Commonweal articles from October 2002

Commonweal archives from October 2002

To the editors. (Correspondence).
October 11, 2002... Thanks to Lopez Thank you for printing George Lopez's thought-provoking essay "Iraq & Just-War Thinking" (September 27). Please let me respond to a couple of points. First, I'd like to caution against a conclusion that readers may...

On the war path.
October 11, 2002... To war or not against Iraq? When? How? Above all: Why? These questions have dominated U.S. foreign policy and the headlines for the past three months. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other administration officials have...

VOTF watch: can it survive a disinformation campaign? (Notebook).
October 11, 2002... The lay Catholic reform group Voice of the Faithful has garnered many supporters (see "Voices of the Faithful," August 16) as well as some significant critics. Bishop William F. Murphy banned VOTF from meeting in his Rockville Centre, New York,...

Of sinners & saints and sometimes both. (Of Several Minds).
October 11, 2002... When she was told that many people considered her a saint, Dorothy Day famously said, "I won't be dismissed that easily." People put a distance between themselves and saints: Saints are different; they aren't like us. You hear things like,...

`Ground Zero': looking west from Church Street. (Of Several Minds).
October 11, 2002... I did not pay close attention to the media coverage of the September 11 commemorative events. So much of it seemed overdone, politically dubious, and incapable of coming to terms with the horror or the consequences of that day. Nor, although...

The `living wage': it couldn't do any harm.
October 11, 2002... In our newly wired world, a good clue to the nature of any reform movement is the quality of the opposition's Web sites. The Web sites supporting "The Living Wage Movement" have a tatterdemalion, homemade feel to them. Data are often stale, and...

Murder in Palermo: who killed Father Puglisi?
October 11, 2002... September 15, 1993, was Father Giuseppe Puglisi's fifty-sixth birthday. The parish priest of San Gaetano in the poor Brancaccio section of Palermo, Sicily, spent the day in a round of pastoral duties. Known to everyone as "Pino," he performed...

Catholics & the liberal tradition: still compatible.
October 11, 2002... Over the last several years, many Catholics have lamented their state of political homelessness. They want to know where they belong in today's debates over public policy and political philosophy. Those are the debates that, in John Courtney...

When Israel is wrong: Christians shouldn't be afraid to say so.
October 11, 2002... From 1973 to 1990, the two of us edited Present Tense, a Jewish, liberal, dovish magazine published by the American Jewish Committee. On the surface, little has changed since those years when Americans, including Washington's foreign-policy...

Sister Anne Robb Writes a Letter.
October 11, 2002... Sister Anne Robb Writes a Letter Having turned in my stamps, signed on to silence, I dream the old friends open their empty mailboxes. In dreams, they come to visit, dressed oddly, staring and shy....

Heaven Is All Downhill.
October 11, 2002... Heaven Is All Downhill Walking in the early morning, I Hold onto Jack's arm after two blocks, My Parkinson's body heavy In the pale sunshine of a brand new day. When we get to the school playground-- Dead until...

Climate changes: `mostly Martha'. (Screen).
October 11, 2002... Mostly Martha, Sandra Nettelbeck's dourly comic look at life in an upscale restaurant in Hamburg, exploits a tantalizing oxymoron: German fine food. Truth be told, excellent German chefs run superb restaurant kitchens all over the world;...

Praying with the enemy.
October 11, 2002... At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land Yossi Klein Halevi William Morrow, $25, 315 pp. During the last two years leading up to the new millennium, Jerusalem journalist...

Follow that Winnebago.
October 11, 2002... The Hebrew God Portrait of an Ancient Deity Bernhard Lang Yale University Press, $32.50, 246 pp. Imagine yourself on vacation. Ahead of you on the road to Mount Rushmore is a large "recreational vehicle," slowing the traffic and blocking...

Big bad ideas.
October 11, 2002... The Reckless Mind Mark Lilla New York Review Books, $24.95, 216 pp. Mark Lilla, who teaches in the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, has written a small book about a very big question: Why do seemingly smart people...

A victim's defense of priests. (The Last Word).
October 11, 2002... The current crisis in the Catholic Church regarding the sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy certainly demands our attention. Sexual abuse, any abuse, of our children is clearly wrong. But, we must remember, it is equally wrong...

To the editors. (Correspondence).
October 25, 2002... Sex & friendship Regarding M. Cathleen Kaveny's "Friendship & Desire" (September 27), reflecting on the TV series Will & Grace: Were it not for Will's homosexuality, I think that the belief to which Kaveny attributes the popularity of the...

Correction.
October 25, 2002... In William Bole's "Communitarian Lite" (September 13), the Web address for the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate's election 2000 phone-survey report was misidentified. The correct address is...

Loyal opposition.
October 25, 2002... Congress has voted to give President George W. Bush carte blanche in dealing with Saddam Hussein and his real or potential weapons of mass destruction. If Bush is, as some suggest, playing a high-stakes game of "chicken" with Saddam, then...

Et cetera.
October 25, 2002... Setting a narrow table * Papal hagiographer George Weigel (Witness to Hope) recently gave an interview to Beliefnet.com on the church's sexual-abuse crisis. Not surprisingly, no mention was made of John Paul II's possible misjudgments or...

Toy story: in abundance, opportunity. (Of Several Minds).
October 25, 2002... Toys are the essence of childhood. When I visit the United States, I am always enchanted with the wonderful things my nephews and nieces have to play with--the charm of their lifelike little dolls and tea sets, the imagination that produces...

Social insecurity: what happened to `privatization'? (Of Several Minds).
October 25, 2002... If candidates live up to what they are saying, the 2002 campaign has already resolved a central issue in our politics: Social Security privatization is dead. At least, it ought to be if candidates mean what they are telling the voters. Do they?...

A reelection strategy: Bush goes to electoral college.
October 25, 2002... On July 4, George W. Bush gave a speech celebrating America as the home of freedom and emphasizing American unity since the September 11 attacks. He said, "In a moment, we discovered again that we're a single people--when you strike one...

`Poultry justice': why Bush took on the chicken cartel.
October 25, 2002... No one would expect President George W. Bush to rush to the defense of worker rights, yet in at least one sector, his administration is acting ideologically out of character. After going after one leading poultry processor and coming to...

Led.
October 25, 2002... Led It comes the day you turn 48, hiking with an old friend. She keeps asking which trail, your birthday after all, choose, until you say What makes me happy is being here, following you. It's my birthday....

The new American Empire: the likely consequences of the `Bush doctrine'.
October 25, 2002... I have been pondering for quite some time just how to describe the new American Empire, but now, quite suddenly, my task has become much simpler. On September 20, the White House issued George W. Bush's The National Security Strategy of the...

From silence to vindication: Teilhard de Chardin & the Holy Office.
October 25, 2002... In 1924, a relatively unknown Jesuit scientist was summoned by his religious superior to a meeting in Lyon, France. The priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, had earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne two years before and was teaching at Paris's...

Holden on: `Tadpole' & `Igby Goes Down'. (Screen).
October 25, 2002... Recently I heard a private-school English teacher discuss her ninth-graders' surprising hostility to The Catcher in the Rye. They rejected Holden Caulfield's stubborn insistence on purity, his fatalistic view of adulthood as a dead-end into...

Trick or treat? `Sightings' & other special issues. (Media).
October 25, 2002... What is it with those amber waves of grain? Three months after M. Night Shyamalan's Signs wrung a parable of doubt and faith from a cornstalk-spiked scenario, the Showtime Network is airing Sightings: Heartland Ghost, a similarly themed movie...

God: half-off.
October 25, 2002... Christianity Incorporated How Big Business Is Buying the Church Michael Budde and Robert Brimlow Brazos Press, $22.99, 191 pp. One evening this past summer, I struck up a conversation with a fellow parishioner at a neighborhood block party....

Talking about morals & faith.
October 25, 2002... War without End Cultural Conflict and the Struggle for America's Political Future Robert Shogan Westview, $41.50, 348 pp. In practice, culture and politics are never really separable, and conflict over things cultural has been more or less...

Pride of the Valkyrie.
October 25, 2002... The Tristan Chord Wagner and Philosophy Bryan Magee Henry Holt, $35, 399 pp. Not to put too fine a point on it: artists can be real jerks. Leo Tolstoy abused his wife; Fyodor Dostoyevsky squandered all his royalties in gambling debts; Lord...

Pilgrim Journey: John Henry Newman 1801-1845.
October 25, 2002... Pilgrim Journey: John Henry Newman 1801-1845 Vincent Ferrer Blehl, S.J. Paulist, $24.95, 452 pp. The story of John Henry Newman's intellectual and spiritual development from his childhood until his conversion in 1845 has been told many...

American Catholics through the Twentieth Century: Spirituality, Lay Experience, and Public Life.
October 25, 2002... American Catholics through the Twentieth Century: Spirituality, Lay Experience, and Public Life Claire E. Wolfteich Crossroad, $24.95, 212 pp. In a scant 180 pages, Claire Wolfteitch tries to trace the emergence of the American Catholic...

Tools Matter for Practicing the Spiritual Life.
October 25, 2002... Tools Matter for Practicing the Spiritual Life Mary Margaret Funk Continuum, $19.95, 165 pp. Margaret Mary Funk is a Benedictine monastic who serves as the executive director of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue--an organization of...

Answered prayers. (The Last Word).
October 25, 2002... In going to Lisieux recently, I fulfilled a desire (long and vaguely felt) to visit the home of a saint sacred to my family. In April 1955, my mother began to hemorrhage while giving birth. A Jesuit uncle, then chaplain to the Seattle community...