Commonweal articles from January 2007

Commonweal archives from January 2007

We're all responsible.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
January 12, 2007... The issues raised by Steven Miles's book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror ("Malpractice," November 17, 2006) are central to the future of our society. Unfortunately, the review by Daniel P. Sulmasy...

The reviewer responds.(Letter to the editor)
January 12, 2007... As a careful reader, I had three concerns about the Miles book. First, most of the book is about U.S. policy regarding interrogation of prisoners, and is not directly about the participation of military physicians in these activities. These two...

Train the laity.(Letter to the editor)
January 12, 2007... Thank you for drawing attention to the crisis in the seminary system, especially for Paul Stanosz's "More on the Seminaries" and Bernard Stratman's thoughtful letter (December 1, 2006). It is an open secret that more than a few unsuitable...

Correction.(Correction notice)
January 12, 2007... Because of an editing error, the description of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges in Keith Burris's "Christmas Critics" piece (December 1, 2006) was inaccurate. The Hedges book was published before the current war in Iraq...

More troops?(Editorial)
January 12, 2007... News reports, presumably generated from within the administration, suggest that President George W. Bush's "new direction" in Iraq will be more of the same. An increase, or "surge," in the number of U.S. troops appears to be in the works....

Grounds for disbelief? Science & The God Delusion.(Column)
January 12, 2007... Books by people who see religion as a profound misunderstanding or dangerous delusion have proliferated recently. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins has been on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. Sam Harris's The End of Faith sold...

Betting the farm: agribusiness comes to India.
January 12, 2007... Food occupies a great deal of our attention, day in and day out. It also raises jarring questions: Why do hundreds of millions of people suffer malnutrition while millions of others struggle with obesity? It's a question I ask myself every time...

The Polish paradox: freedom, religion & community.(Short take)
January 12, 2007... Poland presents a challenge to Western political commentators, especially in light of the recent rise to power of the conservative Law and Justice Party. While most outside observers were happy to see a post-Communist party seize power, many...

Horses.(Poem)
January 12, 2007... Horses (To E) On my desk a photograph shows the two of us smiling broadly, my arm across your shoulders, each of us holding a glass of wine under the tall shade of the grove in Saratoga. If I thought hard, I might remember the...

Learning to listen: Benedict XVI & interreligious dialogue.(Interreligious Issue)
January 12, 2007... The controversy over Pope Benedict's September lecture in Regensburg and his use of the now infamous quote from Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus condemning Islam was a perfect storm. But it was not the first time that stern words and...

Speaking in many Tongues: why the church must be more Catholic.
January 12, 2007... By now, much of the world knows about the uproar caused by Pope Benedict XVI's September lecture at the University of Regensburg in his native Bavaria. In his lectio magistralis Benedict quoted a text of the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor...

Back to Basics: 'APOCALYPTO' & 'THE NATIVITY STORY'.
January 12, 2007... Mel Gibson needs pain. You might retort that, lately, he's made more than enough for himself, but I'm talking only about the pain that feeds his art, not the tabloids. Two cravings seem to ignite his talent, yet also limit it: the need to...

Not Real Enough.(Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country)(Book review)
January 12, 2007... Real American Ethics Taking Responsibility for Our Country Albert Borgmann University of Chicago Press, $25, 232 pp. Albert Borgmann's Real American Ethics is a work of public philosophy aimed at the general reader. Borgmann...

Religion Booknotes.(Pascal's Wager: The Man Who Played Dice with God)(Walker Percy Remembered)(Christ Is the Question)(Book review)
January 12, 2007... Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was a brilliant figure in Western thought and science, who combined a ferocious, practical mind with a deep thirst to wrestle with the most fundamental philosophical issues. He seems to have been cursed by ill health and...

Ask ...(The Last Word)
January 12, 2007... How and why do we decide to approach someone to ask a question or to ask for help? Several months ago, my husband got tickets to take our young sons to a silent movie with live organ music at the Paramount Theater in downtown Seattle. He picked...

The founders' folly.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... In "Twilight of the Republic" (December 1, 2006), Andrew J. Bacevich provides a magisterial and troubling survey of American expansionism. As he demonstrates, it's a tale full of bloodshed, duplicity, self-delusion, and irony. One especially...

Reason, not authority.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... As much as I like to read a demolition of neocon foreign policy, I wish Andrew J. Bacevich had been more explicit about the "professed ideals" and the "model more worthy of emulation" he urges Americans to live up to. He does a good job of...

It takes time.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... I agree that the rich meaning of sexuality should not be reduced to natural family planning ("Stay the Course?" December 1, 2006), but perhaps there is a silver lining. It took us three centuries to arrive at a relatively meaningful and...

Listen up.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... I was confused by your December 1, 2006, editorial. I have no way of knowing whether the U.S. bishops listened in any systematic way either to homosexual or to married Catholics before issuing their three statements on the subjects, but I find...

From the minority.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... One point overlooked in your editorial criticizing the U.S. bishops for "not listening to the experience" of married Catholics is that even if only 5 percent of Catholics actually subscribe to Catholic teaching, it still amounts to about 3.5...

Another view.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... It is refreshing and immensely heartening to see an editorial in Commonweal, a Catholic magazine, tell it like it is. Humanae vitae is as wrongheaded as President George W. Bush's foray into Iraq. The problem with big wrong decisions is that it...

Consummating love.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... The church is lost in speculation about homosexual love and homosexual desire, but for me, it is a matter of radical simplicity. Can a Catholic who loves the church and is also in love with another of the same sex achieve physical and emotional...

The Exodus.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... I was surprised by Anthony Andreassi's review of Double Crossed by Kenneth Briggs (December 15, 2006). Andreassi's concluding paragraph employs an ad hominem argument which insinuates that the author's focus on the documented, protracted...

A true soldier.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... In Richard Alleva's review of Flags of Our Fathers (November 17, 2006), he suggests that Rene Gagnon had never actually seen combat. As someone who fought on Iwo Jima, I can assure you that this statement is false. Rene was a runner...

How wise?(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... I was dismayed to see Bernard G. Prusak assert in his review of The Sheed & Ward Anthology of Catholic Philosophy (November 17, 2006) that Socrates claimed to be "wiser than anyone else in Athens." Socrates did no such thing. He stated that "no...

A tribute.(Letter to the editor)
January 26, 2007... Professor Leo Walsh, a long-time supporter of your publication, has died. He taught English for many years at Queens College, City University of New York, where I was his student. He is singularly responsible for my conversion to...

What about Darfur?(Editorial)
January 26, 2007... The December decision by the United Nations to dispatch a team of experts to investigate human-rights abuses in the Darfur region of western Sudan was a small step in the right direction, as was the conditional sixty-day cease-fire subsequently...

Single mothers: the costs of going it alone.
January 26, 2007... In a recent New York Times column, veteran political reporter Thomas B. Edsall argued that a successful Democratic Party would have to pay attention to moderate voters' concerns about the rising percentage of births occurring among unmarried...

The 'glory' of war: from Homer to Baghdad.(Short take)
January 26, 2007... Since the dawn of Western literature, going all the way back to Homer and his sanguinary epics of men in battle, war has captivated poets. And yet the Iliad and the Odyssey, though they cover traditional heroic materials, are strangely...

Praying to the Buddha: living amid religious pluralism.(Contemporary Theology)
January 26, 2007... In 2000, twenty-five members of my family returned to Vietnam, many for the first time since leaving the country as refugees a quarter of a century earlier. Our nostalgic tour included a visit to the buildings of the Catholic high school where...

Improper wisdom: what the pope learned from August Adam.
January 26, 2007... A few years ago I had the chance to have a long conversation with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in Straubing, a small, beautiful town in Lower Bavaria. Ratzinger was there to celebrate the annual feast day of Germany's oldest surviving...

Jonah.(Poem)
January 26, 2007... He's the one who made the long trip-- the ship, the whale, another three days shouting through the city. Now this-- to miss from his perch outside the walls the destruction he'd described so well, circumvented by their cheap...

Not so heterodox: in defense of Roger Haight.
January 26, 2007... The work of Jesuit theologian Roger Haight seems to arouse the strongest reactions. From the Vatican to reviewers in the pages of Commonweal, Haight has been taken to task for various failures in theological method, even orthodoxy. He is...

Dark parable: 'Children of Men'.(Screen)(Alfonso Cuaron)
January 26, 2007... With a resume featuring A Little Princess and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, director Alfonso Cuaron knows his way around children's films. Now Cuaron has turned his expertise inside out, creating not a warm and whimsical world for...

What's justice got to do with it?(Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics)(Book review)
January 26, 2007... Just Love A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics Margaret Farley Continuum, $29.95, 336 pp. At a time of high-volume recrimination, when all that seem to count are loud opinions on specific hot-button topics, few things...

Ahead of the evidence.(Alone in the World?: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology)(Book review)
January 26, 2007... Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology J. Wentzel van Huyssteen Eerdmans, $40, 347 pp. This book, by the holder of a chair in theology and science at Princeton Theological Seminary, addresses exactly the...

Another inconvenient truth.(Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid)(Book review)
January 26, 2007... Palestine Peace Not Apartheid Jimmy Carter Simon & Schuster, $27, 288 pp. It's a remarkable event when the twenty-first book by a former president--and a rather slim and earnest book at that--turns up center stage on...

A call to activism.(Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change)(Book review)
January 26, 2007... Theological Bioethics Participation, Justice, Change Lisa Sowle Cahill Georgetown University Press, $26.95, 310 pp. Christian engagement of moral issues in medicine and biotechnology is nothing new. In the fourth century,...

Two periods, one faith.(Book review)
January 26, 2007... Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination Mark Bosco, SJ Oxford University Press, $47.50, 216 pp. Like the writers associated with the term "Southern literature," those associated as "Catholic novelists" have a shared achievement. In...

Real characters.(Stalking the Holy: The Pursuit of Saint Making)(My Life with the Saints)(Book review)
January 26, 2007... Stalking the Holy The Pursuit of Saint Making Michael W. Higgins House of Anansi Press, $25.95, 244 pp. My Life with the Saints James Martin, SJ Loyola Press, $22.95, 411 pp. As an Indiana Hoosier, I felt a sense...

Cary Grant, angel.(The Last Word)
January 26, 2007... The New York Times ran a brief "Appreciation" titled "'The Bishop's Wife'" at the bottom of its column of editorials on Christmas Eve. The author, Verlyn Klinkenborg, regularly appears in that space with a signed feature called "The Rural...