Correspondence On Prejudice, personhood
MARCISIAK, ED & PILSBURY, ANNE & FISCHER, TOM & McLAUGHLIN, (REV.) BILL & QUINTON, JOSEPH & HANSEN, LARRY & RASENBERGER, DOROTHY & KAL, EDMUND F. & ARRICALE, FRANK C. & SHEKLETON, JOHN
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors Varieties of prejudice My own experience lends support to Paul Baumann's effort to distinguish among the various forms of anti-Semitism [Correspondence, August...
...As I read the article, I wondered whether some good ideas, loosely wrapped in language less precise and weighty than a Kantian argument, were being defamed because their cousin ideas were very poorly draped and mute, or because the ideas were uttered by the wrong people with the wrong jobs corporate jobs...
...JOSEPH QUINTON Lake Worth, Via...
...I am still breathless...
...And revelation is silent about the precise moment of the beginning of a person's life, as it is of the end...
...A phrase here, a phrase there, often contradictory phrases, stir our spirits and guide our lives...
...After twelve years as a member of that class, I have been happy to see that recognition of personal worth and personal conscience (often known as diversity) has transformed life within my corporation...
...At least you can take walks, along the river...
...Exemplary phrase: "Silence = Death...
...not biologically, at least...
...Thanks all round Just a short note to express my continuing appreciation for your efforts especially for this new way [e-mail] to communicate with you and for your issue of September 12, which I have just read cover to cover...
...His occasional generalizations about Jews in Poland, with which I would disagree, were invariably about their commercial activities...
...ed marciniak Chicago, III...
...While it may mark the latest moment after which the being is unquestionably an individual (that is, a person), there is no guarantee that it could not have already become so, at least in the case of those who do not, in fact, twin...
...Down with the churchy I was seriously considering canceling my subscription when your down-to-earth money letter arrived...
...In turn, according to the same scholastic terminology, the principle of individuation resides not in the nature ("form") of a being, but in its material (materia quantitate signata...
...Theologically: To suggest that every individual human person is not a specific unique creation of God, but that somehow we share in some superhuman collective soul, is so foreign to 2,000 years of Catholic doctrine that Ratzinger would make shorter shrift of it than of the works of Tissa Balasuriya...
...In case you want to know why I almost dropped out, I'm getting tired of Catholics kvetching about the problems with the "other team," be it the conservatives against the progressives or the Catholics vs...
...about as convincing as to argue from words of the Bible that the sun and stars revolve around the earth...
...I hope you will allow me to acknowledge his work...
...And because moral obligations exist not vis-a-vis natures, but persons, it is germane to ask when a particular entity of human nature becomes a person, a human individual...
...30) almost (Continued on page 30) (Continued from page 29) verbatim...
...How about Jane Austen, T.S...
...What's in a phrase...
...DOROTHY RASENBERGER New York, N.Y...
...Good news about Franz It was heartening to read Gordon Zahn's report of progress toward the canonization of Franz Jaggerstatter, the Austrian martyr under the Nazis ["The Peasant Who Defied Hitler," September 12...
...Near the middle of Eugene McCarraher's fascinating article ["Smile, When You Say 'Laity,'" September 12] lies a lament one with which I do not concur about the positioning of certain ideas within the professional-managerial class in America...
...The next level is for (Continued on page 4) (Continued from page 2) reasonably educated folks, or people with strong imaginations...
...bill Mclaughlin Hyde Park, Mass...
...With the power of the Web expanding exponentially (sorry, can't help it), perhaps by the millennium, the OCLC Online Union Catalog will see you hitting Number 15, at least, and passing Reader's Digest...
...But if the intramural squabbles of the Catholic church take over, I'm out of here...
...It is the nonman-agers who have brought about this transformation by using the words the managers first uttered...
...It may have taken Mr...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors Varieties of prejudice My own experience lends support to Paul Baumann's effort to distinguish among the various forms of anti-Semitism [Correspondence, August 15...
...America does the same...
...I want to know how are people of faith living their lives, not so much what are their favorite liturgical practices...
...I suspect that most Commonweal readers have had "a little grade-school math" and could have been spared at least two lengthy paragraphs...
...They were separate ethnic categories...
...But neither is syngamy (or fertilization) such an indisputable marker...
...The gap between rich and poor continues to widen, in the world, in the city, in our hearts and minds...
...Watch out, Timel tom fischer Sarnia, Ontario, Canada From the editors: By way of explication, we'll mention that the OCLC Catalog is a database of bibliographic information...
...Would Mr...
...Frank made me do it Frank McConnell should really not go around daring people to read 773-page books [Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon, review, August 15...
...Relying on Mr...
...It's a method for people to work together, comprehensible to all...
...The engineer in me could not resist calculating that this represents some 1 percent of Commonweal's readership base...
...McConnell, be it noted, is both a writer and an English teacher...
...Thanks for all you do right...
...McConnell until halfway through the book to get the overarching theme, but it took me easily that long simply to learn how to read it...
...Epistemologically: The metaphoric expression of our union in the mystical body of Christ stands for a supernatural mystery...
...I was also pleased to see that you had received some 635 "hits" in the past few months...
...When I was growing up in Chicago before World War II, I often had discussions about Jews with my father, who was born in Poland...
...Having once spent a brief stint inside the "Godbox," I could not help feeling sorry for you because you had to move uptown to such institutional surroundings...
...Editor's note: Additional comments on the McCarraher article will appear in a future issue...
...Biologically: The zygote does not get implanted into the placenta but into the uterine wall by means of the placenta, which is the organ the embryo produces for that very purpose...
...It's like riding a wild horse along the edge of a deep but scenic canyon: You have to sit very loosely and watch everything very intently...
...The third class can be understood and perhaps enjoyed only by other writers and English teachers...
...Some almost anyone can read: Joseph C. Lincoln and John Greenleaf Whitti-er, for example...
...The first time I learned about the term "Christ killers" was when, at the age of twenty-one, I read Michael Gold's book, Jews Without Money...
...they are alive, they metabolize, and they have human DNA...
...Not every person is human...
...The fourth category, included here only to make up a set, is occupied by foreign-language authors in the original and Joyce's Finnegans Wake...
...None of the above explains why the next time he recommends a book, and as soon as I've finished Vineland (the only other Pynchon book available at our library), I will snatch it up humbly and with joy...
...To those three contributors, special thanks...
...Who is a person & when...
...But the most fundamental flaw is the failure to distinguish between person and nature...
...God seems to leave this to human reason and science...
...ANNE PILSBURY Center Lovell, Maine Website takes some hits As a fairly long-term subscriber, I was pleasantly surprised to find that you have put up a very respectable web page...
...FRANK C. ARRICALE Bayside, N.Y...
...Yet they are not persons...
...Exemplary phrase: "Love one another as I have loved you...
...Neither their religion nor his (he was a Catholic Christian) ever entered our conversations...
...larry hansen Aloha, Oreg...
...Even Evangelium vitae acknowledges this (no...
...The disparaged Total Quality Movement is not much more than a group discipline for success, a corporate child of the examination of conscience...
...The source was William Tabb's article, "Globalization Is an Issue, the Power of Capital Is the Issue" [Monthly Review, June 1997...
...To reify it into a space/time reality and from that to draw conclusions about the physical realities of human nature is a logically impermissible jump from one order of existence to another order...
...On the other hand, maybe those 635 hits are nonsubscribers who may be contemplating a plunge into sustained readership...
...my yearly subscription payment for your magazine is the unique exception...
...Eliot, and the James Joyce of Ulysses...
...The prohibition of abortion, then, rests not on some revealed truth about the precise moment of the beginning of a person's life...
...For him, a Jew was not a Pole...
...Credit where due No doubt out of editorial necessity, my reference to the source for my criticism of Jay Mandle's recent article [Correspondence, September 12] was omitted from the printed version...
...Nor is everything human a person...
...james J. higgins Seattle, Wash...
...EDMUND F. KAL, M.D...
...But her arguments are biologically inaccurate, epistemologi-cally and metaphysically questionable, and theologically bordering on heresy...
...Let me note, in particular, Father John Garvey's moving meditation on suffering, the stimulating essay by Eugene McCarraher, and the probing interview of Archbishop Desmond Tutu by Frank (Continued on page 29) (Continued from page 4) Ferrari...
...Just as a hunter is not permitted to shoot a moving object that could be a game animal (but could also be a fellow hunter), we must not, in the absence of a scientifically certain marker, risk killing a human being...
...McCarraher call this cant, or phony...
...The white cells in a nosebleed, the sperm in an ejaculate: They are all human...
...Now there's a glittering consumerist fantasy...
...Pynchon, and maybe Ezra Pound's Cantos...
...It is a legitimate question whether the "primitive streak," marking the impossibility of further twinning, is such a marker...
...Sidney Callahan's zeal for the unborn [column, June 20] is admirable...
...Cultures change, even corporations, if the phrase has power enough and the people repeat it loudly...
...rev...
...Fresno, Calif...
...This may mean that not only am I a fairly rare bird as a conventional subscriber, but that I am truly uncommon as one who both receives the magazine and also clicks on your web site...
...McConnell's wonderfully flamboyant prose style, and encouraged in the adventure by our small local library's actually having two copies, I took out M& D and immersed myself in my first Thomas Pynchon...
...And yes, it has an impact on the corporate bottom line...
...Enough already The editorial tolerance that you displayed in printing Mary Beth Celio's letter in its entirety [Correspondence, September 2] should make you all candidates for beatification...
...Please bill me Almost never am I happy to pay bills...
...It tends to carve whole big chunks out of their schedules and to effect goodness knows what other changes in their psyches...
...Alas, the experience intensified one of my prejudices about literature, to wit: Writing comes in four classes...
...John Barth comes to mind, the aforementioned Mr...
...the angels are persons, and so are the Persons of the Trinity...
...McCarraher's article wondering which phrases from Catholic tradition he would propose to balance out the whole, or should I just open my Summa and let it sing...
...the Protestants or men against women...
...Hence it is appropriate to search for physical markers of a particular being having become, irrevocably, a unique individual of a particular species...
...According to the scholastic definition (and since Callahan seems to use terms from that school, I feel free to argue in the same terminology), a person is an "individual substance of a rational nature...
...At our Thanksgiving day dinner prayer, Commonweal is one of the blessings we mention for which we are truly grateful....I am always consoled and instructed by the consistently balanced approach your journal provides...
...Coincidentally, I had been reading Kenneth Woodward's book Making Saints, which includes several references to the Jaggerstatter canonization, among them a comment that declaring him a saint "would be interpreted as official endorsement of pacifism a position which conficts with the church's 'just-war' tradition and an attitude with which John Paul II has shown little sympathy...
...How grim...
...It lists about 25 million books and about a million and a half "serials"-magazines and the like...
...In its 1995 compilation of the 100 top serials (ranked by the number of libraries reporting holdings), Time was first, Christianity Today was 100th, Reader's Digest 16th, the New York Times 66th, and this very magazine that you are now holding was 71st (ahead of Ms., the Economist, Commentary, Vogue, and America...
...But we do not expect to topple Time, on or off the Web, until the fourth millennium...
...Anyway, here's a check to help keep your independent spirit alive...
...Ideas usually gain territory in our thoughts and actions through a single phrase that has sticking power, much like the hummable parts of great music...
...You do write about it sometimes and for that I'll continue paying your expensive subscription rates...
...it rests on principles of probability in moral theology...
...I finished Mr...
...it echoes Evangelium vitae (no...
...john shekleton Minneapolis, Minn...
...It is by far the greatest split we confront as a people of God...
...But her most fatal flaw is her failure to recognize the fundamental distinction between nature and person...
Vol. 124 • October 1997 • No. 17
