Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Too mean to Pat Scranton, Pa. To the Editors: Your mean-spirited and ad hominem attack on Pat Buchanan [October 26], with its gratuitous insults of President Ronald Reagan,...
...In brief, we found that there was no statistically significant cohort effect for either Protestants or Catholics...
...Second, these relationships have been central in defining Christianity's understanding of sexuality...
...Since this conclusion is immediately germane to the discussion in Coleman's article, and since it is based on testable mathematical modeling (and not merely the "cumulative insights" of the junior author of the article), we are at a loss as to why it was ignored...
...on the contrary, I tried to restate it with approval...
...I hope there are no ruffled feelings anywhere since, as one Jesuit rule puts it: Let us deal with one another not that one may get the upper hand, but that the truth may prevail...
...As for the suggestion that Richard Wood and I would have saved ourselves considerable effort in reanalyzing the 1988 NORC data, may I remind Andy that before writing the article I wrote him to ask his suggestions...
...Though Mr...
...In a church where marriage is forbidden to those who would avail themselves of the sacrament with a faithful partner of the same gender, it is hard to advocate marriage as the social/religious foundation for family life without explicitly denying lesbian/ gay people such a possibility...
...A sexual ethic based on friendship and not on heterosexual marriage as the norm is a first step toward getting real about sex...
...However useful the impressions and the insights of the Commonweal symposium might be, especially as applied to certain Catholic subpopulations (authors and their students and their friends), the fact remains that the statistical evidence based on large composite national samples dating back to 1949 indicates that, taking into account the Humanae vitae shock, the striking find ing about young Catholics today is not how different they are in fundamental religious behavior from their parents, but how sim ilar...
...After dismissing my work, Mr...
...LISA SOWLE CAHILL Interpreting Bergman Brooklyn, N.Y...
...ROBERT E. LAUDER The reviewer responds: I very much wanted to write positively of Robert E. Lauder's text...
...It couldn't have happened to two nicer guys...
...I tend to approach sexual ethics from the standpoint of marriage and parenthood for two reasons...
...We expect that a new epoch of declining attendance-should one occur-will come from a new source...
...In any case, I was aware of Hout and Greeley's classic piece of research, I share their enthusiasm for it, and nothing in my article in any way contravenes it...
...JAMES W. HICKEY Read our tips Berkeley, Calif...
...Hunt's letter raises a question deserving of further attention within ongoing discussions of Christian sexual ethics: Is the privileged status in Christianity of heterosexual marriage purely a historical artifact or obsolete custom...
...Hunt's conclusion that friendship should be the foundation of all sexual relationships, and that, moreover, it is the primary moral criterion by which they should be judged...
...If not, then how can the sexuality of nonmarried persons (whether single heterosexuals or gays) still be understood in ways that are truly affirmative and fruitful, rather than oppressive and exclusionary...
...We noted "further declines in church attendance based on matters of personal morality must be regarded as unlikely...
...September 14] made me think of a favorite children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit...
...First, that is my own primary experience and hence it represents the realities about which I feel most authorized to speak...
...The only trouble is that you heaped Buchanan with the snakes, boils, etc., but you left Rosenthal unscathed and uninfest-ed...
...Even so, I must make some comments on James W. Hickey's totally negative review [September 14] of my book on the philosophical vision of author/director Ingmar Bergman, God, Death, Art, & Love...
...Hickey recommends four other books on Bergman...
...When he describes my treatment of The Magician as "especially embarrassing," Bergman authority Hickey gives a release date for the film that misses the mark by twenty-seven years...
...The question is easy to ask but not easy to answer because it requires, in effect, following various cohorts through the life cycle and determining whether one cohort follows a different path than do other cohorts...
...ANDREW GREELEY The writers are, respectively, professor and chair of the department of sociology, University of California at Berkeley, and professor of sociology at the University of Arizona and the National Opinion Research Center...
...Hickey adds at least eight films to the total corpus of Bergman's work...
...Referring to Bergman's "more than sixty films," Mr...
...Sorry the article was not cited in the printed version of my manuscript, but I feel one mention of the research itself may have been enough...
...We addressed ourselves to the question of whether young people are less likely to be devout in their religious practice than the previous birth cohorts when those cohorts were the same age as young people are today...
...But it flies in the face of many lesbian women's efforts to adopt children as honest couples rather than as single women, and many gay men's offers to parent that are often met with misplaced anxieties about pedophilia...
...The author replies: The original text of my article included a sentence in parentheses inviting readers to consult the article by Michael Hout and Andrew Greeley referred to in their letter, citing it by name and publication, and praising it for providing "an especially elegant mathematical proof of its thesis...
...Too soft on Abe Brooklyn, N.Y...
...We also demonstrated that there has been no decline in Catholic church attendance since 1975...
...Hickey's claim that I distort Bergman's "clear intentions" and opt for less obvious interpretations of individual films: the text of my book gives ample evidence for my choice of interpretations and shows how these interpretations are strengthened when considered in the context of my entire treatment...
...The editors excised the sentence, perhaps because, for a nonacademic journal, it smelled too much like a footnote...
...I wondered in the face of an analysis of contemporary sexuality that pays more attention to ancient coupling customs than to the everyday lives and loves of at least 10 percent of our Catholic population, lesbian and gay people...
...a plague be on both their houses...
...To the Editors: The possibility of experiencing a book-bashing comes with the territory for any author...
...Whereas a fair-minded, objective observer might criticize the Shamir government in at least some of its more outrageous actions, Rosenthal is always ready to bedeck it with medals...
...I wish Lauder had developed this or another theme more thoroughly...
...MICHAEL HOUT REV...
...Hickey says that Bergman buffs would agree with my statement: "To claim that reality is absurd and then live as though it were meaningful is to live in a contradictory fashion...
...Hickey bashes...
...JOHN A. COLEMAN...
...The negative impact of unpopular teachings about human sexuality has probably spent itself...
...Hickey judges my effort a failure, comments by other critics and readers make me confident that readers who look at my text will find a book, whatever its limitations, that is considerably better than the one Mr...
...Besides calling attention to the article "The Center Doesn't Hold," he advised me explicitly to do a reanalysis of the 1988 data...
...Likewise, the proposal that "moral analysis starts with a presumption in favor of the conduciveness of sex to shared parenthood" has a nice ring to it...
...Were it within my power I'd require him to register as an agent of a foreign government: Israel...
...To the Editors: Your mean-spirited and ad hominem attack on Pat Buchanan [October 26], with its gratuitous insults of President Ronald Reagan, capsulizes perfectly why Commonweal'?, subscription base is so nar row...
...The sharp decline in Catholic church attendance which occurred in the wake of the birth control encyclical (and, as we demonstrated, because of it) between 1968 and 1975 was equally distributed among all birth cohorts and did not disproportionately affect younger cohorts...
...To the Editors: Lisa Sowle Cahill's "Can We Get Real About Sex...
...Certainly, lesbian and gay people have a need and a right to establish committed relationships and "family life...
...My review as written ended with a comment that a serious Thomistic treatment of Bergman might prove interesting, but that emphasis was excised in the printed version...
...While Buchanan might be anti-Semitic on occasion, certainly Rosenthal is 180 degrees opposite him 100 percent of the time...
...A good way out of these contradictions is to take Cahill's observation seriously that "humans have a deep capacity for friendship and interpersonal reciprocity, which when expressed sexually constitutes the most intense of human relationships...
...I believe other Bergman scholars have produced more substantive, engaging books...
...First, a couple of factual errors...
...WILLIAM J. PARENTE The writer is professor of political sci ence at the University of Scranton...
...But he then misrepresents my statement with his preposterous claim that I offer "the premise outright as a Scholastic proof of a benign and reasonable deity...
...Each is a fine book but none attempts a detailed philosophical exploration of Bergman's themes, and that is one of the reasons I wrote my book...
...JAMES J. DAvrrr A faulty sexual norm Silver Spring, Md...
...What is real...
...Concerning Mr...
...I was not asked to proof galleys which contained the wrong release date for The Magician...
...And, while I regret that Lauder takes my review so personally, I paraphrase the quote from Bergman in my review: Some points of interpretation are matters of taste on which we are entitled to dis agree...
...To the Editors: I happily applaud your editorial judgment of both Pat Buchanan and Abe Rosenthal...
...To the Editors: John A. Coleman ["A Look at the Demographics," September 14] could have saved himself (and Richard Wood) considerable effort and speculation had he read our article on church attendance in the June 1987 issue of The American Sociological Review (Michael Hout and Andrew Greeley, "The Center Doesn't Hold: Church Attendance in the United States, 1940-1984...
...MARY E. HUNT The writer is co-director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual [WATER], and author of Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (Crossroad, 1990...
...REV...
...The author replies: I could not agree more with Dr...
...In fact, my book argues that a proof for God must rest on a prior free choice to accept the intelligibility of being and that the absurdist option is a genuine option that can not be disproven...
...If any harm was done, this exchange will repair it...
...Such voices are muffled when the presumed heterosexual norm, "the love relationship established between a woman and a man," obscures the reality of same-sex love...
...She also quite legitimately addresses the need of the church to listen to the experience of persons who do not fit within the sexual categories that Christianity has traditionally valued...
...They may also have felt that my citing of Greeley's essential reprise of the argument in his Religious Change in America was sufficient...
...Should church attendance among Catholics decline noticeably in the next fifteen years or so, it will be because some new shock has eroded the wellspring of communal loyalty in the American Catholic population...
...Hickey apparently has misread other books on Bergman as well as mine...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 20
