Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Hopkins misjudged? Newburgh, N.Y. To the Editors: Re John Garvey's piece "Gays & Straights Together" [March 22], in which he insouciantly speaks of the homosexuality of Gerard...
...In historical reality, Celticism has been reduced to its present state by crimes as atrocious as Hitler's and Stalin's...
...76r three times...
...p. 322, St...
...To paraphrase another white, European male: "If there is no absolute standard of judgment, then everything is permitted...
...Carlin tries to refute the anti-Eurocenlrists by reminding us that there are two types of culture...
...Free literature...
...Cathoiic bishops were on both sides of the question...
...Time evaluates nothing...
...the poorer Arab countries that joined the coalition were bribed...
...Multiculturalism does combat the legacy of European imperialism, which I suppose even Carlin can agree is a bad legacy...
...Nevertheless, we are both heterosexuals...
...But the authority to designate what is "high" is the power to establish these social hierarchies...
...Those that didn't faded to obscurity...
...Basically the parish served as a touchstone for putting women in contact with available resources...
...Special two-year rate: U.S., $62...
...so was Don Juan...
...Of course, if Mr...
...And the judgments of people are always prejudiced by their own ideologies...
...Often only counseling was needed, since many young women had insurance, but the parish had helped with medical expenses, food, rent, baby clothes, etc...
...Kelly were consistent in his nonjudgmentalism, he would refrain from passing judgment on the likes of Bennett and Hirsch and me...
...All peoples have equal claims to possessing this type of culture, which Carlin describes pejoratively: "narrow, prejudiced, chauvinistic, inclined to overrate itself and its people while underrating the rest of the world...
...My sexual habits are different from his...
...He is half-fight...
...Hough's argument is not for a recovery of the mediev.al world view but for a common good which takes account of ecology--a theme central to Cobb's own theology in recent years...
...As Secretary of State James Baker said, the issue was jobs, which translated means oil...
...This fact is a part of the human condition and no excuse for moral paralysis...
...But the merits of Shakespeare et al., whatever those merits may be, do not get diminished because their works have been put to bad uses by the average sensual man...
...Carlin apparently thinks that this "high" culture somehow transcends the narrow politics of ethnicity--and yet he admits that he thinks "societies and individuals can be ranked in a hierarchy according to how much of this high culture they possess" (my italics...
...America and its Western partners went to war because the control of their oil supplies was threatened by Saddam's aggression...
...July 29-31...
...An example is at hand...
...FRANCIS X. WINTERS The power to rank Austin, Tex...
...Those Arab members of the coalition which also possess oil reserves supported the American war to protect their own interests...
...Yearly subscriptions, U.S., $36...
...212-289-6484...
...Here perhaps lies the core of the difference between Branigan's moral calculations and my own tentative ones...
...dollars by International Money Order or by check on a U.S...
...328, 337, Valerry...
...R e t i r e t o North Carolina WHY RETIRE TO FLA...
...Consider Carlin's own example of the demise of Celtic culture...
...I'm used to finding myself to the right of many opinions expressed by your columnists, but now I find myself looking over to the right at Carlin, and just 348: Commonweal behind him E. D. Hirsch, and a little farther off William Bennett, the three of them together sipping their whiskeys and wildly discussing how education ain't what it used to be...
...Kelly and me is that he believes we ought to get out of the business of passing cultural judgments, whereby we find some things better and some worse...
...Ministry v s . Violence The Niebuhr Conference on the Church and Society: Christian Ministry in God's Violent World juxtaposes sociological analyses of violence with theological interpretations and ministerial applications...
...Kelly and his fellow "multiculturalists" seem to be saying, that a thing is bad because it has been used badly is a non-sequitur...
...Yes, Griffin argues, if one understands theology not as a defensively orthodox discipline but as a rigorous inquiry into ultimacy done from a critically sophisticated stance...
...Any historical study of what has been designated "high" culture will show how political, and how fickle, the criteria of "high" culture are...
...Serials Data program No.: ISSN 00103330...
...If there is evidence for them, it should be published in full and assimilated in the public debate...
...Branigan rightly implies that some consequences of the war (e.g., the flight of the Kurds) were not precisely foreseen...
...p. 321, Franke Keating...
...But having made this concession Carlin immediately forgets it...
...We pledge this to any woman regardless of her religious faith...
...To the Editors: Re: Julia Upton's article, "Father, I'm Pregnant" [April 5...
...And we are all equally correct in our own multicultural ways...
...forces to the Gulf area...
...Perhaps you could tone it down a little...
...4. Branigan writes: "...the devastation and displacement of possibly a million Kurds and Shiites give evidence that the ruin following the war was greater by far than the original havoc caused through the invasion of Kuwait...
...But this is not a refutation of multiculturalism but only a restatement of the position multiculturalists have been disputing...
...p. 344, Chariot...
...whereas I believe that (a) human beings are by nature animals that make value judgments and (b) since we are bound to make these judgments anyway, we ought to try to get them right...
...foreign, $72...
...COMMONWEAL, 15 Dutch St., NYC 10038...
...to anyone halfway sympathetic with multiculturalism, Arnold is anathema...
...But this political agenda does not "lurk...
...Perhaps he has a genuine fear, as we all do, of things unfamiliar and different...
...That Mr...
...Illustrations: Cover design, pp...
...315,326, Antonucci...
...but theology...
...To the Editors: In "The 'Just War' War" [April 5], Francis X. Winters seeks to establish that on the issue of using force or sanctions, the U.S...
...to defend Kuwait by the use of force, I follow the 1948 teaching of Pope Pius XII: "The solidarity of the family of nations forbids others to behave as mere spectators in an attitude of apathetic neutrality [when people are threatened with unjust aggression...
...action be accommodated under the just-war terms of due proportion...
...President Bush warred for Kuwait, but not for the Kurds and Shiites, who are in greater millions...
...Such a characterization is a decidedly uncatholic way of thinking...
...FRAN MADDEN A war for oil Staten Island, N.Y...
...Copyright _9 1991 Commonweal Foundation...
...I wish I could say that our own parish has adopted a similar program, but after everything was in place we were stopped-not by the people, not by the clergy, but by the diocesan lawyers, who feared "potential liability...
...JOHN GARVEY How to h e l p in c r i s i s Bethany, Conn...
...it's as though he recognizes that Eurocentrism once had a political agenda but believes it doesn't have one now...
...Kelly and his friends so eager to repeat the experiment...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...da...
...CLASSIFIED RATES: 80r a word, one time...
...p. 343, Meinrad Craighead...
...We were surprised to learn from Father John Perusina of St...
...350: Commonweal...
...The characterization of the Iraqis as irrational and beyond the pale of civilized nations, promoted by George Bush and naively accepted by Americans, allowed us to ignore the deaths of tens of thousands of their soldiers, as if they were subhuman...
...Such outcomes, likewise not foreseen in August, would set a formidable precedent to be pondered by would-be future aggressors...
...306: Commonweal guaranteed right to teach about religion in state schools (indeed, the vast majority of departments of religion in state universities derive their legal legitimacy from that decision...
...If that is the case, I hope I haven't alienated him by the stridency of my reply...
...The calculation must rather weigh spiritual realities: the unleashing of destruction in response to unjust aggression and, on the other side, the suffering of those whose claim to independence has been snatched away...
...Instead he would mark us down as belonging to a certain cultural tribe and say: "Oh, isn't it lovely, all this cultural diversity...
...For monstrosities akin to nazism lie at the logical end of the road he is inviting us to travel...
...To say, as Mr...
...I have no doubt that the English authorities who oppressed my Irish forebears with penal laws and slaughtered my Scottish forebears at Culloden did so with easy consciences--consciences made easy by the confidence the English possessed that theirs was a higher civilization than those of the Scots or the Irish: England, after all, being the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, Locke, etc...
...None of this fits within the principles of just-war doctrine...
...If that claim sounds ridiculous, it's only because the English have been so good at promoting their own culture as "universal" and "the best that is thought and said in the world...
...Registered nurses needed, work with inner-city families as part of team with other professionals...
...What is Carlin afraid of...
...1. On the American Catholic bishops' views about the war, I continue to accept the authority of Archbishop Roach, who has said: "Most bishops...have withheld a definitive judgment [on the morality of the war...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 306) sibly a million Kurds and Shiites give evidence that the ruin following on war was greater by far than the original havoc caused through the invasion of Kuwait...
...Plenary sessions and workshops with John Yoder, Rosemary Ruether, Catherine Meeks, Ismael Garcia...
...Carlin describes the political agenda that is "lurking behind" what he calls the "antiEurocentrism" crusade that is especially popular on university campuses (where it is called "multiculturalism," a term less sinister than Carlin's...
...Anyone who turns to Arnold's The Celtic Element in Literature (which describes the Celts as feminine, irrational, mysterious, and sentimental and the Anglo-Saxons as masculine, rational, practical and intellectual) will find, lurking behind these descriptions, the rationalizations for the type of paternal exploitation that executed and starved hundreds of thousand of Celts, and dispossessed and exiled millions more...
...The principle simply requires that other methods of settling international conf l i c t - - d i p l o m a c y , compromise, sanct i o n s - b e tried before a resort to force...
...Sanctions may yet turn out to be a new and powerful instrument of justice in a new international order...
...Piles of rubble on either side of the ledger create only a mirage of moral argument...
...Why are Mr...
...1, 1924, to current issues available through University MicrofiLm, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M148106 and on Microfiche from Bell & Howell, Wooster, Ohio 44691...
...To the Editors: I was surprised to see the reactionary and ill-informed article by David R. Carlin, Jr...
...Failure to recognize that the authority to judge culture confers power rises out of ignorance of history...
...But that is mystification...
...Full- or part-time...
...On the just-war principle of last resort, Winters confuses the issue by engaging an elaborate polemic, inapposite and notional...
...I salute the people and clergy of St...
...This volume is a welcome addition to the literature that ponders the role of theology in the academy when it is no longer easily accorded the title of the "Queen of the Sciences," It is a fitting tribute to John Cobb who has spent nearly all of his professional life as a theologian in the university...
...cover art, pp...
...a type of ignorance that (to paraphrase Carlin) leads to narrowness, prejudice, chauvinism, a tendency to overrate one's own culture and people while underrating the rest of the world...
...Select groups of people with cultural authority decide what is "the best...
...p. 330, Gervas Blakely...
...But then again, to be offended by a non-sequitur is to prove one's attachment to logic, a discipline invented by Aristotle--who (we regret to report) was a white, European male...
...The large-scale destruction of Iraq, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, combatants and noncombatants, the devastation and displacement of pos(Continued on page 348) Commonweal, is indexed in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Catholic Periodical Index, Index of American Periodical Verse, Book Review Digest and Book Review Index...
...He also cites a statement by Archbishop John Roach dissenting from the view that the bishops' conference had reached a clear consensus on the morality of the war...
...But multiculturalism doesn't advocate that he do so, but only that he examine exactly how his native hue was rinsed away and stop explaining it by calling the ways of history "labyrinthine...
...it's rather like saying the Democrats are bad and proving it on the authority of Ronald Reagan...
...JAMES GILHOOLEY The author r e p l i e s : I am a heterosexual...
...But the United States was not attacked and was not justified in using force before thoroughly testing peaceful means to a just solution...
...Casting his net a bit wider, Joseph Hough stipulates that a university should not only seek to serve the good in the Aristotelian sense of the natural order but in the Thomistic sense of a common good ordered to the cosmos in relationship to God...
...Canada, $38...
...p. 350, Punch, Rothco...
...Goebbels was clumsy compared to Arnold...
...I do not believe, however, that such estimates are yet in the public domain...
...Kuwait controls oil, the Kurds and Shiites do not...
...Bush did not give these means enough chance to work...
...but it speaks badly for his logic...
...Is he afraid that some new order will rise that won't let him listen to his Puccini records...
...It is rather between the ruin of war and the violation of the Kuwaiti people's right of independence...
...North Carolina golf & lake homesites from only $10,900...
...Michael's, who have faithfully provided such a public and creative alternative, as well as the Birthright organization, which has long been a compassionate advocate for women and the unborn...
...Kelly would kindly point out to me one good thing, from Christianity to ice cream, which has not been put to bad use by its fans...
...I have my views, Carlin has his, the Eskimos have theirs, the Nazis have theirs, etc...
...On a journey in 1985 my husband and I were most impressed by a large sign standing outside St...
...One type is the narrow sense of the word--merely the "way of life of a people...
...1-800768-7358...
...Carlin ridicules multiculturalism by supposing it would resurrect in hereditary Celts (like Carlin and me) the Gaelic language, druidism, and pilgrimages to Stonehenge...
...JAMES FINN COTTER (REV...
...Carlin writes: "My Celtic soul, I fear, lost its native hue somewhere in the labyrinthine ways of history," and adds that he has no desire to return to the druidic days...
...Amazingly, Carlin at one point admits that "Eurocentrism" had this political agen17 May 1991:349 "You seem to be a very intelligent young man...
...Otherwise, there is no evidence whatever for putting him in the same class with W. H. Auden, a self-proclaimed homosexual...
...No doubt all this is accurate...
...Such an enterprise, he contends, should not be merely tolerated but nourished...
...All Canadian and foreign subscriptions must be paid in U.S...
...3. Branigan estimates casualties of the war in the "hundreds of thousands," Such a toll would indeed raise serious questions of proportionality...
...There were some schoolboy infatuations, which were a common experience in all-male English public schools of his time...
...JOHN F. BRANIGAN The author r e p l i e s : John F. Branigan enriches the debate on the justice of "Operation Desert Storm" with several factual claims and moral assessments, which are not, however, beyond reasonable counterclaims and contrary arguments...
...Single Copy, $2...
...For the moral weighing is not, in my view, between the rain of war and the havoc caused by the invasion...
...The fundamental disagreement between Mr...
...In two letters to President George Bush, Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk, NCCB president, strongly endorsed the choice of sanctions over violence, contending in his second letter that Operation Desert Storm "would likely violate" just-war principles...
...Classified payable with order...
...Joseph Abbey...
...We have just spent most of the twentieth century verifying the truth of that proposition...
...In a companion essay the Harvard theologian Gordon Kaufman makes the same case from a somewhat different perspective, while Schubert Ogden (who was involved in the Charles Curran case as an investigator for the American Association of University Professors) untangles the many issues arising from university based theologians who must straddle both the world of their communities of faith and the astringent character of secular learning...
...it enabled the exploitation of native populations by delegitimizing their cultures (thus Spaniards---Carlin's example---could rationalize enslaving Native Americans...
...Contact: M. Ebner, Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service, 426 East 119th Street, New York, NY 10035...
...Ultimately, cultural hierarchies give the higher-ups the power to call the people they kill "collateral damage...
...308, 314, Ross, Rothco...
...2. On the right of the U.S...
...Citing Matthew Arnold in its defense doesn't help...
...most of its advocates are up front about their aims...
...Those that measured up got to join the country c l u b - t h a t is, they were included in the anthologies and school curriculums...
...Contact: Paul Parker, Elmhurst College, 190 Prospect, Elmhurst, IL 60126...
...My congratulations also to Julia Upton for her creative and objective effort to highlight a perceptual problem affecting the Catholic church...
...It remains Irue that most American Catholic bishops were against the use of force and supported continued reliance on sanctions, and that Pope John Paul II warned that war in the Gulf "could be devastating and tragic...
...p. 334, Russell Lee...
...Clearly visible to any passing motorist or pedestrian, the sign read: "The clergy and people of this parish pledge to any woman faced with an unwanted pregnancy who comes to this church for aid, immediate practical help, if she is prepared to let her baby be born...
...To the Editors: Re John Garvey's piece "Gays & Straights Together" [March 22], in which he insouciantly speaks of the homosexuality of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Since Hopkins was celibate and scrupulously chaste, it is misleading and unjust to judge him a homosexual...
...Second-class postage paid at New York, N.Y...
...Nurses Needed You know the problems--become part of the solution...
...called "Shakespeare's Embrace: The Values of Eurocentrism" [April 5...
...Neither can the U.S...
...In this rather vague method of evaluation, new texts would be compared to those already recognized as "high...
...Kelly's multicultural tolerance has probably not yet grown catholic enough to condone nazism speaks well for his moral instincts...
...foreign, $41...
...bank...
...The politics behind his program lurks so well, dodging behind the pillars of Shakespeare and Cicero, et al., that apparently even Carlin is unaware of it...
...The National Council of Catholic Bishops [NCCB] voted 249-15 to support the letter of Archbishop Roger Mahony enunciating Catholic justwar principles in support of sanctions as the way to go, while approving the sending of U.S...
...Such a method leads to the popular belief that "the test of time" will evaluate our texts for us...
...Over half of North Carolina retirees came from Florida--learn why...
...JOSEPH KELLY The author replies: I wonder if Mr...
...Microfilm from Vol...
...Against this preponderance of views, Professor Winters juxtaposes individual statements of support for the war made by Cardinal Bernard Law and Archbishops James T. Hickey and Joseph T. Ryan...
...Please do not ask an Irish-American to comment on the crushes of English public school boys...
...72r six times...
...A problem with Arnold's definition is that it mystifies the adjudication of "high" culture...
...Canada, $66...
...While it is still too soon to know whether the UN and allied preparations for the Kurds' retum to their homes will work over the long term, it is perhaps not wholly utopian to hope that the glare of publicity, the UN initiatives, and Saddam Hussein's weakened condition will combine to provide the Kurds an opportunity to shape their own destiny, and that the continued presence of formidable allied forces, along with the continued effectiveness of sanctions, may bring about the removal of Iraq's stores of weapons of mass destruction...
...No superhuman or transcendent or universal or self-evident criteria evaluate what is "the best that is thought and said in the world...
...DAVID R. CARLIN, JR...
...The other type of culture is what we are used to calling "high" culture, defined by Matthew Arnold as "the best that has been thought and said in the world" and praised by Carlin as being "broad, enlightened, and catholic...
...Michael's that this policy had been in place for approximately twelve years at that time, that it cost the parish only about $10,000 a year, and that about fifteen women were helped by the program annually...
...708) 617-3559...
...Michael's Catholic Church in downtown Houston, Texas...
...True, any country attacked may defend itself immediately...
...The cultural program that does hide a political agenda is the one Carlin advocates...
...and at additional offices...
...The English were able to destroy many people around the globe because they convinced themselves they were civilizing the savages and that it was their responsibility to do SO...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
