Commonweal articles from November 2005

Commonweal archives from November 2005

Double standard.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... May I congratulate Kenan B. Osborne, OFM, on cutting through pedantic regulations and understanding the fundamental principle that sacramenta propter homines: "sacraments are meant for human beings" ("Bread & Wine," October 7). Let us hope that...

Gluten intolerance.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... As someone who suffers from celiac disease, I appreciated Kenan B. Osborne's discussion of the eucharistic elements of bread and wine within the framework of the church as the body of Christ. For much of my life I have had to educate pastors...

To the stake.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... I'll go to the stake with Terence L. Nichols on his restatement of the doctrine of transubstantiation ("This is My Body," October 7). This seems to me closer to what Christ meant than the strangely suspended "accidents" of Aquinas and Trent....

Eucharist as meal.(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... Concerning the Eucharist, Terence L. Nichols states: "In the traditional understanding of transubstantiation, it is hard to see how the Eucharist can be a meal." But Jesus said, "Take and eat, take and drink." The great virtue of...

The theological left.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... John Garvey ("Who's In & Who's Out," October 7) quotes from a recent article in First Things that purports to describe a prevailing attitude in today's Episcopal Church: God accepts and affirms us, and his love should be characterized as...

Exercising conscience.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... In "Conscience" (September 23), Darlene Fozard Weaver astutely identifies a disturbing trend. Confusion, not temptation, has become the more common moral challenge. This shift reflects the long-term effect of suppressing one's conscience:...

Primacy of conscience.(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... Throughout my years in parochial school and religious-education classes, the teachings of the Catholic Church were emphasized and not to be questioned. The church's views were especially stressed in the areas of the use of birth control and...

Overly scrupulous.(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... Dr. Lynn-Beth Satterly is suffering from scrupulosity. I am a doctor and the father of eight children, and I have made the following observation on the papal teaching on contraception. The lower clergy, the laity, and Catholic doctors do not...

God & poets.(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... I was very impressed by Todd Boss's short poem, "Worst Work" (September 23), which succinctly explores the nature of God from the view of a poet contemplating his work--a work which, as any creative artist knows, is always subject to revision...

Myths about married priests.(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... In the September 9 issue, Adam DeVille, a "married Eastern Catholic subdeacon," sought to enlighten us about the practical reality of optional celibacy ("Married Priests: Not So Fast"). Why should a deacon from the Eastern Church advise the...

Flawed responses.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 4, 2005... Robert Barron's response to his critics was remarkable for both its content and tone (Letters, September 23). His critics had raised concerns, hardly unrealistic, about the perennial risks of overemphasizing the separateness of priests. Msgr....

Fruits of disagreement.(From the Editors)(Bishops)
November 4, 2005... Bishops should not disagree with one another in public, especially on the most neuralgic issues of the day. For better and more often for worse, that discipline was a cornerstone of John Paul II's pontificate. Yet disagree they did at the Synod...

Why prolife? It's about people, not abstractions.(Columnist)
November 4, 2005... Prolife Web sites regularly display the faces of adorable infants and small children. This is a savvy move. Anthropologists and psychologists say that the structure of a baby's face (a head "too large" for the body; a high forehead; large,...

What's scientific about it? Why intelligent design belongs in social studies class.(Short Take)
November 4, 2005... For what can be known about God is perfectly plain... since God himself has made it plain. Ever since God created the world, his everlasting power and deity--however invisible--have been there for the mind to see in the things he has made"...

Goodbye, Catholics: how one man reshaped the Democratic Party.(Fred Dutton)
November 4, 2005... In mid-1971, a short book called Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s argued that the Democratic Party should loosen its historic ties with Catholics. The book acknowledged that "the Catholic vote" had consistently...

Hello, Catholics: Republicans & the targeting of religious voters.
November 4, 2005... An increasingly obvious feature of American politics over the past quarter-century has been the prominent and polarizing role played by religion. The strategic importance of evangelicals and of religious people in general has burgeoned to the...

Dreams.(Poem)
November 4, 2005... And then it was quite hot and the light late so that often we ate dinner around ten and sat until midnight on the porch while the winds blew warmth on our arms and the trees shuffled in our ears. We talked of better days when we...

Not for iconoclasts: the Museum of Biblical Art.(Art)
November 4, 2005... I admire religious art, but like most people my ideas about what makes art religious are pretty conventional. I love Fra Angelico and El Greco, but until recently I would be hard pressed to name an artist who tackles religious subjects who is...

Neocon men.(The Assassins' Gate : America in Iraq)(Book Review)
November 4, 2005... The Assassins' Gate America in Iraq George Packer Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 454 pp. As the epigraph for his new book on the politics of America's intervention in Iraq, George Packer has chosen a verse by the Arab...

A wider world.(The Tulip and the Pope: A Nun's Story)(Book Review)
November 4, 2005... The Tulip and the Pope A Nun's Story Deborah Larsen Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 288 pp. A former nun turned poet and novelist, Deborah Larsen has written a vivid and nuanced memoir of formative years spent in a Midwestern religious...

(Global) village atheist.(The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)(Book Review)
November 4, 2005... The End of Faith Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason Sam Harris Norton, $24.95, 336 pp. Sam Harris must have felt conflicted when contemplating the outcome of the last U.S. elections. He believes that values are...

Treading lightly.(The Last Word)(Cordoba, Spain)
November 4, 2005... The Guadalquivir River makes a dramatic loop southward as it passes the city of Cordoba on its way to the Atlantic. A Roman bridge connects the two banks; on the right bank is the magnificent Mezquita, the great mosque of Cordoba. Every...

Hindu-Christian dialogue.(Letter to the Editor)
November 18, 2005... Francis X. Clooney, SJ's scholarly essay on Pope Benedict XVI and interreligious dialogue ("Dialogue Not Monologue," October 21) called to mind Bede Griffiths's 1989 response to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's letter on Asian prayer and...

Good enough to eat.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 18, 2005... Thank you for publishing Paul Contino's article on Tobias Wolff ("This Writer's Life," October 21.) When I finished reading it, I ran to the library and was lucky to find two of Wolff's books, and then I ordered others online. I am consuming...

Disabled children.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 18, 2005... I wholeheartedly applaud Jo McGowan's column on learning what it's like to be disabled ("Learning Curve," October 21). As a catechist for the past seven years to children with Down syndrome, autism, and other mental disabilities, I have found...

Obsession.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 18, 2005... It appears to this reader that Commonweal has become so obsessed with its dislike of George W. Bush that it has lost virtually all credibility as an objective critic. In particular, your editorials have come to read like a lawyer's brief in an...

A matter of faith.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 18, 2005... Regarding the three articles on the Eucharist in the October 7 issue: the definition of transubstantiation shouldn't require pages of print or chemical formulas; just a few words would do. Belief in the Eucharist is a leap of faith, a step into...

Age discrimination?(Letter to the Editor)
November 18, 2005... Who decided to limit the 2006 Commonweal Theological Essay Prize to contestants under the age of fifty? This seems to be a subtle, sophisticated form of ageism. It suggests that only those under fifty are capable of creative theological...

Alito & Armageddon.(From the Editors)(Samuel A. Alito, Jr.)
November 18, 2005... Despite threatening disarray on nearly all fronts, President George W. Bush moved quickly and with characteristic political focus to nominate Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to replace Harriet Miers as his choice for the seat on the Supreme Court...

Fair & balanced?(ET CETERA)(Joseph McCarthy critics)(Brief Article)
November 18, 2005... George Clooney's new film Good Night, and Good Luck recounts CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow's televised condemnation of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy (see Richard Alleva's review, page 20). Murrow is portrayed as uncommonly brave for...

'Commonweal' conversations.(Editorials & Comment)(Brief Article)
November 18, 2005... As you may have noted in these pages, Commonweal and its friends held an evening of dinner and conversation at the Essex House in Manhattan on September 26 to celebrate the magazine's eightieth year of publication. At the event, syndicated...

Why 'Scooter' did it: Bush's reelection was at stake.(Scooter Libby, George W. Bush)(Column)
November 18, 2005... Has anyone noticed that the cover-up worked? In his impressive presentation of the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby last month, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald expressed the wish that witnesses had testified when subpoenas were issued in...

A wounded universe: and the kingdom yet to come.(Columnists)
November 18, 2005... During a recent talk at St. Vladimir's Seminary in Crestwood, New York, Bishop Savas Zembillas, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, read one of my favorite Rilke poems, "Archaic Torso of Apollo." The talk was about encountering the...

Bad neighbor: the failure of U.S. policy in Latin America.(Short Takes)
November 18, 2005... The world is watching as our war in Iraq drags on, a war rooted in the Bush administration's distortions and penchant for militaristic solutions. The rhetoric that led to the invasion of Iraq echoes the language used twenty-five years before to...

At a loss for words: ecumenism stutters in Germany.(Short Takes)
November 18, 2005... Pope Benedict XVI has put ecumenism high on his agenda. Right from the start of his papacy, he has reached out to other churches and stressed the unity of all Christians. Yet despite good intentions, fault lines in his approach are beginning to...

Depopulation bomb: a crisis in Western birthrates?(catholics)
November 18, 2005... Long before I took a professional interest in demography I had noticed a puzzle in the history of my family. Why was it that my wife Sidney and I, born in the 1930s, had seven children (one of whom died) while the families of my father and...

Follow that metaphor: what faith, jazz & poetry have in common.
November 18, 2005... Recently, prompted by the New Republic's literary critic James Wood, I've been thinking about the relationship between poetry--in particular, metaphor--and faith. Wood is unusually attentive to the spiritual workings of metaphor. Reading his...

Civil courage: "Good Night, and Good Luck" & "North Country".(Screen)(Movie Review)
November 18, 2005... Arrow shirts, furrowed brows, steely replies, and the Hemingway ethos of coolness-under-fire abound in Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney's depiction of the televised joust between the newscaster Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph...

Anchorwoman.(Mother Angelica : The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles)(Book Review)
November 18, 2005... Mother Angelica The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles Raymond Arroyo Doubleday, $23.95, 371 pp. I'm only an infrequent viewer of Eternal World Television Network (EWTN), founded by Mother...

Permanent Conflict.(Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem--and What We Should Do About it, God vs. the Gavel : Religion and the Rule of Law, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom)(Book Review)
November 18, 2005... Divided by God America's Church-State Problem--And What We Should Do About It Noah Feldman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $ 25, 320 pp. God vs. the Gavel Religion and the Rule of Law Marci A. Hamilton Cambridge...

Troubled Water.(Bridging the Great Divide : Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative, Evangelical Catholic)(Book Review)
November 18, 2005... Bridging the Great Divide Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative, Evangelical Catholic Robert Barron Sheed and Ward, $24.95, 289 pp. One of the hazards of a clever book title is that it sometimes promises more...

Looking for Its Luther.(No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)(Book Review)
November 18, 2005... No god but God The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam Reza Aslan Random House, $25.95, 336 pp. Although it may not have felt like it, September 11 was just fallout. According to Reza Aslan, the West, with its great...

Thanksgiving in October.(The Last Word)(Chicago White Sox)
November 18, 2005... There were plenty of things to frighten a seven-year-old on the South Side of Chicago in 1983, but nothing struck fear into my young heart like the sight of a White Sox home run at Comiskey Park. The park's "exploding scoreboard"--a remnant...