Commonweal articles from June 2008

Commonweal archives from June 2008

Against elections.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 6, 2008... In his April 25 article, "Reforming the Vatican," Thomas J. Reese, SJ, claims it would help the governance of the church if bishops were "elected by the local clergy, accepted by the people of his diocese, and consecrated by the bishops of his...

More reforms.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 6, 2008... Thomas Reese does an excellent job of showing how Vatican structures have been derived from secular forms of governance. His six points for reforming church bureaucracy stem from civil and democratic developments in modern societies. I would...

Required viewing.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 6, 2008... In the May 9 issue, Cathleen Kaveny mentions that Catholic institutions of higher education regularly squabble over whether to host productions of The Vagina Monologues ("The Right Questions"). Having seen a production of the play this spring...

Not a Democrat.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 6, 2008... For some years now, David Carlin has been writing articles along the lines of his most recent piece ("Two Cheers for John McCain," May 9), in which he claims to be a Democrat, yet declares that "on the really big issues" McCain "is more correct...

Presidential powers.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 6, 2008... David Carlin argues that Catholic Democrats should vote for John McCain because he opposes abortion. This argument was also presented as a reason to vote for George Bush in 2000 and again in 2008, and look where that got us. The president...

A cosmopolitan church.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 6, 2008... As a sometime admirer of David Carlin, I am troubled by his demand for tough-minded patriotism not diluted by cosmopolitanism. This is another version of the call for " 100 percent Americanism," whose implications have always been both...

Egan's critics.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 6, 2008... Thank you for Robert J. Egan's landmark article on women's ordination ("Why Not?" April 11). Reading the letters written in response to his article, I notice that Father Hottinger ("Too Historical?" May 9) misreads the Letter to the Hebrews as...

Passing it on.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 6, 2008... Sue Norton's "Pomp and Piety" (April 25) left me sad. My generation (I am seventy-three) did not do well by Ms. Norton's generation if we did not pass on to them a deeper understanding of religion than is shown in this piece. Commonweal is to...

Squishy.(From the Editors)
June 6, 2008... When we say that something is beneath our dignity, what do we mean, exactly, and how do we know? How should we define or measure dignity? The experimental psychologist Steven Pinker believes such questions are impossible to answer...

Outrageous or meaningless? Two views of suffering.(Columnists)
June 6, 2008... One argument against Christianity begins with suffering: a good and all-powerful God would never allow the suffering of the innocent. There . is an understanding of goodness and of power here that should be challenged, but first it must be said...

Just do it: Catholic sex education.(Columnists)
June 6, 2008... For a meeting about sex education, the turnout was curiously small. Then again, none of the parents of the kids in my parish's religious education program had been told why we'd been summoned in the first place. The woman who runs the...

Don't just do something: getting sanctions right.(Issues 2008)
June 6, 2008... One legacy of Washington's support for coercive embargoes against Iraq in the 1990s has been a series of U.S.-imposed sanctions aimed at other troublesome countries and nonstate actors. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait turned sanctions into...

Bishops, not altar boys: what would real collegiality look like?(Articles)
June 6, 2008... Hardly anyone had expected that Pope Benedict XVI would confront the scandal of clerical sexual abuse in the direct way he did during his recent U.S. visit, referring to it four times in five days. In another development that had not been...

How weighty to me are your thoughts O God.(Poem)
June 6, 2008... Since you are weighty, am I light? Sparks against granite, flutter in the shadows. Lobes of the brain align along a magenta blossom. The sky a hazy balm. The clouds in their loft speak. What's the weight of the days...

Among the Catholic commentariat: my seven hours of fame.(Articles)
June 6, 2008... Commonweal is not very high on the media food chain, and I'm not one of the handful of usual suspects the media rely on to comment on papal announcements, demographic alarms ("Where have all the Catholics gone?"), excommunications, or the...

Suiting up 'Iron Man' & 'Redbelt'.(Screen)(Movie review)
June 6, 2008... I can't write a fair review of Iron Man because the Spider-Man trilogy has ruined the superhero genre for me. Though Tim Burton's Batman may have started the trend of showing the "human" side of comic-book champions, Spidey consolidated it....

More Square than campy 'Cry-Baby'.(Stage)(Theater review)
June 6, 2008... Even the sleaze is wholesome in Cry-Baby, the bobby socks-perky new musical that recently opened on Broadway. The show may be based on the 1990 movie by John Waters, the filmmaker whose gleefully subversive works wallow in low camp. And it may...

Supreme fictions.(The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process)(Book review)
June 6, 2008... The Next Justice Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process Christopher L. Eisgruber Princeton University Press, $27.95,272 pp. Does anyone have anything good to say about the absurd process by which we select Supreme...

Taking root.(Books)(The Catholic Worker after Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation )(Book review)
June 6, 2008... The Catholic Worker after Dorothy Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation Dan McKanan Liturgical Press, $ 19.95, 236 pp. In Catholicism and American Freedom (2003), historian John T. McGreevy described the Catholic...

Religion booknotes.(Books)(Mystic Street: Meditations on a Spiritual Path)(Book review)
June 6, 2008... S.T. Georgiou's previous book, The Way of the Dream catcher, was an account of the author's friendship with Robert Lax, the poet, spiritual writer, and longtime "hermit" on the island of Patmos in Greece. Lax, who was one of Thomas Merton's...

The better end.(The Last Word)(Personal account)
June 6, 2008... Like many people who work with the sick and the dying, I had started out wanting to comfort people, to help them with their pain and their fear. I also wanted to understand why some people seem to die "better" than others, and I hoped to take...

More than sacrifice.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 20, 2008... JPII priests, secularism & more Fr. Damian Ference's article on the challenges of priesthood today ("Why We're Different," May 23) is refreshingly free of talk of generation wars, and I am greatly heartened by his upbeat approach to...

Don't generalize.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 20, 2008... There may be something to what Fr. Damian Ference says. A long article by a thoughtful, honest priest is bound to get something right. But someone should help him out of his habit of generalizing. Social scientists can find trends that seem to...

No plan.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 20, 2008... After reading Fr. Damian Ference's article, I realized that there is no consensus about how clergy should relate to one another. Diocesan seminarians are often formed and educated outside the church community they will serve. The clergy, apart...

Missed opportunity.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 20, 2008... The review of a major work by a major intellectual in a serious journal of opinion is no place to settle old scores from school days. In his review of Mark C. Taylor's After God ("The Lord & Taylor," April 11), Bernard G. Prusak admits that he...

The reviewer replies.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 20, 2008... I am sorry that my whiny review of Taylor's work hurt the feelings of his friend Jack Miles. If Miles is up for considering substantive criticism of After God, perhaps he should read more than the opening and closing paragraphs of my review.

An uncharitable policy.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
June 20, 2008... If Commonweal were to adopt the policy of the National Catholic Reporter, which refuses to accept ads for military chaplains, a policy one of your letter writers recommends ("Conflicting Message," May 23), I would immediately cancel my...

Marriage, California style.(From the Editors)
June 20, 2008... When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court discovered a fundamental right to same-sex marriage in that state's constitution in 2003, this magazine lamented the fact that the authority to redefine the meaning of marriage had not been "left to...

A flawed analogy: prochoice politicians & the Third Reich.(Columnists)
June 20, 2008... As the 2008 presidential election cycle heats up, the political and moral rhetoric about abortion is reaching the boiling point. Some prominent prolife Catholics have compared politicians who support abortion rights to the Nazis, and intimated...

A political prisoner; Dr. Binayak Sen, Pediatrician.
June 20, 2008... Twenty-five years ago, when Dr. Binayak Sen and his wife Ilina moved to the remote Adivasi area of what is now the state of Chhattisgarh in central India, they never imagined the situation they would find themselves in today. "It was love at...

Benedict, German Catholics & the Holocaust.(Continuing the Conversation)
June 20, 2008... John Connelly's previous contributions to Commonweal--particularly his balanced assessment of Fear, Jan T. Gross's book on the Kielce pogrom in postwar Poland ("Ordinary Poles," February 23, 2007)--did not prepare me for the cliche history in...

Unsustainable: hard truths about the 'American way of life'.(Article)
June 20, 2008... I suspect we all have our rogues' gallery of vexing social issues, those that get under our skin and, like splinters not easily removed, hurt. Here is my gallery: credit cards, medical technology, global warming, and the automobile. That may...

Yes you can: why Catholics don't have to vote Republican.(ISSUES 2008)
June 20, 2008... Republicans often use overheated and oversimplified rhetoric regarding the affinity between Catholic teaching and their platform. As a result, many people mistakenly assume that a Catholic must vote Republican. David Carlin, former Democratic...

Torcello 2006: Three Poems.(Poem)
June 20, 2008... 1. I want to find ways round about it. Otherwise lamentation, and, at it, no skills. I found him dead, jaw slack, a hole in his neck, blood, a small hedge cradling his throat. I laid him on his back,...

Young at heart: 'Prince Caspian' & 'Indiana Jones and the kingdom of the Crystal Skull'.(Screen)(The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian)(Movie review)
June 20, 2008... All of us recreate in our memories the books we've read, but children do this drastically, sometimes adding scenes that simply aren't there in the text or greatly expanding brief ones. Director Andrew Adamson has candidly admitted that with his...

Summer reading.(Books)(Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Joe's War: My Father Decoded )(Book review)
June 20, 2008... One cannot read a book, one can only reread it," Vladimir Nabokov famously remarked. "A good reader, a major reader," he explained, is necessarily a rereader because a book cannot be apprehended instantaneously the way a painting can be "taken...

Summer reading.(Books)(Reading Life: Books for the Ages, The Emperor's Children and The Fifth Child)(Book review)
June 20, 2008... It was on a transatlantic flight to Italy last February that I came to appreciate the cultural significance of beach reading. I boarded the plane thinking that in the eight hours I'd spend on the flight I could knock out 150 pages or so of...

Summer reading.(Books)(Book review)
June 20, 2008... Start your summer reading with The People's Choice (Plume, $13.95, 320 pp.), Jeff Greenfield's hilarious poisoned valentine to the U.S. electoral system. When MacArthur Foyle, the new Republican president-elect, cannot wangle out of a promise...

Summer Reading.(Books)( Life Class, A Person of Interest, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao )(Book review)
June 20, 2008... In the midst of our country's unending "war on terror," we are graced with a trio of formally inventive novels that explore the aftereffects of both war and terror with unblinking moral vision. These novels can't simply be described as...

Summer reading.(Books)(Book review)
June 20, 2008... I read and teach theology for a living, which tends to deter me from taking it to the cabin or the beach--let alone recommending that others do so. But I do appreciate authors who are able to raise profound theological questions without...

My father's home.(The Last Word)
June 20, 2008... It's midnight, and sleep will not come to me. My parents are frantically searching for my father's green card. My father, a carpenter, has a habit of hiding important documents in random spots in our garage and then forgetting where he placed...