Commonweal articles from May 2007

Commonweal archives from May 2007

Parish closings redux.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... Grant Gallicho's article "Shutting the Door" (March 23) is incredibly misinformed. To suggest that the administrator and parishioners of Our Lady of Vilnius Parish in Manhattan had no advance notice of the closing of the parish is outrageous....

The author replies.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... My article did not object to the decision to close certain parishes, including Our Lady of Vilnius. In fact, I wrote that some parishes needed to be closed. Rather, I objected to the manner in which Our Lady of Vilnius was closed: namely, the...

Diocesan finances.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... Your February 23 editorial ("Bad Housekeeping") concerning the alleged unlawful activities of Rev. Rodney Rodis in the Diocese of Richmond has been referred to me. The homily at my installation Mass on May 24, 2004, had as one of its themes the...

The editors reply.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... Bishop DiLorenzo's focus on diocesan finances is laudable. Our editorial went to press on February 13, more than two weeks before Called to Stewardship was made available online. While the sixty-eight-page document contains many sound...

Breathing space.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... Andrew Bacevich's analysis of the surge in military personnel in Iraq ("Downsizing," April 6) helped readers understand how one could completely oppose the "Bush project" and yet, paradoxically, hope that the "surge"--which I also...

When it will end.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... In your March 23 editorial ("Disarray"), you note: "In other words, there will be no end to the war in Iraq on Bush's watch, and therefore no need to face up to any ultimate failure." It is highly unlikely there will be an end to the war...

Evaluating bishops.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... Adam A. J. DeVille raises an interesting issue in his article, "Look to Tradition" (March 23). Although they have an impressive history, episcopal elections seem to have little chance of again becoming the method for selecting new bishops. But...

Who should preach?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... Nancy A. Dallavalle's review of New Wine, New Wineskins ("Vision Quest," March 9) noted Christopher Vogt's lament that a "lack of connection" exists between his work as a professional theologian and the wider ecclesial community. Vogt's...

Ashley's treatment.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... I was surprised that Cathleen Kaveny's column, "Forever Young" (February 23), conflated the issues of cosmetic surgery and the "Ashley Treatment." While I agree that the lengths to which people are willing to go to align their minds with their...

The author responds.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... My point was analogy, not conflation. All too often, situations like Ashley's are seen as freakish "hard cases" which bear no resemblance to experiences faced by "normal" people. By drawing analogies to sex reassignment surgery, as well as the...

Making the choice.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... Just three paragraphs into Robert K. Vischer's otherwise excellent discussion of the problem of state intervention in dysfunctional family situations ("All in the Family," March 23) is this bone-jarring sentence: "We even ensure that women are...

A hunger for Scripture.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 4, 2007... As a canon lawyer who is more interested in the "canon" of Scripture than the minutiae of church precepts, I found the reflections of William Burton and Roger Vermalen Karban ("Buried Treasure" and "A Book of Surprises," April 6) both...

Standing up to Mugabe.(From the Editors)(Robert Mugabe)
May 4, 2007... Robert Mugabe is not a typical dictator. Unlike, say, Idi Amin or the former Liberian president Charles Taylor, Mugabe does not play the part of a thug. He wears natty suits, watches cricket, and reads the British press. He gets up early to...

Regulating abortion: what did the Roberts Court do?(Columnist)
May 4, 2007... In Gonzales v. Carhart, the Supreme Court upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, a federal law banning a specific type of late-term abortion procedure in which a physician delivers the baby partway, then kills it while it is still in...

Trick or trickle? The richest get richer.(Short Take)
May 4, 2007... Over the past few years, the enormous share of income claimed by the very rich has become one of the hottest of political issues. (See "Economic Injustice for Most," Commonweal, August 13, 2004.) Much of the data documenting the income shifts...

The Catholic novel: is there any such thing?(Articles)
May 4, 2007... Richard A. Rosengarten's review of Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination by Mark Bosco (Commonweal, January 26, 2007) raised interesting questions about the relations between faith and fiction. In his first sentence Rosengarten refers to...

A real Gnostic gospel: the fiction of Philip K. Dick.(Articles)
May 4, 2007... Philip K. Dick (1928-82) was the kind of science-fiction writer who is read and praised by people who don't like science fiction. His fame moved beyond the genre's ghetto after some of his novels and short stories were turned into movies--Blade...

Identity crisis: Mira Nair's 'The Namesake'.(Screen)(Movie review)
May 4, 2007... The Namesake, Mira Nair's film of Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, takes globalization--for most of us no more than a concept dealt with in newspaper editorials--and turns it into something concrete, sensuous, funny, and dramatic. The purely economic...

Lavender hill mob.(Spring Books)(Fellow Travelers)(Book review)
May 4, 2007... Fellow Travelers Thomas Mallon Pantheon, $25, 368 pp. There is no contemporary practitioner of the art of historical fiction more accomplished, in my view, than Thomas Mallon. His forays into the past have ranged from small-town...

Overcoming democracy.(Spring Books)(Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900)(Book review)
May 4, 2007... The Age of Betrayal The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 Jack Beatty Alfred A. Knopf, $30, 512 pp. A recent political cartoon by the Chicago Tribune's Dick Locher featured two well-dressed lobbyists walking in front of...

Diabolical conception.(Spring Books)(The Castle in the Forest)(Book review)
May 4, 2007... The Castle in the Forest Norman Mailer Random House, $27.95, 496 pp. Norman Mailer published his first quasi-novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, and his most recent, The Castle in the Forest, earlier this year, very close to...

A novel sensibility.(Spring Books)(Inventing Human Rights: A History)(Book review)
May 4, 2007... Inventing Human Rights A History Lynn Hunt W. W. Norton, $25.95, 320 pp. We hold these truths to be self-evident," begins the most famous document in American history. But, asks Lynn Hunt, if these truths are so self-evident,...

Dissident president.(Spring Books)(To the Castle and Back)(Book review)
May 4, 2007... To the Castle and Back Vaclav Havel Translated by Paul Wilson Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95, 400 pp. It is always a pleasure to read Vaclav Havel. His new book displays all the evocative language, philosophical arguments, and ironic...

The lost gentleman.(The Last Word)(Walker Percy)
May 4, 2007... I was standing in the lobby of Santa Fe's historic La Fonda Inn when my wife broke the news. "Walker Percy's name isn't in here," she said, waving a brochure that listed the hotel's long list of "celebrity guests." My exact reply escapes...

Correcting the record.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 18, 2007... Thank you for your vigorous defense of the U.S. bishops' too-little-known critique of the U.S. war in Iraq ("Bishops and Their Critics," April 20). Too few Catholics are aware of the prophetic role the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has...

Looking back for justice.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)(Brief article)
May 18, 2007... My stomach turned as I read the title of Mark A. Sargent's article, "Vengence Time: When Abuse Victims Squander Their Moral Authority" (April 20). Since 2002, when I first became involved in supporting men and women who were victims of clergy...

Pension predicament.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 18, 2007... Mark A. Sargent argues that diocesan sexual-abuse settlements threaten church pension plans. "The scale of the threat is not yet certain, because little is publicly known about church pension programs." Indeed, little is known about these...

Reality check.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)(Brief article)
May 18, 2007... I imagine you've received several negative responses to Mark A. Sargent's article about the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP). I want to offer another point of view. Of course I condemn, absolutely and unreservedly, both...

Stonewalling justice.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)(Brief article)
May 18, 2007... Having closely followed the clergy sexual-abuse crisis for more than five years, I found Mark A. Sargent's article disappointing in citing the excesses of victims' rights groups. The article lacked empathy for the plight of victims, and...

Asking the hard questions.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 18, 2007... Mark A. Sargent has turned what could have been an enlightened analysis of the strain between victims and advocates and church attorneys into a diatribe against victims and their advocates. Although I am a victims' advocate, I am not a...

Abortion conundrums.(From the Editors)
May 18, 2007... Last month's 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Gonzales v. Carhart) upholding the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which prohibits a procedure used each year in three to five thousand late-term abortions, was greeted with predictable...

Fellow traveler: Nina Polcyn Moore, R.I.P.(Farewell)(Obituary)
May 18, 2007... She called herself a "merchant princess and trafficker in crucifixes." And so she was, entrepreneur extraordinaire, friend of Dorothy Day, social activist, doyenne of religious books and art in Chicago in the halcyon 1950s and '60s. Nina...

Of monks & madmen: tempted by silence & darkness.(Columnist)
May 18, 2007... There has been a lot written about Into Great Silence, a film which shows the life of monks in the Carthusian monastery of Le Grande Chartreuse. I saw it not long ago, and so should you if you get the chance--which you may not; so far its...

Can't we all just get along? A history of religious coexistence.(Short Take)
May 18, 2007... Every week for the past five years, there have been news stories of U.S. soldiers being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan; stories of Israeli Jews either attacking or being attacked by Palestinians; reports of sectarian Sunni Muslims in Baghdad...

The Sobrino file: how to read the Vatican's latest notification.(Article)(Christology by Jon Sobrino, SJ)
May 18, 2007... In March, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a "notification," or warning, about the teachings contained in two books of Christology by Jon Sobrino, SJ, a major liberation theologian who has spent most of his career in...

Vagrants at Their Work.(Poem)
May 18, 2007... All over the city they persist at their failed occupations: the idle waiters in their rumpled jackets, smoking outside as if always on break; the displaced fare collectors operating without a turnstile, stationed at rush hour by the...

Bogs of war: 'The 300'.(Screen)
May 18, 2007... Though The 300 was adapted from a Frank Miller graphic novel rather than from the histories of Herodotus or Plutarch, the Miller version (which I haven't read) seems to include all the events of the heroic stand at Thermopylae in 480 BC that...

An unfinished agenda.(Books)(Book review)
May 18, 2007... Catholicism and Religious Freedom Contemporary Reflections on Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Liberty Edited by Kenneth L. Grasso and Robert P. Hunt Rowman & Littlefield, $26.95, 258 pp. The Declaration on Religious...

No excuse.(Books)(Book review)
May 18, 2007... In Defense of Christian Hungary Religion, Nationalism, and Anti-Semitism, 1890-1944 Paul A. Hanebrink Cornell University Press, $39.95, 352 pp. Pius XII failed to speak out against the Nazi murder of Jews because he feared...

Real absence.(Books)(Book review)
May 18, 2007... Meeting Mystery Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments Nathan D. Mitchell Orbis Books, $20, 288 pp. It is popular these days to ask how traditional Christian beliefs and practices are faring in a postmodern world. A book that offers a...

Forbidden fruit.(The Last Word)
May 18, 2007... When Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-proclaimed Turkmenbashi, "Father of all Turkmen," and president for life of Turkmanistan, died last December 21, Dr. Gregory Levin e-mailed me a Russian saying: "If you wait long enough, your enemy's corpse...