Commonweal articles from January 2001

Commonweal archives from January 2001

To the Editors.(letters)
January 12, 2001... The sins of 'Commonweal' I believe "Relative Morality" (November 3, 2000) is the last and best word on the Catholic church and gay people of all that I've read in recent months in Commonweal. Until I read the article, I had never...

Mashed potatoes.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2001... The Bush II administration is looking a lot like Bush I, though it also bears some resemblance to the Nixon-Ford and Reagan years. In choosing cabinet members and close advisers, President-elect George W. Bush is reaching into the Republican...

WAUGH ON THE MEDIA : Get it first, then get it right.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2001... I started watching the returns early election night. Consequently, I heard Dan Rather, CBS's king of cornpone, begin the evening with his now infamous promise. Speaking in his usual oleaginous fashion, Rather told us that CBS might not be the...

TOWARD A BRAINY CHURCH : Not top-down but back-and-forth.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2001... Conservatives in the church buttress their theological arguments for a centralized authority at the top of a hierarchy by relying on current assumptions about rational organization. As you go higher in organized institutional ranks, more power...

Medium.(Brief Article)(Poem)
January 12, 2001... When she'd outgrown a Medium, my daughter gave me a red ski sweater, strewn with snow in knitted flakes. It's thick--wool--but the sweater's extra warmth (despite the chilly rows of crystals on the yoke of knitted firs) had...

Correction.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2001... On page 15 of the November 17, 2000 issue of Commonweal, there was a misprint in the ad for the GodTalk Foundation. The correct Web site address is: www.godtalktv.org. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

'BUSH' v. 'GORE' : What was the Supreme Court thinking?
January 12, 2001... One of the most astonishing episodes in American political history ended last month with perhaps the most imperial decision ever by the United States Supreme Court. In one stroke, the Court exercised power that belonged to Congress, the...

CAN JEWS TRUST CATHOLICS? A rabbi looks forward.
January 12, 2001... The celebration of Jubilee 2000 reached beyond the boundaries of the Catholic community, leading to dramatic steps toward reconciliation with other religious communities. In particular, Pope John Paul II focused his efforts on putting an end to...

1054 & ALL THAT : Look to the undivided church.
January 12, 2001... One way to move beyond the current stalemate in our efforts toward Christian unity is to take the state of the undivided church, before 1054, as a point of reference. The Vatican II decree on ecumenism states as much and John Paul II, in his...

BEAM ME UP : A repackaged Apocalypse.
January 12, 2001... If I were to ask you to name the five most popular novelists in America, I suppose you might rattle off three of them before hesitation set in. John Grisham? Right. Tom Clancy? Of course. J.K. Rowling? Good. And the other two? How many of...

TAKE FIVE : Ken Burns's 'Jazz'.(Review)
January 12, 2001... Jazz, the musician Matt Glaser opines at one point in Ken Burns's reverent new documentary film Jazz, "is the ultimate temporal art form. It's about the human experience of time." Time--a lot of it--is certainly at issue in the latest...

Let's get physical.(Review)
January 12, 2001... Einstein in Love A Scientific Romance Dennis Overbye Viking, $27.95, 416 pp. Einstein in Love is a sad saga of how love can go tragically wrong, and how being the smartest man on earth (and Time magazine's "Man of the Century")...

SAINT GEORGE ON JURA.(Review)
January 12, 2001... Orwell Wintry Conscience of a Generation Jeffrey Meyers Norton, $29.95, 380 pp. George Orwell, whose last will and testament in 1950 specifically requested that no biography of him be written, has been the subject of three...

SURVIVING MAO.(Review)
January 12, 2001... Colors of the Mountain Da Chen Random House, $25, 320 pp. Colors of the Mountain is one of a growing number of Cultural Revolution survival stories appearing in English. Liang Heng's Son of the Revolution, Yue Daiyun's To the Storm,...

Understanding Early Christian Art.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 12, 2001... Understanding Early Christian Art Robin Margaret Jensen Routledge, $25.99, 221 pp. Early Christian art, as Robin Jensen understands it, falls into two rather distinct chronological periods: the pre-Constantinian art of the third and...

Exploring Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Reader.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 12, 2001... Exploring Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Reader Edited by Kenneth J. Collins Baker, $26.99, 400 pp. The subtitle of Collins's anthology on spirituality should be taken seriously. The range of essays in this collection...

Faithful Dissenters.(Review)
January 12, 2001... Faithful Dissenters Robert McClory Orbis, $16, 180 pp. The title of Robert McClory's book is slightly misleading since not all the persons profiled in this highly readable account were "dissenters" in the technical sense of the term....

The Pleasure of Their Company.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 12, 2001... The Pleasure of Their Company Doris Grumbach Beacon Press, $22, 119 pp. Doris Grumbach's latest memoir revolves around her plan to have a party for her eightieth birthday. Naturally, the party is really only scaffolding for Grumbach...

Little Saint.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 12, 2001... Little Saint Hannah Green Random House, $25.95, 272 pp. Late in the process of writing Little Saint, Hannah Green saw that what she was writing was not history or art history or hagiography. Little Saint is more like a "novel, a...

A MODEST HOPE FOR MODESTA.
January 12, 2001... Modesta was on the porch that first evening, two years ago, when I arrived at Saint Augustine University of Tanzania as a Jesuit Volunteer. There stood a dark-skinned adolescent with close-cropped hair, whose gender I could detect only because...

Layoffs At EMusic.com, Fandom.com.
January 17, 2001... REDWOOD CITY, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 2001 JAN 14 (NB) -- By Dick Kelsey, Newsbytes. Subscription music download site EMusic.com Inc. has laid off 36 percent of its staff as part of a restructuring plan to save $16 million, laying some of the blame...

Telekom Malaysia Eyes Purchase Of Rival ISP.
January 17, 2001... KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA, 2001 JAN 14 (NB) -- By Adam Creed, Newsbytes. Telekom Malaysia is considering buying part of Malaysia's oldest Internet service provider, Jaring, according to local media reports. The Malaysian national carrier -...

Biz-To-Biz Buzz Asia Pacific.
January 17, 2001... HONG KONG, CHINA, 2001 JAN 15 (NB) -- By Staff, Newsbytes. In today's roundup of Asia Pacific business-to-business (B2B) news: Hong Kong Govt Encourages More Use of E-Tendering. -- Hong Kong Govt Encourages More Use of E-Tendering The...

Net Travel Market Drops 21% Down Under.
January 17, 2001... SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA 2001 JAN 15 (NB) -- By John Stackhouse, Computer Daily News. Australians who used the Internet to buy travel snapped up bargains in October and November. So there was no last minute dash for online travel tickets - research by...

Hewlett-Packard Co-Founder Dies Aged 87.
January 17, 2001... PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 2001 JAN 15 (NB) -- By Adam Creed, Newsbytes. William R. Hewlett, who saw his and co-founder David Packard's company grow to a multinational computer giant from its roots in 1939 as a tiny Silicon Valley garage...

Internet Update: Costa Rica Resource.
January 17, 2001... Planning to visit one of the world's most spectacular rain forests? Costa Rica is a jewel of the earth, teeming with life and biodiversity, with a large portion of its land reserved in federal parkland. Here is a page of links to tourism and...

Internet Update: Currency Converter.
January 17, 2001... Frequent travelers always need to use these before they go, currency converters, and Oanda has one of the best on the Net. Dozens of world currencies are represented with their daily price fluctuations. Just enter one currency type and another...

Net Boom Brings Australian Business Realities.
January 17, 2001... SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA 2001 JAN 15 (NB) -- By John Stackhouse, Computer Daily News. Australia gained 1.89 million Internet users between 1999 and 2000, for a total of 7.4 million, market research firm IDC Australia reckons. Meanwhile, e-commerce...

To the Editors.(letters)
January 26, 2001... Right & Left together David Beckmann's account (December 15, 2000) of how debt relief for the world's poorest countries captured the attention of both the White House and the Congress is fascinating reading. In over four decades in...

Abstinence, anyone?(teenagers and sex-free life style)
January 26, 2001... Strange things do happen. Earlier this month Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, relented after years of obstructionism and allowed the United States to pay its back dues to the United Nations. If Helms...

ET CETERAs.(briefs)(Brief Article)
January 26, 2001... The chickens come home n Columnist, polemicist, and anti-union ideologue, Linda Chavez withdrew her nomination for secretary of labor in Bush II on January 10 when it became public that in the early nineties, she had taken in an abused...

GIVING DEATH ITS DUE : Christianity's eschatological hope.(Brief Article)
January 26, 2001... This past year felt full of death. One of our godchildren, a twelve-year-old girl, died after eight days in the intensive care unit. She had been in an automobile accident. I was with her parents when they got the news that she was unlikely to...

FOX & THE GOVERNORS : Mexico's new chief needs some help.(Vicente Fox, President of Mexico)
January 26, 2001... Mexico city--The nomadic Somalis have forty-five names for the camel because of the dromedary's crucial role in their lives. In contrast, Mexicans have traditionally employed a plethora of terms to mock the self-serving authoritarianism of the...

A DISEMBODIED 'THEOLOGY OF THE BODY' : John Paul II on love, sex and pleasure.
January 26, 2001... Papal teaching on human sexuality has received some positive reviews recently. A number of these have appeared in the journal First Things. In "Contraception: A Symposium" (December 1998), Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., declares...

Naked.(poetry)(Brief Article)
January 26, 2001... I have this to say about the unclothing of the clothed: becoming naked is a turnabout of what is ordered and decreed: we are told to hide the flesh, to hitch it to a stitch or hem: lacking belt, buttons, ...

SURVIVORS : 'Cast Away' & 'You Can Count on Me'.(Review)
January 26, 2001... Director Robert Zemeckis has made all sorts of films in his charmed career--offbeat comedies (Used Cars), thrillers (What Lies Beneath), slick adventures (Romancing the Stone), and megahits (Forrest Gump). While you may not always like his...

THE CAT DECIDES : The music of John Tavener.(religious music composer)(Brief Article)
January 26, 2001... British composer John Tavener, fifty-six, is one of the most remarkable classical music success stories in recent years. His 1989 work for cello and orchestra, The Protecting Veil, inspired by the Orthodox feast of the Protecting Veil of the...

Dismantling the Cross.(Review)
January 26, 2001... Constantine's Sword The Church and the Jews: A History James Carroll Houghton Mifflin, $28, 756 pp. Novelist and National Book Award winner James Carroll claims that Constantine's Sword is a work of history, and he even uses the...

FEEL, THRILL, WEEP.(Review)
January 26, 2001... Do Not Go Gentle My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time Ann Hood Picador, USA, $23, 256 pp. Teach us to care and not to care, Teach us to sit still Our peace in His will. In "Ash Wednesday," T.S. Eliot describes the...

APSED CATHOLICS.(inspiration from the Cathedral of Our Lady at Chartres in France)(Brief Article)
January 26, 2001... The Cathedral of Our Lady at Chartres rises like a crown at the edge of the plain of Beauce. Below lie suburban sprawl, motorways, and the remaining wheat fields of the Ile de France, the golden granary of Paris. Chartres is a massive...