Politics & culture
Garvey, John
Most of us, slightly bewildered, staggered back to our parishes, wondering how to put together the scattered theological pieces. I wondered if Father Peregrine had indeed come back for...
...One thing concerns me here...
...We have moved beyond the sixties in an important and scary way...
...It is demeaning to think that there should be...
...We produced complicated heroes like Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth (who forced some slave women into freedom at gunpoint rather than allow them to make the choice of slavery for their own children), and the revolutionary-era Quaker saint John Woolman who opposed both the violence of slavery and the violence of the revolution...
...This may in part be due to something that happens with the press, especially during the summer--the need to grab at something hanging dimly in the air and make a trend of it...
...A number of black intellectuals, not all of them conservatives, have openly questioned the ways in which the continued pursuit of "victim-status" hurts blacks...
...We want to put in place of this a picture of noble "people of color" (don't call them colored, or examine the fact that this makes white people transparent) whose high culture was tom from them by evil white slavers, and who were rescued solely through their own determined struggle toward freedom...
...All other essays will be returned to their authors after January 1. COMMONWEAL 15 Dutch Street New York, New York 10038 black anti-Semitism...
...And at the same time, we produced geniuses like Madison, whose approach to writing the Constitution that became the foundation of our government is probably the most enduring and fascinating product of the Enlightenment, one with effects that continue to inspire people in every comer of the world...
...These victims were brought against their will to a land already populated by tribes, some of whom were peaceful, others vicious, few at all decent to the women among them...
...The point is that we have moved beyond the level of problems that can be met with the narrowly coercive forces politics can bring to bear...
...Original and unpublished essays of approximately 2500-4000 words should be submitted to the editors of COMMONWEAL who will make the final decision following consultation with a panel of experts...
...The need is important to demagogues, but should be anathema to educators...
...The prize is intended to encourage and support new ecumenical and interreligious ideas and perspectives...
...I think we will have a healthier society when we can show our children both heroes and complications, and tell them that the heroes themselves were complicated...
...As for the idea that Bush may have instituted a "black seat" on the Court, that's hardly new...
...Writers as different from one another as Julius Lester, Shelby Steele, and Thomas Sowell have made it clear that there is no one black voice, no one black point of view...
...This is, once more, a case of public schools being asked to do what a larger culture, or network of subcultures, has failed to do...
...Or at my next call...
...HARVEY F. EGAN Harvey F. Egan, pastor emeritus of St...
...Announcement of Prize: December 15, 1991...
...The problems that had to be faced then were primarily political: a war that was tearing the country apart, the establishment of voting rights and equality of opportunity for people who had been denied them for years...
...We seem to want to trade one stupid myth for another...
...We want to replace a vision of America as a nation of heroic white Protestants fleeing persecution in Europe, who "discovered" an inhabited continent, helped to civilize its inhabitants--making some mistakes along the way--and struggled through a problem with slavery which was finally solved by white people, after some more mistakes...
...The main concern of educators should not be to make African-American or IrishAmerican or Italian-American children proud of their culture...
...The flurry over what is and is not politically correct occurs at the same time as a raw and ugly fact: race relations are once again openly nasty, after years of a kind of forced politeness, punctuated by confrontations in which nobody listened to anybody else...
...It i s n ' t easy to teach, but teaching isn't--shouldn't be----easy...
...The prize-winning essay will be published in COMMONWEAL'S January 17, 1992 issue...
...Ed McMahon...
...The winning essay will receive a prize of $1,000 and will be published in COMMONWEAL...
...They are a complex and interesting set of voices addressing a complicated society, and the problems we face collectively involve not only political agendas, but cultural depths no political agenda can begin to plumb...
...Deadline: October 1, 1991...
...The main point is that they want their kids literate when they go back home, and they are right to doubt that American schools are capable of doing the job...
...American expansion happened for reasons that involved a mushrooming greed...
...There was a Jewish seat on the Court for years, as well as a Catholic seat...
...This ought to be celebrated...
...This is not, as some have suggested, simply a matter of the Japanese wanting to keep their own cultural values isolate and intact, though those values are definitely part of this movement...
...The common will to deal with cultural problems really can't be, and it is in this messy area that our greatest problems lie...
...The editors reserve the right not to award the prize...
...Thomas's career is a challenge to racists, though not the kind of challenge the civil rights movement has traditionally mounted...
...That is the fact that we are wrong-headed enough to want a version of history in which whole groups were good, and whole other groups were bad...
...That's their parents' job...
...That divergence is itself not a bad thing...
...Morality (contrary to the views of those conservatives who opposed civil rights legislation or those liberals who defend the rights of child pornographers) can be legislated, with varying degrees of success...
...Some of the most difficult passages we will face as a society over the next several years will involve something no one has yet dealt with in any depth: politics simply can't do the work of culture...
...Selfesteem ought to be at the bottom of any educational curriculum, and literacy (narrowly defined) at the top...
...our revolution was perhaps the least defensible use of violence in world history, in that we weren't really oppressed~we were overtaxed by a tooremote government, and were finally willing to kill for it...
...Teddy Kennedy...
...This keeps Serbs and Croats hating each other, and that fact ought to be apparent even to our most brain-damaged educators, but no one seems to notice that the problem stems from a primordial need to have good guys (and therefore bad guys...
...There is something profoundly ugly about the pressure that has been brought to bear against Lester, a convert to Judaism and University of Massachusetts (Amherst) professor who has refused to toe a party line on Israel and has been openly critical of THE GRAYMOOR PRIZE The Friars of the Atonement announce the second annual Graymoor Prize, to be awarded to the best essay on any aspect of ecumenical or interreligious affairs...
...Those who deny that "political correctness" is a problem on campus should review Lester's case--but the fact that he faced the pressure a couple of years before the current journalistic attention to the phenomenon proves that the PC thing really is a faddish attentiveness to a persistent problem, and not at all new...
...I don't like the company he has kept, but that doesn't matter...
...This essay will become the property of the Graymoor Ecumenical Institute...
...I think it can be argued that the sort of heat generated by the nomination of Clarence Thomas is in its oddly skewed way a sign of health: here a black conservative is being called "treasonous" by black liberals with a stake in one comer of the current system...
...Thomas has staked 9 August 1991:457 a claim and a career somewhere else...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey POLITICS & CULTURE TO EACH ITS OWN e seem deluged, lately, with stories about "PC," about being "politically correct," and the ways this concern has taken over campuses, grade school curricula, and even Supreme Court appointments...
...I wondered if Father Peregrine had indeed come back for another trip or two...
...I live in a part of New York where Japanese who have moved to America for several years, for business reasons, send their children to Japanese schools...
...It's all at least as good as Homer, but it is complicated...
...The problems facing the poorest black Americans are indeed horrible--but there is a generation of black thinkers who have begun to address them, and to urge on the rest of us the understanding that this is not a black problem but a national one...
...There are attempts at curriculum reform which indeed look foolish, and while they aim at instilling pride in children from minority ethnic backgrounds, they will instill, instead, bad history...
...Joan of Arc Church in Minneapolis, is the author of Leaven: Canticle for a Changing Parish (North Star Press...
...Not long ago someone lamented the fact that no one now speaks for black Americans the way Martin Luther King, Jr., did...
...We should be able to tell the truth: white Christians, for reasons of greed, bought black animists as slaves from black Muslims who bought and sold people with as little remorse as their white customers...
...Now political remedies are less obvious, and it is in fact not at all obvious that any political action, within or outside of the system, can move us into a significantly better place, as Brown v. Board of Education, the Voting Rights Act, and the antiwar movement did...
...The awardwinning submission, which may take the form of a scholarly or critical essay or a personal narrative, should appeal to the interests of the general educated reader...
...Who speaks for Irish Americans...
...There is a new degree of nastiness in race relations, a new separatism, but it isn't all that different from the old kind...
...Blacks don't need a single surrogate...
...His epitaph encouraged me to concentrate more earnestly on current opportunities to grow in love so that I will be fully prepared for entrance into glory at the first call...
...El 458: Commonweal...
...But that cultural failure should not lead schools to try to fill in the blank, as if a school room could do what home, church, and neighborhood cannot...
Vol. 118 • August 1991 • No. 14
