Commonweal articles from July 2007

Commonweal archives from July 2007

Preserving the Pauline principle.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 13, 2007... James J. Sheehan raises a profound question in his review of The Fire ("A Necessary Evil?" June 1): Is it sometimes necessary to violate the Pauline principle that evil is not to be done in order that some good come of it? If I read him...

No dissent.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 13, 2007... As one of the co-editors of Catholicism and Religious Freedom, I would like to thank Joseph Komonchak for his generally favorable review of the book in the May 18 issue ("An Unfinished Agenda"). It should be noted, however, that Komonchak...

Harmful caricatures.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 13, 2007... I wanted to take a moment to thank you for Richard Alleva's May 18 review of The 300 ("Bogs of War"). I was pleased to read a review that really began to analyze the values and principles behind the film. But although Alleva observes the...

An artful profile.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 13, 2007... Congratulations to Commonweal on publishing Paul Lauritzen's excellent article on Daniel Callahan ("Daniel Callahan & Bioethics," June 1). Callahan has long deserved a public evaluation of his life's work and Lauritzen has brilliantly provided...

Catholic & Mennonite.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 13, 2007... Gerald Schlabach's excellent article, "You Converted to What?" (June 1), stirred in my memory my very infrequent contacts with Mennonites. A woman who was a Mennonite convert to Catholicism once asked me what I knew about Mennonites. Since I...

Dialogue?(From the Editors)
July 13, 2007... Is peace breaking out? No, not in Iraq, but among Catholic scholars in the United States? It seems unlikely, yet one promising sign is the address delivered last month by the Catholic Theological Society of America's (CTSA) outgoing president...

Model atheist: Jeffrey Stout & the culture wars.(Columnists)(Critical essay)
July 13, 2007... For years now, Christian culture warriors such as Richard John Neuhaus and James Dobson have been railing against the secularists who want to repress religion and eradicate the effect of religious beliefs on public morality and law. Until...

The last chapter: saying goodbye to Tony & Harry.(Columnists)(Tony Soprano and Harry Potter)
July 13, 2007... It's been a month since the HBO series The Sopranos faded to black, the details of New Jersey gangster Tony Soprano's destiny left ambiguous. In just a week--but who's counting?--the last book in the Harry Potter series will reveal how this...

The business of all: Ronald Knox's plea for peace.(Short Take)
July 13, 2007... This August 24 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ronald Knox, one of the most popular Catholic writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Among his unpublished papers is a 1928 speech that is remarkable for several...

Village Church.(Poem)
July 13, 2007... That bird like no bird and half a horse hold up the doorway and march to the curve of the arch. Someone said, Here--St. Martin, and maybe a pelican to fill up the space. Get a mason good at birds. Someone selected colors for the...

All we can eat? Thinking about vegetarianism.(Articles)(Critical essay)
July 13, 2007... After living in England for a year, and eating one too many dishes of poorly cooked, unidentified meat, I came home to the United States a vegetarian. Over Thanksgiving dinner, my uncle jokingly proclaimed that I had become an Episcopalian....

The Old Ones.(Poem)
July 13, 2007... Wait Wait croaks the old one shuffling half a block short of the bus stop. Slow slow she comes with a wallowing undersea grope. I stall on the step. Buddy get in I see her the driver growls. On she comes wide and low. Ultimately she...

A noisy soul: Roberto Bolano's defiant fiction.
July 13, 2007... Roberto Bolano, the Chilean expatriate poet, novelist, and literary prankster who died in 2003, has inserted himself into the world's literary consciousness with singular doggedness. Since the U.S. publication in that year of By Night in Chile,...

Career.(Poem)
July 13, 2007... Though far from the sea my plot is sandy and I count the grains am years into numbering seeing all ones so I start to count the leaves of beach grass still not believing the sea can be so distant each blade a decision...

Behind the music: 'once' & 'La Vie en Rose'.(Screen)(Movie review)(Sound recording review)
July 13, 2007... Boy meets girl in the streets of Dublin. Both are aspiring musicians. She's Czech and estranged from her husband. He's Irish and mourning a broken romance. They make music together but don't quite make love. After they cut a promising CD, he...

Between theology & exegesis.(Books)(Critical essay)
July 13, 2007... Jesus of Nazareth From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI Translated by Adrian J. Walker Doubleday, $24.95, 374 pp. Writing under his personal name as well as his...

Beyond the Waterfront.(Books)(Critical essay)
July 13, 2007... Looking for Jimmy A Search for Irish America Peter Quinn The Overlook Press, $26.95, 320 pp. You don't have to be Irish or Irish-American to love this book," promises Frank McCourt in his above-the-title dust-jacket blurb for...

The Qu'ran at Notre Dame?(Books)(Critical essay)
July 13, 2007... God's Continent Christianity, Islam, and Europe's Religious Crisis Philip Jenkins Oxford University Press, $28, 352 pp. Brooding in 1938 about the degree to which the future has a distressing way of taking us by surprise,...

Sleeping watchdog.(Books)(American news media's political role)
July 13, 2007... When the Press Fails Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston University of Chicago Press, $22.50, 278 pp. You are just as biased with your far left...

From grease to ashes.(The Last Word)(O'Rourke restaurant)
July 13, 2007... The greasy spoon. Everyone had one in college, some beloved hole-in-the-wall that never seemed to close, a place where the waitresses knew everyone's name and the cups of coffee were bottomless. (Restaurants that serve breakfast all day were...