Correspondence
CORROSPONDENCE The wit that refreshes Besides all the other excellent qualities of your magazine, you have a refresh-ing sense of humor. The back-page announcements of the [then] coming tribute to...
...At that time, she said she would vote to ban the proce-dure...
...I welcome the renewed interest in philosophy of religion in all of its variety...
...Editors note: The celebration held February 7 at the Fordham University Law School was indeed rewarding, and Senior Writer Bob Hoyt's golden years have been a great bless-ing to this magazine and all who know him...
...Continuum Books is planning two volumes from the Gethsemani en-counter, the one containing the papers that were presented and the other re-porting the ensuing dialogues...
...For those who knew him well, Christian will live on as a loving memory of the transforming power of the Risen Lord, warmly human, gen-tle in manner, and unyielding in pur-pose...
...PATRICK HART, O.C.S.O...
...ERIC R. BUERMANN, O.S.B...
...The Atlas community of Trappists have long lived in a most delicate situ-ation, not only because of the threat of violence from fundamentalist Islamic groups but also because of the con-straints placed on all Christians in Algeria...
...ABBOT JOHN EUDES BAMBERGER, O.C.S.O...
...Before "leaving the world" I spent my last few dollars on subscrip-tions to your paper in Kansas City for people whom I thought needed it...
...May the celebration be a rewarding experi-ence for you, and may your golden years be your best...
...The writer replies: 1. Mr...
...It was many years ago when I visit-ed the monastery of Atlas, but already I experienced something of the Trappists' friendly relationships with the local villagers...
...So congratulations on your 75th birthday, and thanks for being part of my education back in the forties...
...Palestinian Catholics com-prise indigenous Catholicism in the Holy Land...
...The bishops have long emphasized that Catholics should make election choices based on a wide array of issues, not just abortion...
...The Jesuits encouraged us to get involved in such things...
...I remember that one evening after the meeting you gave me a ride back to Regis...
...It is important to know that Christianity, including the Catholic liturgy, is alive and well in many Arabic-speaking countries...
...Piffard, N.Y...
...Once during the civil war he had been held as a hostage for ten long days, he told me, and since he suffered from a lung disorder he had as much as he could handle in surviv-ing the ordeal...
...The back-page announcements of the [then] coming tribute to Bob Hoyt, honoring him as "a famous monument of antiquity/' were just one example-sketches and all...
...As a Christian, how was I to vocalize the Our Father when I had heard Arabic only in a Muslim context...
...Yet he chose to remain at the monastery when it became clear that the lives of the monks were in danger...
...Egypt has many Coptic Christians, and Lebanon has Maronites and Melkites...
...That event, he said, caused him to live his own faith more deeply and finally to become a monk and volunteer for our monastery of Atlas...
...He told me how patient his patients were when he would announce they had to wait because it was time to pray the Divine Office...
...BRIEN KINKEL Silver Spring, Md...
...Advocates on the two sides did make such cases...
...Congratulations to him and to all of you...
...Praying in Arabic In his essay "Remembering the Mar-tyrs" [January 31], George Dardess writes: "Arabic, to me, was a language in which one vocalized and chanted the verses of the Qu'ran...
...Later I heard that you had left the NCR and more recently noticed that you were writing for Commonweal...
...You were work-ing at the Register and had a Catholic Action group called something after Blessed Martin de Pores...
...The consensus following the week was one of greater mutual under-standing of and respect for one anoth-er's traditions, and a call to enter more deeply into one's own...
...The writer is the superior of the Abbey of the Genesee...
...His warm personality and gift for friendship explain a great deal of the witness he and his community gave in Algeria...
...I attended with a couple of his counselees, Robert Tweedy and Bill Foley, whom you would be more likely to remember...
...It called up memories of what was expe-rienced at Gethsemani in the last week of July 1996, when the Dalai Lama and twenty-five Buddhist monks came to the abbey for a week of interreligious dialogue with the same number of Christian monks, mostly Benedictines and Cistercians...
...In my case it was Father Stauffen...
...He read the whole thing...
...ROBERT J.EGAN, S.J...
...THOMAS E. DENNELLY Baldwin, N.Y...
...2. Carolyn McCarthy backtracked on her views on partial-birth abor-tion during a WCBS-TV debate with Dan Frisa during the latter stages of the campaign...
...Neither God nor his grace ever dis-misses created nature...
...The first volume should be available by fall...
...Monks meet monks Rarely does one read such a balanced ecumenical statement as John W. Healey's recent letter to Sister Linda Julian ["When Christianity & Buddhism Meet," January 17...
...A Catholic theologian, Robert J. Egan, S.J., reviewing Swinburne's work ["When Philosophers Talk about God," January 31], breaks with his own tradition of using philosophical reasoning and argument, and plays skeptical fideist toward Swinburne's arguments...
...Trappist, Ky...
...it had to do with his descent from the daughter of Lafayette, who, along with his other children, had been given honorary and effective cit izenship by the Founding Fathers of our country in appreciation of their father's services during the Revolu-tion...
...On another occasion he told me why he had de-cided to come to Algeria and to learn Arabic...
...Nicely done...
...Dom Christian mentioned once that he had taken out Algerian citi-zenship (while retaining French) and took the name Abdul Lechay, mean-ing Servant of the Living...
...McCarthy had "backed away" from her earlier support of President Bill Clinton's veto of the partial-birth abortion bill...
...But historical-crit-ical study of the Bible is no less unin-spiring...
...Callers to her office just prior to the election were told that she supported the veto...
...Granted, analytical philosophy is only dimly aware of language as ana-logical, and its discourse about God is the flattest possible...
...Does ecumenism expect everyone to switch chairs...
...PETER FEUERHERD...
...I then attended Saint Thomas Seminary for two years where I got to know Jim Kettleson...
...The claim appears in Feuerherd's comment on the Long Island congressional contest be-tween Carolyn McCarthy and Daniel Frisa ["Pulpit Politicking," December 6,1996...
...Dennelly confuses reporting with advocacy...
...Lafayette, Oreg...
...My reservations about Richard Swinburne's work have rather to do with the way the relationship between talk about God and talk about religion should be understood, as well as with what, in my judgment, an adequate philosophy of religion now requires...
...My young daughter's command of Arabic may be tenuous, but her Jordanian-American mother has taught her to recite the Hail Mary in Arabic with ease...
...Aquinas's five proofs for God's exis-tence were in his theological writings...
...A principal reason given by the assassins for killing the monks was precisely that, though they took care not to proselytize di-rectly, their obvious deep regard for what is best in Islam and their person-al respect for the people among whom they chose to live began to alter per-ceptions of Christians and the teach-ings of Christ...
...From observing and talking with Brother Luc, who is one of the seven martyrs, I learned that sick people from many miles around visited his clinic, since he had the reputation of being a holy man as well as a good doctor...
...In the Middle East, for example, Catholic and Orthodox churches are a part of the landscape in Jordan, Syria, Arab areas of Israel, and nascent Palestine...
...HOWARD CURTIS, O.C.S.O...
...His complaint is actually with the United States bish-ops, not with me...
...Though I am wary of talk about the "purely natural" power of reason, I have no desire to dismiss created nature, break with Catholic tradition, or discount the very signifi-cant role that reason, dialogue, and ar-gument can play in a life of faith...
...Later that monastery moved to Lafayette, Oregon...
...I am convinced it helps us to "remove obstacles" and to deepen our understanding of Christian faith...
...DICK ROLWING Reynoldsburg, Ohio The reviewer replies: I am happy to count myself on the side of God and divine grace in this controversy...
...Dom Christian, the prior, was a friend of mine from the year he be-came the superior there...
...Congratulations on the January 31 issue of Commonweal, a remarkable piece of work from the editorial on Father Balasuriya to the superb mate-rial on Islam and the outstanding re-view of Richard Swinburne's new book...
...In 1951 I joined the Trappists at Pecos, New Mexico...
...On the contrary, I think the practice of philosophy is crucially important for the integrity of Catholicism today...
...It should also be noted that Feuerherd was in error when he wrote that Ms...
...Reason & faith A Protestant Christian, Richard Swinburne, breaks with his fideistic tradition of eschewing the purely nat-ural power of reason in philosophy and writes books to provide argu-ments for the existence of God...
...Humacao, Puerto Rico Love that Bob Although we have met, it is unlikely, Bob, that you would remember me...
...Abortion & voting Peter Feuerherd's claim that "a Catholic case" can be made for a polit-ical candidate who embraces the en-tire abortion-rights agenda, even if the candidate's opponent has a 100-per-cent prolife voting record, should be seriously questioned...
...Specifically, how would Feuerherd reconcile the Holy Father's descrip-tion of abortion or infanticide as "an unspeakable crime" with his belief that "a Catholic case" could neverthe-less be made in the situation I have described...
...Wish I could have joined you...
...She later reaffirmed her total prochoice stand...
...Charmed as I am by the phrase "skeptical fideist," and skeptical as I am about the way words like "fideist" and "sectarian" are sometimes used in place of arguments, I don't want to switch chairs on this issue...
...Those years at Regis and my brief foray into Catholic Action enabled me to handle Vatican II and its aftermath better than would have been possible otherwise...
...A gentle Christian Readers of George Dardess's article (January 31) about the memorial ser-vice at the Abbey of the Genesee to honor our seven martyred brothers of Atlas Monastery in Algeria may wish to know more about that community, and in particular about its prior, Dom Christian de Cherge, whose testament Dardess found so moving...
...The function of these disciplines is not to produce faith but to lead those looking for God to him, removing obstacles in the way...
...During the Algerian war, in which he served as a French officer, he and a Muslim friend were am-bushed, and the Muslim stepped in front of him to protect his life...
...The notice on the back of a recent Commonweal announcing the celebra-tion of your seventy-fifth birthday stirred the old memories once more...
...He insisted that no arguments could convince a mind closed to God's grace, but none were useless because of that...
...It is to the honor of both the monks and their neighbors that, in spite of the limitations on their free-dom to witness to the gospel, the monks had become not only accepted but loved and trusted by their neigh-bors, and even by people from more distant places...
...GERALD J. WILLIAMS Basking Ridge, N.J...
...I noted that a Catholic case could have been made for either candidate in the Frisa-McCarthy cam-paign...
...Both managed to escape, but the same friend was assassinated a week later because he refused to betray Christian...
...I was a student at Regis College in Denver from 1945-49...
...He told me of his special interest in the United States...
Vol. 124 • February 1997 • No. 4
