Commonweal back issues from September 1994:
Picking a fight. (Vatican's response to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development) (Editorial)
Sep 09, 1994 ... For many long months the Vatican and the United States have been sparring over the International Conference on Population and Development meeting in Cairo this month. Given the world's looming quandaries over development and population, their quarrel has struck many people as a ludicrous ...
Politics on parade. (Attleboro, Massachusetts) (Column)
Sep 09, 1994; ... For longer than I've known him, my friend Jim has aspired to run for Congress. He met his wife, my college friend Lina, on the campaign trails almost a decade ago, and kept involved in Democratic party political circles while he worked as an advocate for Oxfam. It's been good for me to ...
Complexities of community. (Washington D.C.'s Western Presbyterian Church sues to keep its homeless feeding program) (Column)
Sep 09, 1994; ... The biblical mandate to feed the hungry sounds so simple. Yet watching the clash between residents of Foggy Bottom and the newly relocated Western Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., belies such simplicity. In May 1994, one month after the opening of the new church and its breakfast ...
Pointing the way. (religious faith and miracles) (Column)
Sep 09, 1994; ... There is a common assumption among modem, secular people that in ancient times people were more credulous than they are now - hence the belief in miracles: We know better than to believe in them today. Ancients could believe, for example, in a virgin birth because they knew less than we ...
Ushering in the age of the laity. (Cover Story)
Sep 09, 1994; ... I've never identified myself as a Catholic layman. Just a Catholic. What interests me is the koinonia, the commonality that we all share as Catholics. Never, I must confess, have I given much thought to lay-clerical distinctions. I recognize that these distinctions are real - especially ...
Shotputters and discus throwers. (poem)
Sep 09, 1994; ... And if a person does not care to transfer those terms that he learned from lower and less worthy things to those sublime entities ... Saint Augustine Cut down to size by distance, always consigned for everybody's safety to outer fields far from hurdlers, sprinters, ...
Treasures on earth: Armenian illuminated manuscripts. (traveling exhibit)
Sep 09, 1994; ... Thematically, there are many ways to approach "Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Illuminated Manuscripts," which appeared through early August at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and is now on view at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. And each of them brings us to a better ...
The X-Files.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Let us now praise the Fox Network. TV, as its most Cromwellian critics never tire to tell us, is debased, popular entertainment out to make the fastest possible buck by pandering to the most vulgar possible mass tastes. The same charge of whoredom has been brought, at various times, ...
Traffic jam on the spiritual superhighway.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Recently, I had a lively conversation with a young, bright, confident theology student, the sort of student I might expect one day to explain the mystery of the Trinity after having demanded and been granted an interview with all three Persons. When I mentioned a popular contemporary ...
The Road Less Traveled.
Sep 09, 1994; ... M. Scott Peck Though not without its own precedents (such as the works of Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Victor Frank]), M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled (Simon and Schuster, 1978) was the first and is still the most read among the present-day best sellers. Some of its appeal comes from the ...
A World Waiting to be Born.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Whereas in his first book Peck stood outside of religion while singing its praises, in his more recent works (A World Waiting to Be Born, Bantam Books, 1993; Further Along the Road Less Traveled, Simon and Schuster. 1993) he speaks as a Christian. He testifies to his own experience of ...
Further Along the Road Less Traveled.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Whereas in his first book Peck stood outside of religion while singing its praises, in his more recent works (A World Waiting to Be Born, Bantam Books, 1993; Further Along the Road Less Traveled, Simon and Schuster. 1993) he speaks as a Christian. He testifies to his own experience of ...
A Return to Love.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Marianne Williamson In A Return to Love (HarperCollins, 1992), Marianne Williamson offers her reflections on A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1975), a three-volume spiritual workbook alleged to have been channeled through a Jewish psychiatrist, Helen Schucman, directly ...
Care of the Soul.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Thomas Moore Thomas Moore is the author of Care of the Soul (HarperCollins, 1992) and SoulMates (HarperCollins, 1994). Moore combines spiritual guidance with an exploration of myth and tradition. Before becoming a therapist, Moore lived in a Catholic religious order for twelve years. He ...
SoulMates.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Thomas Moore Thomas Moore is the author of Care of the Soul (HarperCollins, 1992) and SoulMates (HarperCollins, 1994). Moore combines spiritual guidance with an exploration of myth and tradition. Before becoming a therapist, Moore lived in a Catholic religious order for twelve years. He ...
Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth.
Sep 09, 1994; ... In his most recent book, Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth (Bantam, 1992), Bradshaw blends his work on the inner child and family dynamics with a broader reflection on spirituality and the meaning of human relationships. He acknowledges the strong influence of both Peck and ...
Joshua: A Parable for Today.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Joseph Girzone In 1986, Joseph Girzone retired from the active Catholic priesthood on the advice of his physician. Girzone, a priest for many years, had been warned that he was heading for a stroke. Perhaps Girzone's symptoms were stress-related: he had already begun to articulate his ...
Never Alone: A Personal Way to God.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Girzone gives a more direct statement of his views in Never Alone: A Personal Way to God (Doubleday, 1994). Here he defines spirituality as a "mystical friendship with Jesus" requiring that "we open ourselves to God, and show a willingness to follow his grace in our lives." Girzone depicts ...
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
Sep 09, 1994; ... The term "same-sex union" used in the title of this book is a translation of a Greek phrase (adelphopoiia) which if translated literally would be rendered "making into a brother" or "adopting as a brother." The term is used in medieval Christian manuscripts written in Greek and Slavonic to ...
Banished Children of Eve.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Irish history, like the history of the Jewish people, embraces diaspora, exile, suffering, and a vision of the promised land. In his remarkable first novel, Peter Quinn, chief speechwriter for Time Warner, brings a new and formidable talent to the chronicling of Irish wanderings and their ...
A Way in the World.
Sep 09, 1994; ... Fiction and autobiography have never been entirely separate genres, and in his latest book V. S. Naipaul walks that perilous line more closely than he ever has before. A Way in the World is less a novel than a grand, fictionalized meditation on Naipaul's colonial heritage and his life as a ...
It's not fair. (unequal distribution of wealth in the U.S.) (Editorial)
Sep 23, 1994 ... The American economy has been uniquely successful in providing a decent and rising standard of living for its citizens. In the "boom years" following World War II, Americans enjoyed an unprecedented prosperity; economic productivity doubled in twenty-five years. So did living standards ....
A southern pastor. (Monsignior Joseph B. Gremillion) (Obituary)
Sep 23, 1994; ... The public career of Msgr. Joseph B. Gremillion, who died August 9 at the University of Notre Dame, was a microcosm of an extraordinary era in church history. A native of tiny Moreauville, Louisiana, he became in time an internationally respected pioneer of Catholic social ministry. ...
Following Salinas. (Ernesto Zedillo wins 1994 Mexican Presidential elections) (Column)
Sep 23, 1994; ... Unless the Virgin of Guadalupe intervenes to prevent it, Mexico's new and more diverse Congress will declare Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, candidate of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the coutry's next president. That action will confirm Zedillo's robust showing ...
Rescuing the future: a chance for the Bosnian students. (immigration effort) (Column)
Sep 23, 1994; ... For me, what is happening now in Bosnia brings to mind memories of a time--fifty-four years ago--when my parents and I waited in Vienna for relatives in the United States to rescue us from the Nazis. Because there was no way for Jews to earn a living, we relied on American soup kitchens ...
Your money or your lifestyle: privatizing the prison system. (Column)
Sep 23, 1994; ... As the crime bill swung into its second round this summer, vacationers with whom I was sharing Cape Cod tended to grow nostalgic about the relatively crime-free times of their youth. I, too, thought fondly of the days when we put the key on the ledge over the front door--if we locked the ...
It's the culture, stupid; the irony of Clinton's success. (Column)
Sep 23, 1994; ... The irony of Bill Clinton's situation is that if he succeeds in doing the job he got elected to do, there is a real likelihood he will be thrown out of office. Before explaining what I mean, I should confess that one of my abiding prejudices is that in accounting for great ...
Science vs. religion (I): some tough questions. (Cover Story)
Sep 23, 1994; ... It was a moment of consequence. Galileo Galilei, seventy-years-old, blind and feeble, knelt on the marble floor of a Roman palace before assembled princes of the church and renounced his life work, affirming, against the evidence of reason and his own senses, that the Earth was ...
Science vs. religion (II): some possible answers. (Cover Story)
Sep 23, 1994; ... Chet Raymo demands a reply. I have sympathy for his predicament and have argued toward conclusions similar to his own more than once, but his treatment of the disputed questions runs the risk of unwittingly perpetuating error. First, Raymo laments the general conservatism of the ...
Forrest Gump.
Sep 23, 1994; ... A feather wafts in the breeze at the start of Forrest Gump and comes to rest on the dirty sneaker of a man sitting on a bus stop bench. Forrest, a slightly retarded man in his late thirties, picks it up and places it in his favorite book, Curious George. Later, he will lose the feather ...
The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.
Sep 23, 1994; ... In her inaugural address as the president at Duke University, Nan Keohane confessed that it was only after she had agreed to become Duke's new president that she discovered Duke's motto is Eruditio et Religio. She observed that she was initially made uneasy by this since the motto has an ...
Public Religions in the Modern World.
Sep 23, 1994 ... Perhaps only once in a decade is a book published in the sociology of religion that brings about a fundamental rejection or revision of revered theoretical paradigms. Thomas Luckmann's The Invisible Religion did that in the 1960s by rejecting Emile Durkheim's thesis that all societies ...
The End of the Hunt.
Sep 23, 1994; ... Near the beginning of Thomas Flanagan's The End of the Hunt, a novel of the Irish Troubles of 1919-1922, there is a brilliantly constructed scene in which the principal female character, Janice Nugent, witnesses the summary execution of a British collaborator by the IRA. It is brilliant in ...
Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age.
Sep 23, 1994; ... This book confronts a situation well known within the Lonergan movement: On the one hand, the brilliant contributions to twentieth-century thought of the late Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan could ground "the new age envisioned in the Christian Scriptures." On the other hand, the ...
The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age.
Sep 23, 1994; ... One of the sadder spectacles of our time is the growth of a victimization industry. Beginning with the initial discussions to build a Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., groups representing the victims of Nazi conquest demanded that they be included in any memorial. Even the ...
Riders to the Dawn: From Holocaust to Hope.
Sep 23, 1994; ... I am not quite sure how to characterize Friedlander's book. It is, in one sense, a broad-brushed survey of reactions to the Nazi extermination campaign against the Jews and, at the same time, a kind of terminus a quo for those who wish to honor the fact of that terrible event and yet not ...
Christ of the 21st Century.(Brief Article)
Sep 23, 1994; ... We are now, Cousins thinks, on the cusp of the second axial period, a time not just of individuated consciousness but of cosmic consciousness and a corresponding convergence of spiritual striving characterized by a unity in diversity. If this all sounds somewhat familiar it is probably ...
Hearts on Fire: The Stories of the Maryknoll Sisters.
Sep 23, 1994; ... The Maryknoll foundress, Mother Mary Joseph (born Mollie Rogers), was an energetic Smith graduate who shaped and guided her fledgling community from an ancillary group whose members basically worked as servant/secretaries for the Maryknoll priests into an order that sent women, first to ...
Cardinal Hume and the Changing Face of English Catholicism.
Sep 23, 1994; ... Stanford's book on Cardinal Hume has two purposes, as the title indicates. First, he wants to describe the episcopal life of Basil Hume and, second, he wishes to do that against the larger historical background of the history of the Catholic church in England after the restoration of the ...
Lighten Up, Mr. Dostoevsky. (mock reviews of classic novels) (reprint of column originally published April 26, 1963) (Column)
Sep 23, 1994; ... The great critic Sainte-Beuve held, I believe, a low opinion of Flaubert, Balzac, and Stendhal, his three most gifted contemporaries. A ridiculous mistake for anyone to make about three such famous men: and yet I sometimes wonder whether masterpieces really are so easy to spot--supposing ...