The Defense Rests
McGowan, Jo
THE DEFENSE RESTS lo McGowan ~ hen I heard about the October 17 death of Jim McFadden, founder and publisher of the Human Life Review (HRL), I felt strangely bereft. My association with...
...0-8091-3801-8 $5.95 PAULIST PRESS Available a t bookstores or 1 ~ ] 997 Macarthur Blvd...
...D Jo McGowan and her family live in Dehra Doon, India...
...John Reitano...
...What a strange experience...
...l ~ ,I Mahwah, N.J...
...Walter J. Burghardt, S.J...
...His Review dealt solely with "life issues": these came to include topics like euthanasia, contraception, and in vitro fertilization, but abortion was far and away its overriding concern...
...illustrated by William Haines Full color illustrations...
...My association with Jim began in 1989 when he reprinted an anti-abortion piece I had written for Newsweek...
...And he did it with a rigor that astonished: One is not accustomed, in these days when "nonjudgmental" is the highest compliment, to hearing unvarnished truth, thundering off the page with nothing less than biblical certainty...
...In his own writing and in the things he published, he consistently exposed what passes for compassion (assisted suicide, for example) as the shallow selfishness it is...
...Our friendship was mostly through letters (we met only twice, both times for lunch in wonderful Italian restaurants in New York City), and these letters necessarily dwindled as his cancer progressed and I became more and more taken up by the care of my own seriously ill child...
...He loved finding the lighter side of almost everything and he made a point of lacing the very serious pages of the HLR with hilarious cartoons lifted from the Spectator of London...
...A simple yet profound story that confronts us with the absurdity of racism and prejudice based on skin color...
...Definitely not "for women only...
...Given the intricacies of a situation in which most of the people I associate with are prochoice, the temptation is often to soft-pedal my prolife views, to be "sensitive and compassionate...
...I was hooked...
...He was, as William Buckley pointed out, the "prime exhibit of G.K...
...Jim was also a family man, delighting in his five children and two grandchildren and, most especially, in the love of his wife, Faith Abbott...
...PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Cloth 0-8091-0499-7 $14.95 What If the Zebras Lost Their Stripes...
...In the beginning, reading it used to literally give me a headache and I often flung it in the wastepaper basket in disgust, but just as often it made me laugh out loud...
...Cloth 0-8091-6648-8 $14.95 Hope far the Flowers Trina Paulus A best-selling modern-day fable in celebration of hope...
...Two million copies in print...
...Regularly he sent me large packages filled with magazines, clippings, and books--all to keep me informed and to encourage me to keep writing...
...Indeed, as a good left-winger, I had barely even read one, except to poke fun at it...
...0-8091-3795-X $7.95 A Walk through Our Church written and illustrated by Gertrud Mueller Nelson Illustrated with bold and inviting line drawings, this book offers readers a reverent and educational tour of an empty church, giving names to its furnishings-a lovely experience for children and adults...
...0-8091-3710-0 $6.95 The Seven Secrets of Successful Catholics Paul Wilkes "..presents in down-ta-earth language a profoundly practical spirituality...these are indispensable building blocks...
...Cloth 0-8091-0488-1 $11.95 Kathleen Norris The Quotidian Mysteries Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work" 1998 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality Kathleen Norris The bestselling author of The Cloister Walk reflects on the sanctifying possibilities of everyday work and how God is present in worship and liturgy as well as in ordinary life...
...I know he is watching her still, and I feel a little safer with this champion of human life now firmly ensconced in the only court that matters...
...Still, I thought of him as a dear friend and a profound influence on my life...
...Sparing no one (except perhaps the pope and Mother Teresa), he would gallop along, shooting from the hip with sarcasm and truly awful puns, quoting from such diverse sources as the London Economist and the Baltimore Catechism...
...If nothing else, Jim made it impossible for me to use either of those words without quotation marks...
...She was a special pet of his and he followed the joys and sorrows of her life with a constant concern, made sharper by his own suffering...
...Something kept drawing me back to it, however, until finally I gave up, sat down, and read it straight through...
...Jim was, probably first and foremost, a Catholic...
...My first reaction was to hide the thing before my husband saw it...
...With the exception of the abortion issue, Jim and I probably disagreed on almost everything of any importance: from women priests to capital punishment, from defense spending to socialized medicine...
...Chesterton's dogged insistence that piety and laughter are inseparable, and indefeasibly the work of God...
...But the really important thing about Jim McFadden, who cultivated the image of being "to the right of Atilla the Hun" (to quote his daughter, Maria), was that he was one of the sweetest men I have ever known...
...Ages 5-adult...
...She is the founder of Karuna Vihar, a school for children with special needs...
...Cloth 0-8091-0174-2 $14.95...
...Barbara DeAngelis, Author of --REAL MOMENTS Cloth 0-8091-6649-6 $16.95 Friendship The Key to Spiritual Growth John W. Crossin A concise and practical reflection on the necessity of friendship with self, others, and God for developing virtues and achieving spiritual growth...
...In addition, Jim put out the catholic eye, a quirky little biweekly newsletter that often gave an eye for an eye, written, it seemed, entirely by himself, in which he took on whatever secular god was in vogue at the moment...
...Commonweal 3 0 December 4, 1998 PR~sSJ An Uncommon Correspondence An East-West Conversation on Friendship, Intimacy and Love Ivy George and Margaret Masson Insightful and intelligent letters between two women, one British, the other Indian, which offer a cross-cultural exploration of themes of human intimacy, such as friendship, courtship, marriage, and celibacy...
...He was a strong conservative, fiercely loyal to the pope, and utterly convinced of the prophetic power of the church...
...How did he remember me---and how out of touch I might be feeling--in the midst of his extraordinarily busy life...
...Cloth 0-8091-0500-4 $14.95 Living a Gentle, Passionate Life Robert J. Wicks Stories, ideas and truths that show how to nourish the human spirit-our own and that of those we meet along life's journey...
...He sent me a copy of the issue in which my piece appeared and I read through it with a growing sense of dismay...
...For thirty years he worked as a journalist with the National Review, whose political views were harmonious with his own, and for nearly twenty-five he presided over the publication of the Human Life Review, the only scholarly journal in the country devoted solely to exploring the "life issues," most notably abortion...
...I had never been published in so conservative a magazine...
...0-8091-1754-1 $9.95 Hope for the Flowers Audio with Book Gift Package Audio read by Trina Paulus Paper 0-8091-8249-1 $19.95 Celtic Prayers from lana J. Philip Newell Based on the rhythms and images of Celtic oral tradition, these morning and evening prayers are a week's cycle of daily worship used by the ecumenical community of Iona, the most famous of Celtic shrines...
...07430 To order, call 1-800-218-1903 or FAX 1-800-836-3161 e-mail: paulistp@pipeline.com http://www.paulistpress.com...
...Full-color illustrations...
...Written in calligraphy...
...Laughter was an important part of Jim's life...
...I was on the receiving end of his generosity for the nine years I knew him, and I am sure I was only one on a long list...
...He was fearless in their defense, in spite of the ridicule he was certain to receive in an unbelieving society...
...Jack Canfield, Co-author, CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL "A beautiful book that invites children to learn about love, compassion and tolerance...
...This quality of his was an inspiration to me in my often lonely position as an anti-abortion leftwinger...
...I think what I admired most about Jim was the strength of his beliefs...
...In it, he gathered some of the world's finest argument on the subject, mainly against, but occasionally for as well, just to give his own stable of writers something fresh to wrestle with...
...On his first day back in the office after his cancer surgery, he sent me a note and "a few oddball items" he had been saving for me...
...A persuasive guide to strengthening one's inner fife...
Vol. 125 • December 1998 • No. 21
