Commonweal articles from September 2005

Commonweal archives from September 2005

Rethinking celibacy.(Letter to the Editor)
September 9, 2005... Franz Klein would support mandatory priestly celibacy as a logical deduction from the ideal concept of priestly vocation ("John Paul II Priests," August 12). This is the crucial point of his gentlemanly disagreement with my considerations for...

The spirit speaks.(Letter to the Editor)
September 9, 2005... Thank you for John Garvey's insightful observations on the married priesthood ("Priests Should Be Married," August 12). Yes, celibacy is beautiful, but we need the balance of a few priests who are living the experience of marriage. Whenever the...

An immodest proposal.(Letter to the Editor)
September 9, 2005... As scientists and readers of Commonweal for forty years, we are disappointed that you would print Jo McGowan's column on stem cells ("Another Modest Proposal," July 15). Such a dismissive treatment of a serious, promising subject did not belong...

A difficult moral question.(Letter to the Editor)
September 9, 2005... Jo McGowan's column on stem-cell research was a great disappointment. I usually find her work to be well-written and insightful, but this latest column was, to my mind, a silly flight of fancy that bordered on the uncharitable. Proponents of...

Conception vs. fertilization.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 9, 2005... Commonweal's coverage of stem-cell research on cloned human embryos has generally been fair, accurate, and appropriately nuanced. In your June 17 editorial, "Misleading Photos," however, one important nuance was missed, namely, the distinction...

The dangers of relativism.(Letter to the Editor)
September 9, 2005... In her column "Either/Or?" (July 15), Cathleen Kaveny argues against what she calls "dualistic views of the world" to which she says we Americans are attracted. She seems to believe that when a person or a group believes very strongly in the...

Decoding Shakespeare.(Letter to the Editor)
September 9, 2005... In the course of his review of my book Shadowplay ("Interesting, if True," July 15), Jesse Lander touches on two familiar academic objections to the book's argument. The first is the widespread assumption that political allegory was rare in the...

Four years after.(World Trade Center and Pentagon Attacks, 2001)
September 9, 2005... So much has happened to obscure the real nature of the crisis the nation faced on September 11, 2001, as well as the remarkable solidarity shown by the American people in the aftermath, that it is hard to believe it has been only four years...

Clearing the air.(hearings on supreme Court nominee John Roberts )
September 9, 2005... One of the issues likely to play a critical role in this month's hearings on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts will be unpacking his views on federalism. In the past, as both lawyer and judge, Roberts has often favored states' rights over...

The martyrdom of John Roberts: Catholic squabbling, then & now.(chief justice nominee)
September 9, 2005... John Roberts came from a socially prominent and financially comfortable family. He attended what many considered the most prestigious university in the country before going to law school. An expert advocate, he engaged in vigorous debate about...

The nuclear option: why nations want the bomb.(Column)
September 9, 2005... The background to the controversy over Iran's nuclear program is an American position on nuclear nonproliferation that is unsustainable in the long term. Much of the international policy community understands that this is so. It is time for...

Married priests: not so fast.(Continuing the Conversation)
September 9, 2005... Cardinal Keith O'Brien of Edinburgh has repeatedly raised doubts about mandatory clerical celibacy in the Roman Church. In 2002, just prior to being named cardinal, he went on record as being open to changes in this discipline and was promptly...

Can Catholics think for themselves? Many Americans doubt it.(Short Take)
September 9, 2005... Does anti-Catholicism persist in American society, not as violent perhaps as when convents were being torched in the nineteenth century, but still there, lurking just beneath the surface? Is it America's ugly little secret, an unacknowledged...

Organizing the faithful: a report from the trenches.(Archdiocese of Boston)
September 9, 2005... The Archdiocese of Boston, where my wife and I live, famously suffered from sexual abuse by priests, and by misfeasance and perhaps malfeasance by bishops in dealing with that abuse. By July 2002 there was an almost universal feeling in our...

Teach the children well: a guide to passing on the faith.
September 9, 2005... My daughter Anna and I used to share a peculiar fascination with a radio call-in show whose host hectored and scolded her callers for their failures as parents. Anna called it The I'm-a-Good-Mother-and-You're-Not Show, thus summing up the...

Home alone: one lay minister's story.(community services)
September 9, 2005... It was in Detroit that I first realized a career in lay ministry requires not only plenty of self-care, but other intrepid souls with whom to share the trip. My apartment building sat in the middle of the block on Detroit's aging southwest...

Like a prayer: Sufjan Stevens's 'Seven Swans'.(music)
September 9, 2005... For the better part of the last month my iPod has served as little more than a delivery vehicle for the music of Sufjan Stevens, a thirty-year-old Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter. After a week of obsessive listening, it suddenly hit me: he's...

A Large Soul.(The Letters of Robert Lowell)(Book Review)
September 9, 2005... The Letters of Robert Lowell Edited by Saskia Hamilton Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $40, 852 pp. Although he was honored from the start as the leading American poet of his generation, Robert Lowell lived what was, in important...

You Break It, You Buy It.(Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq)(Book Review)
September 9, 2005... Squandered Victory The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq Larry Diamond Times Books, $25, 384 pp. When a final accounting of the U.S. war in Iraq is toted up, we may learn why so many things...

Scene Stealer.(Book Review)
September 9, 2005... Alec Guinness The Authorized Biography Piers Paul Read Simon and Schuster, $35, 624 pp. One can almost feel charitable toward George Lucas--perhaps even forgive him for the sheer tedium of the most recent installment of the...

Into the Light.(Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision)(Book Review)
September 9, 2005... Scattered Shadows A Memoir of Blindness and Vision John Howard Griffin Orbis Books, $18.95, 230 pp. In 1959, a thirty-nine-year-old white Texan who was a Catholic convert contrived to masquerade as a black man by ingesting...

Saintly Ambition.(Augustine: A New Biography)(Book Review)
September 9, 2005... Augustine A New Biography James J. O'Donnell Ecco, $26.95,376 pp. The key to understanding James J. O'Donnell's biography of Augustine is the word "new" in the subtitle. He remarks that Augustine "comes weighed down with the...

Petition to his Holiness, pope benedict XVI to Save Our Sacraments feast of corpus Christi-2005.(Advertisement)
September 9, 2005... Your Holiness, in this dark hour, when the shortage of priests in North America threatens to deprive us of the life-giving nourishment of the Sacraments, we, the supporters of "Save Our Sacraments," respectfully urge you to listen to our...

The dead need us.
September 9, 2005... A little over four months ago, my wife of nearly forty years died. It is the worst thing I have ever experienced; and yet also the most powerful--and in some ways the most beautiful. What could be beautiful about death, this awful and...

The Word of God?(Advertisement)
September 9, 2005... "This is the word of the Lord" That is the liturgical phrase used in Christian churches to mark the end of a reading from the Bible. It is a strange, even a misleading, phrase. Yet Sunday after Sunday it is repeated, reinforcing in the...

Mandatory celibacy.(Letter to the Editor)
September 23, 2005... Your issue on celibacy and the priesthood (August 12) was most interesting, but the two writers who defended celibacy--Rev. Robert Barron and Franz Klein--failed to explain why this precious gift, this "fasting from sex," has to be mandatory....

We want you!(Letter to the Editor)
September 23, 2005... Thank you for your excellent articles on celibacy (August 12). For me as a monk, the question "celibacy or not?" is purely academic. Celibacy is a defining characteristic of the monastic state. Paul Stanosz's article especially caught my...

The role of the priest.(Letter to the Editor)
September 23, 2005... Several years ago I wrote a rave review of a book on Thomas Aquinas by Fr. Robert Barron (Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master). I said it was the best book I had read on Aquinas. My initially favorable impression of his writing, therefore, did not...

Irrational & confounding.(Letter to the Editor)
September 23, 2005... I have great respect for Rev. Robert Barron but I suggest that he get real in regard to celibacy. If there are any people who are "over the top, irrational, confounding to the reasonable people around them," it is the young couples who ask me...

Sacramentally charged.(Letter to the Editor)
September 23, 2005... To anyone steeped in sacramental tradition, Robert Barron's argument "from fittingness" for a celibate priesthood clearly has its appeal: as the Eucharist is "the eschatological act par excellence," the one presiding at this event would be,...

From nun to wife.(Letter to the Editor)
September 23, 2005... Since many of the articles about priestly celibacy dealt with personal experience, I would like to add my own. For about fifteen years, I was a nun, and during those years I tried sincerely to reach out in love to everyone I came in contact...

Really radical.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 23, 2005... Franz Klein asserts of the generation of neoconservative priests: "We want to witness to the world the Good News of salvation, and to do this we must be radical--we must be set apart." That sounds impressive at first hearing, but I wonder if,...

Priest & husband.(Letter to the Editor)
September 23, 2005... I am a married Episcopal priest with an Anglo-Catholic background and piety. I graduated from a high-church seminary, which had a strong quasi-monastic and celibate tradition (though by the time I went there many of the students were married)....

Lay ministers & priests.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 23, 2005... As a layperson who did graduate study in a diocesan seminary, I found Paul Stanosz's observations about young seminarians to be right on point. Though my instructors at the seminary received me warmly, the seminarians did not always make me...

Broken covenant.(Editorial)
September 23, 2005... President George W. Bush has been rightly lambasted for the bumbling way in which he personally reacted to the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as well as for the inept federal response on the ground,...

Public Catholicism: the church, Judge Roberts & the common good.(John G. Roberts Jr.)
September 23, 2005... Catholics are everywhere. John Roberts is likely to become the first Catholic Chief Justice of the Supreme Court since the Civil War, bringing the Court's denominational lineup to four Catholics, two Protestants, two Jews, and a vacancy. The...

Turkey & the EU: how inclusive can Europe afford to be?
September 23, 2005... Though continuity with his predecessor has been the norm so far, Pope Benedict XVI has already diverged from several positions held by John Paul II. One concerns the proposed accession of Turkey to the European Union, a question the EU will...

Conscience: rightly formed & otherwise.
September 23, 2005... I am suspicious enough of the Disney empire to feel skeptical that it will prove an ally in the moral education of my new son. Take Disney's Pinocchio. In this version of the classic Italian children's tale, Jiminy Cricket advises the puppet...

A doctor's dilemma: my patients, my conscience & my faith.
September 23, 2005... I was in my office one morning last April completing a pelvic exam on a sexually active sixteen-year-old girl. I'm a family doctor in a busy private practice. As a Catholic, I have many concerns about teenagers who are sexually active, but I...

No easy gait: 'Broken Flowers' & 'March of the Penguins'.(Screen)(Movie Review)
September 23, 2005... Bill Murray was the first movie comedian since W. C. Fields to make cold contempt hip and attractive. For both performers the world was enemy. Fields squinted at it suspiciously but Murray's gaze never concealed its open contempt. The Murray...

Sex & the City: HBO's 'Rome'.(Television Program Review)
September 23, 2005... They came; they saw; they conquered. They ordered 250 chain-mail tunics from India, and they sent Hollywood actors to boot camp. Yes, I'm talking about those canny strategists at HBO, the cable channel that--to steal a phrase from Julius...

Tolerance & Truth.(The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defense of Political Liberalism)(Book Review)
September 23, 2005... The Politics of Human Frailty A Theological Defense of Political Liberalism Christopher J. Insole University of Notre Dame Press, $30, 208 pp. The title of Christopher J. Insole's audacious book is no lie: The Politics of...

A Tale of Two Cities.(The Hour of the Cat)(Book Review)
September 23, 2005... The Hour of the Cat Peter Quinn The Overlook Press, $25.95, 400 pp. Here in my part of the country, northern Indiana, there once lived a nomadic tribe of ten thousand people. They descended, or so it was thought, from southeastern...

Religion Booknotes.(Let God's Light Shine Forth: The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI)(In the Vineyard of the Lord)(The Rise of Benedict XVI)(Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine)(Book Review)
September 23, 2005... These four books on Benedict XVI, hustled into print just months after the installation of the new pope, are written by four journalists working in Rome (two of them are American, one is Italian, and one is German). They show the...

My city.(New Orleans)
September 23, 2005... I first discovered New Orleans at seventeen, in the summer of 1951. I had been fired from my job with the Smith, Brown, and Root Construction Company (now a subsidiary of Halliburton) after only two weeks of lugging railroad ties between...