Commonweal articles from June 2005

Commonweal archives from June 2005

Reese's removal.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... Thank you for your editorial on the dismissal of Thomas Reese from America magazine ("Scandal at America," May 20). A warning shot has been fired across the bow of mainstream Catholic America. A thoughtful, articulate, moderate, and, above all,...

Courageous editorial.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... Time after time over the last several years we have seen church leaders behave like bullies, while others in positions of leadership sit back in quiet dismay, saying nothing. There are many reasons to remain silent: leaders might find...

Shocking dismissal.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... Your May 20 issue just arrived, and I read your editorial "Scandal at America" with a renewed sense of outrage, tempered by gratitude that at last the shocking dismissal of Fr. Reese was being addressed somewhere. I first learned of it on the...

Curious Catholics.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... Oh my. Your May 20 editorial was certainly whiny: "The audience for intellectually serious Catholic publications like America... is shockingly small.... Why are Catholics so incurious about the intellectual challenges and satisfactions of...

No longer Catholic.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... Church doctrine is not a matter of debate, as America and Commonweal seem to think. Some Catholic publications--like some Catholic colleges--have become so secular that they can hardly be called Catholic anymore. Scandal has been given by far...

Evidence, please.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... While Commonweal prints some fine articles, articles that would benefit the whole church, it has a reputation of being little more than a reactionary voice against any authoritative voice in the church. Unless you have concrete information that...

Few unchangeables.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... I agree with so much in Charles Curran's article on Pope Benedict XVI ("A Place for Dissent," May 6) that it may seem churlish to disagree on one point. But it is a crucial disagreement. Curran distinguishes between those things that are...

Defining 'church teaching'.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... I was disappointed to see this language coming from Charles Curran: "But many conservatives dissent from papal teaching on capital punishment, on opposition to the wars in Iraq..." (emphasis added). Curran ought to restrict use of the term...

Orthodox relations.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... John Garvey is correct that as long as the Vatican holds that "all power flows from Rome" there can be no movement toward reunion with the Orthodox Church ("The New Pope," May 20). The Orthodox believe that all bishops confess the true faith...

Bishops & the laity.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... Thank you to Timothy Schilling for stating the obvious: "Yet I suspect most bishops don't have a clue what it is like to live as a Catholic layman" ("Rome Journal," May 6). Sad but true. What is to be done? Without this knowledge, how can the...

Catholic or not?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... Timothy Schilling is incorrect ("Intercommunion Now?" May 6). Brother Roger Schutz of Taize became a Catholic some years ago. In fact, a few years back, he sent a member of the Taize community, a young man from Brooklyn named, appropriately,...

Home theater.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... I hope that the excellent essay by Richard Alleva on the films of Carl Dreyer ("Corruption and Transcendence," March 25) is a sign of things to come. For the first time in history, film education can take place in the living room. Almost all...

Future perfect.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... I really enjoyed the short essay by James VanOosting ("Saintly Grammar," May 6). I laughed out loud at his comment about never referring to Jesus as "my late brother." One thought: VanOosting's tenselessness seems only devoted to the past. What...

The interpreter.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 3, 2005... A further word on Richard Wilbur ("A Master," April 22): Years ago I taught his wonderful, rhymed translation of Moliere's The Misanthrope. Here's a sample: "Men, Sir, are always wrong, and that's the reason / That righteous anger's never out...

Deficit blues.(budget deficits management of president George W. Bush)
June 3, 2005... Nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, Benjamin Franklin observed that it is "better to go to bed supperless than wake up in debt." During the past four and a half years of the Bush administration, the American people have bought supper on...

The secret lives of mothers: the difference between rich & poor.(Columnists)(Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety)(Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage)(Book Review)
June 3, 2005... When motherhood was the common and expected lot of most women, it was generally assumed that the experience was the same for all mothers. But if this assumption was true in the past, it isn't today, according to two recent books. Both set out...

Escape from Iraq: how long can the occupation last?(Columnists)(military aspects)
June 3, 2005... The Bush administration's acute anxiety about Iraq was demonstrated by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent visit to that country, as it was during Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's earlier Iraq trip. Once again the administration's...

Florida gets it right: raising the minimum wage.
June 3, 2005... Last month, nearly four hundred thousand Florida workers got a dollar-an-hour raise. It wasn't because employers had suddenly become more generous. In November, Florida voters had approved a ballot initiative to raise the state's minimum wage...

Calling Fr. Reese: on silencing the messenger.(Thomas Reese pressured to resign from America magazine.)
June 3, 2005... I had just taken my seat at the Diocese of Brooklyn's annual World Communications Day lunch when religion journalist David Gibson told me that Rev. Thomas Reese had been pressured into resigning as editor of America magazine. This major...

The Alluvial Forest.(poem)(Poem)
June 3, 2005... The dark roots deep. It will not break: this ravaged grove. Witchwood, frozen black to stunted trunks, hold the dark, roots deep. It will not break. Shards of hard calm. A mirrored lake, still. Certain as current the...

Drift.(poem)(Poem)
June 3, 2005... Impossibly as the world settles, a shadow finds us. Light with its long thought coaxes air asleep, and certainty is the silence upon a river-- allowing breath to matter. We are waders in this summer heat, turned by sounds...

The church in crisis: Pope Benedict's theological vision.(Joseph Ratzinger's theological work's analysis)(Cover Story)
June 3, 2005... In articles about Pope Benedict XVI, much has been made of his experience of student unrest at the University of Tubingen in 1968. Many see that experience as the best explanation of the apparent intellectual about-face that turned the young...

No restorationist: Ratzinger's theological journey.(Benedict XVI Joseph Ratzinger's theological work's analysis )
June 3, 2005... The election of Joseph Ratzinger as pope has evoked reactions of both satisfaction and of dismay. For some, the dismay was quickly reinforced by news of the removal of Fr. Thomas Reese as editor of America magazine. In a time of heightened...

A farewell to remember: what John Paul II's death taught us.
June 3, 2005... Some have expressed understandable reservations, even skepticism, about the enormous popular outpouring, especially among the young, at John Paul II's death. Where, it is asked, did the power of celebrity stop and the draw of sanctity begin? As...

Skin deep: 'Crash' & 'Kingdom of Heaven'.(Screen)(Movie Review)
June 3, 2005... Though the executives of movie studios need to make tons of money to keep their jobs, they also want to hang on to their self-respect. So every other month, among the scores of chop-sockey action films, horror movies, lighter-than-air comedies,...

The Enlightenment & all that.(book by Pope John Paul II )(Book Review)
June 3, 2005... Memory and Identity Conversations at the Dawn of the Millennium Pope John Paul II Rizzoli, $19.95, 172 pp. Of all the many documents produced by the Second Vatican Council, none systematically takes up the question of God....

Religion booknotes.(books)(Book Review)
June 3, 2005... Rise, Let Us Be on Our Way is John Paul II's memoir of his long episcopal career. It begins with his appointment as auxiliary bishop of Cracow at the age of thirty-eight, continues through his years as archbishop of that diocese, and ends with...

Basic instinct.(The Last Word)(death penalty)
June 3, 2005... Last month, the State of Connecticut executed serial killer Michael Ross, resuming capital punishment after a forty-five-year hiatus. Ross, who strangled eight teenage girls, raping most of them, in the 1980s, spent his last months resisting...

Stem cells & natural law.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 17, 2005... Commonweal has done Catholics a great service by publishing William A. Galston's excellent article on stem cells ("Catholics, Jews & Stem Cells," May 20). We have become used to Catholic authorities dialoguing with no one but house theologians...

When does life begin?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 17, 2005... I was pleased to read William A. Galston's article on the stem-cell debate, especially for its important point that Jews believe that human life begins many days after conception. This brought to mind an important book published a few years...

Changing teaching.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 17, 2005... Congratulations to William A. Galston for a very fine article. Galston clearly describes the differences between Catholic and Jewish teaching on when life begins. He does not note, however, that Catholics and Jews were once in agreement on this...

A rich discovery.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 17, 2005... As a biologist preparing for medical school, I found William A. Galston's article on stem-cell research quite helpful. I try to remain morally and intellectually informed on questions of bioethics, and while I had encountered Christian...

Blame television.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 17, 2005... Your editorial on the dismissal of Fr. Reese suggests that the reason for the low readership of magazines like America is "that the church has historically taken a dim view of the questioning intellect." I suspect that the real reason for the...

Ratzinger & I.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 17, 2005... Your May 6 articles on the election of Pope Benedict XVI were generally fair and well balanced. I would like to add two points to the discussion. I was one of Joseph Ratzinger's students at the University of Tubingen in the late 1960s. Midway...

Cancer's lessons.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
June 17, 2005... Sarah O'Connor's point that fear can be a positive experience is one of the ironies of having cancer ("Unwelcome Guest," May 20). It can offer profound theological insights often not found in homilies or religious education classes. My own...

Misleading photos.(Embryonic stem cells research under debate)(Editorial)
June 17, 2005... It was an arresting photograph: President George W. Bush holding a baby, and surrounded by children, all of whom began life as "excess" embryos otherwise destined for destruction or possibly for use in stem-cell experimentation. It is hard...

We know the facts.(ET CETERA)(prisoners abuse )
June 17, 2005... Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and a contributor to the New York Review of Books (NYRB), has been documenting the plight of those caught up in war, and the lies told by those who wage war, for years. Commonweal readers may...

Cloning for dollars: morality & the market for stem cells.(Columnist)(Column)
June 17, 2005... Here we go again: another round of debate about the merits of embryonic stem-cell research. Recent headlines reported a "break-through" in South Korea, where scientists extracted stem cells from embryos created by the injection of DNA from the...

Back to Christendom: one Cardinal's response to secularization.(Short Take)
June 17, 2005... In a recent speech commemorating the end of World War II, President George W. Bush dusted off a shopworn bit of far-right GOP dogma. He accused President Franklin D. Roosevelt of making a corrupt deal with Stalin at the Yalta Conference in...

The Catholic bard: Shakespeare & the 'old religion'.(Excerpt)
June 17, 2005... Ever since a seventeenth-century Protestant clergyman, Richard Davies, remarked that "William Shakespeare dyed a papist," Shakespeare's religion has been a thorny subject for scholars and biographers. Protestant England would much rather he had...

The instinct toward mercy: what Hopkins has to teach Darwin.(evolution biology teaching ban cases)
June 17, 2005... This summer marks the eightieth anniversary of the famous (or, depending on one's viewpoint, infamous) "Monkey Trial," a landmark courtroom struggle whose legacy continues to roil American politics and public life. When the trial began in...

Tempted by the devil: 'The Ninth Day'.(Screen)(Book Review)
June 17, 2005... The ticking-time-bomb movie genre must be nearly as old as moviemaking itself. It lends itself to all manner of variation, but the basic format demands an explosive device set to go off at a precise moment under certain conditions. The heroes...

Good on their feet: 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' & 'Spelling Bee'.(Stage)(motion picture on Swindlers)
June 17, 2005... The art of the con is alive and well--just take a look at my mailbox. The latest Williams Sonoma catalog suggests that I buy a hand-forged branding iron for monogramming steaks; a brushed-stainless-steel cream whipper; a mozzarella slicer (what...

Summer Reading.
June 17, 2005... I do not subscribe to the view that hot weather and long days sanction the reading of the slight or the dubious. The books that can be finished in a year are too few, and the number that prove worth the effort, disheartening. So no searching of...

Summer Reading.
June 17, 2005... Summer is a time for journeying. If you won't be making a trip to distant shores this season, here are three books that will satisfy your literary wanderlust. The first, Swami and Friends (University of Chicago, $14, 190 pp.), is from R....

Summer Reading.(book analysis)
June 17, 2005... Murder, arson, and reclusive movie stars make Robert Eversz's Burning Garbo (Simon & Schuster, $23, 271 pp.) excellent beach reading. This noir caper featuring thirtyish excon Nina Zero, the gentle and toothless Rottweiler who adopts her, and...

Summer Reading.(novels from United States)
June 17, 2005... Martin Amis has said that since America is the most powerful nation in the world, it produces the world's best novelists. Britain once held that distinction, he argues, but has since ceded it to the United States. I don't think Amis gives his...

Summer Reading.(The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories book by Christopher Booker)(Book Review)
June 17, 2005... It is not often that a book is published that has taken thirty-four years to gestate, whose vast frame is justified by the enormity of its scope, and which repays in fascination what it extorts in concentration. At nearly seven hundred fifty...

Lost in translation.(The Last Word)(international debate)
June 17, 2005... "This house resolves that antiterrorism is the new McCarthyism." I was sitting in a classroom in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, at the annual World Debate Tournament, preparing to do battle with students from India and Malaysia. When my opponent...