Recently added articles from Commonweal:
Speaking of suffering; waxing on bees.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 08, 2009; Pramuk, Christopher ... HISTORY & THE CRUCIFIXION Thank you for Peter Manseau's penetrating critique of Christian theodicies that too facilely appropriate the suffering of others ("Catholics & the Shoah," March 13), and Matthew Boudway's careful rejoinder ("Suffering, Silence & Holy Week," April 10), ...
Bee stuff.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
May 08, 2009; Repohl, Roger F. ... As a beekeeper and candle-maker, I was delighted to read Rita Ferrone's good tidings that the new English translation of the Roman Missal restores the missing bees to the ode to the paschal candle in the Easter Proclamation ("Virgil & the Vigil," April 10). The question Ferrone does not ...
Seeking justice.(From the Editors)(sex abuse laws and the Catholic Church)(Editorial)
May 08, 2009; ... In the homily at his April 15 installation Mass, New York's new Archbishop Timothy Dolan candidly acknowledged the many challenges facing the church, including the priest shortage and the economic crisis. Importantly, he also mentioned the sexual-abuse scandal. The church must ...
The right to refuse: how broad should conscience protections be?(Columnist)(laws about refusal to treat)(Column)
May 08, 2009; Kaveny, Cathleen ... Do health-care providers have a right to refuse to be involved in medical procedures that they believe to be immoral? If so, how broad is that right? These are the questions raised by the eleventh-hour decision of the outgoing Bush administration to enact a federal regulation confirming a ...
Bombs away: Obama's call to eliminate nuclear weapons.(Short Takes)(Barack Obama)
May 08, 2009; Powaski, Ronald E. ... During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised to make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element of his administration's nuclear policy. Now, in his proposed budget for fiscal year 2010, he has taken a significant step in that direction. The ...
Messy love: Jean Vanier's L'Arche.(Globe and Mail's Nation Builder of the Year awardee)
May 08, 2009; Higgins, Michael W. ... The Globe and Mail is the Canadian equivalent of the New York Times. It is a Toronto-based paper (one of four), but it shares the same spot in the national consciousness as the Times, and delights in its own magisterial expanse. Some years ago the Globe and Mail established its Nation ...
To the visible world: on worshiping John Updike.(Articles)(Essay)
May 08, 2009; Cooper, Rand Richards ... I knew that someday I would find myself writing this essay. I just didn't think it would be yet. If you'd put money on which American writer of the postwar generation would be blessed with longevity, proceeding deep into a svelte nonagenarianism while putting forth stories and novels ...
Wind.(Poem)
May 08, 2009; Updike, John ... <Pre> If God has any voice it is the wind. Women hate this seeking of a vacuum, it gets their edges up, they cannot sleep, they think of Boreas impregnating primeval Night, of skirts rudely lifted in funhouses. It is death made loud: nowhereness bellowing, now reedy along ...
Borderline stranded in Nogales.
May 08, 2009; Robinson, Ananda Rose ... Throughout recorded history, people have migrated in search of a better life. They have walked jaw-dropping distances, across ice and desert, mountains and valleys, jungles and plains, hoping to find easier ways to survive. They have gotten into boats and set sail for shores known and ...
Looking for sparks: 'Sin Nombre' & 'Duplicity'.(Screen)(Movie review)
May 08, 2009; Alleva, Richard ... The more movie gangsters change, the more they stay the same. In the 1930s they were Irish (The Public Enemy) and Italian (Little Caesar, Paul Muni's Scarface). Since then, the hoods have become Jewish (Bugsy, Once Upon a Time in America), Cuban (Pacino's Scarface), and African-American ...
Scriptural soap: NBC'S kings.(Media)(Television program review)
May 08, 2009; Wren, Celia ... It's extreme-makeover time for a portion of the Old Testament--and the results are pretty swanky. Kings, a recently launched NBC drama, sets the story of David and Saul in a parallel universe whose lifestyle is not unlike twenty-first-century America's. With its intriguing ...
The miracle worker: 'Irena's Vow'.(Stage)(Theater review)
May 08, 2009; O'Reilly, Mollie Wilson ... When Irene Gut Opdyke, a Polish Catholic, immigrated to the United States in 1949, she was not yet thirty years old. Like so many Europeans who had survived the horrors of the Second World War, she struggled to leave her memories behind her. For decades Opdyke kept quiet about her ...
An Offer You Can Refuse.(Practicing Catholic)(Book review)
May 08, 2009; Baker, Thomas ... Practicing Catholic James Carroll Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28, 400 pp. James Carroll is nothing if not ambitious as a writer, and in Practicing Catholic he has given us at least three books for the price of one. That is an attractive offer during a ...
Where's Ludwig?(The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War)(Book review)
May 08, 2009; Castronovo, David ... The House of Wittgenstein A Family at War Alexander Waugh Dougbleday, $28.95, 352 pp. The mystery, glamour, and romance that surround the name Ludwig Wittgenstein are now part of our intellectual heritage. There were arguably a dozen other ...
The Transfigured World.(Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies)(Book review)
May 08, 2009; Portier, William L. ... Atheist Delusions The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies David Bentley Hart Yale University Press, $28, 253 pp. When St. Peter heard the cock crow early on the morning of the first Good Friday, the synoptic Gospels tell us that he ...
Walking Backward.(Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor)(Book review)
May 08, 2009; Wolfe, Gregory ... Flannery A Life of Flannery O'Connor Brad Gooch Little, Brown, $30, 464 pp. At the beginning of her novel The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O'Connor describes a wild backwoods prophet, Old Tarwater, reading an article about himself written by ...
Foote's feat.(The Last Word)(Horton Foote)
May 08, 2009; Burkhart, Marian ... In play after play, Horton Foote, who died in March at the age of ninety-two, made the quotidian extraordinary. He wrote more than sixty plays, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Young Man from Atlanta. He is perhaps most widely known as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of To Kill a ...
