Commonweal articles from March 2001

Commonweal archives from March 2001

To the Editors.(letters)
March 9, 2001... A heart broken When I march this year in the "ashen parade," I will be carrying a heart broken by the death of my wife Margaret, who died on December 27 of a malignant brain tumor. "Marchers in an Ashen Parade" (February 23), so...

The diversity dilemma.(Gratz versus Bollinger, affirmative action case)(Brief Article)
March 9, 2001... Is affirmative action the victim of its own success? That's one conclusion to be drawn from Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, two cases challenging affirmative-action policies at the University of Michigan. Affirmative action has...

ET CETERAS.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
March 9, 2001... Unmanned, yet again n Samson, you will recall, had a certain--and ultimately fatal--attraction to women of suspicious, namely Philistine, pedigree as well as a reputation for roughhousing. When he finally hooked up with Delilah and her sneaky...

PUBLIC RELIGION : Not around here, says Ellen Willis.(religion and government)
March 9, 2001... In a recent article in the Nation ("Freedom from Religion," February 19), Ellen Willis, director of the cultural journalism program at NYU, makes a candid, straightforward, and wrong-headed argument about church and state, religion and culture....

THE CALL TO HOLINESS : Planned & unplanned.(Pope John Paul II)(Brief Article)
March 9, 2001... In his apostolic letter Novo millennio ineunte, initiating the new millennium, Pope John Paul II asks: "Can holiness ever be planned?" Well might he ask--given the complexity of the idea of holiness. John Paul II, however, rarely asks questions...

THE LESSONS OF COMPLEXITY : On reading E. O. Wilson & Wendell Berry.(Review)
March 9, 2001... A recent New York Times Magazine article (February 4) told the chilling tale of a couple who are trying to clone their dead child. They are being assisted by a UFO cult, one led by a former racecar driver named Rael, who claims to have learned...

A PAPAL VISIT TO RUSSIA : Where is Alexei II's invite?(Brief Article)
March 9, 2001... Most Catholics, I suspect, are annoyed if not dismayed at the unwelcoming and unecumenical attitude of Alexei II, Patriarch of All Russia. Pope John Paul II would like to add Russia to the long list of countries he has visited. He has already...

I WAS A TEENAGE CONSERVATIVE : The dead end of politics & the possibilities of art.
March 9, 2001... I want to relate my work as the editor of a quarterly journal of literature and the arts to the larger patterns of Catholic civic engagement in America today. The more I think about this, the more convinced I become that the best way to address...

VERSION ONE : A continuum in the great tradition.
March 9, 2001... Are rival interpretations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic history vying for our attention and making competing claims to be the true history? In "Continuing the Conversation" (September 8, 2000), Robert Egan asked the question and...

VERSION TWO : A break from the past.
March 9, 2001... I teach a course titled "Two Great Councils: Trent and Vatican II." In it I pit the two councils against one another because I believe, with Aristotle, that it's basically through the discernment of likenesses and differences that we learn....

To St. Peter.(Poem)(Brief Article)
March 9, 2001... (After Herbert) The cock crowed as you denied all and let them all deride Him while you fled to hide. You abode still in your lie as they spiked Him to a tree stripped and hoisted up for...

I READ THE BOOK -- 'Hannibal': Nearly undigestible.(Review)
March 9, 2001... Before Rand Cooper reviews Hannibal, I would like to recall something unusual that happened before this film adaptation of Thomas Harris's novel went into production. I do this to make two points: (1) morality and aesthetics not being...

VERY DIFFERENT SENSES : 'Hannibal' & 'Sound and Fury'.(Review)
March 9, 2001... When I saw The Silence of the Lambs I was living in a European city where violent crime was virtually unknown. Strolling home at midnight after the movie, however, I found myself walking at the edge of the sidewalk, then right out in the...

YOU COULD LOOK IT UP : The 'New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians'.(Review)
March 9, 2001... With fitting hoopla, the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians has appeared. It replaces the previous edition, from 1980, with nine additional volumes, making for a total of twenty-nine. The price is hefty ($4,850),...

Pius XII: Not vindicated.(Review)
March 9, 2001... The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 Michael Phayer Indiana University Press, $29.95, 324 pp. Under His Very Windows The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy Susan Zuccotti Yale University Press, $29.95, 396 pp. ...

WE BRAKE FOR GOD.(Review)
March 9, 2001... Riders for God The Story of a Christian Motorcycle Gang Rich Remsberg Afterword by Colleen McDannell University of Illinois Press, $34.95, 263 pp. One summer night a few years ago, as my brother and I were having a couple of...

FROM G.E. TO S.J.(Review)
March 9, 2001... In Good Company The Fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience James Martin Sheed & Ward, $15.95, 216 pp. When my wife and I went in for the requisite premarital investigation, the pastor asked each of...

PRACTICING CATHOLICS.(Review)
March 9, 2001... Inventing Catholic Tradition Terrence W. Tilley Orbis Books, $24, 200 pp. Terrence Tilley's main purpose in this book is to develop and defend a general theory of tradition, a theory intended to capture, descriptively, what...

YES.(Review)
March 9, 2001... Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship Between Science and Religion Michael Ruse Cambridge University Press, $24.95, 242 pp. Few scholars have written more voluminously and more interestingly about Charles Darwin than...

MORE AMERICAN THAN CATHOLIC?(Review)
March 9, 2001... The Catholic Church in the Twentieth Century Renewing and Reimaging the City of God John Deedy, editor The Liturgical Press, $24.95, 244 pp. The title of this book makes a promise that only an encyclopedia could fulfill. Its actual...

NO, NOT EXACTLY.(Review)
March 9, 2001... Does God Suffer? Thomas G. Weinandy University of Notre Dame Press, $22.95, 312 pp. Anathema for centuries, the claim that God suffers is commonplace in many contemporary theologies. A God impassive in the face of the human...

'QUEEN OF VICTORY, PRAY FOR US'.(Brief Article)
March 9, 2001... Between 1964 and 1977, Coach Al McGuire took Marquette University on a manic ride to the top of college basketball. Marquette's eleven postseason appearances under McGuire included two trips to the Final Four of the National Collegiate Athletic...

To the Editors.(Letter to the Editor)
March 23, 2001... Inspiring woman What a wonderful article by Sister Mary Carita ["At Bayonet Point," February 23]. I have known her since 1955 and was fortunate to have her as a teacher at Saint Elizabeth College in Convent Station, New Jersey, and later...

All dressed up.(Brief Article)
March 23, 2001... Last month's consistory in Rome, in which John Paul II elevated forty-four men to the College of Cardinals, received a good deal of media coverage, especially in New York and Washington, D.C. That's not surprising, since the archbishops of both...

Correction.(Brief Article)
March 23, 2001... In the February 23 issue listing the Commonweal Associates, we failed to include the names of Rev. James A. Coriden, D.C., a Patron, and Charter members George Cody, N.J., and Raymond J. Casey, Ill. We apologize to these generous Associates.

ET CETERAS.(brief notes)(Brief Article)
March 23, 2001... We have lists n Looking for a guide to "authentically Catholic" universities, colleges, and seminaries? Visit www.mandata.org, which is complete with links to lists of university faculty who have obtained the mandatum to teach theology, as...

AGENT HANSSEN : The spy who came in from the fold.(Catholic conservatism and moral ambiguity of alleged spy Robert Phillip Hanssen)(Brief Article)
March 23, 2001... Kim Philby's My Silent War disclosed how he rose to head the British Secret Service's counterespionage operation while working as a Soviet spy. In the introduction to that book, Graham Greene compared Philby to "Catholics, who, in the reign of...

TAX CUTS : All the public policy Bush needs.(tax-cut bill campaign in administration of President George W. Bush)(Brief Article)
March 23, 2001... When President Bush visited the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange earlier this month--the place where they trade pork bellies and all manner of other stuff, imaginable and unimaginable--his words sounded inevitable as soon as they were...

THE HUMAN GENOME : Now the hard work & the hard questions.(ethical and social issues related to human genome project)
March 23, 2001... The dramatic announcement last month of the final sequencing of the human genome by Celera Genomics, a private corporation, and the publicly funded International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium brought to an exhilarating conclusion decades...

AVOIDING MORAL CHOICES : Call in the ethics expert.(function of professional ethicists within society and individuals' moral responsibility)
March 23, 2001... It does not require an expert to see that we are living in era of highly bureaucratized knowledge, a time that more than one pundit has described as "an age of experts." We have experts on everything--inter- and intrapsychic life, gender...

TRAGEDY IN TWO GENDERS : 'The House of Mirth' & 'The Pledge'.(Review)
March 23, 2001... Part way through Terence Davies's lavish, bitter The House of Mirth comes a fabulous movie kiss. Edith Wharton's icy 1905 manners-and-morals satire of New York's moneyed aristocracy pairs Lily Bart, a society girl dependent on her rich aunt,...

MUDDLED ROAD TO GLORY : HBO's 'Boycott'.(Review)
March 23, 2001... Don't believe what you read, and only half of what you hear," a rumor-wary civil rights activist cautions in Boycott, HBO's commendable new film (televised throughout March) about the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Suspect what you...

Saint Paul & Saint Vincent.(Review)
March 23, 2001... Van Gogh and Gauguin The Search for Sacred Art Deborah Silverman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $60, 494 pp. Deborah Silverman's intelligent new book, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, asserts the importance of the...

STORIES YOU LIVE WITHIN.(Review)
March 23, 2001... The Hill Bachelors William Trevor Viking, $22.95, 245 pp. The Hill Bachelors gives strong support to the growing consensus that William Trevor is one of the very best writers of short stories alive. One can open this book, pick a...

HELLO MODERNITY.(Review)
March 23, 2001... Goodbye to Catholic Ireland Mary Kenny Templegate, $19.95, 312 pp. Mary Kenny is one of the few people on the planet who regret saying goodbye to "Catholic Ireland." Her definition of this reality and the reason for her regrets are...

Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint John of the Cross, The Poets' Jesus: Representations at the End of the Millennium, and The Christ of Velazquez.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 23, 2001... Bernard of Clairvaux Gillian R. Evans Oxford University Press, $18.95, 220 pp. Saint John of the Cross By Kieran Kavanaugh Crossroad, $16.95, 216 pp. The Poets' Jesus: Representations at the End of the Millennium Peggy...

CHRIST RISES AT TAIZE.(ecumenical Christian community in France)(Brief Article)
March 23, 2001... Whenever I think of Taize, I remember the long outdoor lines for meals, the sandy soil underfoot during the sprint from the bunk-bed dormitories to the shower-and-toilet cabin, and praying that the rain would stay away. And I remember the...