Correspondence
Correspondence Pennies from Reagan Boston To the Editors: Too many explanations of this administration's rush toward a full-scale depression focus on President Reagan's stubborn attachment to...
...Jan...
...Take comfort in knowing that a heart full of joy and gladness will banish sadness, hardship, and strife...
...Is this "derision...
...PATRICIA M. LEIPER Prisoner of conscience Ashland, Ohio To the Editors: On March 23, 1981, a young Russian woman, Mziya Ardzhovanidze, was sentenced to two years in a Georgian S.S.R...
...GORDON C. ZAHN Professor Emeritus of Sociology University of Massachusetts-Boston The liberal club Eureka, Mont...
...Please urge your readers to write to the editor of Zarya Vostoka, asking him to investigate the case of Mziya Ardzhovanidze more carefully...
...Anyone not American is constantly bemused by the powerful religious mythology that surfaces most vividly in presidents' speeches...
...That mythology has done powerful things for the American people and for others in the past, but a new sense of pride in our own traditions and cultures is sweeping the rest of us...
...Miss Ardzhovanidze has not advocated or done anything violent...
...To the Editors: After reading in your periodical, two highly complimentary reviews of Owen Chadwick's book, The Popes and European Revolution [Oxford, $84], how I envy reviewers who are fortunate to receive copies of such books, without cost, in return for their opinions...
...Being history-minded and familiar with Owen Chadwick's earlier works, it is frustrating to learn of a new book which neither my personal budget nor our parish library can afford...
...Leary's back-handed slap at the World Without War Council's work to develop other-than-military means to blunt the curve of Soviet power and bring them into agreement with us on reversing the arms race is also unfair...
...To the Editors: Congratulations on your memorial article on Archbishop Romeso [Mar...
...own life of less value than his rightly-formed conscience...
...Those of us who live, work, and struggle with low-income groups, mostly Latin, in the "inner city" are as moved by testimonials from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and now Guatemala as are many Americans who have been touched by the film, Missing, and the true story of a father (played superbly by Jack Lemmon) who goes to Chile to search for his son who was wrongly murdered in the 1973 coup...
...He would remind, them that every cloud has its silver lining and all they have to do is wait until the sun comes shining through...
...12] contained many interesting items including an ultimate irony: Sir Thomas More being invoked to shame anyone who would allow religion to share in the formation of his conscience - and by an Associate Professor of History at that...
...20] and the readers' responses [Feb...
...I do believe that today's activists are repeating many of the errors of past, failed peace efforts, and that this activism, for so long as it effectively focuses only on American responsibility for the arms race, will be a divisive force in a Catholic community quite able to understand the need for a peace strategy capable of addressing the problem of Soviet militarism...
...29], was helpful, even challenging for anyone not part of the American evangelical tradition...
...They are individuals who have neither committed nor advocated any act of violence but who are imprisoned, undergoing torture, perhaps facing execution because of their race, political views, religion, or ideas...
...It seemed reasonable to emphasize (Continued on page 254) Correspondence (Continued from page 226) how vigorously they distance themselves from the present anti-nuclear weapons sentiment...
...Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for its humanitarian work...
...REV...
...ANNE LONERGAN A book of my own Sacramento, Calif...
...Peace is too important a goal for disputing the right road to it...
...NEIL HURLEY, S.J...
...Saint) Thomas be...
...Remember, somewhere the sun is shining so the right thing to do is let it shine for you...
...SSR, Gruzinskyaya SSR...
...And no matter how tough things get, keep on smiling cause when you're smiling the whole world smiles with you...
...Just grab your coat and hat and, leaving your worries on the doorstep, cross over to the sunny side of the street where the gold dust at your feet will make you rich as Rockefeller...
...Where would Sir (a.k.a...
...MARY ELLEN LEARY A wider destiny Port Burwell, Ontario To the Editors: The article by Max Stack-house, "Religious Right: New...
...I think sociology has a better answer...
...Correspondence Pennies from Reagan Boston To the Editors: Too many explanations of this administration's rush toward a full-scale depression focus on President Reagan's stubborn attachment to bizarre economic theories...
...G. Tbilisi, Zarya Vostoka Redactoru...
...The elaborate structure of "initiatives" WWWC is fashioning will serve as routes for some...
...Our organization of Amnesty International is a worldwide volunteer group of workers for the humane treatment and freedom of prisoners of conscience...
...That a nation with the size and influence of the United States should continue with a naive sense of its destiny under God - which never includes the same rhetoric for any other country - can only be tragic for our common future which demands a respect for the plurality of visions and a new interdependence...
...In this, they differ from the majority in the peace advocacy roster...
...The Council's office has sheltered as interns a long parade of idealistic young peace-seekers, has aided peace training in Catholic schools, and enticed business leaders to widen their horizons...
...In fact, the public library may not have it either considering the reduction in funds available these past few years...
...William Shannon and Peter Steinfels should know that no one, no matter how impeccable his credentials from Selma through El Salvador, is allowed even auxiliary membership in the liberal club unless he is indignantly and unreservedly pro-abortion...
...That work, developed for over twenty years, has grown into the Council's "American Initiatives Project," which has drawn support from an extraordinarily wide group of advisors that now includes Walter Laqueur, Paul Seabury, Louis Sohn, Roger Fisher, and Michael Walzer...
...REV...
...Since he and I share roughly the same generational background (he is a few years older, but I was a precocious child), I think I can detect the basic themes of his present policies in the songs he is likely humming as he shaves or whistling while he works...
...ALLEN VILD Bronx, N.Y...
...All that is necessary is for them to follow his example as master of the one-liners and learn to live and laugh at it all...
...She has been imprisoned for the nonviolent expression of her religious convictions and she has been adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience...
...The issue it did not address was the problem of the relationship between the classical evangelical impetus and the sense of the divine mission, nature, etc., of the United States...
...If you have lost your job and are having trouble making both ends meet, don't be afraid of the big, bad wolf...
...Readers wanting to make their own judgments may obtain my essays from the World Without War Council-Midwest, 67 E. Madison St., Chicago, IL 60603...
...To the Editors: Mary Ellen Leary has done your readers, and me a serious disservice in her article "Nuclear Freeze" [Jan...
...Seattle, Wash...
...Two phrases were excised from a 3200-word manuscript to illustrate this specious charge...
...bishops is patently false...
...Every road is needed...
...But I felt it important to indicate how aloof they stand from the passion for survival that is trying to burst through in this "weapons freeze" clamor, an elemental and unsophisticated human drive that keeps surging stronger week by week and state by state, a phenomenon in the reach for peace which may have an impact on history...
...This is the question that went begging in Stackhouse's article: "Can the evangelical tradition - mainline, pietistic, fundamentalist, or Catholic- be converted from being narrowly American to a sense of destiny that includes all the rest of us as equal partners in the journey...
...Special Session on Disarmament this summer, and for use in other forums...
...Derision" did not seem too blunt a description for the impatience I discovered WWWC exhibits with this movement as sheer, unreasoned response to fear, different from their own ratiocinations...
...Readers wishing a full prospectus on the Project may obtain it from the Chicago address above...
...Don't they know that life is just a bowl of cherries, much too mysterious for them to be so serious...
...act like melancholy babies who don't realize that ail their fears are foolish fancies maybe...
...THOMAS FENLON Deriding the freeze...
...Otherwise, they will make him melancholy too...
...Amnesty International has helped secure improved conditions for thousands around the world...
...The Project is developing a package of proposals that would constitute a feasible program of arms reduction initiatives for the 2nd U.N...
...Her claim that I have "derided" the current wave of peace activism among U.S...
...Our "South Bronx Committee for Justice in Central America" held a religious service on March 24, the second anniversary of the bishop's assassination, at a parish in the South Bronx...
...corrective labor colony, for allegedly distributing material that called for complete freedom of religion and advocated stopping of the teaching of atheism in the Russian schools...
...To the Editors: Your abortion issue [Nov...
...This hardly is the kind of fence-sitting and thumb-twiddling that Leary imputes to the Council...
...It is understandable that we Americans would more readily identify with a case closer to our ethnic and class sympathies but Gospel reflection will help us to discern the "Real Presence" of Him who identified with all the persecuted and poor...
...I am sure he finds it difficult to keep his sunny side up and hide the side that gets blue when his critics - some of them even Republicans...
...Right...
...The real key to his social philosophy may lie in the lasting influence of the pop culture of his youth, especially its music...
...I suspect that I know him better than our history professor and I haven't the slightest doubt: pro-life, precisely and paradoxically because he held his...
...GEORGE WEIGEL Scholar-in-Residence World With War Council of Greater Seattle The author replies: My reference to the World Without War Council and my effort to distinguish its search for international peace from the current "nuclear weapons freeze" movement central to my article stemmed from a long acquaintance with their aspirations, respect for the goals pursued by their leader, Robert Pickus, whom I know, and recognition that many Catholics get the Council's viewpoint via George Weigel's writings...
...As an exercise in the virtue of patience, perhaps eventually there will be a paperback edition during my lifetime...
Vol. 109 • April 1982 • No. 8
