Commonweal articles from February 2002

Commonweal archives from February 2002

To the Editors.(Letter to the Editor)
February 8, 2002... More Remberts, please "O rare Rembert Weakland!" I exclaimed to myself after reading his irenic Janaury 11, 2002 article, "The Liturgy as Battlefield." This well-balanced piece breathes a spirit of peace and moderation, as well as the...

The rule of law.(Brief Article)
February 8, 2002... The war against terrorism is too important to be left to the military. Though President George W. Bush cast a wide net in declaring that war, he seems content to leave critical legal and diplomatic questions to military judgment. The Pentagon's...

FAMILY FEUD : Will India & Pakistan come to blows?(Brief Article)
February 8, 2002... When the Indian Parliament was attacked by terrorists on December 13, 2001, we watched the news reports on television with even more than our usual concern. My husband's Mamaji (mother's brother), Krishan Kant, is the vice president of India...

GIACOMETTI'S GENIUS : Angst & wit.(Alberto Giacometti, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY)(Brief Article)
February 8, 2002... I first came across the works of Alberto Giacometti (1901- 66) in a 1958 issue of Paris Review. The works reproduced there were not the elongated dark sculptures for which he is best known, but drawings--still lifes and figures and rooms...

IS THE EMBRYO A PERSON? Arguing with the Catholic traditions.
February 8, 2002... Last August 9, President George W. Bush approved federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells, but only if certain conditions are met--including, most controversially, the stipulation that the cell lines to be used must have originated...

DISTINCTLY HUMAN : The when, where & how of life's beginnings.
February 8, 2002... Ever since President George W. Bush announced his decision regarding federal funding of research on human embryonic stem cells last year, newspapers worldwide have reported on various issues surrounding such research. Many people are confused...

CLASS ACTION : Altman's 'Gosford Park'.
February 8, 2002... Robert Altman seems an unlikely director for Gosford Park. How could the sensibility behind a film as sprawling and wild as Nashville possibly cram itself into the small-genre box of a period-piece murder mystery set on an English country manor...

BLACK AMERICA SINGS : Belafonte's 'The Long Road to Freedom'.
February 8, 2002... Now seventy-four, Harry Belafonte, the Harlem-born singer, actor, and producer of Jamaican origins, has long been active in black cultural awareness, whether as an early ally of Martin Luther King Jr. or with his own million-selling recordings...

Jane Addams revised.
February 8, 2002... Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy Jean Bethke Elshtain Basic Books, $28, 328 pp. She wore a full-length black dress almost every day of her adult life, with puffy sleeves extending to her wrists. A bored, wealthy young...

Deep river.
February 8, 2002... Sacred Waters A Pilgrimage up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture Stephen Alter Harcourt, $25, 368 pp. Sacred Waters is a lovely, tranquil account of a spiritual journey undertaken by a third-generation missionary kid,...

Thank you.
February 8, 2002... For seventy-eight years, Commonweal has been providing a place for Catholic, liberal, and opinionated voices to reach an audience of readers around the world. We are able to do this because of the steadfast, generous support of the Commonweal...

HIGHER MATH.(A Beautiful Mind)
February 8, 2002... Having been equally intrigued and inconvenienced by the filming of Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind on the Princeton campus, it was with great curiosity that I attended a showing at our local theater, located virtually on the site where...

To the Editors.
February 22, 2002... Open dialogue I want to congratulate you on Archbishop Rembert Weakland's January 11 article ("The Liturgy as Battlefield"). I really like the fact that he and Commonweal respect the readership so much that you dare to publish an article...

Science & fiction.
February 22, 2002... Last August, President George W. Bush announced his decision banning federal funding for stem-cell research that involved the destruction of living human embryos. At that time, Bush also announced the formation of a National Bioethics...

VIETNAM JOURNEY : What was that all about?(Brief Article)
February 22, 2002... One-third of Americans alive today were born after 1975 when the United States was finally driven from its futile war in Vietnam. That explains an airplane conversation I had going from Siem Riep in Cambodia to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in...

RELIGION & EVIL : Faith offers no immunity.(Brief Article)
February 22, 2002... Flash! This news just in. Religion has not withered away as modern secularization myths would have it. Three establishment magazines have concurrently run stories describing and attacking religious bodies, other than Islam. The January 21 New...

EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS : Unions & globalization.
February 22, 2002... The prestigious World Economic Forum welcomed a special group of VIPs to its 2002 annual meeting, held from January 31 to February 4 in New York City, rather than in its usual site, the Alpine resort of Davos, Switzerland. Thirty union leaders,...

GETTING POORER : Why Islamic nations are falling behind.
February 22, 2002... The relatively well-educated men responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States were citizens of Muslim-dominated "failed states." They came from nations that possess neither a modern politics responsive to public...

HEALTH CARE FOR ALL : A conservative case.(the US is the only industrialized country in the world without universal medical services)
February 22, 2002... Now that South Africa has legislated universal access to medical services, the United States remains the only industrialized or second-tier country in the world that fails to guarantee its citizens access to medical services. This is a curious...

GOING CRAZY : Managed care & mental health.
February 22, 2002... In 1990, mental health cost 9 percent of the medical dollar. In 2000, it was 3 percent. Managed care had trimmed an average of 8 percent from all other medical costs but 54 percent from our specialty, mental health. The Surgeon General's 1999...

Fishing with the Ghosts of Winter.(Brief Article)(Poem)
February 22, 2002... after Russell Banks The man enters his tiny house On the ice, carrying His buckets of bait, gin, and coal. The cove's darkness, the cold fit him Like the bob-house fits him, Like the snowdrifts fit the...

MISSING THE DARK SIDE : Ken Burns does 'Mark Twain'.
February 22, 2002... Whether it deals with the Civil War, baseball, or jazz, a Ken Burns documentary always takes us into the world of Ken Burns. In that world, populations surge west across America, skyscrapers thrust upwards, bridges reach across waterways,...

One nation, including God.(On Two Wings Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding)
February 22, 2002... On Two Wings Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding Michael Novak Encounter Books, $23.95, 239 pp. Michael Novak is an intellectual paladin, ingenious and learned, contentiously empyreal and remarkably prolific,...

ANGELA'S COUSINS.(Crossing Highbridge A Memoir of Irish America)
February 22, 2002... Crossing Highbridge A Memoir of Irish America Maureen Waters Syracuse University Press, $24.95, 149 pp. Dreaming of Columbus Boyhood in the Bronx Michael Pearson Syracuse University Press, $24.95, 218 pp. In this era of...

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD.(Five Points The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum)
February 22, 2002... Five Points The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum Tyler Anbinder The Free Press, $30, 512 pp. In the 1840s and for decades after,...

LIFE IN A SENTENCE.(Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories)
February 22, 2002... Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Alice Munro Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 320 pp. In the halcyon days before he became Oprah Winfrey's sparring partner, National Book Award-winner Jonathan Franzen made a...

GLOBAL MISSION.(Gilligan Unbound Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization)
February 22, 2002... Gilligan Unbound Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization Paul A. Cantor Rowman and Littlefield, $27.95, 255 pp. Like so many other intellectual confections whipped up in the last two decades, a study of television culture might...

SINGULAR.(single lifestyle)(Brief Article)
February 22, 2002... If married, ordained, and professed people witness to something through their commitments, what do vowless singles in their thirties and forties reveal to the world? To what are they called? They must wonder if their state is permanent and what...