Commonweal back issues from May 1997:
CORRESPONDENCE.
May 09, 1997 ... And the same to you Note: This letter accompanied a one-year subscription renewal. Sandra Smith manages Commonweal's circulation and signs our renewal/expiration reminders. Dear Sandra and friends, We do indeed live in interesting times. Like a space ...
WE, THE PEOPLE--OF GOD.(a constitution for the Catholic Church)
May 09, 1997; ... The church needs a constitution What do you think, an interviewer asked the noted theologian Charles Davis, "is the greatest challenge facing the church at the present time?" Davis was a peritus at Vatican II but, on becoming disillusioned over the church's lack of commitment to ...
LIBERTY INTERESTS.(the right to die argued)
May 09, 1997; ... They do not include suicide Until Oregon amended its constitution in 1994, all fifty states prohibited physician-assisted suicide, either expressly or implicitly but unambiguously in the criminal sanctions for homicide. Two of the most publicized cases before the Supreme Court ...
A ZAIRIAN JOURNEY.
May 09, 1997; ... Life under Mobutu, thief of all thieves Watching the tumultuous events in Central Africa in recent years, I've found it hard to square the ongoing agony with my memory of Rwanda, which I visited in 1982, while backpacking my way across the continent following a postcollege year ...
FROM NORA'S HOUSE TO OURS.
May 09, 1997; ... `A Doll's House' & `Stonewall Jackson's House' An armful of Christmas presents launches Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (Belasco Theatre) on its perfect dramatic arc. During the course of that trajectory, the early domestic coziness turns itself inside out. The ...
IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY.(Star Wars' history)
May 09, 1997; ... Lucas's Star Wars' This year's first Big Cultural Event began twenty years ago. I'm talking, of course, about the release of the Star Wars trilogy, re-released earlier this year to an astonishing box-office reception. When the first of the films appeared in 1977, it ...
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.(Critical Essay)
May 09, 1997; ... Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Daniel Goldhagen Vintage Paperback, $16, 634 pp. James Scott of Yale set the tone of the early ecstatic reviews of Daniel Goldhagen's controversial study, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the ...
The Sleeping Lifeguard.(Poem)
May 09, 1997; ... <Pre>He dreams of windows that flutteropen into eddies of sunlightand fillets of spume. I cameround on the twentieth lapand he lay perfectly asleepas the waves slammed againstthe world's cool belly. Hestirred in ...
Aber wozu dann dieses komplizierte Ding?(Poem)
May 09, 1997; ... --Wittgenstein <Pre>"But what then isthe point of thecomplicated thing?"I have been givena stranger nerveand tendonsthat carrysweeps of terrorthrough meto a glandwhere the fool godsmade me quarryto the heart's ...
Apollo on the Bechstein.(Poem)
May 09, 1997; ... <Pre>This oval magnanimity lieson the Bechstein, all curves,caught, held static asthe rubble of rings round Saturn.Now, you see, Brancusicarved it out of the meshes Ihave glimpsed in the barksof some trees and in lead.Yet it is liquid as grass ...
Reality and Dreams.(Review)
May 09, 1997; ... Reality and Dreams Muriel Spark Houghton Mifflin, $22,160 pp. Muriel Spark, as well as being an extremely good novelist, is a conspicuously difficult one to review. This is partly because she is so impressively "crafty"--technically accomplished. Her ideas, themes, and even ...
Human Croquet.(Review)
May 09, 1997; ... Human Croquet Kate Atkinson Picador USA, $24,351 pp. Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a comic novel bubbling with ebullient language, won the 1995 Whitbread Prize in England and critical praise on both sides of the Atlantic. Her new novel, Human Croquet, wraps ...
Dr. America.(Review)
May 09, 1997; ... Dr. America The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-61 James T. Fisher University of Massachusetts Press, $29.95, 293 pp. I am perhaps uniquely ill-qualified to review Dr. America, for I know the author, but not the subject. Knowing the author is a matter of pleasurable coincidence: ...
A Measure of My Days.(Review)
May 09, 1997; ... A Measure of My Days The Journal of a Country Doctor David Loxterkamp, M.D. University Press of New England, $24.95, 320 pp. At the ungodly hour of 4:30 A.M., David Loxterkamp rises from his bed, feeds the cats, prepares the coffee, flips on his laptop computer and, to the ...
MOY MOY SEALS THE BARGAIN.(adoption in India)(Brief Article)
May 09, 1997; ... Adoption in India is still a very strange concept for most people. The most positive response I get from strangers who learn that our third child is adopted is surprise. Incredulity is more common, with a vague desire to warn me of the near-certain calamities awaiting us as she grows ...
Slow burn. (tobacco industry)(Editorial)
May 23, 1997 ... America's tobacco giants ($45 billion in sales last year) hit a major impasse last month. After years of tobacco's denials that smoking harms the public health, a federal appeals court concurred with the Federal Drug Administration that tobacco is an addictive drug subject to FDA regulation ....
Re: James Carroll: the Church & the Holocaust.(Column)
May 23, 1997; ... James Carroll is a National Book Award winner, the author of nine novels, and a regular columnist for the Boston Globe. His record of antiwar activities, status as a laicized priest, and his sharp sense of regret over the failure of church reform have made him a public spokesman for a kind ...
Honest differences: when Communion impedes communion. (Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians)(Column)
May 23, 1997; ... Not long ago Patriarch Bartholomeos of Constantinople invited the Roman Catholic church to join the World Council of Churches on the occasion of the WCC's fiftieth anniversary. Although Catholics have worked since Vatican II with WCC commissions, the Catholic church itself does not belong to ...
Donohue's crusade: tilting at the wrong windmill. (Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties head William A. Donohue)(Column)
May 23, 1997; ... One of the most entertaining characters on the current American Catholic scene is William A. Donohue, who heads the semiparanoid organization named The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties.Nature has endowed Mr. Donohue with a very sensitive nose, capable of sniffing ...
Blair wins with style: report from Britain. (Prime Minister Tony Blair)
May 23, 1997; ... Polling Day was Thursday, May 1. That evening my wife and I were sitting in an Indian restaurant across the road from the local Labour party headquarters. Through a window we watched the candidate, for whom we had voted earlier in the day, emerge with a party worker and set off jogging down ...
Father & son, God & country. (author James Carroll)(Interview)(Cover Story)
May 23, 1997; ... An interview with James CarrollJoseph and James Carroll were casualties of the Vietnam War - a father and a son who, like many of their respective generations, were torn apart by the battles that raged at home, forever divided in their clash of loyalties. In his haunting memoir, An ...
Catholics & colonialism: the church's failure in Rwanda.
May 23, 1997; ... On April 6,1994, two ground-to-air missiles struck the jet carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi. All on board were killed. Within hours, a killing rampage erupted in Rwanda that, over the next three months, would leave between half a million and ...
Sling Blade.
May 23, 1997; ... My review of Sling Blade is late because at first it didn't seem worthwhile reviewing an unresisting imbecility. But the movie has proved to be not only a resisting but a triumphant imbecility: great reviews from the best critics, enduring box office, Oscar nominations and awards. So .... ...
Revelations on display: 'The Glory of Byzantium' at the Met.(Metropolitan Museum, New York, New York)
May 23, 1997; ... The 350 works in "The Glory of Byzantium" (at the Metropolitan Museum in New York through July 6) are like the tesserae of a mosaic; whether they form a coherent and affecting image depends on where one stands to look at them.The people I know who have spent time in what was once ...
John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity.
May 23, 1997; ... One of the many blessings of my childhood was our family's friendship with the late Hubert van Zeller, the English Benedictine monk and theologian who wrote magnificent and widely read books about prayer and the life of the spirit. The great, blazoned moment of Father van Zeller's ...
What It Means to Be a Libertarian.
May 23, 1997; ... In this breezy, engaging manifesto, Charles Murray reveals himself to be a regular boy scout, brimming over with can-do optimism. He wants "greater individual fulfillment, more vital communities, a richer culture." He celebrates the very "stuff of life" defined as "being engaged with those ...
Radical Son: A Journey Through Our Times.
May 23, 1997; ... When David Horowitz was a child, he and other children of Communist party members went to Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, short for "Workers' Children's Camp," where they held ritual bonfires to burn comic books considered "imperialistic" and "anti-Communist" by the camp's directors. Today he is president ...
The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp.
May 23, 1997; ... Any large-scale organization charged with a purpose it successfully carries out ought to be subject to a sociological analysis, yet no one before Wolfgang Sofsky has ever tried to write the sociology of the concentration camp. It is not hard to understand why. Pick any term from the ...
HTTP:\\WWW.BEEN_THERE.DONE_THAT. (Catholic chat room accessible on the Internet)(Column)
May 23, 1997; ... In a small comer of the cyber space galaxy, on cyber ship America Online, under keyword "Catholic," lies the Catholic Chat Room. Clicking my mouse to the station, I find myself in a cyber room populated by anywhere from twenty to forty minds. I ask myself: Is this room a triumph of ...