Commonweal articles from February 2007

Commonweal archives from February 2007

It's all Greek to them.(Letter to the editor)
February 9, 2007... It is painful to read an excellent, valuable, and indeed necessary argument against an unacceptable assertion by Pope Benedict XVI presented in so flawed a manner (Peter C. Phan's "Speaking in Many Tongues," January 12, 2007). Benedict 's use...

Neither illusion nor delusion.(Letter to the editor)
February 9, 2007... John Garvey's January 12, 2007, column ("Grounds for Disbelief") says more on the God-delusion and the free-will-illusion debate in fewer words than anything else I've read. He notes how a strong need for certainty lies behind both the...

Unequal burden.(Letter to the editor)
February 9, 2007... Cathleen Kaveny concluded her most recent column ("Contraception Again," December 15, 2006) by saying, "our committment to a natural-law approach... has to be more fundamental than our position on this particular application of natural law."...

Investigators & believers.(Letter to the editor)
February 9, 2007... In her review of Stalking the Holy: The Pursuit of Saint Making (January 26, 2007), Kathleen Sprows Cummings writes in reference to my book, Making Saints, that "while Woodward approaches the topic from the perspective of an investigative...

The world turns.(global warming)(Editorial)
February 9, 2007... Last year California passed legislation that mandates a 25-percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020. And last month an unlikely consortium of ten corporate leaders from the energy, manufacturing, and financial sectors called for phased-in...

Making babies: how the French do it.(birthrate)(Column)
February 9, 2007... Thirty years ago, the government of Valery Giscard d'Estaing urged the French to have "un troisieme enfant pour la France," but it is only now that they have taken the advice. The national statistics agency says that in 2006 France had the...

What we have done: accepting our responsibility for Iraq.(Short takes)
February 9, 2007... The Iraq war will continue. President George W. Bush has committed 21,500 additional U.S. troops to "seize, hold, and build" in Baghdad. This decision emerged from sharp disagreements within his administration. U.S. allies and countries in the...

Warsaw confession: the Polish church, the pope & the past.(Bishop Stanis-law Wielgus)
February 9, 2007... The dramatic resignation last month of Bishop Stanis-law Wielgus at his investiture Mass as archbishop of Warsaw has raised the most serious questions about the integrity of both the Polish church and the Vatican. I have considerable personal...

Salvation & 'The Sopranos': redemption in New Jersey?
February 9, 2007... In Romans 8:22, St. Paul says that the "whole creation has been groaning" while awaiting redemption. He wrote these words as an evangelist addressing the fledgling church in first-century Rome, but they might just as easily have been written by...

'The Passion' redux: what are Gibson's defenders saying now?(The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson)
February 9, 2007... Last summer I visited Lorrach, Germany, a southern Black Forest city from which my father, his parents, and brother fled in order to escape the Nazis in 1938. I spent several hours in the City Hall one day with a helpful archivist who located...

Inscrutable: 'LITTLE CHILDREN'.(Movie review)
February 9, 2007... Early in Little Children, Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perrotta's novel, Sarah (Kate Winslet) is in the park with her little girl, along with several other suburban house-wives and their children. She's with this group nearly every weekday...

Not a Pretty Picture: 'GLITTER & DOOM' AT NEW YORK'S MET.(Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s, Metropolitan Museum of Art)
February 9, 2007... Anita Berber is the star of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition, "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s." She certainly wasn't beautiful. Like most of the paintings in the show, which closes February 19, her portrait is a...

Battle for the Bard.(The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, and Palace Coups)(Book review)
February 9, 2007... The Shakespeare Wars Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups Ron Rosenbaum Random House, $35,624 pp. At the outset of The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum promises readers a different sort of Shakespeare book, and...

The Spring of His Discontent.(Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties)(Book review)
February 9, 2007... Prime Green Remembering the Sixties Robert Stone Ecco, $25.95, 240 pp. In Robert Stone's 1986 novel, Children of Light, the heroine, a Hollywood actress, encounters a Mexican avant-garde painter who has sold some paintings to...

The People's Court.(The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America)(Book review)
February 9, 2007... The Most Democratic Branch How the Courts Serve America Jeffrey Rosen Oxford University Press, $25, 256 pp. Alexander Bickel, the great scholar of the Supreme Court, famously called the power of judicial review...

Thank you, Associates.(donations)
February 9, 2007... Commonweal is in its ninth decade of providing a place for reflective, progressive Catholic thought, a unique venture that has allowed a wide variety of voices to reach an engaged international readership. We have been able to do this because...

The knock.(The Last Word)(the soldier who delivers the bad news)
February 9, 2007... A friend has two jobs in our town: policeman and soldier. In both, he is the guy who knocks on doors to tell mothers and fathers, wives and husbands that their son or daughter, husband or wife is dead. He has to knock on a door five or six...

The content of belief.(Letter to the editor)
February 23, 2007... While I generally agree with Peter C. Phan's "Praying to the Buddha" (January 26) and Paul Lakeland's "Not So Heterodox" (January 26), I am dissatisfied with their conclusions. Both authors examine their topics from a subjective point of view;...

Limiting God.(Letter to the editor)
February 23, 2007... Ever since I visited with a Thai priest concerned with inculturation in his overwhelmingly Buddhist country, I have been interested in how Christianity can be presented to a society that does not share the same cultural, linguistic, and...

Universal love.(Letter to the editor)
February 23, 2007... Peter C. Phan writes eloquently of the crisis in the church as defined by the association of Catholicism with Western thought and culture, which threatens to obscure the church's universality. This is indisputable. Yet our times require that we...

A glorious article.(Letter to the editor)
February 23, 2007... I thank John J. Savant for his marvelous essay ("The 'Glory' of War," January 26) which goes far beyond a "Short Take." It is a truly wise and exemplary piece of writing. I wish I could distribute it to all our political leaders, including...

Science & theology.(Letter to the editor)
February 23, 2007... Amid all the talk about the roles of faith and reason (John Garvey "Grounds for Disbelief?" January 12), it's important to realize that the methods by which both seek knowledge are similar: each starts with a theory that is eventually tested...

Something missing?(Letter to the editor)
February 23, 2007... After reading Luke Timothy Johnson's "Sense of an Ending" (December 15, 2006), I must confess to some degree of puzzlement. He takes modern Catholics to task for adopting a type of agnosticism that doesn't consider death, judgment, heaven, and...

Smart priests.(Letter to the editor)
February 23, 2007... I have thoroughly enjoyed the lively conversation that has been taking place in the pages of Commonweal over the past few months regarding the quality of today's seminarians. Although fingers have been pointed at the allegedly second-rate pool...

Needless divide.(Letter to the editor)
February 23, 2007... Paul Lakeland's defense of Roger Haight ("Not So Heterodox," January 26) poses questions about ecclesiology, soteriology, and ecumenism that deserve thoughtful consideration. But the contrast Lakeland sets out between pre--and post--Vatican II...

Bad housekeeping.(From the Editors)
February 23, 2007... Rev. Rodney Rodis had a reputation as a people-centered leader who was especially good with kids. This may have had something to do with the fact that--as his parishioners were stunned to discover last month--he lived in a subdivision with a...

Here I stand: doubt & the community of believers.(Column)
February 23, 2007... There has been an interesting recent debate about faith and doubt, religious belief and atheism. Andrew Sullivan, a Catholic and the author of The Conservative Soul (HarperCollins), and Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation (Alfred...

Forever young: the trouble with the 'Ashley Treatment'.
February 23, 2007... The "Ashley Treatment"--a series of medical procedures performed at Seattle Children's Hospital in 2004 on a profoundly mentally and physically disabled six-year-old girl in order to insure that she would remain small, portable, and...

After Fidel: don't expect a revolution.(Short take)(Fidel Castro )
February 23, 2007... I returned to Cuba in November for the first time in two years. On the surface, not much had changed. From my room in the Riviera Hotel on the Havana waterfront, I could still see vintage 1950s American cars driving down the Malecon. On...

The saint of Worcester: why pilgrims visit Audrey Santo.(Spirituality Issue)
February 23, 2007... I first noticed John when I overheard him talking about his robot collection. He had thirty-one of them, all blessed by a priest. My eyes were drawn to the tattoos on John's neck: CHRIST inscribed in black, BIBLE in blue, SOUL in red, and HOLY...

Rescue.(Two Poems)(Poem)
February 23, 2007... O Salamander, sunken leaf at the bottom of the pool's drain, dark frond swept by hazard from summer grass into a chlorine chamber-- I couldn't but admire the clawed stars of your feet, your almost liquid tail, black and, drying,...

It's Not the Same for Me.(Two Poems)(Poem)
February 23, 2007... The yellow-littered roads at summer's end are summer skinned of beauty, goads to grief. For you, the reaching limbs, the rising dark, bring joy. Pilgrim, you know such night will lift.

Why I stay Catholic: the bonds of belief & friendship.
February 23, 2007... Some time back, I got an e-mail from an old friend with whom I had lost contact many years before. He was an ex-seminarian from Argentina who had been imprisoned and tortured during the "dirty war" of the military dictatorship. That he had...

The other side: 'Letters from Iwo Jima' & 'Pan's labyrinth'.(Screen)(Movie review)
February 23, 2007... For Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood used the same cinematographer, Tom Stern, who shot the film's predecessor and companion piece, Flags of Our Fathers (see "A Heroic Effort," November 17, 2006). The battle scenes in Flags were done in a...

Still life & Matisse.(Books)(Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime)(Book review)
February 23, 2007... Blue Arabesque A Search for the Sublime Patricia Hampl Harcourt, $22, 224 pp. Great paradoxes are those that stop, startle, and gain intuitive acceptance well before essential understanding. Take, for instance, the maxim that...

Nation-making amnesia.(Books)(A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility)(Book review)
February 23, 2007... A Shameful Act The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility Taner Akcam Metropolitan Books, $30, 496 pp. It is hard for Americans to imagine a topic almost a century old that remains so wounding that...

The Chairman's willing subjects.(Books)(Mao's Last Revolution)(Book review)
February 23, 2007... Mao's Last Revolution Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals Belknap/Harvard University Press, $35, 752 pp. In the summer of 1967, a group of middle-school students, daughters of high-ranking officials in Beijing, forced their...

Ordinary Poles.(Books)(Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz)(Book review)
February 23, 2007... Fear Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz Jan T. Gross Random House, $25.95, 320 pp. Consult the Web site of Poland's Consulate General in New York and you'll find a link to a photo of the gates of Auschwitz, featuring the...

Run, Frank, run.(Books)(The Lay of the Land)(Book review)
February 23, 2007... The Lay of the Land Richard Ford Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95, 496 pp. I first met Frank Bascombe about twenty years ago when I read The Sportswriter, a novel I was introduced to by the manager of the Loyola University bookstore in New...

Religion booknotes.(Books)(Bibliography)
February 23, 2007... When Jesus' disciples asked him how to pray, he taught them the Lord's Prayer (Catholics call it the Our Father). For that reason, this prayer has always held a privileged place in the personal piety of the Christian faithful. It has also...

The legacy.(The Last Word)(Padre Pio )
February 23, 2007... The first sign that one is nearing San Giovanni Rotondo, "the city of Padre Pio," is the shining white facade of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, often referred to as one of Padre Pio's miracles: a twelve-hundred-bed hospital erected in what...