Commonweal articles from July 2008

Commonweal archives from July 2008

Flawed, but not useless.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 18, 2008... I agree with Cathleen Kaveny ("A Flawed Analogy," June 20) that drawing an analogy between citizens of the Third Reich who turned blind eyes to the Holocaust and Catholics who vote for prochoice candidates is over the top. The fact that this...

Doctored texts?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 18, 2008... Since the exchange between me and John Connelly ("Benedict, German Catholics & the Holocaust," June 20) speaks for itself, I add only a brief postscript. Not only did Connelly doctor Benedict XVI's "strange words" in Poland; he also doctored...

Whose motto?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 18, 2008... In the June 20 exchange between Justus George Lawler and John Connelly, Lawler wrote that Emmi Bonhoeffer "compared [Konrad] Adenauer to Talleyrand, whose motto was 'I survived.'" But it was the Abbe Sieyes, not Talleyrand, who thus summed up...

A cautionary tale.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 18, 2008... John Wilkins puts his finger on the primary obstacle to structural reform in the Catholic Church ("Bishops, Not Altar Boys," June 6). If a bishop dares stray from the Vatican line, he stands alone and receives no support from his colleagues....

Over the line?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
July 18, 2008... The literary path between the arch and the fatuous is exceedingly narrow. In Paul Baumann's "Among the Catholic Commentariat" (June 6), he misplanted his feet a plethora of times. As a longtime supporter of Commonweal, I, for one, found the...

War crimes?(From the Editors)(waterboarding)
July 18, 2008... In february, CIA director Michael Hayden admitted that waterboarding, long considered torture, had been used on three terrorist suspects. When questioned about this, a spokesperson for the Bush administration claimed that waterboarding is...

A bond of blood: remembering William P. Ford.(Farewell)(In memoriam)
July 18, 2008... When William P. Ford died last month at the age of seventy-two, after a battle with esophageal cancer, the New York Times called him a "rights advocate." That he was, having waged a decades-long legal struggle to achieve a measure of justice...

Shot down: what's behind the Court's gun-control decision.(Columnist)
July 18, 2008... In knocking down the District of Columbia's thirty-two-year ban on handgun possession last month, the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court again demonstrated their willingness to abandon precedent in order to do whatever is necessary to...

Women & the priesthood.(Continuing the Conversation)
July 18, 2008... Sara Butler Why not ordain women? In the April 11 issue of Commonweal, Robert J. Egan, SJ, invites readers to look again at this question. Egan doubts that "the tradition of excluding women from the diaconate, presbyterate, and episcopate"...

Not like US: the paradoxical U.S.-European relationship.(Issues 2008)
July 18, 2008... The relationship between Europe and the United States is the result of two remarkable historical developments. The first is an achievement of epic proportion all too easily taken for granted: By any imaginable standard and especially by the...

The erosional world; (The world slipping away).(Poem)
July 18, 2008... Polar bear killed by the cold. Lightning-like bombs from hidden cannons. Storm of bombs racing after birds of snow. Sclerotic veins of naked branches. Stroked water. Groups of refugees climbing the hills with heads bent...

Why Hillary lost and what she won.(Articles)(Hillary Clinton)
July 18, 2008... Hillary's campaign is over, and women like me are supposed to be mad. Like Hillary, I'm a product of the late 1960s and especially the women's movement, which changed my life as well as hers. And like most veterans of that movement, I'm hungry...

A vote for socialism: like Christianity, it's never been tried.
July 18, 2008... Despite the excitement surrounding this year's presidential primaries, American democracy is in big trouble. Sen. John McCain has served his country bravely and on occasion he shows commendable independence. Sen. Barack Obama provides a welcome...

Past prime: 'Sex and the City'.(Screen)(Movie review)
July 18, 2008... I loved the HBO series Sex and the City, and never thought it belonged to the entertainment ghetto that the phrases "chick flick" and "chick lit" imply. The show explored the same social and emotional territory that Balzac covered in his novels...

Christian politics, old & new.(Head and Heart: American Christianities, God in Public: Four Ways American Christianity and Public Life Relate and Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right )(Book review)
July 18, 2008... What's next for the vexed, much-debated relationship between religion and politics in America? For thirty years, the central subject of that debate has been the Religious Right--conservative Evangelicals and Catholics who, in their campaign...

Nicholas Clifford; Missionary myths.(Christians in China A.D. 600 to 2000 and Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724)(Book review)
July 18, 2008... Jean-Pierre Charbonnier, a priest of the Missions Etrangeres de Paris, begins his ambitious new book with the Syrian Church, whose arrival in China during the Tang dynasty fourteen centuries ago marks the first recorded appearance of...

A Consummate vision.(Dante Alighieri's Paradiso )(Book review)
July 18, 2008... Some editions of the Divine Comedy bravely attempt to forego having any notes at all, or to keep them to a minimum. Their hope is to let the poem speak for itself. The aim is noble, but with Dante the difficulties of this approach are...

Learning to see.(Kay Warren's Dangerous Surrender: What Happens When You Say Yes to God)(Book review)
July 18, 2008... I first met Kay Warren over dinner at a restaurant in Boston's North End. At the time, I was coordinating an HIV/AIDS treatment access campaign for a nonprofit human-rights organization. Warren is the wife of the famous Evangelical pastor and...

Was he or wasn't he?(The Last Word)
July 18, 2008... When, years ago, I majored in English at college, the thought that Shakespeare was a Catholic was ventured by no one. The claim that Shakespeare was mixed up with the Catholic underground would have seemed as implausible to me as the idea that...