Commonweal articles from March 2008

Commonweal archives from March 2008

Old errors.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 14, 2008... Luke Timothy Johnson's analysis of the tensions within contemporary Christology ("Human & Divine," January 31) is very well thought out, but I'm afraid that his four rules for keeping the conversation going are probably not going to lead to a...

Defending the flock.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 14, 2008... The recent editorial, "Bridge Closed" (February 15), sent a chill down my spine. It painted Bishop Edward Braxton as an unmovable stone, stubbornly rejecting any challenge to the church or its teachings. As a university student and a Catholic,...

A bad day.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 14, 2008... My day began hearing an NPR interview with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the subject of the Eighth Amendment. Then I opened the February 15 edition of Commonweal and read about Bishop Edward Braxton's "simple" rationale for barring...

Meet me in St. Louis?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 14, 2008... Bishop Edward Braxton is not the only bishop in this part of the country to weigh in on the "no invitation" list. Archbishop Raymond L. Burke of St. Louis apparently told the Aquinas Institute at St. Louis University that it needed to uninvite...

The missing.(From the Editors)(American religious affiliation)
March 14, 2008... Last month the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released the study, "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey," tracking the religious affiliations of Americans. While the study's findings were not surprising, they were sobering, especially for...

Out of control: the meaning of suffering.(Columnist)(Column)
March 14, 2008... In a recent New York Times column ("A Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit," February 5), Jane E. Brody argued the case for suicide. In an earlier column, she wrote about preventing geriatric suicide. In response, she received a letter from a...

Yes he can: the case for Obama.(Issues 2008)(Barack Obama)(Viewpoint essay)
March 14, 2008... This year's presidential election is surely one of the most important in recent history. After more than seven years of the most incompetent administration in American history, it is time for a change. The question is, What kind of change? ...

Praying for the Jews: two views on the new Good Friday prayer.(Short Takes)
March 14, 2008... John T. Pawlikowski On February 5, the Vatican published Pope Benedict XVI's updated Tridentine-rite Good Friday prayer for the Jews. "Let us also pray for the Jews," it reads in Latin. "May the Lord our God enlighten their hearts so that...

'You come too': the pull of poetry.(Short Takes)
March 14, 2008... So you don't see splashy ads advising, "Make Big Bucks on Poetry!" So it's not the art form of this age--which is to say of a postmythic age where almost anything can be measured, where the Web provides an instant encyclopedia, where self-help...

The saga of St. Joseph's: a core curriculum that works.(Education Issue)(St. Joseph's College)
March 14, 2008... The last day of January, three hours out of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, and I am driving across a snowy Indiana landscape under a darkening sky to fulfill a speaking assignment. Having written a book titled The Idea of a Catholic...

Saliva.(Poem)
March 14, 2008... Saliva Even the birds have tongues. I've seen hummingbirds', fine as a hair, slip out to catch the nectar from the fuschia, have seen fledgling woodpeckers' tentatively taste sweetness from the birdbell at my window. Tongues...

Family values: HBO's 'John Adams'.(Media)(Home Box Office)(Critical essay)
March 14, 2008... Most of my knowledge of American history comes from the musical 1776. Not that I didn't study the subject in more traditional circumstances. From a year-long U.S. history course at my liberal-leaning New England prep school I gleaned two...

Heart of darkness: the photography of Lee Miller.(Art)(Philadelphia Museum of Art)
March 14, 2008... Photographer Lee Miller's life was both charmed and haunted. She began as a model and muse before becoming an artist in her own right. She worked for fashion magazines, acted in Jean Cocteau's film The Blood of a Poet, and then found herself...

Smart for one, dumb for all.(Books)(Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class)(Book review)
March 14, 2008... Falling Behind How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class Robert H. Frank University of California Press, $19.95, 160 pp. We Americans all know that we work too hard, save too little, and buy too many things that in the end...

Measuring inequality.(Books)(The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics)(Book review)
March 14, 2008... The Big Con The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics Jonathan Chait Houghton Mifflin Company, $25, 304 pp. Jonathan Chait is a senior editor of the New Republic and a widely published...

Time warp.(Books)(A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win)(Book review)
March 14, 2008... A Bound Man Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win Shelby Steele Free Press, $22, 143 pp. Not all wisdom, alas, is ageless. Some comes with an expiration date--or ought to. And applying outdated wisdom to new...

After school.(The Last Word)
March 14, 2008... When I worked in a parish, one of my responsibilities was to conduct baptismal catechesis for parents of infants. Occasionally a parent would say to me: "I've been to a baptismal class before, do I have to come to this one?" My invariable...

The time has come.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 28, 2008... Raymond C. Mann points out that the long lines for confession are gone and no other form of reconciliation has come about ("The Empty Box," February 29). Although confession has often been considered essential by those interpreting...

Not dead yet.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
March 28, 2008... Despite Joel Rippinger's concern ("Bare Ruined Choirs," February 29), not all Benedictine monasteries are experiencing the difficulties he describes. Over the past several decades, a period that Rippinger characterizes as one of general decline...

Falling on deaf ears.(Letter to the editor)
March 28, 2008... Thomas Massaro's "Unfinished Business" (February 29) reiterates how welfare is the program politicians love to hate. There are many informal studies of a great variety of welfare-to-work and welfare-assistance programs. Both local officials and...

The crueler of two evils.(Letter to the editor)
March 28, 2008... Cathleen Kaveny asks important questions in her column about capital punishment, "Justice or Vengeance" (February 15). But can't her points--particularly about "cruel and unusual punishment"--be applied to life imprisonment without parole, as...

Remembering Zahn.(Letter to the editor)
March 28, 2008... In the late 1960s, I was a graduate student in sociology at Loyola University Chicago, where Dr. Gordon C. Zahn (Michael W. Hovey, "A Man of Peace," February 15) taught the course Sociology of Conflict. Zahn was not a dynamic presenter, but he...

Correction.(Correction notice)
March 28, 2008... Peter Scott (not Paul Scout) is coeditor, with William T. Cavanaugh, of The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (see "Clash Course," February 15, 2008).

Stop it.(From the Editors)(on President George W. Bush's speech regarding war on terrorism)
March 28, 2008... Earlier this month President George W. Bush addressed the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. His speech offered a troubling, though familiar, defense of the "war on terror," and a particularly striking description of the ruthless...

The proof: Rev. John R. Becker Jr., SJ (1925-2008).(Editor's Notebook)(Obituary)
March 28, 2008... When I was in college, a Catholic friend once asked me what more he could do, besides pray, for someone who admired Christian belief, had heard most of the best arguments for it, but still, somehow, couldn't bring herself to believe. Maybe I...

The 'new' feminism? John Paul II & the 1912 encyclopedia.(Columnist)(Pope John Paul II)
March 28, 2008... This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Mulieris dignitatem, Pope John Paul II's apostolic letter on the dignity of women and a lynchpin of his effort to formulate a "new feminism." Reaction to the pope's proposals has been mixed. Among...

The great divide: the crisis of U.S. military policy.(Issues 2008)
March 28, 2008... Regardless of who wins the presidency in November 2008, rethinking the premises of U.S. military policy will be an urgent priority. Grasping the scope of the problem requires an appreciation of three overarching themes that have shaped the...

A faithful striving: the diaries of Dorothy Day.(Articles)
March 28, 2008... In her 1952 spiritual autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day (1897-1980) described her early habit of keeping a diary: "When I was a child, my sister and I kept notebooks; recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording...

Easter in Baghdad: theology in the shadow of war.(Essay)
March 28, 2008... During Holy Week of 2004 I was in Baghdad, where I worked as coordinator of the Iraq program for the Mennonite Central Committee. That was the week that the stupidity of the Iraq war became unavoidably obvious, at least outside the Beltway. On...

Late Spring As Usual.(Poem)
March 28, 2008... Late Spring As Usual The green vine is moving the motion's too slow to be visible but it is racing, racing feeling for a way across the wall of fence it's scrawling on, inches added every day. Forwarding, sunwarding, it claims...

Catastrophe looms: '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days'.(Screen)(Movie review)
March 28, 2008... The superb Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days uses the subject of abortion the way Brokeback Mountain dealt with homosexual love: as a springboard to examine human nature in extremis. In the American movie, thwarted love took its toll...

Empty trenches.(Books)(Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe)(Book review)
March 28, 2008... Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe James J. Sheehan Houghton Mifflin, $26, 304 pp. For historians, debating the causes of wars is a kind of endless intramural sport. Less common are debates...

An art of dislocation.(Books)(Bridge of Sighs)(Book review)
March 28, 2008... Bridge of Sighs Richard Russo Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95, 528 pp. For over twenty years, in half a dozen novels, Richard Russo has followed the examples of William Faulkner and William Kennedy in choosing a single geography for his...

Religion booknotes.(Books)(The Decline of the Secular University; The Good Works Reader; Gandhi on Non-Violence; The Barth Lectures)(Book review)
March 28, 2008... In The Decline of the Secular University, C. John Sommerville describes the power of secularization in our common culture, and then identifies secularism as a militant ideology "that seeks to complete and enforce secularization." In...

Note from the Good Thief.(The Last Word)
March 28, 2008... Strictly speaking, Luke 23: 32, 39-43 had my story right: "When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right, and one on his left. "One of the criminals who were hanged...