Commonweal articles from November 2002

Commonweal archives from November 2002

To the editors. (Correspondence).
November 8, 2002... Good cover(age) Let me add my vote of resounding approval for your October 11 cover. It is so important that Christianity not be hijacked by the pro-war team, and thank goodness an organization as large as the Catholic Church is willing to...

What does Rome want?
November 8, 2002... The application of the policies adopted... in Dallas can be the source of confusion and ambiguity." Is this response from the Vatican an honest one, or does it forecast serious trouble? Is it possible that some Vatican officials don't get it?...

A note from the editor.
November 8, 2002... I joined Commonweal in 1988, and its two-week schedule has set the rhythm of my thinking, reading, writing, and social life ever since. Twenty-two times a year for fifteen years adds up to 330 issues of Commonweal. There have certainly been...

Celebrating Vatican II: celebrating Archbishop Hunthausen. (Notebook).
November 8, 2002... In a dismal season for the Catholic Church, one bright if poignant note has been sounded by celebrations around the country marking the opening of Vatican II on October 11, 1962. On that day, John XXIII began the first session of the council by...

My kind of pol: remembering Paul Wellstone. (Of Several Minds).
November 8, 2002... The late Senator Paul Wellstone never walked into a room. He bounced, he bounded, he trotted--a bundle of energy coiled in a small frame. He didn't just shake hands. He hugged, he kissed, he embraced, his strong wrestler's arms transmitting...

Plundering the dead: harvesting the unborn.
November 8, 2002... Is it not time to stop regarding the dead body as anything but something to dispose of as quickly--and yes, as usefully--as possible? What is it that attracts some people to the dead body and makes them morbidly regard it as an object of...

Kidnapped: from Baptist to Catholic.
November 8, 2002... I grew up a fundamentalist Baptist in 1950s Freeport, Illinois. Although I was allowed to play basketball with Mikey Pohill, I couldn't go inside his house. The Pohills were Roman Catholic. If I saw a priest or nun walking toward me downtown, I...

Eviction day: an eyewitness account.
November 8, 2002... From the window of my second-story apartment, I watch a sheriff with civilian cohort sleuthing about on the next block. My viewing angle prevents me from seeing exactly which house(s) are under scrutiny. I wonder if there has been a break-in....

Baptism.
November 8, 2002... Baptism You sleep deeply in your mother's arms in the front row of the small stone church far and not far from the center of things. In a few minutes cold water will strike your forehead and disturb your slumber. ...

The Catholic novel: fact or fiction?
November 8, 2002... Is there such a thing as the Catholic novel?" Tricky question. My qualifications for addressing it boil down to two: I'm a practicing novelist--although that's not how I make my living (I'm a political and corporate speechwriter); and I'm a...

A war for oil: Bush, the Saudis, & Iraq.
November 8, 2002... I am deeply suspicious of economically determinist or conspiratorial explanations for political and historical events. The world is just too complicated, and chance and history play too large a role in the choices we face and the decisions we...

Catholics online: never an unpublished thought. (Media).
November 8, 2002... As if the bishops didn't have enough to worry about. Now they are under attack from the bloggers. Blogs--a word that combines "web" and "log"--are an electronic Hyde Park on the Internet. Bloggers use the power of the Web to create their...

Goldhagen at it again.
November 8, 2002... A Moral Reckoning The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 344 pp. This book's title promises a moral treatise, but in fact its structure and tone are...

A salty, greasy hot dog.
November 8, 2002... Caramelo Sandra Cisneros Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 454 pp. Sandra Cisneros's novel Caramelo could, dryly but accurately, be said to be about the American--specifically Mexican American--immigrant experience. But oh, that would so completely...

An uncertain trumpet.
November 8, 2002... Girl Meets God On the Path to a Religious Life Lauren F. Winner Algonquin, $23.95, 320 pp. In this tell-all age, the spiritual memoir faces a daunting storytelling challenge. Spiritual autobiography has always been confessional, of...

Nowhere else to go?
November 8, 2002... John Henry Newman The Challenge to Evangelical Religion Frank M. Turner Yale University Press, $35, 740 pp. Few major intellectual figures have been so fortunate in controlling the way posterity viewed them as John Henry Newman. Newman was...

How Bush won.
November 8, 2002... A Badly Flawed Election Debating Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court, and American Democracy Edited by Ronald Dworkin New Press, $26.95, 352 pp. The Longest Night Polemics and Perspectives on Election 2000 Edited by Arthur J. Jacobson and...

The Prayer that Jesus Taught Us.
November 8, 2002... The Prayer that Jesus Taught Us Michael Crosby Orbis, $19, 208 pp. The disciples' request, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Lk 11:1), elicited one of the most enduring and commented-upon of Christian texts, and the Lord's Prayer has subsequently...

Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism.
November 8, 2002... Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism Edited by Christopher R. Seitz Brazos, $18.99, 250 pp. Nicene Christianity is a collection of essays, written by an ecumenical group of theologians, and drawn from papers delivered at a...

John Macquarrie: A Master of Theology.
November 8, 2002... John Macquarrie: A Master of Theology Owen Cummings Paulist, $14.95, 152 pp. John Macquarrie would not know me, but I remember him as a most welcome summer-school teacher at Notre Dame. We served together on several oral exam committees,...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Called by God.
November 8, 2002... Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Called by God Elizabeth Raum Continuum, $21.95, 184 pp. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45) is one of the most luminous Christians of the twentieth century. He was an academic, pastor, ecumenist, peacemaker, and, most...

Mary in the Plan of God and in the Communion of Saints.
November 8, 2002... Mary in the Plan of God and in the Communion of Saints Alain Blancy and Maurice Jourjon Paulist, $18.95, 162 pp. Recently, I was a speaker at an ecumenical conference held at Saint Olaf's College in Minnesota. The topic was a theological...

The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi.
November 8, 2002... The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi Jacques Dalarun The Franciscan Institute, $24.95, 295 pp. Thirty-four years after the death of Saint Francis of Assisi in 1226, the general chapter of the Franciscans commissioned a new legenda...

Introducing Theologies of Religions.
November 8, 2002... Introducing Theologies of Religions Paul Knitter Orbis, $25, 256 pp. Paul Knitter has long been a prominent voice in the theological discussion about the relationship of Christianity to the other world religions. It is a delicate area of...

En garde! (The Last Word).
November 8, 2002... As war with Iraq appears increasingly unavoidable, some have suggested that George W. Bush's obvious personal animosity toward Saddam Hussein is more a question of honor than of national security. Saddam did, after all, try to assassinate the...

To the editors. (Correspondence).
November 22, 2002... Byron's daughter I suppose I am among scores of readers who will have noticed Edward T. Oakes's slip in his review of The Tristan Chord ("Pride of the Valkyrie," October 25) when referring to Lord Byron's daughter "by his half-sister." The...

One-party rule.
November 22, 2002... In recapturing control of the Senate and increasing their majority in the House, Republicans both defied midterm election history and threw the Democratic Party into a soul-searching tailspin. President George W. Bush, who campaigned...

Et cetera.
November 22, 2002... Lighter collection baskets Twenty percent of churchgoing Catholics say they have stopped contributing money to their diocese. One in nine have reduced what they give to their parish. These figures come from a Gallup poll commissioned by...

Books & more books: too much of a good thing. (Of Several Minds).
November 22, 2002... Frank O'Malley was one of my teachers at Notre Dame, and he was a blessing, as anyone to whom he taught literature can tell you. O'Malley was the last of Notre Dame's "bachelor dons"; he lived in an apartment in Lyons, a residence hall at the...

Election autopsy: what the democrats need. (Of Several Minds).
November 22, 2002... There are good recriminations and bad recriminations. Good recriminations entail an honest, if painful, assessment of what went wrong. Bad recriminations happen when factions use defeat to score the same tired points against their rivals that...

The Bishops & Iraq: where was the coverage?
November 22, 2002... After walking in late to a monthly meeting of eucharistic ministers at my parish in Brooklyn, New York, I sensed right away that something was wrong. Everyone was tense. The deacon who leads the ministry was raising questions about the...

Forgiving God: a daughter almost lost.
November 22, 2002... I would appear to be leading a nearly idyllic life. My husband of more than thirty-five years, a college professor, has recently retired. For some two and a half years we have been the awe-struck grandparents of our happily married younger...

Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother (1936).
November 22, 2002... Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother (1936) After the peas freeze on the vine, they feed on wild birds. Then they feed on dust. Hunger grows fat on their flesh. It climbs up their sleep into their eyes. ...

Vatican II as ecumenical council: Yves Congar's vision realized.
November 22, 2002... Noticing that the words "Vatican II" evoked no response in her high school students, an Irish nun recently told me she asked them what Vatican II was. After some time and with much hesitation, one of them asked: "Would that be the pope's summer...

How a Lutheran saw it.
November 22, 2002... The sixty or so delegated observers at the Second Vatican Council, of whom I was one, were a privileged lot. Catholic bishops sometimes complained, and not always humorously, that we outranked them in terms of the council's protocol. The side...

Realpolitik: `Trials of Henry Kissinger' & `Bowling for Columbine'. (Screen).
November 22, 2002... As a kid I had a "radical" uncle who delighted in rocking my parents' suburban world. One year he drew my father into a vehement patio argument over who should win the Nobel Peace Prize. My uncle's nominee--Mao--looked like a piece of pure...

Lions, dinosaurs, & Jules Feiffer. (Children's Books).
November 22, 2002... If the Washington Square/ Greenwich Village scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s--folksingers and coffeehouses and leotards, Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag and the Village Voice--seems as romantic to some of us as Fitzgerald's Jazz Age,...

Is the state always our enemy?
November 22, 2002... Free for All Defending Liberty in America Today Wendy Kaminer Beacon Press, $15, 208 pp. In this collection of columns and occasional essays, most of them originally published in The American Prospect, Wendy Kaminer offers a passionate...

Seer from Milledgeville.
November 22, 2002... O'Connor, Flannery A Life Jean Cash University of Tennessee Press, $30, 376 pp. Return to Good and Evil Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism Henry T. Edmondson III Lexington Books, $24.95, 224 pp. The action of grace in territory...

Chicken or egg?
November 22, 2002... The Press Effect Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories that Shape the Political World Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman Oxford University Press, $26, 240 pp. As news outlets multiply and scatter public attention in more...

Fame & Seneca Falls. (The Last Word).
November 22, 2002... On October 5, 2002, the quiet town of Seneca Falls, New York, enjoyed a rare visit from the Secret Service: former First Lady Rosalynn Carter was being inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame [NWHF]. That accounted for the Secret...