Commonweal articles from May 2006

Commonweal archives from May 2006

A sinful ministry?(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... Maurice Timothy Reidy's report on campus ministry ("Catholicism on Campus," April 7) is an excellent examination of a vital part of the church's mission. Originally, the name "Newman" was given to Catholic chaplaincies at secular schools to...

Two ghettos.
May 5, 2006... As I read Maurice Timothy Reidy's article, I dreamt of a Catholic university that welcomed the likes of George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus as well as John Allen and Richard Rohr. Then I woke to the realization that we live in two ghettos:...

Catholic campus ministry.(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... Thank you to Maurice Timothy Reidy for directing Commonweal readers' attention to the important issues of campus ministry at secular schools. Because almost 90 percent of college-aged Catholics attend non-Catholic colleges, it is important to...

Princeton's Madison Program.(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... "Catholicism on Campus" is an interesting article on an important topic. Maurice Timothy Reidy's piece is marred, however, by errors about Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, of which I am a visiting fellow....

Haight's Christology.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... Pity the poor Christian who makes the mistake of being inspired by Roger Haight's "Christology from below." For as John Garvey tells us in his review of Haight's The Future of Christology ("Malnourished," April 7), such theology would not move...

Paul & the synoptics.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... Does John Garvey, in his review of Roger Haight's book, really mean to imply that we are to prefer Paul to the synoptics in constructing a modern Christology? Surely he ought to raise questions about why the historical Jesus should have been of...

The origin of life.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... Cathleen Kaveny's March 24 column ("When Does Life Begin?") contains a sentence that some of my friends have interpreted to mean that I agree with Paul Ramsey's reservations about the fact that human life begins at fertilization. I do not...

Catholics at Duke.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... Stephen Martin's article about Wallace Fowlie's "Catholic Presence" at Duke University (April 7) brought back memories of another such presence there. Roland Murphy, O Carm, was the George Washington Ivey Professor of Biblical Studies at Duke...

Teacher & guide.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... Hurrah to Stephen Martin for his wonderful article on Wallace Fowlie. A devout Catholic who wrote with understanding and discernment about Jim Morrison is someone I simply must know! I have my own story of someone who drew me back to the...

Jacques & Raissa.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... Thanks to Lawrence S. Cunningham for his review of Jacques & Raissa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven ("Religion Booknotes," March 24). For those of us desperately trying to find our way among the intellectual brambles after World War II, the...

Pax-Christi spirituality.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 5, 2006... Anyone interested in the study of spirituality, not to mention its practice, is indebted to Lawrence S. Cunningham for his excellent article, "Catholic Spirituality" (February 24). In addition to the Catholic Worker, Cunningham might have...

Judas, Da Vinci & us.(The Gospel of Judas, The Da Vinci Code)
May 5, 2006... This Easter season saw the publication of The Gospel of Judas, a third-century Coptic copy of a second-century Gnostic text. The papyrus manuscript was initially discovered in Egypt in the 1970s, but for want of a wealthy-enough buyer it ended...

Et Cetera: rediscovering Rouault.(Georges Rouault)
May 5, 2006... Fifty-eight Stations of the Cross is what you might call Georges Rouault's powerful series of etchings, Miserere et Guerre, on view through May 28 at the Museum of Biblical Art near New York's Lincoln Center. The exhibit, which hopes to travel...

The boy problem: fathers of the world unite.(Column)
May 5, 2006... The latest figures on the college gender gap have triggered a flurry of media stories about the "boy problem." On nearly every educational measure, we're told, boys are doing worse than girls. More to the point, we're also told, the news of the...

To welcome a child: gay couples & adoption.(Viewpoint essay)
May 5, 2006... I have always been a strong advocate of adoption. It is a family tradition: my parents adopted my sister; my husband and I adopted our youngest, my sister and her husband adopted their little girl; and my brother-in-law and his wife adopted...

Are illegal immigrants pioneers? The irony of American history.
May 5, 2006... Breaking the law is a terrible thing, except when it isn't. Listening to politicians call for the criminalization of today's illegal immigrants, one would never guess that the forebears of some of those same politicians, and of many of their...

Fiction vs. nonfiction: the power of a well-made story.
May 5, 2006... In the spring of 1965, my literary agent called to tell me that Harper's magazine wanted to publish a short story I'd written. The story, "Luther," told of a New York City teacher's longtime friendship with a black student who, while serving...

Squinting at the absolute: the vision of John McGahern.(Obituary)(Biography)
May 5, 2006... A few months ago, I was fortunate to hear a BBC radio abridgement of All Will Be Well: A Memoir, read by the Irish novelist, John McGahern, who died of cancer at the end of March. A light tenor voice, scarcely betraying his seventy-one years,...

Panhandler on the church steps after Mass.(Poem)
May 5, 2006... Panhandler on the Church Steps after Mass Like a salesman who's learned where the prospects are, he waits for us at his rickety stand: old crate and castaway cup, swaying to his own liturgy, coining psalms, his tireless jingles. ...

Place of rest: what I found under a maple tree.
May 5, 2006... One fall day, I decided to take a break from working my farm in upsate New York and drive to a distant town for supplies. It was good to relax and reflect on the passing year. I thought about the year's crops, the sweat equity I earned, and...

Spin Doctor: 'THANK YOU FOR SMOKING'.
May 5, 2006... Does it ever seem to you, when you spy those lonely cigarette smokers puffing away outside offices, or sip the crystalline air in a bar, that overnight we have awakened to a post-tobacco world? Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking takes us...

Perfect Pitch.(Let Me Finish )(Book review)
May 5, 2006... Let Me Finish Roger Angell Harcourt, $25, 293 pp. I always feel a frisson of delight at opening a New Yorker and finding a piece by Roger Angell. Favorite essays are still etched in memory--an evocation of the pitcher Vida Blue's...

Empire Falls.(American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century)(Book review)
May 5, 2006... American Theocracy The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century Kevin Phillips Viking, $26.95, 428 pp. Augustine composed The City of God sixteen centuries ago, but its scathing...

All That We Can Be.(American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short )(Book review)
May 5, 2006... American Mythos Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short Robert Wuthnow Princeton University Press, $29.95, 298 pp. Our national conversation about values has a superficial quality. Typified by the red state/blue...

State of Emergency.(Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism)(Book review)
May 5, 2006... Before the Next Attack Preserving Civil Liberties in the Age of Terrorism Bruce Ackerman Yale University Press, $26, 240 pp. Yale law professor and constitutional theorist Bruce Ackerman is known as a tireless advocate of...

Odd Fellows.(A Changed Man)(Book review)
May 5, 2006... A Changed Man Francine Prose HarperPerennial, $14.95, 432 pp. In the early 1970s, one might have thought few reviewers would give much space to a first-time novel about wonder-working Hasidim written by an author barely over...

Where we do not wish to go.(Quebec)
May 5, 2006... On an ordinary Sunday, I sit in the plain narrow pew. It is scarred from decades of use. The eighth Station of the Cross is signed Jesus console les filles d'Israel. The brick church itself was built in the 1870s by immigrants from Quebec. Our...

The fight against AIDS.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Thank you for publishing Marcella Alsan's thoughtful and courageous article ("The Church & AIDS in Africa," April 21). Alsan writes that "if men did not stray, if women had rights, if AIDS did not kill, perhaps the church's strict ban on condom...

Don't blame the church.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Marcella Alsan's article seems to place blame for the AIDS epidemic in Africa squarely on the shoulders of the church. The church's first duty is to promote Christ-like behavior. The epidemic is clearly a result of lack of knowledge of Jesus...

Tubingen, 1968.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... A number of people have speculated on the effect the European student revolt of 1968 had on then Professor Joseph Ratzinger. I can't add much to what Ronald Modras, a friend, says in his highly interesting article ("In His Own Footsteps," April...

Pope & patriarch.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Ronald Modras notes that the papal title "patriarch of the West" has been omitted from the 2006 Vatican yearbook. What does this mean? It could, as Modras suggests, be a sign of Pope Benedict XVI's openness to Orthodoxy. Yet I'm afraid that it...

Catholicism at Princeton.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Thank you for Maurice Timothy Reidy's article on campus ministry ("Catholicism on Campus," April 7). I am a PhD student at Princeton Theological Seminary and I served as an intern at the Aquinas Institute, home to Princeton's Catholic...

Dinter & Columbia.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Paul Dinter, the Catholic campus minister at Columbia University when I was a student there, is one of the most important people in my life. I was therefore very happy to read Maurice Timothy Reidy's fine appreciation of his work in the article...

What about Catholic colleges?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Having just accompanied my daughter on her third college tour, I could not wait to dive into Maurice Timothy Reidy's "Catholicism on Campus." His article left me unsatisfied, however. Reidy's narrow focus on Catholicism at Princeton--a highly...

Garvey & Haight.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Why would you give Roger Haight's book to John Garvey to review ("Malnourished," April 7)? You must have known that Garvey, good Orthodox priest that he is, would have no truck at all with Haight's way of thinking. You might answer: Well,...

Good Words.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Having followed the sexual-abuse scandal, been shamed by our hierarchy's neo-conservative tendencies, and being a member of a bankrupt archdiocese, I find myself relieved by the fresh wind of positive views provided each month by Luke Timothy...

Typical Catholics.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... I am a fan of Luke Timothy Johnson's work, but I wonder if he would recognize the "typical Catholic parish" if he saw one ("Trust the Laity," March 24). At my parish in San Antonio, few adults are interested in faith formation. Most of them are...

Look to the East.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Luke Timothy Johnson insists in "With Thankfulness & Praise" (April 21) that we "should rejoice that Catholics now feel at home" in various mainline Protestant worship services. I have never understood why such ecumenical overtures should be...

A social experiment?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... Fr. Val Peters did admirable work at Girls and Boys Town, but he errs when he calls adoptions by gay couples a "social experiment" that disregards the rights of children (Letters, April 21). Surely needy children are better off in a home with...

Didymus & Dismas.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... In his obituary of John Deedy (April 21), Peter Steinfels refers to one of Deedy's books, Auden as Didymus, which "delved into the columns that W. H. Auden wrote for Commonweal in the 1940s under the pen name Didymus (the Good Thief)." The Good...

Against a seamless garment.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 19, 2006... In the articles "The Catholic Voter" and "Holy Alliance?" (March 24), by John J. Dilulio and Paul Lauritzen respectively, the authors blame the Catholic bishops for focusing too much on abortion, and not enough on such issues as poverty, health...

If only ...(Muriel Spark )(Editorial)
May 19, 2006... One of the sadder aspects of a brilliant writer's passing is thinking about the particular books he or she will never write. Certain subjects belong to certain writers as if granted by God, and when they die, they leave us looking around and...

The globalized economy: who wins & who loses.(Column)
May 19, 2006... A specter is haunting Europe--the specter of Anglo-American market capitalism. This threat dominated the French student unrest in March and April, and motivated popular rejection in France a year ago of the proposed new European Union...

Two disasters: Katrina & the INS.(Immigration and Naturalization Service, Hurricane Katrina)
May 19, 2006... Before Hurricane Katrina hit, an estimated twenty to thirty-five thousand undocumented immigrants lived on the Gulf Coast. In the weeks following the disaster, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refused to provide assurance that...

This, too, is my body: when does the consecration happen?(Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East)
May 19, 2006... This year marks the fifth anniversary of a Vatican document about which most Catholics know very little, Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. It was signed on July 20, 2001,...

Episcopalian crisis: authority, homosexuality & the future of Anglicanism.
May 19, 2006... Many Roman Catholics, ordained and lay, were understandably concerned when the Vatican issued its statement last fall barring men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" from the priesthood. If a priest is faithful to his promise of chaste...

The Simplicity of Waters.(Poem)
May 19, 2006... Torcello, Summer 2004 In the pig's snout rooting among the cabbages living waters flow. Roots push deep to seek the stalks and gravel paths. Scree breaks up the rain into seeds that nourish the sluices of light that melt...

Staying afloat: Lajos Koltai's 'Fateless'.(In Fateless)
May 19, 2006... Some of the most poignant ironies in literature occur in scenes where a child tries to understand the bizarre behavior of adults. Why does my lovable nurse Peggotty turn grouchy when my pretty mother strolls with the handsome stranger Mr....

Now, a word from our sponsors: 'the Threepenny Opera'.
May 19, 2006... Few Broadway stars can boast that their own soap-and-perfume line is for sale in the theater lobby. This retail coup has, though, been wrangled by Alan Cumming, the compulsively watchable satyr of an actor who headlines in the Roundabout...

The least among us.(Books)(Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership)(Book review)
May 19, 2006... Frontiers of Justice Disability, Nationality, Species Membership Martha C. Nussbaum Harvard University Press, $35, 464 pp. The task of the public intellectual is to ensure that important areas of common life (public policy,...

Manhattan transfer.(The Witness of St. Ansgar's)(Book review)
May 19, 2006... The Witness of St. Ansgar's Francis W. Nielsen Steerforth Press, $23.95, 240 pp. Now and then a novel surfaces, seemingly from nowhere, telling a tale we didn't even know we needed to hear. Such a rarity is The Witness of St....

Age of faith?(Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War)(Book review)
May 19, 2006... Earthly Powers The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War Michael Burleigh HarperCollins, $29.95, 530 pp. I wonder how many students emerge from a course on modem Europe knowing...

Public theologian.(Reflections Over the Long Haul)(Book review)
May 19, 2006... Reflections over the Long Haul Robert McAfee Brown Westminster John Knox Press, $24.95, 305 pp. Robert McAfee Brown may not be a familiar name to younger readers of Commonweal, but there are many reasons to place him on a list of...

A larger sense of church.
May 19, 2006... Lay Catholics, I think, are way ahead of the hierarchy in embracing an ecumenical vision of the church. For the hierarchy, the ecumenical movement is necessarily concerned with concordats and theological treaty making. Bishops meet...