Editorials
Contents Volume CVI, Number 23 9 Correspondence 706 Editorials 707 The first volunteer: Eileen Egan 709 Humanitarians amok: Frank Getlein 678 Continental lovers: Abigail McCarthy 712 The...
...He stayed on until his death of heart failure at the age of 63...
...To his acute sense of social justice and charity: When asked by a grieving woman what good she might do for her dead mother's soul, Muhamreed gets straight to the point: "Water...
...foreign, $22...
...Volunteers who joined the movement made no corn21 December 1979:709...
...This theology accounts for that trust, which we share, that the material aspect of life is basically good, something wonderful to be understood and rejoiced in...
...Thou needest not raise thy v o i c e . . . " Secondly, the created world is no passing illusion unconsciously emanating from the Absolute, as in Indic religion, but is the deliberate act of God's will...
...Marie Ponsot has also published a volume, True Minds, in the Pocket Poets series and broadcasts a monthly radio review of poetry...
...We may well wonder this Christmas eve...
...His word is theirs also...
...THE FIRST VOLUNTEER DEATH OF A CATHOLIC WORKER BAr i ~ ANY CAME and went, but Stanley stayed," said Pl the Rev...
...Recall that Jesus, our wisdom, spoke an Aramaic dialect, kin to Muhammed's tongue, and Muslims recognize Jesus as one of their own...
...Taking the clue, therefore, from the Iranian bystander's comment that the current crisis arises at the deepest level out of a soul-sense of cultural violation, we are advised to look deeper than our outrage at the taking of the hostages, deeper than the condemnation we share with Iranians of the Shah's ill-gotten gains and secret police, and deeper still than our similarly shared discomfort with a process of modernization that creates soulless cities like Teheran...
...The birth of Israel's hope in the flesh is thus understood as an ecumenical event...
...Yearly subscriptions, U.S...
...The dream sleeps...
...Stanley Vishnewski, who died at Maryhouse, on East Third Street on November 14, 1979, joined Dorothy Day shortly after the founding of the Catholic Worker movement...
...As in the desert from which this experience of God is sprung, between the Muslim and Allah stands nothing...
...Dig a well for her, and give water to the thirsty...
...Paul says, all nature groans...
...18, 1980...
...Might we even profit from Islam revived...
...To the insider, however, the Lord of all worlds displays qualities not other than Yahweh--Father of Jews and Christians...
...The Iranian ambassador's empty seat at the United Nations Security Council chamber speaks loudly...
...Ironically, on the eve of the feast of the Word made flesh, language appears to have broken down over an unbridgeable chasm...
...He was giving the homily at the Mass of the Resurrection for Stanley Vishnewski of.the Catholic Worker at Nativity Church in New York's lower East Side...
...I CHRISTMAS, ISLAM AND THE AYATOLLAH W IITH BARELY concealed shock and perhaps contempt, a New York Times correspondent in Iran reports a scene of black-shirte=d young men chanting revolutionary slogans while flagellating themselves to the rhythmic beat of cymbals...
...If we go behind his rhetoric to the great-souled tradition he very likely misrepresents--as many of our own spiritual and civil leaders have misrepresented us--is it...
...Poetry: Rosemary Deen, Marie Ponsat Correspondents: Brian Wicker (Great Britain), Desmond Fisher (Dublin), Alain Woodrow (Paris) Staff: Karen F. Silva, Harriette Balsky, Jacqueline Reeves Advertising Manager: Ruth E. Taylor Publisher: Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, A Review of Public Affairs, Literature and the Arts, is published biweekly, except monthly Christmas-New Year's and July and August, by Commonweal Publishing Co., 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...possible we can hear, this Advent-time, a call back to our own authentic spiritual roots...
...Over that extended period, volunteers had appeared, served, and gone on to other things, to be replaced in an ever-renewing stream of new blood...
...He was seventeen years old...
...POETRY EDITORS For no less than sixteen years, John Fandel has served as poetry editor at Commonweal...
...Special two-year rate: $35...
...For our attention this Advent season is diverted by events in Iran which seemingly threaten to stop or turn back the clock--to something that at first hearing sounds elemental, primitive, frightening...
...And to great-souled forgiveness: Persecuted and humiliated for years by licentious and tribally warring Meccan authorities, Muhammed refused revenge when he finally took that city...
...He seems to have in mind, not crude economic exploitation by the West, but the more subtle, psychologically disorienting, cultural hegemony that often goes silently with rapid, Westernfinanced, modernization...
...Deen has previously reviewed for Commonweal, Ms...
...We are urged, then, to uncover a common language at the level of those theological notions of God, creation, and the human which tradition-minded Muslims feel have been trampled, and which they seek to re-animate in a distinctively Islamic constitu21 December 1979:707tion...
...God is great...
...The current Iranian wave of anti-intellectualism, if that is what it is, reflects but one strain of Islam, a fundamentalistic resistance to science In keeping with its usual holiday practice, Commonweal is skipping one issue during the Christmas-New Year's season...
...Stanley Vishnewski, R.oI.P...
...The Ayatollah Khorneini is not Islam's best representative...
...According to Pentecostal symbolism, Jesus was born to heal the Babel of tongues which divide this world...
...Wisdom," an ancient adage goes, "has alighted on three things: the brains of the Franks, the hands of the Chinese, and the tongues of the Arabs...
...A bystander explains that "third world countries must regain their own cultures as the first way of fighting imperialism...
...Can we learn to speakits language...
...but it does not represent that other, intellectually creative, strain without which the Western Renaissance and seventeenthcentury Scientific Revolution are virtually unthinkable...
...For Christians, too, the meaning of Incarnation is too great...
...The magazine's readers profited from the scrupulous judgment he used in sifting through the many poems submitted here...
...He came and went in our office with the same quiet grace that marked the poems he most liked to publish...
...It is an assignment he has always fulfilled with extraordinary care and attention...
...The new editors will be Rosemary Deen and Marie Ponsot, who both teach at Queens College of the City University of New York and have completed a book together on the practice and teaching of writing...
...Telephone: (212) MU 3-2042...
...Earlier this year, John proposed to pass the editorship on to others, and with this issue that change takes place...
...The Koran (vi, 12) expresses it this way: "Is He not closer than the vein of thy neck...
...foreign, $39...
...Outsiders typically misjudge Allah as a pitiless tyrant playing with submissive adherents without regard for their sacrifice, like pawns on a chessboard...
...As in Judaism and Christianity, matter matters to GOd as well as ourselves...
...724 Verse: LeRoy Smith, Jr., Anne Porter, James Sullivan, Jodn Walsh, Jock Henderson 726 Books Cannibals and Missionaries: Margaret Wimsatt 727 Faith & Sexism: Mary Perkins Ryan 727 Secret Rendezvous: Irving Malin 729 Sideshow: Raymond A. Schroth 729 The Community of the Beloved Disciple: Eugene H. Maly 730 Index to Volume CVI: 731 Staff Editor: James O'Gara Executive Editor: Peter Steinfels Assistant Editors: :Daniel M. Murtaugh, David Toolan Editorial Assistant: Anne Robertson Columnists: John 'Garvey, Frank Getlein, Abigail McCarthy, Thomas Powers Movies: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...Upon this religious, rather than merely social, principle is built Islam's fundamentally democratic spirit and its principled stand against the social injustice of the Shah's regime...
...And at this elemental and profound level of soul-talk, there remains an extraordinary opportunity for re-opening the conversation...
...Finally, in the Islamic creed, Allah's supreme accomplishment lies in the creation of human beings and their potential to consciously live and speak His word...
...A member of Shem's race, a son of Abraham, Jesse's shoot, Jesus spoke in parables of the Kingdom, a word of boundless love, a word somewhere stuck in our throats, as yet unspoken and inactive in this world...
...God is great...
...Until we have swallowed the big aborning troth here, not simply in unconscious body and blood, but awakened conseiously, our brothers and sisters in this distressed world will not know the Messiah's Kingdom has come--a second time, to fill time...
...So much our adventing Eucharistic rite tells us...
...Single copy, $1...
...Contents Volume CVI, Number 23 9 Correspondence 706 Editorials 707 The first volunteer: Eileen Egan 709 Humanitarians amok: Frank Getlein 678 Continental lovers: Abigail McCarthy 712 The Catholic revival revisited: Dolores Elise Br[en 681 Bostonians & Kennedys: romance, recrimination, & leadership: Dennis Hale 716 The boat people on our shores: Peter Kovler 72 l Screen: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...In honor of his birth~ it pays us to look beneath the surface of recent events for some promise of reconciliation-- at lea.st in the long run...
...For finally in this provisional in-between-time we dwell in, Eucharist is not so different from the Prophet's sense of God's "real presence" in the vein of the neck--that is, unconsciously in the blood, not yet in awakened word and deed...
...No less than the West, Islam proclaims the ultimate value of the individual--again in contrast to Indic and Far Eastern religions for which individuality has no permanent value in the ultimate scheme of things...
...This is authentic Islam...
...and Canada, $20...
...Is such speech and chanting the empty clang of religiosity covering the eruption of stone-cold hearts and ungovernable passion...
...Of this secret hidden since the foundation of the universe, both Judaism and Islam speak in fragmentary and varied ways, but finally they cannot swallow it as Christians will...
...We, especially Christians, are as yet too smallhearted, to, unimaginative, to body-forth into our domestic let alone foreign policies the greatness of the God of Jesus--and so, in history, that God appears rather as victim than as one in charge...
...The next issue will be dated Jan...
...We might remember that God's cosmic wisdom, His Word which has created and hallowed the material world, chose to sow earthly soil by taking flesh...
...Largely unwitring, we also swallow, under elements of bread and wine, God's wish to hallow earth and body more than we can fathom...
...cries the muezzin five times daily...
...To speak to the Muslim world, we would do better to appeal to the example of the Prophet...
...Will this fierce revival of purist Islam spread, and if so, how do we understand it...
...Geoffrey Gneuss, O.P...
...In hearing the elemental call of Islam, we might remember our God and ourselves...
...In triumph, he accepted, in place of the talonic law, his enemies' renunciation of former idolatry and conversion to Allah...
...Ponsot forPoetry...
...For once, the political crisis seems linked to the perilous theological illiteracy of our diplomats and technocrats, and theirs as well...
...Does a. way out of our linguistic confusion lie here...
...If American arms and money are now indicted as co-conspirators in the Shah's inju[tice and callous modernization, we need not appeal for hostage life exclusively in terms of international law...
...Then the bystander ominously mentions all of Africa in this connection, and refers to the need to purge Iran's intellectual elites of those contaminated by Western ideas...
...As a consequence, our scientific orientation has little to fear in the long run from a fulsome retrieval of Islamic tradition...
...Christians may well heed that summons, and recall that until the eighteenth century our European ancestors blessed themselves with one hundred and fifty holidays a year lest they Commonweal: 708forget themselves in dogged work...
...10016...
...Behind the passions of the moment, and after they have subsided, Islam's wise tongue appeals to our souls...
...For this, coming birth, as St...
...and technology that is no stranger in our own history...
...It's too big a truth, stumbling block and scandal, in the face of all those manifest dualisms that battling wits empirically experience between each other, in themselves, and with the Lord of worlds...
...And it was upon this confidence that Islam, in its earlier history, produced that exh~aordinary display of mathematical, scientific, and philosophical creativity which was to inform the reawakening consciousness of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries...
...not a few aspiring poets profited from his acute advice and gentle encouragement...
...As Ameer Ali put it in The Spirit of islam (London: Christophers, 1923, p. 18), Allah is 9 the Holy, the Peaceful, the Faithful, the Guardian over His servants, the Shelterer of the orphan, the Guide of the erring, the Deliverer from every affliction, the Friend of the bereaved, the Consoler of the afflicted, in His hand is good, and He is the generous Lord, the Gracious, the Hearer, the Near-at-Hand, the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Very-forgiving, whose love for man is more tender than that of the mother-bird for her young...
...It was only a small recognition of the devotion he had for his task that poems published in Commonweal were awarded first place in the Catholic Press Association competition for the last two years--in fact, winning two of the fkst three places each year...
...He never married...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 23
