Commonweal articles from May 2001

Commonweal archives from May 2001

To the Editors.(letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 4, 2001... Bow... In his "Last Word" column ("God's Best Friend," April 6), Frans Jozef van Beeck mentions that he has never seen a dog at Mass. In Honduras, a group I was with stayed at a girl's orphanage and boarding school for a week. They had...

Vatican deliberations.(councils and synods)(Brief Article)
May 4, 2001... Later this month the church's 184 cardinals will gather at the Vatican for the sixth consistory of Pope John Paul II's pontificate. The subject of this meeting, the first since 1994 when the pope broached the idea of issuing an apology for...

Et cetera.(catholics and politics)
May 4, 2001... Pope George & his court * Word arrives via the Washington Post (April 16) and the New Republic (April 23) that President George W. Bush continues to place a high priority on wooing the Catholic vote. Under the tutelage of Crisis magazine editor...

YOU WILL EAT AGAIN : On the front line of the gender wars.(housework, dinner, and taking out the garbage; humor)(Brief Article)
May 4, 2001... Not long ago the business of counting chads and electoral votes in Florida raised the ominous specter of a constitutional crisis. Global warming, we are told, is an impending disaster that may affect every aspect of our lives. George W. Bush,...

'DIES IRAE' : And don't you forget it.(judgment's place in Christianity)(Brief Article)
May 4, 2001... Once I was talking with a woman in our parish who had come from a Muslim background and had been baptized as an adult in her husband's Orthodox Christian faith. It was important for a couple to share a religion, she said, but what really...

ISRAEL'S MORAL BURDEN : The toll occupation is taking.(the Bush administration is discovering that it cannot ignore the Middle East)(Brief Article)
May 4, 2001... President George W. Bush and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, have discovered that it is not so simple to walk away from the Middle East. They have wanted to end Washington's intimate involvement in the search for peace there. Bush...

BEING A WRITER, BEING CATHOLIC : Sometimes the twain can meet.(Brief Article)
May 4, 2001... In a recent talk to a group of Catholic writers, artists, and academics, book editor and journalist Paul Elie argued that the most distinctive thing about the contemporary Catholic writer is his or her "aloneness," and that any distinctively...

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE : Movie stars on a stage near you.(theater)
May 4, 2001... If you live in a fair-sized city or near one, you will soon be receiving an eye-catching and idealistic brochure in your mail. Eye-catching because it will feature color photos of actors strikingly dressed (or undressed) and caught in highly...

REALITY, COOKED & RAW -- 'Ratcatcher' & 'Series 7: The Contenders'.
May 4, 2001... Ratcatcher opens with a slow-motion close-up of a child spinning around in a lace curtain, and it's unclear at first whether we're seeing rapture or torture, suffocation or play; there's beauty here, the image announces, but harm as well....

DECISIONS, DECISIONS : 'Judgment at Nuremberg' & 'Trappists'.(Review)
May 4, 2001... The dry ice is the first bad sign. In the minutes before the house lights dim at Broadway's Longacre Theatre, current home of the new play Judgment at Nuremberg, wisps of the artificial smoke slither out from behind an intimidating onstage...

Beyond authority.(Review)
May 4, 2001... Moral Freedom The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice Alan Wolfe W.W. Norton, $24.95, 215 pp. The idea that individuals should be allowed to make up their own minds about matters of right and wrong is not new. A high regard for...

FREE TO DO WHAT? An interview with Alan Wolfe.(Interview)
May 4, 2001... A Ian Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. A frequent Commonweal contributor, Wolfe's most recent book, Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World...

WHY THE DANE WAS MELANCHOLY.(Review)
May 4, 2001... Hamlet in Purgatory Stephen Greenblatt Princeton University Press, $29.95, 314 pp. My spiritual director tells the following tale: Several years ago a Jesuit seminarian was appearing in a college production of Hamlet and gave this...

OF STONES & STORIES.(Review)
May 4, 2001... The Geometry of Love Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church Margaret Visser North Point Press, $27, 262 pp. Every reader of Margaret Visser's new book--and may there be many--will be able to pinpoint the precise...

MRS. ROOSEVELT'S OPUS.(Review)
May 4, 2001... A World Made New Mary Ann Glendon Random House, $25.95, 384 pp. The language of human rights is so ubiquitous in political discourse today, so readily invoked in even minor cases, that anyone born in the last half of the twentieth...

WHAT HATH BARRY WROUGHT?(Review)
May 4, 2001... Before the Storm Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus Rick Perlstein Hill and Wang, $30, 671 pp. The mystic chords of memory operate in odd ways. Think 1960s, and you probably think of hippies, riots, student...

A MOVABLE Priest.(Brief Article)
May 4, 2001... I suppose they're teaching it now in Preaching 101. No, I haven't actually researched this with a representative number of seminaries. But the last two seminarians who spoke in support of vocations at Mass in my parish raced--and I mean...

To the Editors.(Letter to the Editor)
May 18, 2001... Sparks of joy Time and again it is good to find an article like Valerie Sayers's "Being a Writer, Being Catholic" (May 4) in your journal. As well she must, she features novels. But before Pentecost this year I rush to mention a 1950s...

A just war?(war on drugs)(Brief Article)
May 18, 2001... The shooting war against drugs--the part that shoots down airplanes--is a war about which most Americans know nothing. Well, now we know. On April 20, Veronica Bowers, a Baptist missionary, and her seven-month-old daughter were killed when...

Haight on trial.(Catholic theologian Roger Haight)(Brief Article)
May 18, 2001... The news is pathetically familiar--yet another theologian barred from teaching, and set to writing a take-home exam for Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. According to Robert Manning, S.J., president of the Weston School of Theology, Roger Haight,...

CASTE AWAY : Touched by the untouchable.(social strata in India)(Brief Article)
May 18, 2001... Last week the entire staff of the school I work with here in India went river rafting. With the exception of me and the principal, none of the others had ever done it before. Most could not swim and all of them were very nervous. For three or...

BOB KERREY'S WAR : U.S. policy condoned atrocity.(Brief Article)
May 18, 2001... You can never really be rid of the past. Events of the past can resurface and change the orbits of people's lives, as former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey has now learned. His experience is part of America's Vietnam past, which is still an open...

SHUN CLONING : Scientists must speak out.
May 18, 2001... Scientists say evidence is mounting "that creating healthy animals through cloning is more difficult than they had expected." So began a front-page story in the New York Times (March 25), highlighting the frustrations of animal cloners, and the...

ACADEMIC SWEATSHOPS : The higher unionizing.(pay scale for graduate-student teaching assistants)
May 18, 2001... On March 1, hours before a threatened strike at New York University by graduate teaching and research assistants, the school's administration agreed to bargain with the graduate assistants' union. The historic pact places NYU graduate...

L'EGLISE DE FRANCE : The church in a postreligious age.(French catholicism)
May 18, 2001... One of the reassurances of writing about French Catholicism is that nothing is ever new. You know what the categories are--ultramontane, gallican, liberal, integriste, laicite, anticlerical, etc.--they were virtually invented here, and they...

SILENT DISSENTER : Jacques Maritain on contraception.(twentieth-century French Catholic theologian)
May 18, 2001... Jacques Maritain, French philosopher and intellectual, played a crucial role in the revival of Thomistic philosophy early in the twentieth century, as well as in reconciling the Catholic church and democratic institutions. Today conservatives...

Rondel of Charles D'Orleans, #1.(Poem)
May 18, 2001... The season now has cast away its cloak, The clothes it wore of wind and rain and cold. The season sports the stitches, bright and bold, Of sunshine on a form that just awoke. There is no beast in field or bird in oak ...

PRISONERS OF LOVE : 'Bridget Jones's Diary' & 'The Widow of Saint-Pierre'.(Review)
May 18, 2001... I lived in Germany for several years, and it almost destroyed me for romantic comedy. I can remember sitting in a kino, gnashing my teeth at the scene in Schlaflos in Seattle where Meg Ryan and Rosie O'Donnell get teary-eyed retelling the plot...

ANON WAS A WOMAN : Enchanting chanting.(Brief Article)
May 18, 2001... Praised by some critics as the "hottest vocal quartet" since the Beatles, the singing group Anonymous 4 has sold more than 1 million CDs of meditative medieval music on Harmonia Mundi. In the wake of best-selling Gregorian chant CDs that soothe...

Faith, sex & poetry.(Review)
May 18, 2001... The Virgin of Bennington Kathleen Norris Riverhead, $24.95, 272 pp. Kathleen Norris opens her new memoir with an epigraph from Saint Augustine's Confessions, and the youthful adventures of the first few chapters suggest that this book...

TILL DEATH DO US PART?(Review)
May 18, 2001... Public Vows A History of Marriage and the Nation Nancy Cott Harvard University Press, $27.95, 288 pp. Ask Americans today to define marriage, and they are likely to describe it as a private intimate relationship between two...

RIGHT THING, WRONG REASON.(Review)
May 18, 2001... Cold War Civil Rights Race and the Image of American Democracy By Mary L. Dudziak Princeton University Press, $29.95, 352 pp. The soil of racial justice was rich with promise in the decades after World War II. In a relatively short...

MEMORIAL DAY, DORSET, VERMONT.(Brief Article)
May 18, 2001... One day a year, in our Vermont village, you can put your hand on the heart of America. Nestled in the spring green of the Taconic range, Dorset turns out proudly every Memorial Day to salute those who went away to war from this bucolic place...