Commonweal articles from June 2003

Commonweal archives from June 2003

To the editors.
June 6, 2003... Phayer's fables Having failed in previous efforts to engage Michael Phayer in dialogue about his various errors regarding Catholics and the Holocaust, I appreciate Commonweal's juxtaposition of our quite different views in my "History...

Correction.
June 6, 2003... The reference to Michael Novak's February 12 Times article in William T. Cavanaugh's "At Odds with the Pope" (May 23) should have been to the Times of London.

Leadership?
June 6, 2003... With the passage of his irresponsible tax-cutting budget bill, George W. Bush once again demonstrated the clout of a president in "wartime" as well as the formidable political focus of his administration. Squabbling among Republicans in the...

Et cetera.
June 6, 2003... 'Matrix' & other tricks n The much-anticipated sequel to The Matrix, titled The Matrix Reloaded, did an astonishing $135.8-million in ticket sales during its four-day opening. That's a lot of moolah, especially for a movie that goes to such...

Bush to states: drop dead: the economic crisis trickles down. (Of Several Minds).
June 6, 2003... The Pacific Northwest is known for Microsoft, Intel, lattes, breathtaking natural beauty, alternative music, rain, stock-option millionaires, and the Seattle Mariners' star outfielder, Ichiro Suzuki. Americans do not associate this...

Hello Dalai: my brush with his holiness. (Of Several Minds).
June 6, 2003... In these anxious days, when world leaders astonish us with their deeply held stupidity, meeting a man like the Dalai Lama--whose very being radiates peace and tranquility--is a corrective and a restorative. I had that opportunity recently when...

Graham's crusade: should evangelicals invade Iraq?
June 6, 2003... The Bush administration is well aware that the Muslim world regards the liberation of Iraq as a war on Islam. Someone within the administration needs to convince the president that allowing evangelists into Iraq to push Christianity as well as...

Misprints? Falun Gong & the First Amendment.
June 6, 2003... Does freedom of the press allow newspapers to print lies aimed at undermining a religion? Does freedom of religion allow believers to stop a newspaper's crusade against their faith? The First Amendment guarantees both freedom of religion...

Are the bishops listening? An interview with VOTF's James E. Post.
June 6, 2003... One of the most interesting and hopeful developments to come out of the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse crisis is the lay reform group Voice of the Faithful. Founded in February 2002, VOTF has quickly established itself as a lay initiative that...

Consulting the laity.
June 6, 2003... It's no secret that several bishops aren't very fond of Voice of the Faithful (VOTF). The organization has acquired, at least in some circles, a reputation as a front organization for standard "liberal" causes. The most emphatic criticism thus...

Birds & bees: 'down with love,' 'the shape of things,' & 'blue car'. (Screen).
June 6, 2003... Spring is in the air, when a moviegoer's thoughts turn naturally to romance. If innocent fun is your idea of innocent fun, you'll find plenty in Down with Love, Peyton Reed's affectionate spoof of the Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedies. Set in the...

All in the family: 'long day's journey into night'. (Stage).
June 6, 2003... Written in tears and blood"--such were the words Eugene O'Neill used to describe Long Day's Journey into Night, a monumental autobiographical edifice so vaulted with pain and domestic secrets that he ordered it to remain unpublished until...

Why they hate us.
June 6, 2003... Terror and Liberalism Paul Berman W. W. Norton, $21, 214 pp. Paul Berman is a political and cultural critic whose writings have appeared in numerous journals. His best-known work is A Tale of Two Utopias (W.W. Norton), an account...

The great awakener.
June 6, 2003... Jonathan Edwards A Life George M. Marsden Yale University Press, $35, 640 pp. With the possible exception of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) must count as the only American theologian who can claim...

Paradise lost.
June 6, 2003... Waiting for Snow in Havana Confessions of a Cuban Boy Carlos Eire The Free Press, $25, 388 pp. A little-known cold-war episode: from 1960 through 1962, some fourteen thousand Cuban children were airlifted--unaccompanied--to...

Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church.
June 6, 2003... Sacred Silence: Denial and the Crisis in the Church Donald Cozzens Liturgical Press, $19.95, 208 pp. Donald Cozzens's deservedly well-received The Changing Face of the Priesthood (2000) appeared just as the sexual-abuse crisis flooded the...

Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas.
June 6, 2003... Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas Edited by Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff Routledge, $24.95, 317 pp. The papers that make up Colonial Saints were first delivered at a Toronto conference. The plural "Americas" in the...

The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint.
June 6, 2003... The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint Rudolph M. Bell and Cristina Mazzoni The University of Chicago Press, $30, 320 pp. The scope of Colonial Saints spans the period from 1500 to 1800, with studies of a...

This old house. (The Last Word).
June 6, 2003... The yard when we moved here was a tangle of phlox and ferns, a garden reluctantly abandoned by the old woman who lived here before us. Like neighbors who turn up blinking in the sun after a winter indoors, the descendants of these perennials...

To the editors.
June 20, 2003... Hercules! Thank you for Grant Gallicho's informative interview with James Post, president of Voice of the Faithful ("Are the Bishops Listening?" June 6). Gallicho asked pointed questions and Post seemed up to them. Post is emerging as...

Peace now?
June 20, 2003... One of President George W. Bush's professed goals in going to war with Iraq was to change the political dynamic in the Middle East. A demonstration of U.S. willpower and military resolve was intended, at least in part, to convince Arab leaders...

Murder, he read: crime, punishment & sex. (Of Several Minds).
June 20, 2003... When I was a child I had an illness that kept me out of school for a year and left me pretty much unable to do anything but stay at home and read and draw. I was seven, and my lifelong addiction to reading started with mythology and fairy...

Little Sir Echo: U.S. lies & Tony Blair's dilemma. (Of Several Minds).
June 20, 2003... From the start, it has been hard to understand British Prime Minister Tony Blair's conduct concerning the war on Iraq. Clearly, he believed deeply in the moral case for unseating Saddam Hussein. Blair had nothing to gain politically from...

Do no harm: should we medicate to execute?
June 20, 2003... In 1986, the United States Supreme Court decided Ford v. Wainwright, holding that the execution of the mentally incompetent violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. A prisoner cannot be executed unless...

Dear Woman Who Feared for Her Life.
June 20, 2003... Dear Woman Who Feared for Her Life Was that a whippoorwill You heard among the sparkling trees, An omen of delight? The fireflies weave through leaf And fern, amazing. The bird cries Her single note of gold. ...

Sex, women & the church: the need for prophetic change.
June 20, 2003... The consequences of the sexual-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States continue to unfold. On the surface, the crisis is about sex. Beneath the surface, the crisis is about the church's teaching authority. The crisis of...

Friends and Daughters.
June 20, 2003... Friends and Daughters The mother, in a flannel dressing-gown, holds her thin, flame-haired daughter on her knees, the Shorter Version of her energies. Here, three girls lark on the muddy lawn, her two in shorts,...

Dig in: 'holes' & 'raising Victor Vargas'. (Screen).
June 20, 2003... Once in a great while, the Newbery Medal actually goes to the best children's book of the year rather than a pale compromise (that is, the third choice of everyone on the selection committee). When the 1999 award went to Holes by Louis Sachar,...

Marietta Pritchard. (Summer reading).
June 20, 2003... The phrase summer reading evokes a retreat into ease that seems to require trashy romances, undemanding mysteries, and long naps. Though I endorse long naps, my summertime reading often follows a more strenuous route. In the absence of my usual...

Robert H. Bell. (Summer reading).
June 20, 2003... For the past year I've been on sabbatical and blessed with time for reading promiscuously. My most exciting venture was rereading Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, $18.95, 1,079 pp.), David Foster Wallace's novel that inspired critical acclaim and...

Celia Wren. (Summer reading).
June 20, 2003... Any classification is superior to chaos," anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in The Savage Mind, expressing an idea that, perhaps, explains the proliferation, over the last few years, of a certain type of nonfiction chronicle: the...

Timothy P. Schilling. (Summer reading).
June 20, 2003... My love of the West came early. I lived my first years two hours southeast of Chicago, in Indiana. One of my favorite childhood memories is of a car trip westward with family and friends through the Badlands of South Dakota to Yellowstone and...

Jacqueline Dowdell. (Summer reading).
June 20, 2003... In my second year of graduate school, I traveled south for the first time in my life, joinging four other students on a spring break vacation to Kiawah Island, South Carolina. The vacation turned into a history lesson of sorts for me. Every...

Amy Welborn. (Summer reading).
June 20, 2003... When I was a child, my favorite book was Louis Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy. Harriet, in case you don't know, is a scruffy, almost-outcast young girl who spends her time observing people up close and in secret, writing about what she sees,...

True fiction. (The Last Word).
June 20, 2003... When I lived in Berkeley, almost twenty years ago, I heard of a Dominican priest in neighboring Oakland. He was a Spaniard who had fought for the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. I was told he never spoke of it publicly for one simple reason:...