Odyssey Thomas Sowell The Free Press, $25, 308 pp. An American Story Debra Dickerson Pantheon Books, $24, 285 pp. Among all the stories in Thomas Sowell's A Personal Odyssey, two struck me as particularly revealing....

CROWD CONTROL.(large families)(Brief Article)
February 9, 2001... My wife died suddenly more than twenty years ago and I was left with seven children, five of them teenagers. After the funeral, I felt dreadfully alone, knowing I had a difficult job and no models to follow. Some friends avoided me, fearful...

To the Editors.
February 23, 2001... Looking good As a design person I want to extend belated congratulations to you for the attractive and distinctive covers you have produced in recent months. My favorite journal of opinion has gone through many stages in my years as a...

Church, state & money.(Bush administration reduces the barrier between church and state through social service funding)(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... In signing two executive orders designed to lower the barriers between religious institutions and the government funding of social services, President George W. Bush has set off a broad, and sometimes heated, debate about the proper...

ET CETERA.(globalization has brought about increased danger from imported foods, ranging from 'mad cow' disease to pathogens on fruits and vegetables)(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... Mad banana disease * In Commonweal's editorial, "Taxing Rhetoric" (February 9), we suggested that the new Bush administration think twice before drastically cutting taxes. Apparently they are not listening to our ideas about what needs doing by...

Abigail McCarthy, 1915-2001.(Obituary)(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... Abigail Quigley McCarthy died on February 1 at her home in Washington, D.C. She was eighty-five. Mrs. McCarthy wrote a column in these pages from 1974 to 1999. She had been scheduled to offer a comment on James O'Toole's "Empty Confessionals"...

ALL DRESSED IN SCARLET : Avery Dulles goes to college.(theologian named to the College of Cardinals)(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... About a decade ago colleagues and former students of Avery Dulles published a volume in tribute to him on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The book's title, Faithful Witness, both defined what the chief task of theology is and expressed...

EMPTY CONFESSIONALS : Where have all the sinners gone?(sharp drop in the number of American Catholics attending confession)(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession, and these are my sins." Many American Catholics over forty can recall some of their most intense religious experiences beginning with those words, experiences...

Do I know this guy?(personal thoughts about the ritual of confession)(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... When I was twelve, a priest assigned me 300 Hail Marys and 300 Our Fathers for reciting the new Act of Contrition. He didn't like it. My mother reduced the sentence to 3, reasoning that I must have misheard, and in any case God knew that I had...

Not yet in line.(a Catholic, who has not attended confession)(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... Long before I became a Catholic, my Jesuit-educated husband, born into and faithful to the church, told me that if I ever entered it, I wouldn't be eligible for confession. He explained that I was scrupulous--I imagined that I had sinned when I...

Examination of conscience.(sharp drop in confessions represents a rejection of a system of beliefs)(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... For centuries, confession or penance (as it was alternatively called) was the linchpin of the Catholic sacramental economy. The Eucharist might be exalted as a miraculous source of sanctifying grace but it was confession that got one over the...

AT BAYONET POINT : China, Holy Week, 1951.(a 1951 ejection from China is recounted by a member of the Sisters of Charity)(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... Perhaps it was fitting that our eviction from China took place during Holy Week, 1951. That was nearly fifty years ago, and the event is still indelibly etched on my memory. There we stood huddled together amid a jeering crowd in a remote...

SAVING THE SACRED PAST : And welcoming the future.(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... The Haenssler Classic recording company, based in the southern German city of Holzgerlingen, is an anomaly: a small independent firm specializing in sacred music that has produced quality recordings and made a profit. Not content to record only...

A Chicagoan, born & bred.(Review)
February 23, 2001... Bellow A Biography James Atlas Random House, $35, 686 pp. James Atlas's long-awaited biography of Saul Bellow has been more than a decade in the making. Although ambitiously conceived, Bellow deals more satisfactorily with the...

A POET REMEMBERS, FRUITFULLY.(Review)
February 23, 2001... Milosz's ABCs By Czeslaw Milosz Translated by Madeline Levine Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $24, 312 pp. This little book, by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, is a remarkable testament to the place of memory in the definition of a...

flay.
February 23, 2001... your body lies there and I love it even more now the color of milk the sun at the window rises and sets on you breath cakes at your lips but you add so much more to speech than the blurbs which talk on...

IN GOVERNMENT WE TRUST.(Review)
February 23, 2001... What Government Can Do Dealing with Poverty and Inequality Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons University of Chicago Press, $29, 409 pp. The recent presidential campaign may have left some doubt as to where George W. Bush and...

MARCHERS IN AN ASHEN PARADE.(Brief Article)
February 23, 2001... I am watching a procession of cripples lurch toward the altar, and would be among them but for my station in the church choir and, most pressingly, the son who slumbers on my lap. The resonance of his breathing--like a soft lowing--attests to...

Gratitude from the Heart of Commonweal.
February 23, 2001... For seventy-seven years, Commonweal has been able to provide a place for catholic, liberal, and opinionated voices to reach an audience of readers around the world. We have been able to do this because of the steadfast, generous support of the...