Correspondence
Regenerate! Poway, Calif. To the Editors: Your special section, "Regenerating Catholicism" [September 14], was thoughtful and thought-provoking. It should receive quite some response. Professor...
...The angry one is saying: "Just once I'd like to see the gods worship us...
...This year's plans include a faculty mini-course on "The Art of Engineering" and a student-sponsored biweekly series of faculty talks on "M.I.T...
...In fact, in '61 the Iraqi ruler Abd al Karim claimed Kuwait as part of Iraq and threatened to do what Saddam Hussein did this year...
...Further, after a year-long review, M.I.T...
...When the bodies come home, his support will dwindle...
...I'm afraid that, like playwright Jean Kerr's mother, we will have to keep on looking for a blessing that's not in disguise...
...Any new world order would have to take account of the Palestinian dilemma...
...We have only to see it-just once...
...I showed how the theory of evolution had freed us from the atonement-appeasement mentality which results from seeing suffering as punishment...
...The U.S...
...Let the Arabs settle the argument over boundaries themselves...
...In brief, the context initiative, rooted in an integrative philosophy, has launched an important dialogue that may one day radically alter M.I.T...
...We stopped being a superpower when we accepted dependency on other nations...
...Those who believe this episode has restored our image as superpower don't see that when we ask for money and support from other countries they will rightly expect a share of authority over the forces being deployed...
...Any new system for controlling the distribution of oil would have to respect the rights of owners: OPEC was founded to protect its member states against the form of free enterprise practiced by the oil companies, which robbed the producers of any fair share of oil profits...
...our record in honoring the rights of other nations, especially in Central America, is dismal...
...To the Editors: At the beginning of the academic year, we write to correct the impression conveyed by Commonweal [April 6] that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology "was abandoning a bold and potentially subversive three-year experiment in curriculum reform" referred to as the "Human Contexts of Science and Technology...
...When my bride and I married, in the days before people began making up their own pallid vows, we promised each other: "With my body I thee worship...
...In determining Iraq's boundaries they deliberately shut off all access to the Gulf except for a small passage one could say was the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers...
...We don't make the return worship until we go out of church, giving ourselves to his body, his sisters and brothers...
...In the past three years these team-taught courses have addressed a variety of topics (AIDS, ethical issues in engineering, automation and unemployment, industrial competition in the U.S...
...LAWRENCE M. LIDSKY MERRITT ROE SMITH The writers are, respectively, professor of nuclear engineering and professor of the history of technology at M.I.T...
...Professor Lisa Sowle Cahill contributed greatly to the over-all plea for a look at the church we are handing on to the next generation...
...This crisis serves George Bush only to the extent that, till now, it has distracted attention from the state of the union here at home, where the news is all bad...
...To the Editors: Somehow the editorial "Ends and means" [September 28] manages to leave out the history of the Middle East since World War I. The people who lived there had no say in the making of national boundaries...
...Rather than being abandoned, context subjects continue to be offered...
...In reality, the context initiative is alive and well and is developing further...
...JULIAN PLEASANTS 'Context' at M.I.T...
...Neither did the French, but both did lose their colonies...
...Bush has no real military options...
...To the Editors: Your issue of September 14 carried a penetrating cartoon of two cave men squatting miserably in a cave while a storm rages outside...
...they may shock us all by doing much better...
...they are co-directors of the program they describe...
...has allocated an endowed chair to the program's co-directors and provided staff and resources to open what is now known as the Context Support Office, which has sponsored a variety of activities, including formal courses, an undergraduate research project on wastes generated by M.I.T., and workshops on the environmental crisis and M.I.T...
...We want to see the storm go away...
...It is a goal worth pursuing...
...s role in the formulation of public policy...
...But your own cartoonist's complaint goes deeper, and I'll quote a passage from my article which I think provides an answer: "We could see the Mass not as Jesus' gift to the Father for us (a gift totally unnecessary) but as Jesus' gift of himself to us, to convince us of our worth, our tremendous potential...
...Cambridge, Mass...
...and Asia, the decision to build the H-bomb, etc...
...M.I.T...
...indeed, twenty-two M.I.T...
...The smartest thing Bush can do is to give the Saudis all the military equipment already there and bring the troops home...
...To that point the article might have been illustrated by a well-known cartoon of that era which shows two cave men huddled on a ledge while lightning strikes around them...
...As for Iraq's capacity for chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare, no one seems ready to point out that we have the same capacity and have already gone the nuclear route, not to mention our use of things like napalm and Agent Orange...
...we could wind up as bankrupt as the Soviet Union...
...The British drew the lines solely for their self-interest...
...MONSIGNOR) CHARLES DOLLEN History omitted Sacramento, Calif...
...decided last year that the "context initiative" should not be limited to undergraduates and that the range of offerings should be broadened to include public seminars, faculty minicourses, undergraduate research projects, and student-sponsored events, such as last spring's workshop on "Error, Fraud, and Misconduct in Science," planned and organized by two graduate students...
...Meanwhile, however, God has worshiped us just once, and goes on reenacting it for us, in the only dramatic form that becomes the reality it dramatizes...
...One cave man says to the other, "The gods are angry...
...We will not come out of a Middle East war in any better shape...
...Of course, this is not how your average cave man, or average any of us, would like to be worshiped by God...
...departments have contributed to a recently issued list of more than seventy crossdisciplinary and contextual courses...
...The Mass is not our worship of the alienated Father...
...PATRICIA M. LEIPER Truth in drawing Granger, Ind...
...The other asks, "What have they got to be angry about...
...Though he speaks of international law and a new world order, George Bush acted only because of oil...
...s instrumentalist culture...
...A saber-toothed tiger licks its chops on the cliff above, a bear is emerging from a cave the pair hadn't noticed behind them, and crocodiles peer up menacingly from the river below...
...Jesus put his Last Supper and Crucifixion in that framework, worshiping us with his body...
...respects international law only when it suits us...
...Your cartoonist is the first kindred spirit I've found on that question in twenty years of searching...
...in Reality...
...In 1986 a faculty planning committee proposed a set of elective courses on the contexts of modern science and technology...
...We haven't done too good a job...
...The Iraqis never accepted these lines-not in the early days of the mandate, nor in 1933, when Iraq became independent, nor in 1961, when Kuwait became a fully independent state...
...It is precisely God's worship of us, expressing our worth, acknowledging that we are worth the life and death of God...
...Churchill did not fight a war, so he said, to lose the empire...
...In my article, "A Father's (Day) Reflection" {Commonweal, August 15, 1975), I started out debunking the idea that the Mass reenacted for us Jesus' appeasement of an angry Father...
Vol. 117 • October 1990 • No. 18
