Commonweal articles from September 2007

Commonweal archives from September 2007

Unprecedented experiment.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 14, 2007... The discussion of homosexuality in your June 15 issue by Eve Tushnet and Luke Timothy Johnson ("Homosexuality & Scripture") has prompted me to say a word on gay adoption. My wife and I have a "natural" child and an adopted child. We both feel...

The responsible choice.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 14, 2007... I was glad to see vegetarianism addressed in your July 13 issue (Bernard G. Prusak, "All We Can Eat?"). Unfortunately, I found the article itself disappointing. Prusak, who eventually rejects vegetarianism, fails to address almost all the...

A biological approach.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 14, 2007... Bernard G. Prusak seems to consider the issue of vegetarianism almost exclusively from an ethical perspective. While it is refreshing to see ethics considered in the choices of daily life, there is also biology to consider, and Prusak seems to...

Correction.(Correction notice)
September 14, 2007... Thank you for Richard Alleva's reviews of Once and La Vie en Rose ("Behind the Music," July 13). As a lover of both Edith Piaf and boxing, I noticed a small mistake in the review. The name of the love of Piaf's life was the boxer Marcel...

'Crisis' averted.(From the Editors)
September 14, 2007... In this age of the Internet and the blogosphere, magazines of all sizes and prejudices are having a hard time surviving. The print era is drawing to a close, or so enthusiasts for the "wired world" keep telling us. Still, it came as a shock to...

After the floods: how nature reacts to our mistakes.(Columnist)
September 14, 2007... The rainbow and God's promise to Noah must be of scant comfort to the thousands in England, hundreds of thousands in North Korea, and millions in India who are living through floods as personally devastating as the one from which Noah was...

Me, not we: what ails our health-care system.(Short Take)
September 14, 2007... I was in a funk not long ago, and a person in a funk sometimes makes bad decisions. Like the night I decided to take in Michael Moore's Sicko to shake some of the horrible thoughts I was having. Very bad idea--like treating food poisoning by...

Sleep walker.(Poem)
September 14, 2007... My father gets out of bed, unlocks three deadbolts on the apartment door and rides the elevator to the street. He wears a pair of cotton pajama pants. His shoes are upstairs in the closet. Upstairs too my mother sleeps beside his...

American Idol: Rome vs. the 'Modernists'.(Articles)(religious reforms)
September 14, 2007... With the advent of a new millennium, what some have called "The American Century" officially came to an end seven years ago. The significance of the United States' rise to world power and, eventually, to lone superpower status, marked as it was...

Good faith: what the new atheists get wrong.
September 14, 2007... Condemnation of religion has become the fashion of the day. Richard Dawkins, Samuel Harris, David Dennett, and, most lately, the elegantly irascible Christopher Hitchens have hit the bestseller lists with screeds against faith. The critics...

Identity crisis: 'The Bourne Ultimatum'.(Screen)(Movie review)
September 14, 2007... Of the cohort of boyish leading actors we've spent the last decade waiting to see turn into men, Matt Damon is the most surprising. For someone blessed with all-American good looks and a brash, winning grin, he can be surprisingly inward,...

What happened at the council?(Books)(Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue; The Church in the Making)(Book review)
September 14, 2007... Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy Paulist Press, $18.95, 304 pp. The Church in the Making Richard R. Gaillardetz Paulist Press, $19.95, 240 pp. The story is told of a teacher in the...

Telling it right.(Handing on the Faith: The Church's Mission and Challenge; Passing on the Faith: Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims)(Book review)
September 14, 2007... Handing on the Faith The Church's Mission and Challenge Edited by Robert P. Imbelli Herder & Herder, $24.95, 240 pp. Passing on the Faith Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims...

Authentically Fake.(Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids)(Book review)
September 14, 2007... Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids A History of One of Florida's Oldest Roadside Attractions Lu Vickers and Sara Dionne University Press of Florida, $34.95, 320 pp. The late Hunter S. Thompson once arrestingly remarked that crack...

The reunion.(The Last Word)(high school reunions)
September 14, 2007... I had an unfashionably good experience at Catholic schools in Minnesota from 1974 to 1985. Contrary to popular myth, not a single nun who taught me was ugly or mean. I got solid academic instruction, but was also encouraged to look within and...

It's more than money.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... Your August 17 editorial ("$660 Million") reflects a narrow and very deficient comprehension of the complete picture in the Los Angeles archdiocese's sexual-abuse settlement. The focus on the amount of the settlement and the notion that it will...

Checks and balances.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... You end your August 17 editorial by saying that healing will never begin without clear acts of penitence by church leaders. True, but I do not think that penitence is the only thing called for. There must also be some structural change, one...

A minor change.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... For the life of me, I cannot understand why there has been such controversy over the pope's recent motu proprio ("The Old Rite Returns," August 17). So the Latin Mass will be more available. This is something to go into high dudgeon over? Is...

A local tradition.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... I find the four views on the Tridentine Mass very helpful. They are all learned, well argued, and judicious. One thing I sorely miss is consideration of the possible impact of the restoration of the so-called Tridentine Mass on the churches of...

Remembering the old rite.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... My first reaction to the return of the Latin Mass was "much ado about nothing." Surely there cannot be many people who really want or insist on the Latin Mass? I am old enough to remember the old Latin Mass and I do not remember a great degree...

Performance, not Mass.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... The articles on the return to the Latin Mass were timely and asked some important questions. They also reminded me of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, who stated that the people need "miracle, mystery, and authority." When you mix a...

Bad math.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... In her article, "A Step Backwards" (August 17), Rita Ferrone writes: "The old lectionary had a one-year cycle of readings. Almost all of the Gospel passages were taken from St. Matthew." This is incorrect: of the fifty-four possible Sunday...

False dichotomy.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... Much as I respect Peter Jeffery's work on the inconsistencies of Liturgiam authenticam, I find his August 17 article, "Widening Our Hearts," to be flawed by false dichotomies. He is clearly trying to avoid caricaturing either version of the...

Solidarity.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... In your July 13 editorial ("Dialogue?"), the editors applauded Daniel Finn's presidential address to the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) that called for dialogue within our ideologically fractured church. The price of such...

Savoring O'Rourke's.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 28, 2007... What a delightful surprise to arrive at The Last Word ("From Grease to Ashes," July 13) by Stephen Aubrey and find a picture of O'Rourke's Diner in Middletown, Connecticut. It was like running into an old friend in a totally unexpected...

One mistake away.(From the Editors)
September 28, 2007... The unjustified and ill-conceived invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a catastrophe, the full consequences of which few dare to think about. Correcting President George W. Bush's errors will take years, if not decades, and will require the...

The bishops & the 2008 election: lessons from Australia.(Columnist)
September 28, 2007... While lecturing in Australia in June, I was overcome by a sense of deja vu. The Australian newspapers were dominated by a bitter controversy between a Catholic prelate and Catholic politicians regarding embryo-destroying stem-cell research. For...

Catholic enough? Religious identity at Notre Dame.(Short Takes)
September 28, 2007... A surprise in my morning e-mail: an article by my friend and colleague, Fr. Wilson Miscamble, CSC, criticizing his own academic department--History, where Miscamble is one of my predecessors as chair--and our own university, Notre Dame, for not...

Separated brethren: homosexuality & the Anglican Communion.(Short Takes)
September 28, 2007... Following a Sunday forum presentation, two angry parishioners informed me they were leaving the Episcopal Church: one because of the election of an openly homosexual man as a bishop, the other because the local bishop had not supported such...

Sex & Christianity: how has the moral landscape changed?(Articles)
September 28, 2007... The generations that have been formed in the cultural revolution of the 1960s are in some respects deeply alienated from a strong traditional model of Christian faith in the West. They are refractory to the sexual disciplines which were part of...

The Tree Says.(Poem)
September 28, 2007... The tree says: "How to love: put down strong roots. Be slow to rise. Study the turn of light before you ramify so that new shoots do not obscure old. Tolerate the flight of birds you welcomed. Deepen your old roots, match thick root to...

Student soldiers: is there room for ROTC on Catholic campuses?(Reserve Officers' Training Corps)
September 28, 2007... Last year some renegade members of the prolife group at John Carroll University, where I teach, placed signs around the quad that caused quite a stir. One of the signs read: "Vote prochoice--signed Satan." The resulting uproar led to a...

Indian Summer.(Poem)
September 28, 2007... At the train station, cigarette butts scatter in the gravel; amber light warms the pavement. I sit in the shade of the terminal; I wait for the train that will take me home. Beyond the tracks, buildings rise swaddled in cloth,...

Overcrowded: '3:10 to Yuma'.(Screen)(Movie review)
September 28, 2007... James Mangold has remade the 1957 semiclassic Western, 3:10 to Yuma, in the same way that Martin Scorsese remade Cape Fear. In both cases, a story told in a modest, taut black-and-white movie has been reupholstered in color and packed with...

Anatomy of a failure.(Books)(The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace)(Book review)
September 28, 2007... The Occupation of Iraq Winning the War, Losing the Peace Ali A. Allawi Yale University Press, $28, 544 pp. Who lost Iraq? This blame game will be the stuff of U.S. electoral politics for the next decade, but for now the...

The chosen frozen.(Books)(The Yiddish Policemen's Union)(Book review)
September 28, 2007... The Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon HarperCollins, $26.95, 432 pp. Michael Chabon is an all-out, full-throttle writer, audaciously ambitious in matters stylistic, thematic, and moral. His early stories and novels--densely...

Local knowledge.(Books)(The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight against AIDS)(Book review)
September 28, 2007... The Invisible Cure Africa, the West, and the Fight against AIDS Helen Epstein Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 352 pp. Recently, Africa has become a continent of great concern to much of the American public, riveting the...

Religion booknotes.(Book review)
September 28, 2007... About forty miles east of where I live is a very large Amish settlement. I always feel sorry for its quiet inhabitants when I see tourists stick cameras in their faces as they come into town to do their shopping. The Amish culture is an exotic...

Cursed by God?(The Last Word)
September 28, 2007... Americans generally think of pregnancy and birth in terms of natural processes that call for a healthy diet, doctor's appointments, ultrasounds, and pain management during labor. But as New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof reported...