Let civilians govern
White, Robert E.
grams. In the several months when the nomination of Clarence Thomas was newsworthy, correspondents asked four times as many questions about him as they asked in three years about affirmative...
...It received no support from any quarter...
...Though there has not been a formal or final break, continued relations between the Orthodox and the NCC are being studied by Orthodox theologians...
...As for the forlorn hope that the U.S...
...As you look at the testimony of the mystics in every tradition a remarkable consensus can be found in their descriptions of what an experience of the holy is like...
...Pressure from the U.S...
...there was also the Essene faction, which may have influenced John the Baptist and John the Evangelist...
...Congressman Joe Moakley (D-Mass...
...It would confine its role to the defense of the nation against external threats...
...has identified Gen...
...In public statements, U.S...
...Neither President Bush nor Secretary of State James Baker congratulated the parties on what was truly a historic achievement...
...Some perspective is needed, however...
...officials, for who can deny the obligation of an army to stamp out subversion by any means...
...Ponce, who is still a CIA favorite, has bragged, "This war can yet be won...
...and the FMLN presence in the national police force, particularly in the zones traditionally under guerrilla control, would help integrate the combatants into the power structure...
...and the baptisms performed by heretics (did they count...
...Skilled UN diplomats searched for months for the elusive formula that would guarantee the safety of the guerrillas after they laid down their arms and reentered civilian society...
...Looking at this fragmentation, it is easy to see why rationalists can argue against any religion on the grounds that all claim to be true---but there are so many of them, saying so many different things...
...What has happened here is significant and may mark a mm in the whole of the ecumenical movement...
...could break the deadlock...
...it is war that buys the condominium in Miami and puts the Mercedes in the garage...
...Hurdles remain...
...For years people have spoken of "the scandal of a divided Christianity...
...ordinary understanding needs enlightening...
...Thus do tired phrases about external interference left over from the Reagan days undermine the peace process the Bush administration claims it supports...
...There is a point to be made here, but it needs to be seen in the light of a phenomenon that is interesting and ought to give us pause before deploring it: every one of the great religious traditions is divided...
...REPORT ON EL SALVADOR LET CIV .Tq...
...The FMLN first proposed total demilitarization...
...The $1,000 prize has been divided between the two winners...
...On the other hand, one alert reporter did ask Mr...
...ambassador to El Salvador, is president of the Center for International Policy...
...The first is the official one, between President Alfredo Crisfiani's government and the FMLN...
...As a result, the army would no longer have a pretext to persecute its enemies...
...ROBERT E. WHITE Robert E. White, former U.S...
...The second, and by far the more important, is between Cristiani and the army...
...The essays will be published in our January 17, 1992 issue...
...Peace holds few attractions for the swollen Salvadoran army...
...This purging would appear to be the indispensable minimum for E1 Salvador to reenter the company of civilized nations...
...Mormonism already has splintered into many branches, and even within the largest branch (the Salt lake Citybased Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) there are serious divisions...
...something (illusion, the Fall) separates us from truth...
...As if to reinforce Ponce's thesis, the Bush administration argues that military aid is needed to strengthen the hand of the government in its negotiations with the FMLN...
...Another FMLN initiative called for the integration of the FMLN combatants into the army...
...It always was this way...
...In the several months when the nomination of Clarence Thomas was newsworthy, correspondents asked four times as many questions about him as they asked in three years about affirmative action or civil rights...
...Military assistance simply strengthens the army hard-liners in their determination first to limit the agreements as they are negotiated and then to gut the agreements Cristiani and the FMLN leaders reach...
...officials still indulge in ritual condemnations of Cuban and Nicaraguan support for the FMLN...
...Each essay demonstrates the strength of particularity as well as the Christian faithfulness that calls us to ecumenism...
...The timing is certainly graceless: the suspension was announced during the tenure of the Reverend Leonid Kishkovsky, the first Orthodox president of the NCC...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey OY...
...When the New York agreement was signed in September, UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar welcomed it as a breakthrough...
...Forms of monastic asceticism are remarkably similar in religions as different as Buddhism and Catholicism...
...It would include a significant FMLN presence...
...Our winners this year are an effervescent and cartooning anonymous author(s) from the Poor Clare Colettine Community of Ty Mare Duw in North Wales, and Theodore Pulcini, an Orthodox priest from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania...
...In Central America, as elsewhere, democracy and militarism are incompatible...
...What anyone who studies comparative religion notices, however, is the remarkable degree of consensus: human beings are not as they are meant to be...
...But in relation to Central America, our government is still mired in cold-war thinking...
...The present dreaded internal security forces, which have strong links to the THE GRAYMOOR PRIZE Yes, once again, the COMMONWEAL editors, displaying the decisiveness that makes the party of reform sing Hosannas in our name and the Vatican tremble before our querulous indictments, have decided to award not one but two Graymoor Prizes...
...Properly understood, there are two negotiations underway...
...One argument was that it was impossible for Christianity to evangelize effectively as long as it presented non-Christians with an array of competing claims...
...Today, the Bush administration is turning away, consigning the place to a convenient memory hole...
...The Salvadoran military insists that the members of the Farabundo Marti Liberation Movement (FMLN) lay down their arms in exchange for govemmental commitments...
...With these two avenues closed, the UN came up with an ingenious formula that meets the FMLN demand that its combatants be protected...
...The FMLN had demanded not merely dismissals but prosecution...
...The Bush administration has given at best lukewarm endorsement to the Salvadoran peace process...
...Emilio Ponce as one of the senior officers most directly implicated in the 1989 murder of the six Jesuit priests...
...The UN softened that proposal but could never get the backing of the Bush administration...
...This was no idle search...
...Bush whether his views on broccoli had cost him any votes...
...20 December 1991:741 army, would be abolished, and a new civilian police force, completely removed from military control, would be established to enforce the laws and maintain domestic order...
...The FMLN, understandably, wants to see not just promises but real compliance before disarming...
...nly a few short years ago, Central America was the major foreign policy focus for the United States...
...Christians love to generalize about the kind of Judaism to which Christ came, but it would be better to speak of"Judaisms": there was at least as great a difference between the beliefs of the Sadducees and the Pharisees (a party with which Jesus' teaching in fact had much in common) as there is between today's Reform and Orthodox Judaism...
...Under this plan, agreed to by the Cristiani government, the military of El Salvador would no longer have power to enforce its will inside the country...
...A crucial provision of the UN peace framework requires that the army be cleansed of human rights violators...
...And worse, ithas given the Salvadoran peace process, now at a crucial juncture, only lukewarm encouragement...
...KOUMENISM ENUFF ALREADY _9 ishops representing the D jurisdictions that com4 p r i s e the Orthodox D Church in the United States recently voted to suspend relations with the National Council of Churches...
...Beyond the major Islamic Sunni and Shia branches, there are many Muslim subgroups...
...Hinduism is full of varieties of Hinduism--more, probably, than any other religion...
...Tens of thousands of Salvadorans have met torture and death merely because they sympathized with change...
...The hope is that this armed truce will serve as a prelude to a full-fledged peace agreement...
...The odds are otherwise...
...Salvadoran army hard-liners delight in these statements by U.S...
...Christianity is not alone...
...Judaism is divided into Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative branches, and those are just the largest ones...
...We would especially like to thank the Friars of the Atonement for sponsoring the essay contest, which has the important goal of encouraging new ecumenical ideas and perspectives...
...It indicates, at least, that a new prospect has come into view...
...Yet because there have been no apparent pressures from the Bush White House, the Salvadoran military high command feels free to resist even dismissals, proposing instead a "self-purification" that most observers, including the UN negotiators, regard as an empty promise...
...As new democratic forces in E1 Salvador seek to untangle competing demands and needs, the White House should join Congress and send a clear message to E1 Salvador's military leaders that we expect them to stand down from their position as arbitrator of political power, and to abide by the agreements reached by the elected civilian government and the FMLN...
...o'S GOVERN WHERE DOES THE U.S...
...A lot of people have deplored this apparent weakening of an already relatively weak movement toward Christian unity...
...Only relatively new religious groups have any obvious unity, and it doesn't last long...
...Justin Martyr and some other early Christian apologists saw this at work 742: Commonweal...
...In the Salvadoran military, rank order goes: major, colonel, millionaire...
...military would teach professional conduct to the Salvadoran army, the influence has, if anything, run the other way...
...It can be argued that there is something that draws all human beings, and our efforts to describe it have been inadequate precisely because what draws us can't be put into words...
...After more than a decade of U.S.-sponsored war in E1 Salvador, a UN-supervised cease-fire is tentatively scheduled for shortly before Christmas...
...Christianity itself was almost instantly challenged by gnosticism, and soon had to deal with Marcion's denial of the real continuity between the Old and New Testaments, Montanist claims of prophetic inspiration, and a series of schisms over church discipline in areas involving such questions as the reconciliation of lapsed Christians (could anyone, after baptism, be restored to Communion after serious sin...
...STAND...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 22
