Commonweal articles from October 2006

Commonweal archives from October 2006

Committing to Catholicism.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 6, 2006... As Dennis M. Doyle's article makes clear ("Young Catholics & Their Faith," September 8), the struggle for many young adults to commit to a formal religious tradition is difficult. As someone who had to make that choice, as well as help others...

Too little, too late.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 6, 2006... Dennis M. Doyle writes that he questioned his nephew and new wife about their faith "two months after the wedding." Two months after the wedding! These were questions that should have been asked many months before the wedding, if not by Doyle...

Let's get together.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 6, 2006... Dennis M. Doyle writes that Joe and Laura describe themselves as "spiritual, not religious." What often gets lost in the debate about "religion vs. spirituality" is the importance of community. Whether we are part of a religious community,...

A living faith.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 6, 2006... Dennis M. Doyle's article reminded me of something my friend Fr. Jack Dreese once told me: What really establishes one's Catholic identity is regular participation in the Eucharist. In short, it's tradition, and the rituals that sustain...

Benedict on Islam.(Pope Benedict XVI )
October 6, 2006... Pope Benedict XVI has issued a series of apologies for the ill-conceived remarks made in an academic lecture in which he quoted a medieval Christian emperor who called Islam "evil and inhuman." At least in one sense, then, the pope appears to...

Theology of the body: sacred & profane lessons.(Christian doctrine)(Viewpoint essay)
October 6, 2006... The body is the only sign of who we are. That is why in canonical iconography God the Father is not depicted (because he cannot be imagined, which is to say imaged), and why the Son can (because he is the only image we can have of God's...

Getting warmer: climate change on the campaign trail.
October 6, 2006... My family was hiking in Wyoming's Grand Tetons this summer when we came upon a grizzly bear just a few feet off the trail. Of course, we had seen the signs posted all over the park: "You are entering bear country. Proceed at your own risk."...

Losing Charlie: when a child dies.(Short story)
October 6, 2006... After our twenty-year-old son Charlie died seven years ago, my husband Ernie insisted on seeing his body. Everyone told him, and me, not to. Charlie had disappeared from our house in the middle of a freezing January night. After five weeks...

No man's land: report from Guantanamo.
October 6, 2006... Bet when you were back in law school you never imagined that one day you would be flying a crop duster to Cuba." I smiled in return at my new friend, a Department of Defense prison contractor. He and I occupied two of the nine seats of a badly...

Ten-Year-Old.(Poem)
October 6, 2006... What I love is that loose as a tossed wave posting you do, sweet chestnut making fast work of the Sugartown flank of the hundred-acre. You thump his sides for a fast trot and he swings loose in long arcs, hooves sweeping light lines...

Darwin's ghost: can evolution & Christianity be reconciled?
October 6, 2006... It is one of America's enduring paradoxes to be simultaneously the most religious of the postindustrialized nations and the most enthralled with science and technology. For theology, these seemingly contradictory attitudes create challenges....

Stepping on the Air.(Poem)
October 6, 2006... Torcello, December 2003 When that bird stepped from the ledge onto the air it stepped off into light and immeasurable weight of sky and wind and pulled with it my mind for I thought of the minds of birds and how that distance from...

Unjust & indefensible; Iraq: a case study.(military operations )
October 6, 2006... It is well that war is so terrible--we should grow too fond of it. Robert E. Lee, observing the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862 In Plan of Attack, his account of the Bush administration's preparations for the...

L.A. stories: 'Hollywoodland' & 'The Black Dahlia'.(Movie review)
October 6, 2006... Even if you've never hung around actors, you've probably known somebody like George Reeves, the star of the early 1950s Superman TV show, whose ambiguous suicide (ambiguous enough for some to have called it murder) is the subject of Allen...

Uncomfortably beautiful: Walker Evans in New York.
October 6, 2006... More than eighty of Walker Evans's iconic black-and-white photographs of Southern sharecroppers and Northern industrial towns--taken under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration in 1935-36--are on display at the UBS Gallery in...

God's country?(Books)(The Civil War as a Theological Crisis)(Book review)
October 6, 2006... The Civil War as a Theological Crisis Mark A. Noll University of North Carolina Press, $29.95, 199 pp. "I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the...

Balance & the bench.(BOOKS)(Are Judges Political?: An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary)(Book review)
October 6, 2006... Are Judges Political? An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary Cass R. Sunstein, David Schkade, Lisa M. Ellman, and Andrew Sawicki Brookings Institute Press, $24.95, 177 pp. Borked, Filibuster! The nuclear option! The...

Side effects.(mental illness )
October 6, 2006... More than forty years ago, during my brother Robert's first long-term hospitalization for mental illness, my mother would often cry out, "Someday they'll discover that it was all chemical! You'll see. Some day they'll discover that it was all...

Nonsectarian.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 20, 2006... As the honorary chair of Feminists for Life, I was dismayed to find a prestigious journal such as Commonweal inaccurately characterizing Feminists for Life as a "predominantly Catholic organization" ("Shifting Allegiances," John T. McGreevy,...

Class acts.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 20, 2006... I was touched by Luke Timothy Johnson's fond remembrance of Sr. Paulinus and the Springfield, Illinois, Dominican Sisters who taught him in elementary school ("Thank You, Sister," Sepember 22). I was blessed to have been taught in grade school...

A love story.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 20, 2006... Thank you for the lovely piece on my husband ("John Cort, R.I.P.," September 8). Commonweal was responsible for our marriage. When I was in high school in Baldwinsville, New York, the pastor of our parish introduced us to Commonweal, and my...

Evangelizing Europe.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 20, 2006... Timothy Schilling's "Spreading the News" (September 8) is an excellent snapshot of "Europe's new evangelization," yet he fails to mention the evangelization efforts of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor of the Archdiocese of Westminster....

Worthy of the name.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
October 20, 2006... I must say the Web site just keeps getting better. It's clear, uncluttered, and a pleasure to use. As for your blog, dotCommonweal, it's a perfect chip off the old block. I don't know how you maintain such high standards but, please, keep it...

Voting counts.(From the Editors)(Editorial)
October 20, 2006... The news from Washington, D.C., is grim, and the news from Iraq and North Korea grimmer still. Congressional Republican leadership is embroiled in one scandal after another, providing yet more evidence that one-party control of all three...

Answered prayers: where is technological reproduction taking us?(The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception)(Book review)
October 20, 2006... Debora Spar is a professor at the Harvard Business School who has studied the evolution of Internet technology from early, anarchic beginnings into a more mature and consolidated industry. In her new book, The Baby Business: How Money, Science,...

Taking stock: what I learned at the accountant's.(mathematical skills)(financial management)(Viewpoint essay)
October 20, 2006... My favorite cartoon shows an important executive speaking into the phone, a cross expression on his face: "A billion is a thousand million?" he exclaims. "Why wasn't I informed of this?" I sent a copy of the cartoon to my accountant, so that he...

Kansas matters: can the prolife tent be enlarged?(Column)
October 20, 2006... My parents were Democrats on both sides. Strong Democrats. Most of my family's from Ireland. I'm second and third generation." That short family history, related by Mary Harren of Wichita, Kansas, differs little from that of many Catholics in...

The end of education: the fragmentation of the American university.
October 20, 2006... What should be the distinctive calling of the American Catholic university or college here and now? It should be to challenge its secular counterparts by recovering both for them and for itself a less fragmented conception of what an education...

Mailbox.(Poem)
October 20, 2006... Each day once resembled a box like this. The plain of ocean, the rugged breadloaf of earth; day was longer then, and night rose up without sleep or twilight. Nothing ended. Roads and diaries, coins and epitaphs. One morning a...

Grumpy Good Samaritan: my debt to Edmund Wilson.
October 20, 2006... The publication of Lewis M. Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has once again brought the critical mind of Edmund Wilson to our attention. Wilson (1895-1972) was an important figure in American literary and...

Child Magdalene's Reverie: After Andrew Marvell.(Poem)
October 20, 2006... Walking and mincing as I go, I am newfangled meat in a horse-kind land. Centaurs hot with wine pass on tiptoe breathing by in my lap the virgin hay. The hunter at my heels thrusts me up astride plants me in a garden of bright,...

Take a hike: 'Half Nelson' & 'Old Joy'.(Ryan Fleck's )
October 20, 2006... Ryan Fleck's downbeat school drama, Half Nelson, is the kind of indie effort that is truly a creation of the film festival. Fleck first did the film as a bargain-basement short, then, after winning Sundance's 2004 Grand Jury Prize in short...

TV land: 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip'.
October 20, 2006... It's a good thing television producers don't run the government: Politics would be much less entertaining. Or so one might be inclined to think after watching the first few episodes of the new NBC drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. An...

PBS watchers.(The Truth about Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe)(Book review)
October 20, 2006... The Truth about Conservative Christians What They Think and What They Believe Andrew M. Greeley and Michael Hout University of Chicago Press, $22.50, 216 pp. The thesis of the book, bluntly, is that the basic human religious...

Seminars in Christian scholarship.
October 20, 2006... Summer 2007 WORSHIP AND MINISTRY Teaching Hymnology Bert Polman, Calvin College June 25-29, 2007 Funds provided by the Lilly Endowment, Inc. Sponsored by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical...

Clement & loving.(After This)(Book review)
October 20, 2006... After This Alice McDermott Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24, 279 pp. There is a scene early in After This, Alice McDermott's latest novel, set in the parking lot of a public beach on Long Island. The time is Sunday morning, in...

Be not afraid.(The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege)(Book review)
October 20, 2006... The Theocons Secular America under Siege Damon Linker Doubleday, $26, 262 pp. The Theocons, Damon Linker's new book about his former boss, First Things editor Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, is a Catholic The Devil Wears Prada,...

In between.(Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe)(Book review)
October 20, 2006... Mysteries of the Middle Ages The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe Thomas Cahill Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $32.50, 368 pp. Of the Middle Ages, medieval men and women knew nothing. Of the...

Sleight of hand.(The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back)(Book review)
October 20, 2006... The Conservative Soul How We Lost It, How to Get It Back Andrew Sullivan HarperCollins, $25.95, 304 pp. Conservatism, like liberalism, is a protean thing. I learned that many years ago in a graduate seminar. It was 1970 or...

Pirate of the Caribbean.(Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero)(Book review)
October 20, 2006... Clemente The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero David Maraniss Simon & Schuster, $26, 416 pp. Thirty-five years ago this month, veteran right-fielder Roberto Clemente willed his Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series...

The Catholic presence.
October 20, 2006... Is there such a thing as "thinking Catholic"? Looking back, I see that my earliest awareness of something called intellectual life came from reading the fierce journalistic battles fought out among Belloc, Chesterton, Wells, and Shaw. They made...