Correspondence
WRIGHT, ANNE K. & EWY, CHARLES R. & KRAMER, MARILYN & ALLAIN, JAY & HAGGERTY, ROBERT J. & SPRINKLING, SONDRA & POWERS, WILLIAM F. & LEBACQZ, KAREN & CAVIGLIA, REV. CAESAR J. & REPOHL, ROGER & CHAPPELL, ANNETTE & CIPARICK, JOSEPH D. & Pleasants, Julian
CORRESPONDENCE Women as objects El Cajon, Calif. To the Editors: David O'Brien's thought-provoking article, "Sex on Catholic Campuses" [March 24], addresses the charge of "male dominated" social...
...Milhaven asks for attention to "commonplace, vulgar, precious human eros" and rightly notes that some feminist theologians have begun this task...
...JAY ALLAIN...
...O'Malley is certainly entitled to his opinion, but when it flies in the face of what the scientific community holds to be true, without a solid line of argument, his statements don't hold water...
...But even the struggle to recapture the rightful place of eros can be misleading...
...I agree entirely with O'Malley's assessment of high school science and the ridiculous labs (I have been fighting the system for thirty years...
...Too much has been made of Heisen-berg's uncertainty principle...
...Milhaven points us toward the wider arena: eros means life-force, the push toward bonding, the desire for union which at root seeks the divine...
...Yet Robert Spaeth was only responding in kind to David O'Brien's idea of love talk as a kind of counseling about highly subjective and emotional situations...
...Maureen O'Sullivan highly regards Betty Friedan as a "well-known thinker...
...It promises to place the training of the mind in the context of life as a disciple of Jesus...
...Watch any cat stretch and conform to the caress of a hand, plying her body to get the full benefit of every inch of touch, and see what a good thing is sheer physical pleasure...
...Paul Covino deplores the reluctance of Catholic colleges to discuss Catholic sexual ethics with students, including those who are "sexually active...
...There are few topics that require more careful study and thought for a Christian than love, sex, and marriage in today's America...
...Our cultural myth that humans are essentially sexual beings would have to be dethroned and the understanding that we are essentially relational beings accepted in its place...
...We fall back into the mistake that Milhaven laments-assuming that there is nothing good about the bodily per se, but that it is good only if it serves some otherpurpose...
...I had remembered the unusual phrase for so long because it captured my own position of choice...
...is incapable of becoming totalitarian should be confronted...
...In her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, she put down motherhood and touted careers for women...
...In recent years, Ms...
...Besides, has Dean Spaeth recently checked out the quality of most marriage preparation in the dioceses around this country...
...These, too, are gifts from God...
...Although we have relationships on many levels of knowing, a significant ongoing love relationship requires that each understand the innermost emotional needs of the other....But because this knowing exposes us to the risk of emotional damage if the other is unloving, we each have unconscious barriers to emotional intimacy...
...In your article, you have made tenderness newsworthy...
...In nearly every academic discipline there are frequent occasions when a sufficiently courageous professor could ask, "What is the loving (or unloving) consequence of what we have learned...
...This means convincing students that self-fulfillment lies in the development of our potential for giving and receiving relationships, recognizing that our relational capability depends on feelings of trust, security, self-confidence, and self-worth...
...What is wrong with sheerphysical joy...
...What is wrong with sensuous indulgence, with "voluptuous fullness...
...A beginning would be to recall his point that Soviet politics are liberalizing as ours drift toward groupthink...
...Female promiscuity results in male students' low respect for co-eds which manifests in its worst form in date rape, the Number 1 sexual-social problem across the nation's campuses...
...Grammar of Assent...
...motherhood, creative work, friendship are others...
...Two mistakes are so common in Christian thinking that we never see how badly we are stubbing our toes...
...REV...
...biological fatherhood is dependent upon a wife's sexual fidelity...
...It is the mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings, not any technical apparatus of words and propositions...
...Scientists do believe before they know...
...ANNETTE CHAPPELL Faith & science New York, N.Y...
...For me, and probably many women, and yes, even some men, you have brought hope and joy in an era of overwhelmingly depressing news-news of all that is violent, fearsome, and evil in our world...
...It would be an objective question about the consequences of human knowledge and human actions for human good...
...Women have been writing them for a long time, but you men have finally understood, and you have felt, and, most grace-filled of all, you have communicated that you understood and felt...
...Not until we have the courage to ask this question will we begin to address embodiment and know what it is to have an incarnated God...
...I'll bet if he'd asked them an essay question-"Discuss the paradox of faith," for instance-he would have gotten thoughtful, complex, knowledgeable answers...
...What a surprise to see the term used again, and reflected on so skillfully...
...Thank God men and women filled with that message are roaming our campuses today...
...He correctly identified the primary task of a Catholic college as the training of intellect...
...This is another opportunity Catholic universities could provide, but for the tyranny of narrowly specialized professional competence...
...Carlin identifies "lust for the opposite sex" as an issue less determinative of ability to hold public office than stupidity: "however destructive it may be in other respects, (it) does not rank high on the list of impediments" for public office...
...He admits the difference between faith and knowledge: he knows his room is painted white, he does not believe that it is...
...And indeed, in their enthusiasm they need neither faith nor hope, only love of what they have discovered...
...The scientist fulfills Paul's definition of faith ("The substance of things hoped for") much more than many religious "believers" who don't "hope for" anything but just believe what they are told...
...chemistry the relations of electrons and protons, atoms and molecules...
...ROBERT J. HAGGERTY Educating parents Granger, Ind...
...Up to a point, the analogy between science and religion can be very insightful...
...This power of judging and concluding, when in its perfection, I call the Illative Sense...
...Physics discusses the relations of matter and energy, quarks and quasars...
...The theories concern how species evolved (not how life began...
...No wonder they have trouble saying anything about a God who came in the form of a man and in most respects acted like a woman...
...Presumably, Carlin feels that when a man uses a woman as an object for his lust, this is merely another bad habit, like misusing liquor...
...JULIAN PLEASANTS Spoon-sleeping Woodstock, N.Y...
...For it can make us think that sexual joy, sexual pleasure, is acceptable only if it serves the underlying drive for divine union...
...To the Editors: I found Robert L. Spaeth's response to the O'Brien article [March 24] quite interesting...
...That is not what evolution is all about...
...Male sexual promiscuity is more than a bad habit, especially when it is not recognized by others as a major character flaw, reflecting the man's inherent disrespect for women as objects...
...To the Editors: Giles Milhaven's "Sleeping Like Spoons" [April 7] triggered recollection of a paragraph in Martha Weinman Lear's 1980 bookHeartsounds...
...Promiscuity is a perfectly respectable straightforward word and is a pejorative only to the fainthearted...
...What are the sources of hope we might draw upon...
...Not only is this opinion stupid (which would count as two strikes against Carlin if he were rating himself fit for public office), it reflects the very discrimination which O'Brien tried to articulate...
...Father O'Malley implies in his article that there are no "scientific proofs," only "hypotheses...
...WILLIAM F. POWERS Bodily pleasures Berkeley, Calif...
...I find it disturbing that Commonweal would print an article that is scientifically naive...
...If these areas of human experience are not subjected to the lights of intellect and grace, we should hardly be surprised if students in Catholic colleges are hardly distinguishable from their counterparts in secular colleges...
...To the Editors: William O'Malley, S.J., in his article, "A Leap in the Light" [March 10], made some wonderful points about what true faith is...
...To the Editors: David O'Brien's thought-provoking article, "Sex on Catholic Campuses" [March 24], addresses the charge of "male dominated" social life...
...In those long distant days before the reductionists began to dissect spiritual functions into their anatomical parts, that blessed John Henry Newman hit upon the same theme but with a greater sense of poetry...
...If the TV crews were there on Easter morn or on Ascension day, what would they record...
...But his comparisons between religious faith and science are somewhat off base...
...It doesn't say that "electrons don't exist," it only says (and some dispute this) that we can't know everything about them...
...The only good reason Spaeth can give for excluding sexual relationships is that they're not what the faculty know how to teach...
...O'Sullivan's statement that one family income is no longer sufficient is specious, smacks of elitism, and comes across as shaky rationalization for full-time employment of wives...
...Overcoming these barriers can be difficult, sometimes impossible, requiring considerable trust and security...
...What Dean Spaeth misses, however, is that the Catholic college is special because it offers more than the secular college...
...Scientists "see through a glass darkly" until the day they are actually presented with solid evidence that what they hoped for really exists...
...O'Brien confesses he is unsure of what that phrase means, but submits that it may involve "subtle forms of male dominance such as failure to confront in any public way men's assumptions about how relationships are to be initiated and conducted...
...Let the students go elsewhere and get their perspectives on love from parents and pastors and parish discussion groups bringing their personal experiences to the reading of Madame Bovary and the Gospel of St...
...I am extremely grateful to you for thinking it is important to read writers who are women, and that you find something as "ordinary" as "spoon-sleeping" to be a critical component of your life...
...Nearly every academic discipline has something to say about human and sexual relationships and their consequences...
...To the Editors: The counterpoising of Robert Spaeth's "Educators Aren't Parents" with Mary Brabeck's "Merging Spheres" [March 24] brought out the basic tensions in David O'Brien's "Sex (How About Love...
...One example of a not-so-subtle male attitude regarding social relationships between the sexes can be found between the pages of Commonweal-in David Carlin's column on John Tower's womanizing ["Fit for the Cabinet," March 10...
...They are not as watery as they were fifteen years ago, but they hardly compare with the electrifying truth proposed by Michael Garvey in his response to O'Brien: the "scary fidelity of Jesus, the unique and dangerous ingredient in a Christian marriage...
...ROGER REPOHL Limits of true-false Towson, Md...
...They believed in protons until they had hard evidence for their existence...
...Only then might the media move aside and let us reclaim our planet...
...This reasoning makes perfect sense if one sees a woman as an object like alcohol, not necessarily worthy of respect as another human...
...To the Editors: Political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams exposed the grisly depths to which media packaging of our political process has precipitated the "demobilization" of the electorate ["A Nation of Couch Potatoes," March 10...
...Then I hope that O'Malley will give us another contribution...
...CAESAR J. CAVIGLIA Setting back religion Van Nuys, Calif...
...To the Editors: I couldn't believe my eyes when I read ["A Leap in the Light," March 10] that William O'Malley, S.J., gave his high school religion class the statements "Faith is a blind leap in the dark" and "Morality changes from culture to culture" as True-False questions on a test...
...CHARLES R. EWY Christians who marry Washington, D.C...
...Both of them have accepted the exclusion of love from the field of intellectual, objective knowledge...
...To the Editors: If it took William J. . O'Malley four closely reasoned pages to explain what he expected his students to-know about faith ["A Leap in the Light," March 10] why on earth did he ask them a true-false question about it...
...A four spoons performance...
...Spaeth implies that universities shouldn't talk about relationships...
...Carlin probably does not realize how his opinion presumes the relative low worth of women, and relationships with women, which seem to be held by many men...
...JOSEPH D. CIPARICK Politics of hope Northhampton, Mass...
...on Catholic Campuses," March 24...
...They then may be ready to explore love as a giving and receiving action that is successful when it nourishes these feelings in each...
...Or are they good in and of themselves...
...Now they know and no longer believe...
...The success of the women's movement and the liberated culture in promoting female promiscuity under a plethora of euphemisms is evident (Continued on page 349) (Continued from page 322) in today's co-ed who views herself as virtuous and chaste if she defers sex with a man until their fourth date...
...biology the relations of organelles, cells, organs, organisms, and communities...
...The question could be more effectively posed and answered if professors from various disciplines got together to learn from one another how to state it...
...Yes, it is crucial that you, as males, wrote those words...
...I'm afraid that most scientists would say that evolution is not a myth, a theory, but a fact...
...If Spaeth is right that there is nothing intellectual or objective that can be said about love, then there is no point in having Catholic universities, for God is faithful love...
...May thousands read your words and take hope...
...I can just see some poor young Kierkegaard or Margaret Mead not getting into college because their grade point average suffered due to their religion grade...
...JAY ALLAIN our future...
...To the Editors: To Giles Milhaven and his friend, Fergal, congratulations for the article "Sleeping Like Spoons" [April 7...
...Mary Brabeck explains that, too...
...John...
...Perhaps some day we will rediscover Newman...
...Only then might the media move aside and let us reclaim our planet...
...Studies show that when a man is seriously interested in a woman, he wants to see her as chaste...
...To the Editors: It is always a delight to read a contribution from William J. O'Malley, S.J...
...So too, the scientist knows that the neutrinos exist, he does not believe in them...
...But relationships are the only things that universities ever talk about...
...I wouldn't be a science teacher if there were final answers...
...They also know that premarital female chastity is preferable to promiscuity as preparation for marital fidelity...
...To the Editors: Bravo...
...Young men know that when they marry, they could spend most of their working life supporting a child not their own...
...ANNE K. WRIGHT Faith in marriage Lake Tomahawk, Wis...
...Hardly...
...Covino and other educators won't begin to make progress on this problem until they purge themselves of euphemistic buzzwords and phrases for promiscuity...
...When the electron was discovered and observed in the cathode ray tube in the late-nineteenth century, since matter was neutral, there had to be a proton...
...He has evidence, sensible, visible signs of the existence of the massless neutral little critter...
...SONDRA SPRINKLING A surprise performance Setauket, N.Y...
...To the Editors: The corrosive effect on higher education of feminism, the sexual revolution, and libertarian philosophy of the post-1960 era is reflected in David J. O'Brien's piece ["Sex (How AboutLove...
...And I wax eloquent that there are no final answers in science...
...A Leap in the Light," March 10...
...Friedan apparently has had a change of heart about motherhood ...at a time when women who followed her earlier advice have had a change of life...
...Cameras could record a mutation, however...
...Carlin characterizes Mr...
...In fact, it remains an ideology capable of subverting rational dialogue and capturing elections...
...KAREN LEBACQZ Pacific School of Religion Leaping in the light Henderson, Nev...
...O'Brien's piece and the responding letters reflect the impressive strength of feminists and libertarians even on Catholic campuses, which one would expect to be strongholds of traditional values...
...Tower's social relationship with women as "womanizing," and unfortunately, his opinion is illustrative of one of the most damaging attitudes men have about women...
...O'Brien is correct in believing that male students' chauvinist attitude toward female students has to do with sex and that it includes sexual harassment, but he doesn't pinpoint the sexual revolution's best kept secret as the basis for their attitude...
...But he minimized the ominous lesson of the '88 presidential race: McCarthyism is not dead...
...Far too much has been expected of all our schools, with the result that they trivialize the importance of training the mind through well-meant but often fruitless efforts spent in values clarification, consumer rights, etc...
...This kind of thinking has led to the "evolution is only a theory" school of thought, or even the statement which Father O' Malley made in an earlier article that "evolution is a myth...
...The first is thinking that eros means sex...
...The taste of good wine, the smell of a rose, the feel of warm sun on bare skin-must these things be "justified" by being made part of the human agenda for bonding/union...
...to John Giles Milhaven ["Sleeping Like Spoons," April 7] for raising the question of eros and embodiment as goods of human life...
...Mary Brabeck, on the other hand, explains how this exclusion came about through the masculinizing of colleges and universities, and the equating of intellectual activities with male proclivities...
...Robert L. Spaeth's comments are supportive of value-free education, which is rapidly falling from public favor for good reason...
...Men and women must recognize the negative effects these degrading attitudes based on sex stereotypes can have on attempts to establish mutually respectful and healthy relationships between the sexes...
...MARILYN KRAMER Feminism corrodes Cockeysville, Md...
...If that's the kind of test O'Malley gives his students, he's set high school religion pedagogy back thirty years...
...Lear uses the phrase "like two spoons" to refer to her marital sleeping position...
...Hence, sexual pleasure and other forms of passion have to be "justified" in Christian tradition by being "subordinated" to love, procreation, union...
...The myth that the U.S...
...To the Editors: There is a way Catholic colleges could effectively restore faith in marriage, dethrone sex, and install love as the reference point in relationships ["Sex (How About Love...
...Also, if politics is indeed the ability, in the author's words, "to see the present in the light of the possible," we desperately need a collective renewal in our willingness to express both what our present experience is and what we imagine for our future...
...But there is a difference between the hypotheses of science and the established theories...
...Friedan appears also to have been a slow thinker...
...Sex is one locus of eros, but it is not the only one...
...If professors don't say it, that's because of prejudice against topics identified with the feminine, and, by definition, non-intellectual proclivities...
...As a biologist, I could outline a course on what evolutionary biology has to say about human relationships, especially sexual relationships...
...You have made a stupendous breakthrough...
...No religious "myth" can be compared to what O'Malley and others claim are "scientific myths...
...on Catholic Campuses," March 24] and its responses...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 11
