Commonweal articles from May 2008

Commonweal archives from May 2008

Democracy & freedom.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 9, 2008... Arguing against President George W. Bush, Commonweal's editors ("Stop It," March 28) claim wars should not be waged to spread democracy and freedom, but "should be a last resort, undertaken only to protect the innocent, and to reestablish the...

Too historical?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 9, 2008... Robert J. Egan's "Why Not?" (April 11) is the best essay on women's ordination that I have read. However, it needs improvement. Egan criticizes Sara Butler for being ahistorical. But I find Egan too historical and too linear. Sacramental...

Continuous conversation.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 9, 2008... Though the substance and soundness of Robert J. Egan's article is impressive and to the point, even more important is the vision that underlies it: the acknowledgement of the historicity of the church. Such acknowledgement means that no...

The answer is no.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 9, 2008... Robert J. Egan's article left me weary and frustrated. What part of the word "no" doesn't he understand? In Ordinatio sacerdotal is, Pope John Paul II was absolutely clear when he wrote: "Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed...

Expanding sainthood.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 9, 2008... Some fifty years ago, Jubilee published a letter of mine urging that canonization be extended to saints beyond the institutional Catholic Church. Among the examples I cited was Mohandas Gandhi. Now Jo McGowan has introduced us to another Indian...

Benedict in America.(From the Editors)(Pope Benedict XVI)
May 9, 2008... Nearly every observer and commentator judged Benedict XVI's six-day visit last month to Washington, D.C., and New York City a great success. In his first extended introduction to American society as pope, Benedict showed himself to be a man of...

The right questions: Catholic colleges & pop culture.(Columnists)(Sex and the City )
May 9, 2008... Predictably, spring brought the annual tussles about whether or not The Vagina Monologues ought to be performed at Catholic colleges and universities. I understand those who think the content and rhetoric of the play is inappropriate for a...

Two cheers for John McCain: how the Democrats Lost my vote.(Issues 2008)
May 9, 2008... E.M. Forster once wrote the book Two Cheers for Democracy. In that same spirit I say, "Two cheers for John McCain for president." Winston Churchill once said: "Democracy is the worst possible form of government--except for all the others that...

Late conversion: was Rimbaud a saint?(Short Take)(Biography)
May 9, 2008... When Arthur Rimbaud reached Marseilles in August 1891, he had only three months to live. He had come from Roche, in the Ardennes, changing trains in Paris on a rainy Sunday evening, his sister Isabelle by his side. He was on his agonizing...

Modernity & belief: Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age'.(Article)(Book review)
May 9, 2008... In 1949, Karl Jaspers introduced the notion of an "axial age" to describe a few centuries around the middle of the first millennium B.C. when great spiritual masters planted the seeds of the great world faiths. To a world of tribal deities,...

Ordiary Flowers.(Poem)
May 9, 2008... Ordiary Flowers Blind yet sighted suddenly, would the eye first grasp, breath quickening, that golden inner laughter of the dandelion-- tingling born from darkness into form the mind had shaped exactly before...

Confused sympathies: 'Married Life' & '21'.(Screen)(Movie review)
May 9, 2008... Farce is the first cousin of melodrama. Both employ the same devices: people entering rooms at precisely the wrong moment and seeing what they should not see; the misreading of (mostly romantic) motives and intentions; marriage perceived as a...

Hitler's doctor.(Spring Books)(Book review)
May 9, 2008... 1940 Jay Neugeboren Two Dollar Radio, $15, 284 pp. Truth in reviewing requires I admit being not only a fan of historical fiction but a sometime practitioner. In that capacity, I joined an academic panel discussion a few years...

Something else in common.(Spring Books)(Book review)
May 9, 2008... Resurrection The Power of God for Christians and Jews Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson Yale University Press, $30, 304 pp. If you want people to read your book, it never hurts to start with a bold claim--like that made by...

Over there.(Spring Books)(Book review)
May 9, 2008... Life Class Pat Barker Doubleday, $23.95, 311 pp. After reading part 1 of Pat Barker's Life Class, I found to my surprise and disappointment that I was seriously considering not finishing the book. I had looked forward to reading...

Junk thought.(Spring Books)(Book review)
May 9, 2008... The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby Pantheon Books, $26, 384 pp. I remember when I first tried it. I said it would be a one-time thing, but I soon became a daily user, unable to resist the promise of a brief escape from the...

Faith & the hook-up culture.(Spring Books)(Book review)
May 9, 2008... Sex and the Soul Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses Donna Freitas Oxford University Press, $24.95, 328 pp. Tom Wolfe wrote chillingly about the college "hook-up" culture of...

An omniverous talent.(Spring Books)(Book review)
May 9, 2008... Picasso The Triumphant Years: 1917-1932 John Richardson Alfred A. Knopf, $40, 608 pp. This third volume of John Richardson's monumental biography of Pablo Picasso is divided into thirty-nine chapters plus an epilogue. This...

Don't assign these books.(The Last Word)(Book review)
May 9, 2008... The best-selling atheistic manifestoes by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are now in the paperback phase of their remarkable cultural tour. Affordable editions of Dawkins's The God Delusion, Harris's The End of Faith (and...

Patriotism is not Catholicism.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... After reading David R. Carlin's endorsement of Sen. John McCain ("Two Cheers for John McCain," May 9), I could not but feel disappointed by the continued whittling away of reasons why Catholics should vote Republican. Carlin makes the usual...

Silencing the cheers.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... David R. Carlin's two cheers for McCain need to be challenged. How can a person be against abortion but condone invading a country for questionable reasons? What about the innocent people who are killed every day in Iraq? Al Qaeda was not...

Not what Jesus would do.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... As I removed the April 11 issue of Commonweal from my mailbox, 1 began flipping through the magazine. I didn't make it very far before seeing the full-page color advertisement on the inside of the back cover, which depicted a huddle of soldiers...

Conflicting message.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... When I saw that you printed a full-page ad for military chaplains on the inside back cover of the April 11 issue, I discarded the issue. I considered Commonweal prophetic, but your ad belies that assumption. Like America, you take money...

Dialectical materialism.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... Thank you for Angus Sibley's "The Cult of Capitalism" (April 25). He lays out the problems in free-market dogma, and explains how we got to the point where some Catholic intellectuals teach that the mechanism of the markets, without...

More than a cultural marker.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... Several years ago, I speculated about the parents of kids in my baptismal preparation class: "I think they want their children baptized so that they can grow up to reject the same things that their parents did." Sue Norton's "Pomp and...

Amazing grace.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... Peter Steinfels's "Note from the Good Thief" (March 28) is an excellent exploration of the reality and efficacy of grace. As an ordinary layperson, I have a hunch about why more Catholics don't go to confession. Steinfels makes it eloquently...

A modern anchoress.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... Christina Stern provides a fascinating look into the hidden world of the medieval anchoress ("Sealed In, Yet Soaring," April 11). But, although rare, the anchoress can be found in modern times. At least one twentieth-century woman lived such a...

It's all greek to me.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... The end of Gerard S. Sloyan's excellent "Mystery or Mystification?" (April 11) was clever--too clever for me. "Non tali auxilio." My one semester of Latin more than forty-five years ago and a Latin-English dictionary were of no help. I'd...

Remembering a teacher.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... As a classmate of Matthew Boudway's at Brophy Prep in Phoenix, Arizona, and as a student of Fr. John R. Becker, I wish to express my deep appreciation for "The Proof" (March 28), a poignant tribute to a person who graced the earth with a...

All is forgiven.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 23, 2008... Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan's statement in his April 11 letter to the editor ("Practiced, When Preached") that "the Catholic [Latin] Church is unique in having the opportunity for reconciliation" through the practice of confession is...

Hungry planet.(From the Editors)
May 23, 2008... Charles Dickens famously described the workhouse where Oliver Twist was indentured as a place "without the inconvenience of too much food." When nine-year-old Oliver requested another helping ("Please, sir, I want some more"), the almshouse was...

It ain't over: planning for perpetual war.(Columnist)(Column)
May 23, 2008... The Associated Press reports that the Pentagon has prepared a $5 billion commercial development plan for the Green Zone in Baghdad (currently under insurgent mortar and rocket fire), and says the government has signed a contract with Marriot...

Obama & Israel: a missed opportunity.(Issues 2008)(Viewpoint essay)
May 23, 2008... Barack Obama's brilliant Philadelphia speech on race has been eclipsed by his complete break last month with the man he was trying to explain and avoid breaking with, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Yet, for all the Philadelphia speech's brilliance and...

Torched: how a political protest became an Olympic event.(Short Take)
May 23, 2008... Ever since the late eighteenth century, Tibet has exercised a particular hold on the Western imagination. A Himalayan kingdom, difficult to reach, it remained seemingly faithful to its age-old traditions, high above the great changes sweeping...

Why we're different: bridging the priesthood's generation gap.(Articles)
May 23, 2008... On the first Friday of every month, I join a dozen or so other priests for vespers, drinks, dinner, and fellow-ship. Two things make the group unusual. The first is that five decades of ordination classes are represented at our gatherings. The...

The art of resistance: report from Kashmir.
May 23, 2008... The village of Wathoora, nestled in the Kashmir Valley, blends into a dense oak forest. You approach the village on a bumpy dirt track that leads away from the potholed main road. Wathoora emerges gradually: a pile of bricks, a wrinkled old man...

Praying for rain in Santa Fe--for Don Murdoch.(Poem)
May 23, 2008... This is the end of the world, slow motion, this burning, burning till earth is parched, the cypress crisping, brown cactus, brown grass, brown horizon. Through the Cathedral hands of the faithful pass a candle. Feel the...

Bad orchard: Errol Morris's 'standard operating procedure'.(Media)
May 23, 2008... In April 2004, photographs from Abu Ghraib showing U.S. Army MPs humiliating and abusing Iraqi prisoners sent shockwaves around the world. One photo of an Iraqi, hooded and caped, standing on a small box with arms out-stretched and attached to...

From Both Sides Now.(Church and Society: The Laurence J. McGinley Lectures, 1988-2007)(Book review)
May 23, 2008... Church and Society The Laurence J. McGinley Lectures, 1988-2007 Avery Cardinal Dulles Fordham University Press, $39.95, 546 pp. A very Dulles has been, for almost all his long academic career, among the most productive and widely...

Tenderized.(The Uncommon Reader)(Book review)
May 23, 2008... The Uncommon Reader Alan Bennett Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15, 128pp. If you saw Stephen Frears's The Queen (2006), you'll have no trouble picturing the scene in Alan Bennett's novella where the Duke of Edinburgh pops his head in to...

What Wills Misunderstood.(Book review)
May 23, 2008... What the Gospels Meant Garry Wills Viking, $24.95, 224 pp. What Paul Meant Garry Wills Viking, $14,208 pp. What Jesus Meant Garry Wills Viking, $13, 176 pp, Garry Wills has written widely and well for...

Altar Boys.
May 23, 2008... Raising Hell for Justice The Washington Battles of a Heartland Progressive David R. Obey University of Wisconsin Press, $35, 496 pp. Daschle vs. Thune Anatomy of a High-Plains Senate Race Jon K. Lauck ...

In the Beginning.(Embryo: A Defense of Human Life)(Book review)
May 23, 2008... Embryo A Defense of Human Life Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen Doubleday, $23.95, 256 pp. When the story broke in January that scientists at the biotechnology firm Stemagen had created a human embryo by cloning...

Three fathers.(The Last Word)
May 23, 2008... Observing the Fourth Commandment is a real challenge for someone born, as I was, to a verbally abusive alcoholic and a femme fatale whose chronic identity crisis rendered her incapable of distinguishing herself from, among others, Eva Peron....