Correspondence
Correspondence Negativity neutralized South Bend, Ind. To the Editors: I have to thank Mary Gordon for neutralizing the negative attitudes about Mary which twelve years of Catholic education had...
...instead, the bourgeois lays claim to religion," Metz wrote (p...
...That question is critically important today because of the contrast between our middle-class way of life in the West and oppressed conditions of the poor people of the world...
...George Comstock, the hero of Orwell's novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, impregnates his lover, and after learning that she is carrying his baby, engages his lover in a conversation regarding what they should do...
...To the Editors: I have to thank Mary Gordon for neutralizing the negative attitudes about Mary which twelve years of Catholic education had given me [Jan...
...but certainly pro-abortionists have been especially guilty of brutalizing language to cover up the fact that abortion is the killing of unborn babies...
...6], Father James T. Burtchaell provided a thoughtful critique of Metz's proposal for a new and political form of Christianity...
...They did not mean any longer a mere abstract disaster, they meant a bud of flesh...
...The consumer goods and many of the services we enjoy depend on economic oppression, political totalitarianism, and en-(Continued on page 126) Correspondence (Continued from page 100) couragement or at least toleration of violence in accidents and crime...
...Religion does net lay claim to the bourgeois...
...In this way he questions the integrity of bourgeois religion...
...To the Editors: Having no Russophone at hand, I presume to suggest that Eric Ter-zuolo lapsed into an inaccurate cliche in translating Lenin's "ktokogo" [Dec...
...To preach nonviolence to the poor while we, the preachers, benefit indirectly from violence seems subversive to the Gospel...
...JEANNE KRIER Terminating language Arlington Heights, 111...
...but after she begins talking about money for the abortion, Comstock suddenly begins to understand that what they have been discussing is the killing of their unborn child: "For the first time he grasped, with the only kind of knowledge that matters, what they were really talking about...
...CHARLES E. COLE Director, Office of Interpretation Board of Higher Education and Ministry The United Methodist Church...
...The development of new forms of religion that are less bourgeois, such as "basic communities," might show us how to live decently and safely without being such a burden to others...
...LEON LUKASZEWSKI The amazing Metz Nashville, Tenn...
...This, I think, is the point Metz makes when he writes that "the Christian is expected to turn the other cheek when he is struck on the right cheek, but he is not allowed to encourage someone else who is struck on the right cheek to turn the other cheek as well...
...What is bourgeois religion, for example...
...As a Protestant I am not qualified to evaluate Father Burtchaell's defense of the pope...
...Burtchaell rightly attacks Metz and liberation theologians for identifying an earthly kingdom with a transcendent reality (a criticism given elsewhere in the same issue of Commonweal in Richard Fox's review of Christian Realism and Liberation Theology, by Dennis P. McCann...
...In the book reviewed he was painting with a broad brush and did not define his terms very carefully...
...HAVEN BRADFORD GOW Tyrannical predicate Walnut Creek, Ca...
...Mary Gordon ends her article, "Coming to Terms with Mary," by suggesting that it is through the labor, craft, and genius manifested in "human works" of poetry, painting, sculpture and music that we can find a surer way to the Mother of God...
...Bourgeois religion does depend on violence...
...Comstock's lover proposes the "termination of pregnancy" as the "solution...
...She speaks from an articulate, informed, and sensitive perspective...
...Let's add language and literature to that list - Mary Gordon's...
...To the Editors: In his review of Johann Metz's Emergent Church[No...
...Orwell also had something significant to say about abortion and the abuse of language...
...To the Editors: John Garvey's Jan...
...At the same time we must ask ourselves if we have done any better...
...but I am concerned that he did not stress Metz's contribution to the criticism of bourgeois religion itself...
...Father Burtchaell took umbrage at this view, but I think he would agree that we are rather vulnerable when we advocate a position we are not willing to assume ourselves...
...It was the squalid detail of the [money] that brought it home" People who are for and against abortion have abused and manipulated language to gain support for their views...
...15 essay on how pro-abortionists abuse language reminded me of the British novelist and social critic George Orwell, who warned us three decades ago about the abuse and decline of the English language and the degenerative effects such a decline would have on public discussion of important issues and on the moral and political climate of a nation...
...Don't most Western Christians identify with a way of life that could be characterized as middle-class, and isn't this as "worldly" as the revolutionary societies for which many in the Third World are fighting...
...I hope then that Metz's central thrust is not lost in a concern for preserving the present system of institutionalized Christianity...
...Metz may not have all the answers, but at least he is asking the right questions...
...So we may want to correct some of Metz's perceptions out of our own experience and American theologies, but it is a disservice to him and to the interests of the church (meaning the Christian church in general) to depreciate the serious questions he asks...
...The words 'a baby' took on a new significance...
...I think it means,.as the context indicates, not "who does what to whom," but "who does it to whom": Though subject and object may be transposed, the tyrannical predicate remains the same...
...He attacks parish ministry as too conservative, but we in the United States have seen that the "electronic church" is more pathological than the parish...
...The role model of the passive, unquestioning, demure saint may have been functional on some other levels of church history, but it has certainly diminished the potential for generations of women...
...I appreciate the integrity and dignity with which she proposed innocence, grief and glory as qualities we can emulate in Mary...
Vol. 109 • February 1982 • No. 4
