Editorials
I IIIIIII !1! Contents Volume CXI, Number 8 Correspondence 226 Editorials 227 Sistine resurrection: Gerald O'Collins 228 All is grace: David Tracy 230 The big chill: Joseph P. Evans...
...And, above all, because it' s Easter time, a time that for all its coordination with seasonal greening time, has had much less success as a national folk festival than Christmas...
...Unlike Christmas, Easter (and Pentecost) are adult feasts beyond the range of children...
...Hart is a problem-solver, Mondale a group broker...
...Mondale accuses Hart of voting against the Chrysler bailout, of opposing the windfall profits tax on oil, of previously conditioning the shift of America's embassy to JeruSalem on consultations with other nations, of treating the nuclear freeze as primarily symbolic...
...Along the way, he has also demonstrated such an abysmal insensitivity about anti-Semitic stereotyping that each apology and explanation seems to produce new wounds...
...Such happenings are as prized as they are rare...
...That practice tended to reinforce an individualistic and secretive form of piety...
...To put on its figures ritually is like catching a fresh wind -- or a breeze like a still, small voice...
...Reflections like these lead us to the auspicious moment which many Catholics will witness this year, as they have for the past several, in the midst of their parish Easter Vigil service...
...likewise the "profession of faith" took place in private...
...Telephone: (212) MU 3-2042...
...dollars by International Money Order or by check on a U.S...
...No wonder...
...No, it's not...
...foreign, $53...
...Well, the point of lending an ear to the liturgical year in the midst of all that's fit and unfit to print or tape is just this: that it charges our often shallow calculus With times of intense movement -- Sarah laughing...
...Well, we are not going to depart from form The race for the Democratic nomination is terribly disappointing, and particularly so since Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and Jesse Jackson are all political figures a good cut above the average...
...forces from Honduras to a deal with Nicaragua...
...Special two-year rate: U.S $43...
...When Martin Luther King proclaims a dream at the Lincoln Memorial, when Anwar Sadat shakes hands with Menachem Begin, when Argentina elects a humane, civilian president, we recognize "an event" in a sense that the daily horror show of the evening news is not...
...Anything which goes beyond sounding that single note is forbidden...
...No longer...
...A real event, on the other hand, energizes the heart and will do so precisely because it represents qualitative movement, a change in tonal planes, a metamorphosis...
...All Canadian and foreign subscriptions must be paid in U.S...
...foreign, $29...
...EASTER RITES'- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What time is it...
...Hart is said to have a manufactured personality and Mondale none at all...
...kings dancing or caught in the act...
...IIII II I H IGH-MINDED JOURNALS like this one are never happy with presidential campaigns...
...Jackson has come closest to accomplishing what he set out to do -- rallying black voters to a sense of their potential in American politics, reminding the people on the bottom and the m~gins that they can produce their own leadership...
...He has equivocated about welcoming the support of a Black Muslim leader who first issued a vague threat against Jews and has now talked specifically about death for a black newsman...
...10016...
...It seems that the campaign strategists have alloted each condidate one theme -- "new ideas" for Hart, "experience" for Mondale...
...bank...
...Canada, $47...
...One must learn of death and return from the shadow of death, and to some degree take on the race's passion story and know, by "hints and guesses," that God has made it his own...
...That means the baptism of adult converts -- and if we're not mistaken, there's a quiet educational and cultural revolution taking place here...
...Hart could win but not govern...
...Gary Hart is no longer a new idea, and Walter Mondale doesn't stir much special interest...
...STMASa'ER: Send address changes to Commonweal, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Too much image, not enough issues, too many slogans, no great vision, unworthy smears, superficial beauty contests, appeals to baser instincts...
...Ruth E. Taylor Publisher...
...an inconsolable Job, the reluctant Jonah, and fishermen, tax sharks, and prostitutes -- at random -- betrayed into being world-shakers...
...namely, the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults...
...Etc., etc...
...The media and Democratic party orthodoxy conspire to prevent Mondale and Hart from saying anything at all...
...The particular rules at issue, however, are elementary ones of decency and democracy, and their casual treatment by Jackson has gravely marred his effort...
...All very interesting and plausible -- and finally not very decisive in helping Democrats choose a candidate or shape a program...
...There 20 April 1984:227 is, in fact, something to be said for all those positions -- if Hart would say it instead of engaging in evasive maneuvers...
...Single copy, $1.25...
...Is that a simple question, a matter of consulting your calendar or quartz watch...
...a tongue-tied herdsman metamorphosed into a people's leader...
...They are all capable of bringing to this contest sufficiently different perspectives on policy and styles of leadership to make of their competition a genuine exercise in democracy...
...Above all, we humans are concerned with critical moments, auspicious and inauspicious times, moments of opportunity when there's a chance the whole timbre of time can change, shift from cruel time to welcome time...
...Mondale could govern but not win...
...Hart accuses Mondale of wanting to link the removal of U.S...
...Yearly subscriptions, U.S., $24...
...This editorial space is often shot through with metaphors of time -time running out, time to act, time against us, for us, precise timing, inept timing, time spent, lost, or ga~.ned -- and when you think of it, the issue is rarely, or only peripherally, one of uniform standard time, time determined by reference to the minor star in the galaxy we call the sun...
...That is certainly the way they are conducting this campaign...
...it may be stimulating, fraudulently so, but in a qualitative sense, literally nothing is happening -- except death in some form (and thus it's draining, nerve-racking...
...The" instruction" of convertsused to occur privately, by a priest, and normally in a rather bookish fashion...
...The normal news, when you reflect on it, is often no-news, a tale of collapse, collision, power-balance stalemate, wasted energy as in the physicist's entropy...
...formal reception now occurs at the Commonweal: 228...
...It is said that liberal Democrats would form a firing squad by standing in a circle and putting the victim in the middle...
...The contest between the two candidates is a generational struggle, or a clash between industrial and postindustrial America, or a rerun of the 1960 primaries when an ambitious, imageconscious, skeptically liberal JFK ran against the hard-stumping, sentimental, visceral New Dealer Hubert Humphrey...
...10016...
...The issue is the character, intensity, and, despite the clichr, the quality of time...
...You may of course, even as a child, take delight in the colorful rituals of Passion Week and the Easter Vigil, but there's a sense of these great rememberings that no one can take in until the soul has been plowed open, not closed, by the nightmare of history...
...We muse on time because, among the various time frames we dwell in, it's time for the annual Catholic Educational Association convention, a group dedicated to educing quality time for our children, and this year devoting its congress to the topic of peace...
...Of Mondale and Hart, it Can be said that we are fast exhausting all possible ways of specifying the differences between them...
...We stock our imaginations and nervous systems with this'history, and thereby enter a movement of time that would turn our world inside out...
...Edward S. Skillin Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, 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...
...Canada, $26...
...Contents Volume CXI, Number 8 Correspondence 226 Editorials 227 Sistine resurrection: Gerald O'Collins 228 All is grace: David Tracy 230 The big chill: Joseph P. Evans 231 Valiant women: Abigail McCarthy 232 . . . . . . Morality & the question of means: J. Bryan Hehir 234 Alternative to Armageddon?: James Tindall 235 The question they never ask: Frank Zepezauer 238 Verse: Anne Kilmer 239 'Voced' drifts along: Jeremiah Baruch 240 Screen: Tom O'Brien 242 Books II I I I II i The Paideia Proposal/Paideia Problems and Possibilities/ High School/A Place Called School/The Good High School/ Horace's Compromise: John Ratt~ 244 The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener: Dennis O'Brien 247 The Covenant/Five Gospels: Pheme Perkins 249 C. Wright Mills: Mark Naison 250 Staff I llll mm I Editor: Peter Steinfels Assistant Editor: David Toolan Editorial Assistant: Anne Robertson Staff: Karen F. Silva, Harriette Balsky, Sheila Tanksley Advertising Manager...
...Mondale is the creature of labor, Hart of Yuppies...
...wily Jacob wrestling...
...What the Bible gives us," writes Northrop Frye, "is not so much a cosmology as a vision of upward metamorphosis...
...One can fathom the sense in the Jackson camp that they are not going to let their campaign of "outsiders" be dictated to by the established rules of the game...
...All of which takes time, is time's main chance...
...Now that's actually an idea worth discussing -- but Mondale quickly backs away...
Vol. 111 • April 1984 • No. 8
