Correspondence A long-time subscriber renews once more; a one-time defector sends cash and good wishes
HARRINGTON, (REV.) EMMET & Lennon, Brian & ROBERTS, (REV.) JAMES R. & ERARD, PHILIP & MICHAELSON, SEAN D. & MOYNIHAN, RUTH B. & LUKASZEWSKI, LEON & Miles, Jack & Finn, James
CORRESPONDENCE And the same to you Note: This letter accompanied a one-year subscription renewal. Sandra Smith manages Commonweal's circulation and signs our renewal/expiration reminders. Dear...
...Not for the garbage can Your woes touched me to the point of writing out a check...
...his presentation of the victim status of the Protestant community in Ulster is an important message heard too seldom in this country...
...I was surprised, therefore, to find in your editorial rejection of a balanced-budget amendment ["Just Say No," February 28] a quotation of hers followed by this: "The rage for balanced budgets, in other words, is really a war on the idea of government's responsibililty for the common good, and especially for the needy-a war being waged by fiscal strangulation" (Continued on page 29) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) (emphasis added...
...Dear Sandra and friends, We do indeed live in interesting times...
...When, however, he holds that "the form of the Qur'an is the Arabic language" which "religiously speaking is as inseparable from the Qur'an as the body of Christ is from Christ himself," he strains the comparison beyond comprehension...
...Like a space voyage, my cancer has now been given a number, making it likely that the two expirations will be close...
...Christus innocens Patri reconcil-iavit peccatores...
...The Eastern emphasis on the defeat of Death is audible, for example, in the ancient Western hymn, Victimae paschali: Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando...
...It won't work in our context...
...But we agree with our friend Jim Finn that Gertrude Himmelfarb clearly expresses what she intends to say...
...I was reminded somehow of the divine who, noted for his learned and eloquent preaching, heard himself declaiming in the middle of a sermon, "What I think the good Lord is trying to say here...
...War on the needy...
...The only way in which we in Ireland can move out of reciprocal victimhood is by doing so together...
...I'm also hoping that some day you will return to being a Catholic publication...
...JACK MILES Pasadena, Calif...
...Granted the Islamic belief that, as Nasr puts it, the Qur'an "is the Word of God revealed to the Prophet through the archangel Gabriel" so that "both the spirit and the letter, the content and the form, are divine," the comparison between the Qur'an and Jesus is, I believe, a forced one unable to be sustained...
...Will Alleva find quarrel in a last straw...
...I'm occasionally amused and enlightened but more often incensed by your positions...
...The "field" mentioned by Father Lennon's high school friend is only a metaphor for a more general sense of security, of having some sense of control over the economic, social, and political life of the land under one's foot...
...Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus...
...I went back to the Himmelfarb quotation: "[T]he devolution of relief to the states is not merely a considerable move toward federalism...[but] a considerable step toward the abolition of relief as an entitlement...
...I blinked...
...RUTH B. MOYNIHAN Storrs, Conn...
...But does this matter, if the members of each group see themselves, with some legitimacy, as victims...
...He instantly gave up the use of "in other words...
...I think there might be a lesson there...
...In that light the sense of displacement felt by the Catholic community, expressed by the young man in the phrase "they robbed our land," is very understandable...
...During the stand-off at Portadown it was able to cripple the province economically, virtually closing the airport, isolating towns and villages by barricades with little or no interference from the security forces, which reacted far more drastically when members of the Catholic community rioted after Unionist marchers were allowed to enter Catholic areas...
...It is not...
...Surely all of us who care about the future of the province must continue to pray and work for peace and for the creation of the new "myths" of which Father Lennon writes...
...Do those of us who favor a balanced budget-President Clinton, many Republicans and DeVnocrats, etc.-really reject "the idea of the government's responsibility for the common good...
...The policy of the Republican party is designed to deprive the federal government of that revenue...
...It is worth noting that more than half of Catholic victims in Northern Ireland have been killed by Nationalist paramilitaries...
...Bare bodkins at 10 paces Will poor Richard Alleva challenge Commonweal's staff to a duel for allowing his review of Hamlet (March 28) to be corrupted with a reference to the Dane's "marital" (should be "martial") tirade...
...Anyhow, I'm relenting on my "not another dime" pledge of some time ago...
...In a week they will do another CAT scan and read the batwings and lizard tails...
...emmet Harrington Portland, Oreg...
...So good luck...
...ennon does recognize that "the bntish failed once again to respond to an IRA offer of a ceasefire...
...Christ descends, we might well say, as a wolf on Death's fold, though he is the Lamb: Agnus redemit oves...
...For the record: I favor a balanced budget but believe a constitutional amendment to enforce one is a miserable idea that deserves a permanent burial...
...Try as I may, I still cannot...
...Does Shakespeare haunt the printshops that distort his lines...
...Many Protestants in Ulster, knowing that the security forces are overwhelmingly Protestant, felt compromised by their evident bias...
...But I am appalled by his remark that Unionists might be justified when they ask, "Why do people make such a fuss about what may have been an 'overreaction' by the British army on one occasion...
...That is why we need a new structure to replace the traditional nation state, one in which both Nationalists and Unionists will be as concerned about the human rights of the other as they are about their own, and in which these rights will be protected by the two governments...
...I have read Commonweal for more than fifty years-one thing I will miss...
...I believe they should add the eye of the newt...
...That didn't sound like what I had just read...
...This is despite my being highly offended by your unfunny "New Ostrich Review" ad some time back...
...Nevertheless, many in the United States still focus only on abuses by the British government and seem to ignore those for which the Irish Republican Army is responsible, although this tendency thankfully has changed somewhat in recent years...
...james r. Roberts Burnaby, B.C., Canada...
...On this journey we need to distinguish between a human-rights agenda and a nationalist agenda...
...Damn few, I suspect...
...The poem may imply both a theology and a mysticism...
...I guess I continue to read your publication out of habit...
...BRIAN LENNON, S.J...
...I don't think so, although we may have different ideas than the writer of the editorial of how best to serve that common good...
...LEON LUKASZEWSKI Walnut Creek, Calif...
...But, though his "double minority" analysis is helpful, I find that it goes too far toward leveling the status of the two minorities...
...The same agonistic emphasis lives on, if barely, in the Western tradition of the harrowing of hell-that is, not its plowing but its pillage-by a Christ who falls not just into it but upon it as an aggressor upon territory he will take...
...rev...
...It is good to have Finn and Himmelfarb's endorsement of "government's responsibility for the common good...
...Actually, some good came of it: I subscribed to the publication in question and sent them an even bigger check...
...Hmm...
...True, chemotherapy for seven-and-a-half hours on Good Friday was not humorous but a deeply spiritual experience...
...But if government is to meet that responsibility, it will have to have the revenue to do so...
...in Christianity it is Christ...
...The Victimae paschali poet, as I read him, sought to recapitulate a myth rather than either summarize a theology or convey a mystical experience...
...james finn New York, N.Y...
...is taken by Muslims to be the Word of God made Arabic just as orthodox Christians take Jesus to be the Word of God made flesh...
...Sean Michaelson argues that I go too far in leveling the status of the two minorities...
...I'd be curious to know how many of your feminist, liberal subscribers heed your call in a tangible way...
...What a deep reader the writer of the editorial must be, I mused, to find a declaration of war in that statement...
...I am currently a novice in the California province of the Society of JeSUS...
...Nasr himself hints at the inadequacy of his analogy when he qualifies the Qur'an, the Word of God, as corresponding "in a sense to the body of Christ" (emphasis added...
...That is why the balanced-budget amendment is "really a war on the idea of government's responsibility for the common good, and especially for the needy...
...Two-sided 'Troubles' Brian Lennon's article is on the mark in finding victims on both sides in the struggles in Northern Ireland...
...With deep gratitude, I wish you the best...
...Bloody Sunday and its cover-up constitute only a small part of a British army program of killings, prison internment for years without charges, late-night break-ins, destruction of homes, job discrimination, lack of police protection in Catholic areas, armed British troops among the baby carriages, and death-dealing Unionist paramilitary attacks-which are never described as terrorism in the British-(Continued on page 4) (Continued from page 2) controlled media...
...I have read enough of Gertrude Him-melfarb to know that she is capable of expressing quite clearly what she intends to say...
...Nationalism-the theory that the boundaries of the nation and the state should be congruent-is sometimes presented as a way of achieving human rights...
...What creates a gulf of difference is the Christian belief in the Incarnation, that Jesus is true God and true man- a belief abhorrent to Islam...
...But my spirits are good, my coffin (juniper) is complete, and my humor remains...
...Some are more unequal Brian Lennon's "A Nation of Victims" [March 14] is an insightful view of the situation in the north of Ireland...
...Jesus & the Qur'an In his "The Pillars of Islamic Faith" [January 31], David B. Burrell writes that "the Qur'an...
...Further, one should expect higher standards from a government than from a paramilitary group...
...It directly expresses neither...
...Ruth Moynihan is quite correct in pointing out that this atrocity is simply one of many carried out by the British government in Northern Ireland...
...PHILIP ERARD New York, N.Y...
...The very real and fundamental doctrinal differences remain to be faced and the ongoing Islamic-Christian dialogue may yet help us to approach it with insight through the mystical theologies of the two faiths...
...But, even though I get mad at the New Yorker, the Nation, and the New Republic, there's nothing I can do about it there, whereas I feel reasonably confident that my letters are not immediately tossed into the garbage can on Dutch Street (wherever that is...
...Translating, all too prosaically: Death and Life fought a wondrous duel...
...The twain once did meet I am grateful to Jerry Ryan for his striking essay [April 11] on the Eastern and Western interpretations of the dead Christ's descent into hell, but surely the further back in Christian history one goes, the closer one comes to a time in which these now divergent emphases were still convergent...
...That passage was marked because it too had a misprint: "It not" for "Is not...
...The Lamb has saved the sheep...
...Himmelfarb's critique of the welfare state is well known, and is an important intellectual resource for the "broad and disturbing political agenda" to which we referred...
...The Protestant community has indeed been the victim of many horrible atrocities, but the events of last summer's unrest show that it still holds the dominant hand in the life of the province...
...Whatever the case, vive la difference that grants challenging and enriching perspectives as we together plumb the reality of the "incomprehensible Creator...
...that is, the events of Bloody Sunday, 1972...
...Though I was born and educated in this country, virtually the whole of my family lives in Ulster, and I spend several months at home there every year...
...Innocent Christ has reconciled sinners to the Father...
...No poet writing in English has yet put this masterpiece into adequately compelling verse...
...Culver City, Calif...
...The writer is the author of God: A Biography (Knopf...
...Until it is clear that British and Unionist negotiators truly care about justice and human rights for all, there will be frustrated, uncontrollable "wild cards" on both sides who cannot resist resorting to violence...
...Here Burrell appears to echo the renowned Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who in his Ideals and Realities of Islam [1966] writes: "The Word of God in Islam is the Qur'an...
...Someone should try...
...The usual statement of the difference between the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity is that the Eastern is mystical and liturgical, the Western theological and legal...
...But, though we may begin by recognizing the double-minority status that exists, we must also acknowledge a fundamental inequality between the two minorities...
...The basic analogy is also an invidious one which cannot be allowed as an irenic bridge between Islam and Christianity...
...Thus it is worthy of more serious and respectful thought on both sides...
...rev...
...The editors reply: Perhaps we read too deeply, perhaps not...
...Life's dead champion living reigns...
...It is no secret that, like the Reagan administration's cynical expansion of the federal debt, the balanced-budget amendment is an attempt to place the federal government in a fiscal position that will require the elimination of discretionary social spending...
...Confirming my suspicion, I opened my Penguin edition of the play and found the very page bookmarked to the tirade, which is certainly martial, with its Rightly to be great/Is not to stir without great argument/But greatly to find quarrel in a straw/When honor's at the stake...
...And again: "[T]he Qur'an remains God's Word, not Muhammed's, so that Christians should liken the Qur'an to Jesus rather than to the Bible...
...SEAN D. MICHAELSON, N.S.J...
...That is what we meant by "fiscal strangulation," and we consider it a lethal threat to the poor...
...In this case, we read "the abolition of relief as an entitlement" as a very familiar neoconservative call to arms in the ongoing Republican battle to end the welfare state...
...On that spectrum, however, this poem occupies a middle position...
...The author replies: I certainly did not want to give the impression that the Unionist view of Bloody Sunday is justified...
Vol. 124 • May 1997 • No. 9
