Commonweal articles from February 2008

Commonweal archives from February 2008

Bad education.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 15, 2008... In his article on Karl Adam ("Reformer and Racialist," January 18), John Connelly demonstrates how the terms of Adam's theology proved to be so compatible with, and supportive of, Nazi ideology. How are we to account for Adam's enthusiastic...

The best laid plans ...(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 15, 2008... The moderate tone and balance in John Connelly's article made his revelations about Karl Adam all the more chilling. Connelly's warning about speculation reminded me of a talk some years ago at Woodstock College in Maryland. The speaker was...

Jules Isaac's legacy.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 15, 2008... Kudos to John Wilkins for his well-balanced essay on the origins of Catholic-Jewish religious understanding ("The Beginning of the Beginning," January 18). It should be pointed out, however, that the man who prompted Pope John XXIII to include...

Corrections.(Correction notice)
February 15, 2008... The meaning of a sentence in William H. Slavick's October 26, 2007, letter was changed by an editorial error. The sentence should have read, "But the tradition Lauritzen cites [the just-war tradition] is essentially incompatible with the...

Bridge closed.(From the Editors)(censorship among Catholics)
February 15, 2008... There was a good deal of justified outrage among Catholics, and presumably among all fair-minded people, when protests from faculty and students at Rome's La Sapienza University caused Pope Benedict to cancel an academic address he was to give...

A man of peace: Gordon C. Zahn, 1918-2007.(Farewell)(In memoriam)
February 15, 2008... On the night of John Leary's funeral in Boston in August 1982, I ran into Gordon Zahn in Copley Square. His face was lined with tears. Young Leary, a Catholic pacifist and Harvard grad, had dropped dead a few days before while jogging along the...

Sex & the teenage girl: the insights of 'Juno'.(Columnists)(Critical essay)
February 15, 2008... There's a classic story of teen pregnancy, told in books, movies, and teen magazines over the past century. It goes something like this: a young girl falls in love for the first time, and, under the spell of first love, she "goes all the way"...

Justice or vengeance: is the death penalty cruel & unusual?(Columnists)(Essay)
February 15, 2008... Does the three-drug cocktail used by the majority of states that impose the death penalty violate the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment"? The Supreme Court recently heard arguments on this...

Good reasons to be humble: a foreign-policy agenda for the next president.(Issues 2008)
February 15, 2008... In matters of foreign policy, the next president faces a tall order in a short time. Within days of taking office in January 2009, he or she must take a series of actions to restore America's moral authority in the world and our confidence in...

The Suspect Corpse.(Poem)(Brief article)
February 15, 2008... The dead man lay, nibbled, between dark carriages of a rocky river, a curled load of himself, in cheap clothes crusted in dried water. Noisy awe, nose-crimped, sent us up the gorge to jail, in case we were hoaxing. Following...

Faith & politics: after the Religious Right.(Articles)(Essay)
February 15, 2008... It is already clear that the 2008 presidential campaign will be one of the most notable in our country's history. But one of the most important transformations in our politics is receiving remarkably little attention: In this election, the...

Begotten, not made: the dangers of reproductive technology.(Articles)(Essay)
February 15, 2008... In the region where I live and teach on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the economy centers on a thriving poultry industry. On a number of occasions, when my boys were young, I would trot off with them on a school field trip to admire the...

Thicker than oil: 'There Will Be Blood'.(Screen)(Movie review)
February 15, 2008... Why is it that the great characters of fiction and drama always, finally, elude us? Hamlet, Phaedra, Charles Foster Kane, the bums waiting for Godot, Anna Karenina, Huck Finn: they lure us on and lure us on and then they turn into Mona Lisas....

Clash course.(Books)(Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism: A Call to Action)(Book review)
February 15, 2008... Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism A Call to Action George Weigel Doubleday, $18.95, 195 pp. George Weigel offers this book as a guide to the war on jihadism for a bipartisan "Coalition of Those Who Understand."...

Unintelligent design.(Books)(The Case against Perfection)(Book review)
February 15, 2008... The Case against Perfection Michael J. Sandel Harvard University Press, $18.95, 176 pp. In his 1987 novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe explores the hubris, greed, and recklessness of the 1980s Wall Street boom. One of the...

Failed experiment.(Books)(Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy)(Book review)
February 15, 2008... Weimar Germany Promise and Tragedy Eric D. Weitz Princeton University Press, $29.95, 432 pp. In 1950, when the East German authorities demolished the Royal Palace in the center of Berlin, they retained a single piece of the...

Beneath the skin.(The Last Word)(Essay)
February 15, 2008... Aside from the few friends whose names and faces even forty-plus years cannot entirely erase, I remember almost nothing of my high school years. Neither the classes I attended nor the poor devils assigned to teach them have left much of an...

Lost in translation.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 29, 2008... According to John Wilkins ("The Beginning of the Beginning," January 18), the opponents of Cardinal Augustin Bea at Vatican II argued that St. Paul had spoken of Jews as "enemies of God." Indeed the New English Bible features the following...

Well ... did he?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 29, 2008... The subtitle of "Human & Divine," Luke Timothy Johnson's January 31 article, is "Did Jesus Have Faith?" Despite the many valuable things Johnson wrote in that piece, he never attempted to answer that question. I wish he had. The Congregation...

Neglecting the mystery.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 29, 2008... Luke Timothy Johnson frets over what he considers a "reduction of the mystery of Jesus by several liberation theologians." I wonder if he shares a similar concern with the theology of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in its...

Conflict, for now.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 29, 2008... Luke Timothy Johnson's "Human & Divine" shows the kind of theology that could be pursued in dialogue between theologians and the magisterium to the benefit of the whole church. As long as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith continues...

The realities of 'Juno'.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 29, 2008... While I liked Rand Richards Cooper's review of Juno ("Life & Death," January 31)--a truly remarkable film--I disagree with his conclusions about how the movie may represent cultural changes regarding abortion. Again, someone's judgment has been...

Another option.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 29, 2008... I applaud Patrick Hicks for his article about his and his wife's struggles with infertility ("Family Planning," December 7, 2007). But contrary to what Hicks might suggest, one does not have to masturbate to give a sperm sample. Sperm can also...

A shared hope.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 29, 2008... In his review of Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger's The Promise ("Sibling Rivalries," January 18), Michael Peppard asks how we can "share in Israel's hope while we proclaim its fulfillment." This is possible because the fulfillment of Christ both...

Syrian surprise.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
February 29, 2008... The information about the Syrian Christian tradition presented in Sally Cunneen's "The Mary We Never Knew" (December 21, 2007) is of great value. A piece like this is enough to keep me subscribing to Commonweal for life. Now I must read...

Taking stock.(From the Editors)
February 29, 2008... No one seems to know whether we are now heading into a recession or are already in one. But for good reason the economy has become the dominant issue in the presidential campaign. In Washington, both Congress and the Federal Reserve have...

Clinton v. Obama: how a coronation became a contest.(Columnist)(Hillary Clinto and Barack Obama)
February 29, 2008... Hillary Clinton has often benefited from the general awfulness of the sort of lunatic critics who fill my inbox with ravings about how she's had people (and pets) killed in the past and, if elected, intends to pack the Supreme Court with...

Unfinished business: revisiting welfare reform.(Issues 2008)(Temporary Assistance for Needy Families)
February 29, 2008... What ever happened to welfare reform? Our nation's financial assistance to low-income (and usually single-parent) families was a hot-button issue in the 1990s, but since then it seems to have vanished from our collective radar. In the debates...

Country Midnight / Soft Rain.(Poem)
February 29, 2008... Country Midnight / Soft Rain The dogs yip and whine to be let in. Frogs burp happily happy that Heaven is a pond. I cough and cough with a summer cold let the dogs in feel the slow pelt and streaming dark around of Mercy.

The empty box: why Catholics skip confession.(Short Take)
February 29, 2008... I heard eight confessions this morning. For one hour, facing a small crucifix in a spartan room, I listened to the ordinary transgressions of exceptionally good people. In the early church, these penitents would not have gone to confession. A...

'Become all fire': the splendor of Orthodox spirituality.(Spirituality Issue)(Cover story)
February 29, 2008... My wife and I visited Amsterdam a couple of years ago. Her time was taken up with business, and my days were spent exploring. There was a Catholic church close to our hotel and I wanted to see its interior. The church was unlocked on weekdays...

Out of Great Silence: a Carthusian interlude.(Spirituality Issue)(An Infinity of Little Hours by Nancy Klein Maguire, Sounds of Silence by Benedict Kossmann and Into Great Silence by Philip Groning)(Book review)
February 29, 2008... Does it qualify as a Jungian convergence that two books about the Carthusians (An Infinity of Little Hours by Nancy Klein Maguire, and Sounds of Silence by Benedict Kossmann) and a highly praised film about a Carthusian monastery (Into Great...

Daughter Scar.(Poem)
February 29, 2008... Daughter Scar I'm wearing Jacob's ladder-- the selfsame rungs that once were strung with angels. Among them Jacob clambered, thrust his arms through cumuli, captured a passing seraphim, carried her to Earth-- on this very...

A cloud of witnesses: thoughts on an abbey cemetery.(Spirituality Issue)(Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota)
February 29, 2008... When I return to Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota, I always spend a few quiet hours at the cemetery. I knew few of the monks or townspeople who are buried there, yet I feel a kinship with them. As a Benedictine Oblate, I am connected to the...

Presence.(Poem)
February 29, 2008... Presence Miss Kitty sits in the study window --the light lies on her fur. Are you washed in the blood of Iraq? Tuffy comes home from roaming the darkened earth, he comes home --are you washed in the soap...

Locked in: 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'.(Screen)(Movie review)
February 29, 2008... While watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly it came home to me more clearly than ever that literature strains to do what cinema achieves easily: capture the sheer, palpable physicality of the world. Literature's real victories are won...

A tale of two mothers.(Books)(Book review)
February 29, 2008... The Florist's Daughter Patricia Hampl Harcourt, $24, 240 pp. Swimming in a Sea of Death A Son's Memoir David Rieff Simon & Schuster, $21, 192 pp. Two deaths, two mothers, two books: two noted authors write of...

Group dynamics.(Books)(Book review)
February 29, 2008... Vatican II A Sociological Analysis of Religious Change Melissa J. Wilde Princeton University Press, $35, 224 pp. Shortly after announcing Vatican II, John XXIII sent a letter to all the bishops soliciting suggestions for the...

To the bone.(Books)(Book review)
February 29, 2008... Created for Joy A Christian View of Suffering Sidney Callahan Crossroad, $19.95, 256 pp. Sidney Callahan begins her fifth book with these celebrated lines from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence": Man was made for...

Lucid, generous & humane.(Books)(Book review)
February 29, 2008... Inner Workings Literary Essays 2000-2005 J. M. Coetzee Viking, $25.95, 304 pp. Evaluating the worth of critics in 1932, Ezra Pound quite rightly gave the highest praise to readers, like himself, who could strengthen the work...

Tortured.(Books)(Book review)
February 29, 2008... Gangster Priest The Italian-American Cinema of Martin Scorsese Robert Casillo University of Toronto Press, $39.95, 590 pp. In one of his early poems William Butler Yeats memorably denounces those "old, learned, respectable...

Slow the presses.(Books)(Book review)
February 29, 2008... American Carnival Journalism under Siege in an Age of New Media Neil Henry University of California Press, $24.95, 326 pp. My copy of Neil Henry's American Carnival: Journalism under Siege in an Age of New Media is filled with...

Religion booknotes.(Books)(Book review)
February 29, 2008... When as a young neophyte Augustine asked Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, what part of the Bible he should start with, Ambrose answered, "Isaiah." That great prophet was, and is, central for Christians. His words are echoed throughout the New...

Bare ruined choirs.(The Last Word)
February 29, 2008... As a monk who has lived for almost forty years in a Benedictine monastery, I have had this recurring thought: Monasteries of men and women living the Benedictine Rule are an endangered species. In the near future, these places run the risk of...