Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Other side of optimism Athens, Ga. To the Editors: Virginia M. Bouvier's piece on contemporary Paraguay ["On the Threshold," February 12] implies that democracy is just around the...
...MARK PATTERSON Passion illuminated Syracuse, N.Y...
...Carlin on the seriousness of this laxity but let's keep discussion of the problem separate from moral and political questions...
...Is there some scrubberless intellectual smokestack somewhere in the Midwest which makes inevitable and fashionable carping at tenured, learned disciplines, and the surely modest perquisites attached to a life at low wages...
...Nor is the fact that we academics labor under badly mixed motives without its established place in the academic tradition...
...BARBARA KUCZYNSKI...
...To be sure, Paraguayans of all classes and backgrounds are starting to talk of a post-Stroessner era, but the most common attitude I encountered in Asuncion reeked of apprehension and fear, not the optimism that Ms...
...To the Editors: I very much enjoyed Marian Burkhart's fine article ["Horton Foote's Many Roads Home," February 26...
...From the beginnings of the universities, academics have sought patronage, a career, and even a measure of security...
...We must plead guilty, from the beginning, to smuggling in the liberal arts as a necessary preparation to the ladder up, so ardently desired by most of our clientele and their parents...
...Why then do they savage one another so often for that common humanity which no one of us is likely to outgrow...
...In her appreciation of Foote, Ms...
...I don't think that many people would clairn to be neutral on, for instance, honesty...
...She may well be measured a failure, someone to be pitied, by this culture's standards...
...Yet the eyes of the crucified Christ saw Sister Eva as she truly was and understood...
...The actions last August of the militantes faction of the ruling Colorado party suggest a murky future for the average Paraguayan, one that smacks of continuismo or, worse yet, civil war...
...How then is it that my ox is gored gratuitously ["The Academy in Bloom," January 29...
...Ridgewood, N.J...
...Beneath Foote's apparent calm and understatement, he does have a passionate concern about those dark forces that threaten our fragile humanity-forces such as the violence that Ms...
...Prospects for change exist, but the outlook for democracy, under such polarized conditions, hardly seems propitious...
...The years of hidden dying brought her to her own tragedy when she entered into the death/ resurrection of the Paschal Mystery...
...To the Editors: I am a longtime admirer of Commonweal and a somewhat shorter-time admirer of John Garvey...
...It became an expression of a . promise kept to Sister Eva and the reassurance that it would be kept for me also...
...To the Editors: Virginia M. Bouvier's piece on contemporary Paraguay ["On the Threshold," February 12] implies that democracy is just around the corner...
...To the Editors: Thank you for printing such a timely short story ["Death in the Convent," by Joan Sauro, March 25] at the commencement of the church's liturgical celebration of our redemption...
...There is little reason to assume that his successors will think- or act-differently...
...Those moral issues seem to me basically matters of personal decision, since (arguably in the case of abortion) their effects are largely confined to the individuals making the decisions (as in Carlin's comparative example of religious choice...
...I think that we have, for whatever reason, come to tolerate and even expect lapses from ethical behavior...
...For shame...
...Burkhart focuses upon and the ravages of time, itself another form of violence...
...First, he claims that we have become neutral on important moral issues, such as abortion and homosexuality...
...Like Sophocles in the choric ode from Antigone, Foote knows that "man's little joy is the fount of future sorrow,'' but he goes beyond the fatalism of the Greeks (as well as disregarding the posturing nihilism that afflicts the American theater when it tries to be serious) and quietly insists on the power of human goodness and love-a love that takes the form of an intense and all-embracing remembrance that, whether Foote is a formal Christian or not, may not be too different from prayer...
...On balance, it seems that academics, clergy, andjour-nalists are one in the sense of pursuing a career at least a modicum higher than naked self-aggrandizement...
...I hope they have sometimes wanted these plebeian goodies for the benefit of the tradition of which they are the bearers, as well as for their base selves...
...Bouvier cites...
...Burkhart has gotten at something that the critics have missed in a man who, indeed, might be our finest playwright...
...Church-state relations, as Bouvier suggests, are indeed bad, but as Stalin is once supposed to have remarked of the pope, "How many [military] divisions does he have...
...Garvey understands that vocational training is as old as the university itself, though he should have added doctors to his clerics and lawyers...
...It is not...
...I was so immersed in work and family obligations that I didn't realize we were well into Lent and, indeed, into Holy Week itself when I read the article...
...Stroessner has always depended on the fact that he is, after all, a dictator who rules by force...
...That is, they require policy judgments that have effects on many more people than those who make the choices...
...MICHAEL GALLAGHER CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 290) marks about unrelated moral and political issues...
...That is surely a less than perfect approach, but does a less than perfect human nature suggest it...
...Suddenly all the profound mystery and glory of the salvation event were epitomized in the life of Sister Eva...
...Carlin extends his discussion (again, without apparent realization that he's switched topics) to ethical virtues such as honesty and self-discipline, and claims that we are neutral with respect to these virtues as well...
...At least Mr...
...however, I do agree that we've become very lax about insisting on such virtues...
...Now she can see with that same vision and reach out to each of us when we come to our own moment of salvation...
...Christ himself preached to philistines and other prostitutes...
...This poignant story illuminated the reading of the Passion on Good Friday for me...
...Carlin then says that many people who are "neutral" on personal moral issues "wax very moralistic" when it comes to issues such as environmental protection and nuclear, disarmament...
...I agree completely with Mr...
...I doubt that many people are actually neutral on these issues, but I agree that many are unwilling to enforce their views of those issues on others...
...I think that such tolerance is no bad thing...
...THOMAS WHIGHAM Gored ox groans Villanova, Pa...
...BERNARD J. REILLY Professor of History Villanova University Our finest playwright...
...Thus, it is entirely consistent to feel obliged to take a stand on such political issues, but still to feel that one has no place making personal moral decisions for others...
...However, those issues, though they do have ethical components, are primarily political...
Vol. 115 • May 1988 • No. 10
