Commonweal articles from January 2006

Commonweal archives from January 2006

Translating the liturgy.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 13, 2006... John Wilkins's "Lost in Translation" (December 2, 2005) was one of the saddest articles I have read in a long time. All that initial enthusiasm, all those years of work, all those dedicated scholars, all lost because of--what? I certainly can...

Rynne redux.(Letters)
January 13, 2006... John Wilkins's account of the travails of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) was keen and incisive. It recalled the style of Xavier Rynne's reporting during Vatican II. As it turns out, the same timeline recounted...

Resisting Rome.(Letters)
January 13, 2006... Regarding "Lost in Translation": I have come to the conclusion that it is time to stop wasting energy trying to convince Rome to live up to the spirit of Vatican II. We need to find ways to celebrate the Christian liturgy faithfully in spite of...

Gays & the Vatican.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 13, 2006... Regarding your editorial "Instruction from Rome" (December 16, 2005): the Vatican Instruction on gay seminarians asserts that gay men have not reached "affective maturity" and so cannot "relate correctly to both men and women." This repeats...

On the margins.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 13, 2006... In his article "Gay Seminarians" (December 16, 2005) Paul Stanosz questions the prudence of gay men committing their lives in service to an institution that shuns them. Women and other groups marginalized by the church have been questioning the...

Wedding costs.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 13, 2006... In "For Love & Money" (December 2, 2005) Barbara Dafoe Whitehead states that "with the average cost of an American wedding approaching $30,000, every man and every woman's dream of a 'nice' wedding is more Buckingham Palace than the parish...

Don't drink the water.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 13, 2006... Daniel Callahan notes that a 2004 European Commission study on declining birth rates could not explain why Poland's birth rate is so far below replacement level ("Depopulation Bomb," November 18, 2005). The study apparently did not consider...

Overpopulated.(Letters)
January 13, 2006... Daniel Callahan's claim that "there is little good to be said" about dropping birthrates is misguided. When I drive out of Baltimore and into western Maryland, all I see are sprawling communities of cookie-cutter houses, carved out of native...

Art & religious mystery.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 13, 2006... John Savant's penetrating essay on metaphor, poetry, and jazz ("Follow That Metaphor," November 18, 2005) recalls Paul Ricoeur's argument that "literal falsity is thus an ingredient of metaphorical truth." One wonders why so many Christians hue...

Killed in El Salvador.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 13, 2006... Thank you for Robert White's article on U.S policy in Latin America ("Bad Neighbor," November 18, 2005). I was once a Maryknoll nun, and I knew two of the women who were killed in El Salvador twenty-five years ago. On November 27, 2005 the...

Believer beware.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 13, 2006... The article by Daniel Finn ("Hello, Catholics," November 4, 2005) should be must reading for all thinking Catholics. How long will we allow ourselves to be brainwashed by the present Republican administration? How long will we ignore the social...

A hospitable place.(interreligious discussion)(Editorial)
January 13, 2006... Commonweal devotes the first issue of each new year to a discussion of ecumenical or interreligious questions. This year we feature the contributions of two distinguished Jewish scholars, Michael Marrus and Eugene Borowitz. Both men have...

False trust: how intelligent design misleads believers.(Column)
January 13, 2006... The spiritual classic The Practice of the Presence of God begins this way: "The first time I saw Brother Lawrence he told me... [that] one winter day he noticed a tree stripped of its leaves and reflected that before long leaves would appear...

Feeding my daughter: when someone can't swallow.(Column)
January 13, 2006... Feeding tubes rule. My daughter Moy Moy has had one in her stomach for seven months now. She has gained nearly twenty pounds and she looks like a whole new girl. Before her surgery, it took us up to an hour to get her to drink an eight-ounce...

The Vatican & gay priests.
January 13, 2006... The Christian church begins its new year with the first Sunday of Advent, and this year, on the same weekend, Americans kicked off a month of holidays, extending from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day. Both observances are meant to foster a sense...

The Vatican & gay priests.(instruction on banning gay men from ordination)(Editorial)
January 13, 2006... Responses to the Vatican's November 29 Instruction banning men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" from ordination varied dramatically. At one end of the interpretive spectrum was Timothy Radcliffe, OP, former head of the Dominicans, who...

The missing: the Holocaust, the Church & Jewish orphans.
January 13, 2006... A year ago, Catholic-Jewish relations were roiled by yet another revelation concerning the church's indifference to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust. In the December 28, 2004, issue of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, historian...

A nearness in difference: Jewish-Catholic dialogue since Vatican II.
January 13, 2006... More than forty years ago, I was present at what I believe was the first formal Jewish-Catholic colloquy ever held in the United States. Sponsored by the American Benedictine Academy, it took place at the oldest Benedictine monastery in...

No Tame Lion: 'THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE'.("It All Began with a Picture")
January 13, 2006... All my seven Narnian books... began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. At first I had very little idea...

A Test of Goodness.(Saving the Forsaken: Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe)(Book Review)
January 13, 2006... Saving the Forsaken Religious Culture and the Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe Pearl M. Oliner Yale University Press, $32.50, 272 pp. If this book had carried an epigraph, it might have been "A little religion is a dangerous...

Two-thirds Catholic.(Is the Reformation Over? : An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism)(Book Review)
January 13, 2006... Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom Baker Academic Press, $24.99, 272 pp. This book's title might baffle those familiar with the Reformation era and...

Tighten Your Belts.("Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream")(Book Review)
January 13, 2006... Bait and Switch The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books, $24, 237 pp. You probably don't think of C. S. Lewis as a critic of corporate business. Yet, although he was certainly no...

Religion Booknotes.(A Short History of Thomism, Apostolicity Then and Now, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach To Classical Themes, History, Theology and Faith: Dissolving the Modern Problematic and Illuminating the Word: The Making of the St. John's Bible)(Book Review)
January 13, 2006... In his classic work Mimesis, Erich Auerbach observed that the narrative of the Bible is all foreground; it is left to the human imagination to fill in the background. This is certainly true of the gospel portrait of Jesus. Christ the Lord...

An abyss of charity.(Roger Schutz)(Obituary)
January 13, 2006... Last August the world lost one of its foremost ecumenists and spiritual leaders. Br. Roger Schutz, founder and prior of the ecumenical religious community of Taize in Eastern France, was stabbed to death by a Romanian woman suffering from...

Cardinal George responds.(Letter to the Editor)
January 27, 2006... John Wilkins's article on the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) in the December 2, 2005, issue ("Lost in Translation") is partial and biased. Perhaps that is to be expected, since he was not present at the events he...

Lost in translation.(Letter to the Editor)
January 27, 2006... So the bishops and the Vatican are puzzling over whether "not worthy to receive you" or "not worthy that you should enter under my roof" is the more appropriate response just before Communion ("Reforming the Reform," Kevin Eckstrom, December 2,...

Silence & the liturgy.(Letter to the Editor)
January 27, 2006... I attended a penance service soon after reading Roger Repohl's fine article on the need for more silence during the liturgy ("Quiet, Please," December 16, 2005). The service was breathtaking: for forty-seven minutes preceding the opportunity...

Legislating from the bench.(Letter to the Editor)
January 27, 2006... I appreciate Cathleen Kaveny's timely essay, "Letter v. Spirit (December 16, 2005). Kaveny is right, of course, that "good judges do far more than apply the law" and that "the real question is how"--not whether--" a justice will approach the...

Which book when?(Letter to the Editor)
January 27, 2006... In spite of having a couple of English lit degrees, I wasn't aware that critics are of different minds on the proper sequence of reading the Narnia books. Robert Bell ("Inside the Wardrobe," December 16, 2005) recommends Lewis's own sequence as...

Justice & Alito.(Samuel Alito)(Editorial)
January 27, 2006... Like John Roberts, Judge Samuel Alito appears to be a very decent person, a meticulous legal craftsman, and a man of deep conservative conviction. His all-but-certain elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court promises to fulfill the hopes of the...

Religion & science: bridging the gap.(Column)
January 27, 2006... From the Terri Schiavo controversy to the stem-cell debate to the conflict over intelligent design, 2005 was rife with contentious issues that portrayed religion and science as wholly separate and competing realms of thought and experience. ...

The cult of national security: what happened to checks & balances?(Short Take)
January 27, 2006... Recent revelations that President George W. Bush authorized U.S. intelligence agencies to engage in domestic surveillance have revived old apprehensions about the abuse of executive power. Dark references to Watergate litter the airwaves and...

After the big chill: intellectual freedom & Catholic theologians.(Contemporary Theology)
January 27, 2006... Suppose we indulge our fondest hopes. Let us imagine that Pope Benedict XVI turns out to be quite unlike what many expected, and that he embraces a spirit of theological openness and generosity. No longer would a respected and respectful editor...

Patriot Act: "THE COLBERT REPORT".(Television Program Review)
January 27, 2006... A footnote to those year-in-review roundups from 2005: Let's hand a laurel to Brooks Brothers, the upscale clothier, for its contribution to political satire. I'm talking about those natty suits and ties worn (according to program credits) by...

Really?(God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church)(Book Review)
January 27, 2006... God's Choice Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church George Weigel Basic Books, $26.95, 307 pp. George Weigel has chosen a risky title for his book on the election of Pope Benedict XVI. The claim that Joseph...

Is Seeing Believing?(Doubting Thomas)(Book Review)
January 27, 2006... Doubting Thomas Glenn W. Most Harvard University Press, $27.95, 288 pp. How best do we know what we know? What proof, gained by what sense, most assures us that what seems so, is in fact so? Is it sight, as often claimed, that...

Aquinas to the Rescue.(Reason and the Reasons of Faith)(Book Review)
January 27, 2006... Reason and the Reasons of Faith Edited by Paul J. Griffiths and Reinhold Hutter T. & T. Clark, $35, 373 pp. Probably the most famous line from Blaise Pascal's Pensees claims that "the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
January 27, 2006... Because of an editing error, the name of book reviewer Ernest Rubinstein appeared incorrectly in the January 13, 2006, issue. Our apologies.

Ever met a Christian?(The Last Word)(evangelism)
January 27, 2006... Reports on Benedict XVI's outreach to Jews and Muslims during his first papal trip abroad last August provoked in me a set of paradoxical reflections on the nature of evangelization. Does our concern for spreading the faith sometimes, and...