Commonweal articles from February 2006

Commonweal archives from February 2006

Gay priests.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 10, 2006... Regarding your editorial "Instruction from Rome" (December 16, 2005): Although the contours of an uncreative and hypercautious style of thought have been slowly emerging across several otherwise progressive American Catholic publications--a...

Celibacy vs. chastity.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 10, 2006... Paul Stanosz ("Gay Seminarians," December 16, 2005) may be right that homosexuals who are thinking about the priesthood would save themselves a lot of grief by dropping the idea. But if the Vatican's treatment of these men is morally wrong--and...

Scandal in Philadelphia.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 10, 2006... In his analysis of the Philadelphia grand jury's report on clerical sexual abuse ("Abuse in Philadelphia," December 16, 2005), Mark Sargent states that "the most important fact about the report [is that] the grand jury could not produce a...

Lack of charity.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 10, 2006... As a longtime fan of Barbara Ehrenreich's work, I was excited to see Eugene McCarraher's review of her latest book, Bait and Switch ("Tighten Your Belts," January 13, 2006). Yet upon reading it, I was dismayed to find that McCarraher had seen...

What Lewis meant.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 10, 2006... In his welcome appreciation of C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories ("Inside the Wardrobe," December 16, 2005), Robert H. Bell quotes Lewis as intending to "steal past watchful dragons" to depict the "real potency" of Christianity. Bell thinks that...

A distinctive voice.(From the Editors)(Pope Benedict XVI encyclical)
February 10, 2006... The reaction to Pope Benedict XVI's long-awaited first encyclical, Deus caritas est (God Is Love), has been appreciative, even enthusiastic. If some assumed that a seventy-eight-year-old celibate, best known for policing the errors of his...

Wanted: manly men.(Editorials & Comment)(Richard John Neuhaus)
February 10, 2006... Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is clearly a man to be reckoned with. Counselor and confidante of presidents, cardinals, and popes. Conjurer of naked public squares, neoconservative triumphs, Catholic moments, "Great" pontificates, and "the...

Bare minimum: what constitutes a just wage?(Columnist)
February 10, 2006... In a final flurry of pre-holiday maneuvering, the last session of Congress failed to raise the federal minimum wage from its current rate of $5.15 an hour, at which it has languished for the past eight years. Recent efforts to raise the minimum...

Election in Chile: has Pinochet's ghost been exorcised?(Short Take)(Michelle Bachelet)(Biography)
February 10, 2006... The election last month of Michelle Bachelet as president of Chile took place in what the local media described as a "tranquil" environment. Indeed, the atmosphere stood in sharp contrast to the turmoil surrounding the 1970 election of...

Labor's future: can unions restore the dignity of work?(AFL-CIO)
February 10, 2006... By now most people have heard about the schism that roiled the American labor movement last summer. When the AFL-CIO wrapped up its Chicago convention in July, reelecting John Sweeney as president, several unions that had been threatening to...

Emotional Apartheid: 'BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN'.(Movie review)
February 10, 2006... Miraculously, you discover that you can take your heart out of your chest without dying. Well, perhaps you're not really alive but you walk, talk, get business done, and nobody suspects that you are actually an ambulatory corpse. You keep your...

Searching for Martin.(At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68)(Book review)
February 10, 2006... At Canaan's Edge America in the King Years, 1965-68 Taylor Branch Simon & Schuster, $35, 896 pp. Every time the country is convulsed by a racial outrage like the lynching of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, or the beating of a...

Nora's Ashes.(Booking Passage)(Book review)
February 10, 2006... Booking Passage We Irish and Americans Thomas Lynch Norton, $24.95, 320 pp. Early on in Booking Passage, Thomas Lynch describes the quintessentially Irish funeral held for his cousin Nora Lynch, who died--compos mentis and...

Doing Time.(A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life behind Bars)(Book review)
February 10, 2006... A World Apart Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars Cristina Rathbone Random House, $24.95, 304 pp. Cristina Rathbone begins her account of women in prison with one of the salient ironies of correctional institutions: how...

Polish connection.(The Last Word)
February 10, 2006... The death of a ninety-year-old Polish politician in October renewed my longstanding interest in his country. I had not previously heard of Edward Szczepanik, but his obituary described his niche in history as the last prime minister of the...

Plus XII & the Jews.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 24, 2006... I commend Commonweal for publishing Michael R. Marrus's article, "The Missing" (January 13, 2006). It considerably advances our knowledge of the fate of Jewish orphans after World War II, and is far more nuanced than other pieces on the same...

Christians & Israel.(Letters)
February 24, 2006... While it is important to point out the problems the church presented to the Jewish community sixty years ago (see "The Missing"), I wish the editors of Commonweal would recognize the problems that the government of Israel is currently...

Two visions of church.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 24, 2006... Congratulations on your foresight and courage in printing Luke Timothy Johnson's article ("After the Big Chill," January 27, 2006). A most capable theologian, Johnson emphasizes the need to hold in "creative tension" the two visions of the...

Is anyone listening?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 24, 2006... Luke Timothy Johnson's "The Big Chill" arrived like a thunderbolt and was quickly welcomed by several discussion groups I belong to. I was reminded of David O'Brien's Commonweal article urging centrist Catholics to get involved and make their...

A Gay Priest speaks.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 24, 2006... This celibate homosexual priest, more than forty years ordained and an admirer of James Martin, SJ, does not agree with his critical assessment of the recent Vatican Instruction on gay seminarians ("The Vatican & Gay Priests," January 13,...

English Translations.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 24, 2006... Regarding "Lost on Translation" by John Wilkins (December 2, 2005): I have great sympathy for all those who worked so hard on translating the liturgy into English. However, the notion of one single translation for the entire English-speaking...

Addicted to oil.(From the Editors)
February 24, 2006... In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush said the unsayable: America is addicted to foreign oil, and we must wean ourselves from it. Coming from an oil man, it was a surprising admission. How serious Bush is remains to be seen. In his...

A Good Word.(ET CETERA)(Luke Timothy Johnson begins a series)
February 24, 2006... With this issue, biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson begins writing a year-long series of short essays, called "The Good Word," emphasizing what is positive and inspiring about contemporary Catholicism (see page 38). Despite the sometimes...

Clear & present danger.(ET CETERA)(Holy Name Monastery in St. Leo, Florida)(Brief article)
February 24, 2006... The sisters of Holy Name Monastery in St. Leo, Florida, suspected something was wrong when their checks started bouncing last November. Twenty-two checks came back marked RETURN TO MAKER, which has a certain theological ring to it. Deeper worry...

Correction.(Correction notice)
February 24, 2006... We regret a typographical error in Nellie Hill's poem "The Old Poet" in the January 27 issue. The second line in the second stanza should read: "but I sat at his feet while he [not she] said, good, good." THE EDITORS

Climbing trees: and other theological exercises.(Columnists)
February 24, 2006... I grew up at the edge of Springfield, Illinois, across the street from open spaces, an active farm with cattle and corn growing in a field that adjoined the pasture. Beyond the farm was a forest, and another forest lay a few houses away from...

Perverted logic: behind the administration's 'torture memo'.
February 24, 2006... In the Bush administration's most infamous "torture memo," dated August 1, 2002, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee wrote to then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales: "Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the...

Rebel with a cause: Dwight Macdonald remembered.(Short Take)
February 24, 2006... March 24 marks the centenary of the birth of Dwight Macdonald. From 1940 to 1975, Macdonald was one of America's best-known literary and cultural critics. He first came to prominence in the late 1920s and early '30s as a staff writer for...

Catholic spirituality: what does it mean today?(Spirituality Issue)
February 24, 2006... In the forty years since the Second Vatican Council, many devotional practices, most of them developed in the early modern period, have fallen into decline. Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, although promoted vigorously in the latter part...

The Lauds of Saint Francis.(Poem)
February 24, 2006... The Lauds of Saint Francis Altissime! Omnipotent, Good-Sir-Our-Lord, Thine be the praises, glory and honor, Thine every in-blessing-spoken word. With thee alone, Altissime, do such things accord. Blessed be Thou,...

The Philosophical Spirit: from Plato to Nussbaum.
February 24, 2006... One of my favorite tasks as a theological librarian at Drew University is orienting new seminarians to the theological reference room, which sits apart in isolated splendor from the rest of the library. Perhaps housing theology books in their...

Purpose-Driven Spirituality: how deep does Rick Warren go?
February 24, 2006... There's a low-hanging cabinet over my desk that I have been meaning to move for years, and as I was sitting down (finally) to start a draft of what you are reading, I hit my head on that cabinet really, really hard. I saw stars, lost vision for...

Advantage Allen: 'Match Point'.(Screen)(Movie review)
February 24, 2006... Quick, what was the last Woody Allen film you saw? Husbands and Wives? Bullets over Broadway? If you're like many fans, you may wince when you realize how long it's been. Allen meanwhile has gone on, chugging away like the Energizer Bunny,...

Vocational Crisis.(Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son )(Book review)
February 24, 2006... Vows The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son Peter Manseau Free Press, $25, 383 pp. There is a generational passing going on in the American Catholic Church, as anyone who attends meetings of Voice of the Faithful or Call...

Flyover Country.(Waterloo)(Mission to America)(Book review)
February 24, 2006... Waterloo Karen Olsson Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24, 305 pp. Mission to America Walter Kirn Doubleday, $23.95, 271 pp. The philosopher Henri Bergson argued that satire, which he regarded as a form of moral...

Strange New Worlds.(The Science and Fiction of Autism)(Book review)
February 24, 2006... The Science and Fiction of Autism Laura Schreibman Harvard University Press, $27.95, 304 pp. The dramatic and baffling upsurge in rates of autism diagnoses has spawned a brisk literary trade. If the incidence of autism has...

Getting into Shape.(Belonging to God: A Personal Training Guide for the Deeper Catholic Spiritual Life )(Book review)
February 24, 2006... Belonging to God A Personal Training Guide for the Deeper Catholic Spiritual Life Charles Murphy Crossroad, $16.95, 165 pp. Msgr. Charles Murphy has written a readable reflection on Catholic spirituality that speaks directly...

Enlarging the Middle.(Public Matters: Politics, Policy, and Religion in the 21st Century )(Book review)
February 24, 2006... Public Matters Politics, Policy, and Religion in the 21st Century William A. Galston Rowman & Littlefield, $72, 232 pp. William Galston is a most unusual hybrid: an academic political theorist who doubles as a political...

Signs of hope.(The Good Word)
February 24, 2006... If we're to believe movies like Grumpy Old Men, the 1993 Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau comedy about two feuding septuagenarian neighbors, then complaining is a sign of old age: things are never as good as they used to be. If we're to believe...