Commonweal articles from September 2008

Commonweal archives from September 2008

Suffering with Christ.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 12, 2008... Thank you for John Wilkins's moving piece on suffering ("Hope Without Illusion," August 15). Suffering has always been a mystery to me. Indeed, it has been a difficult stumbling block--particularly the suffering of children. I used to beg God...

Still alive.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 12, 2008... I appreciated Fr. Andrew Greeley's article "Signs of Life" (August 15). Much of what he writes of his experiences in Tucson and Chicago is reflected in my own parish, St. Joseph's Church in Odenton, Maryland. "Catholics in good standing"...

Voting against Obama.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 12, 2008... I have one small but important correction to make regarding Gerald J. Beyer's article, "Yes You Can" (June 20). Responding to my article "Two Cheers for John McCain" (May 9), Beyer writes that I have fallen into the "fallacy" of assuming that...

Fresh air.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 12, 2008... Three cheers for Commonweal! David R. Carlin's "Two Cheers for John McCain" (May 9) called readers to take another look at traditional Catholic morality vis-a-vis the U.S. political environment. Some letter writers found his conclusions...

Experts only?(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
September 12, 2008... In Luke Timothy Johnson's review of What the Gospels Meant, What Paul Meant, and What Jesus Meant, he seems to say that Garry Wills simply did not know enough to do the job of writing about the meaning of Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels ("What...

Into the home stretch.(From the Editors)(Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and John McCain)
September 12, 2008... Barack Obama's speech accepting his party's nomination for president before eighty thousand adoring Democrats in Denver's Mile High Stadium was one of the more accomplished political performances in recent memory. Coming as it did on the...

Bad evidence: not only is torture immoral, it doesn't work.(Columnists)
September 12, 2008... Puritans in Salem, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1692 must have viewed the threat of witchcraft in much the same way Americans today view the prospect of another attack by Al Qaeda. Witches were, so to speak, supernatural terrorists-They...

Standing tall: what Michelle means.(Columnists)(Michelle Obama)
September 12, 2008... Anyone interested in making the acquaintance of the real Michelle Obama has done so by now. They've heard her story and (literally) seen where she's coming from on the big screen behind her at the Democratic convention. Yet even after her...

Anglican disunion: what is Rowan Williams trying to hold together?(Short Takes)(Global Anglican Future Conference)
September 12, 2008... During the weeks leading up to the recently concluded Lambeth Conference, an approximately decennial meeting of Anglican primates, the rector of St. Edmund's Episcopal Church, San Marino, California, to which I belong, saw fit to insert in the...

Dropping out: the rewards of homeschooling.(Short Takes)
September 12, 2008... A dozen years ago, I wrote my last column for Commonweal, "A Feminist Homemaker Confesses: Taking the Irony out of Housework." Though someone else gave it the clever title, the sentiment lay close to my heart. At the time I was struggling with...

Russia rising: The Georgian crisis & U.S. Foreign Policy.(Issues 2008)(United States)
September 12, 2008... The ongoing crisis in Georgia has catapulted relations with Russia to a top place on the foreign-policy agenda. It has presented the United States--and the West more generally--with important policy decisions, and it has brought to a head a...

The rules of engagement: Communion in a scientific age.(Articles)
September 12, 2008... Charles Taylor's remarkable book A Secular Age achieves something quite different from what other writers on secularization have accomplished. Most have focused on decline as the essence of secularism--either the removal of religion from sphere...

An editor without Borders: Noel Copin of 'La Croix'.(Articles)(In memoriam)
September 12, 2008... On March 4, 2007, French TV news ended with the announcement of the death of Noel Copin, retired editor of La Croix, the French Catholic daily newspaper, which has a circulation of a hundred thousand. Moving tributes were issued by government...

At longwood gardens.(Poem)
September 12, 2008... Here there is one sycamore propped. Propped with timbers as big, bigger than the tree's limbs. Such polished, weathered crutches. It is this caring that touches. One can imagine the design on graph paper. At the pleasure garden,...

All grown up: 'The Dark Knight'.(Screen)(Movie review)
September 12, 2008... Before last summer the public seemed indifferent to fictional films about the "war on terror" and its putative extension, the Iraq invasion. Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Stop-Loss, the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and several others all...

Bleak house: the marriage of Bette and Boo'.(Stage)(Christopher Durang)(Theater review)
September 12, 2008... It seems safe to say that playwright Christopher Durang is no fan of the Catholic Church. But where would his plays be without it? Who but a cradle Catholic schooled before Vatican II could marry the sublime and the ridiculous as gleefully as...

Greed 101.(The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash)(Book review)
September 12, 2008... The Trillion Dollar Meltdown Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash Charles R. Morris PublicAffairs Books, $22.95, 224 pp. If you're like most Americans, you probably don't understand why the economy is such a...

Waking up.(Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power and Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats)(Book review)
September 12, 2008... Daydream Believers How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power Fred Kaplan Wiley, $25.95, 256 pp. Heads in the Sand How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats Matthew...

A Bishop speaks.(Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus)(Book review)
September 12, 2008... Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus Bishop Geoffrey Robinson Foreword by Donald Cozzens Liturgical Press, $24.95, 320 pp. Bishop Geoffrey Robinson's new book represents a signal...

What lasts.(Deep Rhythm and the Riddle of Eternal Life)(Book review)
September 12, 2008... Deep Rhythm and the Riddle of Eternal Life John S. Dunne University of Notre Dame Press, $25, 160 pp. Edward Schillebeeckx, the renowned Dominican theologian, once asked, "What is a human life of at most between seventy and ninety...

Distrusteeism.(The Last Word)(abuse of trusteeism by catholic priests)
September 12, 2008... Toward the end of his splendid new history of Catholics in the United States (The Faithful, Harvard University Press), James M. O'Toole writes that the church of the twenty-first century is not likely to include broader lay participation in...

Lost shepherds.(Bishops & politics, Shakespeare's religion, conversion)(Letter to the editor)
September 26, 2008... I agree with much of what Fr. Andrew Greeley writes in "Signs of Life" (August 15), except for his depiction of "fallen-away Catholics." He lists many reasons why Catholics leave the church, but he ignores the continued abuse of power by popes...

Not just about 'Roe'.(Bishops & politics, Shakespeare's religion, conversion)(Letter to the editor)
September 26, 2008... I bet that some high-profile bishops will skate around their own Faithful Citizenship document--written to help Catholics decide how to vote--and all but endorse the Republican ticket based on speculation by Democrats about the beginnings of...

The extreme middle.(Bishops & politics, Shakespeare's religion, conversion)(Letter to the editor)
September 26, 2008... Grace Tiffany's description of the Church of England in Shakespeare's time as a moderate via media makes no sense ("Via Media," Letters, August 15). Though that church did occupy a middle ground in the religion of the time between radical...

Welcome to the dance.(Bishops & politics, Shakespeare's religion, conversion)(Letter to the editor)
September 26, 2008... I agree that, for a convert like David Deavel ("The Gift of Incompetence," August 15), the details of Catholic ritual can be daunting. As a cradle Catholic nearing the end of my seventh decade, my advice is just to join the dance! The rhythms...

Pointing fingers.(Bishops & politics, Shakespeare's religion, conversion)(Letter to the editor)
September 26, 2008... William Pfaff's column on malfeasance at General Motors ("General Malfeasance," August 15) is just another futile exercise in the blame game. Is it the unions or management of Japanese automakers that has brought this icon of American...

Bishops & the election.(From the Editors)
September 26, 2008... It is hard to know what is more exasperating, the ill-informed statements of Catholic prochoice politicians about the church's teaching on abortion, or the response of certain bishops, whose criticism of politicians sometimes seems designed to...

Outrageous death: resurrection or resignation?(Columnist)
September 26, 2008... Philip Larkin's poem "Aubade" is one of my favorites. It is a formally perfect composition, and its vision of death is chilling. The poem is bitter, dark, and thoroughly unsentimental in its view of death. This is the first of its five stanzas:...

But it works: liberals & welfare reform.(Issues 2008)
September 26, 2008... In his essay criticizing welfare reform ("Unfinished Business," Commonweal, February 29), Thomas Massaro says that assistance to low-income single mothers "has vanished from our collective radar." Massaro is upset that so little money is used...

Libertarian heresy: the fundamentalism of free-market theology.(Short Take)
September 26, 2008... Catholic moral theology has long been enriched by fruitful dialogue with secular moral arguments. Many of the church fathers were deeply shaped by the Stoic view of moral order, which some of them learned even before they encountered Christian...

Daring.(Poem)
September 26, 2008... You must believe how daring I am on a high trapeze in front of a crowd, for only yesterday I was a mole in the earth groping my way through the world just five yards from my home in search of another planet, which I was told by the...

A higher education: can the humanities survive?(Articles)(Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life)(Book review)
September 26, 2008... Reading Anthony Kronman's Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale University Press, $17, 320 pp.) reminded me of some advice I once got from a colleague. We were discussing a candidate for a...

The making of a bishop: lessons from Ghana.
September 26, 2008... No one seemed more surprised than Fr. Dominic at the letter Pope Benedict XVI sent to my Brooklyn parish last December. The pope asked the fifty-four-year-old Ghanaian priest, who had served at St. Columba Church for nearly four years while...

Some like it hot; 'Elegy' & 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona'.(Screen)(Movie review)
September 26, 2008... David Kepesh, the hero of Elegy, Isabel Coixet's adaptation of Philip Roth's The Dying Animal, is on a long sabbatical from intimacy. A professor and minor literary star in New York, he's estranged from his son, the only child of a marriage...

The First Cold Warrior?(Pius XII, the Holocaust and the Cold War? )(Book review)
September 26, 2008... Pius XII, the Holocaust and the Cold War? Michael Phayer Indiana University Press, $29.95, 333 pp. After all the scrutiny directed at Pius XII in the past decade, two things might justify another book about his actions during and...

Bleack beauty.(Reflections on His Creativity)(Book review)
September 26, 2008... Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher Reflections on His Creativity Irving Singer The MIT Press, $24.95, 240 pp. It was with some misgiving that I began Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher, the first new book about the...

Religion booknotes.(Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents, Four Ways of Holiness for the Universal Church: Drawn from the Monastic Tradition, The Teachings of Modern Orthodox Christianity on Law, Politics, and Human Nature and Disciples of All Nations Pillars of World Christianity )(Book review)
September 26, 2008... According to the standard argument of Protestant historiography, the sixteenth-century struggle to provide a vernacular Bible, with the corresponding doctrine that each person can come to a knowledge of faith sola scriptura, was a pivotal...

A show of hands.(The Last Word)
September 26, 2008... We numbered no more than fifteen participants--including me, the instructor--for the sophomore history seminar, and over the course of the semester, we came to know one another rather well. Almost too well. Our distinct personalities all...