Report from Romania
Davis, Robert Murray
C ORRESPONDENCE A clarification In my letter inquiring about the church's agenda regarding a sexual orientation that it considers objectively disordered, the editors of Commonweal replied,...
...I never stated, or implied, that the church is supporting research to eliminate gays (human persons...
...I had read a novel earlier that week in which one of the characters explained how she always made a point of sending her children off in the morning with a loving good-bye because you just never knew what might happen in the course of the day...
...John Paul II's agenda, Gordon told the audience, is to return the church to its triumphalist past...
...It was related not to mad cow disease but to depleted uraniumtipped shells fired by NATO in Bosnia (1994-95) and Kosovo (1999...
...They shrug at the Exposition Center to the north and sneer at the National Theater at the center, but they seem compelled by a perverse form of pride to first take visitors to see the enormous House of the People, second largest building in the world after the Pentagon...
...I have enough questions of my own...
...So the experience of having blowby-blow, minute-to-minute accounts of such a nightmarish tragedy was quite new to me...
...I share that skepticism...
...Instead, Bush instinctively appeals to a hardy American prejudice: taxation is a form of confiscation...
...The chief policeman was gracious...
...What is left are nineteenth-century neoclassical government and commercial buildings, domed at the corners and chastely ornamented...
...Did they cause a growing number of cancer- and leukemia-related deaths among NATO veterans...
...In addition, a UN inquiry in Kosovo had found that eight of eleven areas where the shells had been used were still contaminated with low-level radiation...
...Communist attempts to industrialize a predominantly agricultural people brought to the cities a number of those who found difficult the transition to urban life...
...Gaps and attempts to fill them are not confined to Bucharest...
...During the 1980s, Romanians were quarantined to prevent toxic Western influence...
...During the Gulf War (1991), more than 900,000 rounds of such ammunition were fired (compared to 31,000 rounds in Kosovo and 11,000 in Bosnia...
...When the metaphor is theft, tax cuts are taken as a form of restitution...
...are nasty— a Bush /Cheney campaign poster is the first image you see—while others are plain bizarre ("Am I interested in weather shielding for my brickwork or not...
...As many economists have pointed out, there appears to be little economic justification for tax cuts that will kick in after the current slowdown has ended...
...It would be excellent for Johnson to expand these topics and to open the dialogue for those who would join him in his plea for a revisiting of Humanae vitae...
...Given Romanian attitudes toward what Ceausescu managed to build before his fall, they should be more tolerant of the ruins...
...In the coming months, look for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to issue norms for a Catholic Internet rating system, tentatively titled Ex corde Webesiae...
...D 8 JO McGOWAN Corporal punishment Natural & other disasters in India Just minutes before the January 26 earthquake hit Gujarat, India—we live in Dehra Doon, north and east of that state—I was thinking about earthquakes...
...Drawn up by Tom Campbell (R-Calif...
...They were and are hungry for cultural fare more substantial than Big Macs—though they clearly want those too...
...Pope John Paul II has a specific message to convey, and there are at least two of us who think his message is right on...
...I replied that, in fact, most Americans weren't worried, and in any case, it was better to wait three weeks or even more to get the results than to know them in advance...
...I approached nervously (a crowd outside a police station is never a good sign), but what I saw there was worse than anything I could have imagined...
...other Western Europeans are not so sure...
...On average, 5,000 Iraqi citizens have died each month since the war, according to the Courant, as the result of UN sanctions leveled against the regime of Saddam Hussein...
...It may not harmonize with the classical buildings to the north of University Square, but compared to the dark glass rectangle of the Intercontinental Hotel just to the southwest, it looks restrained, even elegant...
...I think he's a dangerous figure...
...Many of the details for cuts are still to be worked out and they may prove to be more prudent and equitable than they sounded during the campaign...
...In Transylvania, churches built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Saxon settlers are largely deserted or turned into monuments because Ceau§escu allowed the parishioners, still largely German-speaking after more than eight centuries in the region, to emigrate when the German government paid large exit fees...
...After thinking about the article, I concluded that it produced some very thought-provoking ideas...
...And by the way, for what it's worth from a nontheologian, I think the advertisers, media, celebrities and population in general, promote "the (Continued on page 30) 4 Taxing rhetoric To the surprise of many Americans, George W. Bush delivered an elegant inaugural address on January 20...
...Indeed, it took me over a minute of staring to register what I was seeing, and even now I have difficulty believing I saw it...
...We have no right to ask anyone else to do anything the way we would do it," she announced...
...I I (Continued from page 4) goodness of sexual pleasure" more than enough...
...Bucharest was, by older accounts, a lot more like Paris before various disasters: earthquakes in 1940 and 1977, the bombing of World War II, and the megalomania of Ceausescu, who, like Nero, wanted to demolish large sections of his capital in order to build a monument to himself...
...As I was leaving Bucharest in November, the passport control officer sympathized with our confusion...
...Postmodern people of faith, like Gordon and her admiring listeners, have access to a sense of humility that fundamentalists and so-called Catholic triumphalists explicitly renounce...
...Three years (and many prayers) later, the sanctions remain in force, scarcely reshaped or narrowed...
...There was much to applaud in Bush's brief address, though to his credit, the president did not play his lines for easy applause...
...Samples are being examined for toxicity in five European countries, and an official assessment is expected in March...
...Those that remain are regarded with less suspicion by ethnic Romanians than the much larger Hungarian minority...
...And then I remembered that God hung between two thieves and said that yes, we were worth saving...
...That was rich indeed...
...Downright hilarious, though, was Gordon's analysis of the nature of faith in a postmodern age...
...Yet, as carefully crafted as the speech was in its appeal for the nation "to seek a common good beyond your comfort, to defend needed reforms against easy attacks, to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor," it also exposed the contradictions embedded in the Republican agenda—contradictions that belie the president's appeal to the common good...
...The site has inspired copycats of several varieties...
...If not yet, when might they...
...Take the promised tax cuts: the first and almost only extended round of applause during Bush's speech went to the reiteration of his campaign promise to cut taxes...
...Others range from political satire ("Am I President or not...
...By midafternoon on the second day I could no longer take it, but Ravi, desperate for more information, couldn't bear to turn it off...
...ben shafer Chicago, III...
...Well, almost enough...
...Catholic bishops' conference, wrote to Patriarch Raphael Bidawid of Baghdad, his Iraqi counterpart, saying that while the international community held the Iraqi government accountable for threatening the peace, world leaders must not "hold the Iraqi people hostage or harm innocent people...
...Where else can you get all this for $44 per year...
...How hot ami...
...As Commonweal's reviewer Robert Louis Wilken persuasively showed (January 26), Carroll's book is deeply flawed, especially his insistence that any traditional Christian understanding of the Crucifixion is inherently anti-Semitic...
...Your attractiveness will be rated on a scale of one to ten—ten for hot, one for not...
...My husband Ravi is one of India's experts on disaster relief and earthquakesafe housing...
...Gordon was particularly incensed over the beatification of Pius IX and John Paul It's support for Pius XII's canonization...
...Writing in the May/June 1999 issue of Foreign Affairs, John and Karl Mueller describe comprehensive state sanctions as an "impressive method" of mass destruction...
...The National Theater, a cube slightly rounded at the edges, would grace, or anyway not disgrace, a good-sized American city...
...A man was being tortured...
...Even the casual visitor to Bucharest will see far more evidence of peasant ways than in Central European capitals: wagons drawn by horses, women in rural dress (not colorful peasant costume) sweeping sidewalks with brooms made from twigs, trash carts rumbling down sidewalks on two iron wheels past store windows displaying luxury goods from the West...
...It would be interesting to see an article explaining why the analogy is unreasonable...
...My inquiry was directed toward the implications of the current, official institutional position of the church...
...I hope and pray that I will be able to see this happen in my lifetime...
...Wherever you do it, brother, the upper-wallah (God) will be watching...
...One of the most poignant stories involved a class of thirty high-school juniors (my son's age) who had been called in for a special exam (January 26 is a national holiday in India, and children generally attend school only to participate in outdoor parades and patriotic displays...
...We finally gave in to the children's pleas only a few months ago...
...But her reaction lacked any sense of proportionality...
...administrations...
...A smug, liberal caterwauling animated the evening...
...President Bush insisted that we take our responsibilities seriously both in this country and in the world, reminding us that "compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government...
...Aghast, I asked someone in the crowd what was happening and he told me that the police were trying to get a confession about a recent string of robberies...
...mansions of the nobility and higher bourgeoisie turned by the Communists into museums, writers' clubs, and other cultural sites...
...He put his head inside the window and said, "Should I do it inside the station then...
...While the Courant series in no way exonerated Hussein for his failure to meet UN requirements, and blistered him for refusing to release humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people, nonetheless it reported that during the period sanctions have been in place, percapita annual income in Iraq has dropped from $3,500 to $750...
...Could someone explain that to me...
...If s simply too easy...
...An hour later, the bulletins from Gujerat flashed across the nation...
...The new one is likely to take a harder line toward Iraq...
...Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other buildings fell to Ceausescu's wrecking ball, their sites open wounds...
...If not in ten years, in fifteen...
...Robert j. comiskey Springfield, Va...
...Or again, has anyone demonstrated that dissent from Humanae vitae has produced more stable and faithful marriages...
...Bucharesters especially mourn the lost churches, and the more superstitious feel mat their destruction released forces even more malign than Stalinism and what they called Ceausism...
...The polarities of views on this question range from the "objectively disordered" to "a gift of God...
...Simply stated: How will it respond, assuming no change in its present stance on nonheterosexual orientations, if the cause(s) of such orientations are uncovered in the future and subsequently the orientations themselves are subject to change within the canons of acceptable ethical norms...
...In calling for civility, courage, compassion, and character, he spoke to the desire of many for greater national comity and citizen accountability...
...Moreover, as you are well aware, a sexual orientation is only one component of the totality of personhood...
...True—and again like the Pentagon—it has no features that would tempt one to take a closer look...
...Aside from electing a former Communist to lead a country into capitalist democracy, the most obvious contradictions in Romania, as in every post-Communist country, are evident on the drive into Bucharest from the airport...
...Romanians I spoke with have not had enough time to become disenchanted with the West...
...But do we...
...the letter argued that "morally, it is wrong to hold the Iraqi people responsible for the actions of a brutal and reckless government...
...I think he's done an enormous amount of harm...
...A year ago, seventy members of Congress sent President Bill Clinton a bipartisan letter stating that the UN sanctions offered the Iraqi government little incentive to comply...
...AmIHot.com, a similar site, has personal ads with each photo...
...At a symposium on postmodernism, held in a seventeenth-century building in a district established by Vlad Tepes, (the model for Dracula), a Central European participant observed that discussion always seemed to come back to America as a reference point...
...I am not moved by him kneeling at the wall," she boasted...
...The first question—or rather speech—from the audience was a stem-winder that started out expressing doubt over the possibility of change in the church and descended into a rant on the Catholic origins of civil violence around the world, the sinister immigration policy of the church, and predictably enough, the Catholic overpopulation problem...
...It was enough to make a Catholic speed home with the intention of reuniting the procreative and unitive dimensions of the conjugal act...
...Hoping & praying I thoroughly enjoyed Jerry Ryan's "1054 & All That" (January 12,2001...
...At the same time, they argue that the UN's sanctions have neither undermined Hussein's will to survive nor significantly weakened his hold on power...
...Pilla noted that the UN sanctions should be "reviewed, reshaped, and narrowed to achieve their legitimate objectives of ending threats to peace," and promised that the American bishops would hold the Iraqis' sufferings "in our hearts and prayers...
...Lest we forget, all of this was said at the Interf aim Center of New York...
...Still, he was one of the more reasonable people in the crowded room at the Interf aith Center...
...per-capita daily protein intake has fallen from 81.6 grams to 53.3 grams, landing the country on the list of nations endangered by malnutrition...
...Happily, they had only three days to wait for the result to be finalized...
...In Cluj (Klausenberg under the ID Austrians, Koloszvar under the Hungarians, to give an indication of the complexities involved), the mayor removed the part of the plaque identifying King Matthias Corvinus as a Hungarian king and has excavated large holes in front of the statue, apparently to demonstrate what no one disputes: Cluj was a Roman settlement...
...God knows, the history of Christian anti-Semitism is horrible, but Carroll is not the first or the most authoritative to write about those crimes...
...None of that is good enough for Gordon or her fans...
...Ravi warned him that he would be inviting his own punishment if he continued to violate the law so flagrantly...
...What seems on landing to be a golden ground haze turns out to be smog that rises higher and grows thicker toward the center of the city...
...Then he reached out and took his hand...
...Help thou my unbelief...
...It is as if acts of God are not enough—we have to create our own tragedies as well...
...All of this appeared to go down very well with those in the room...
...Until very recently, we had no television in our home...
...More than three years ago, Bishop Anthony Pilla, then president of the U.S...
...If you've ever asked yourself that question, here's a Web site for you: www.AmIHotOrNot.com...
...One member lists among her hobbies "drinking/getting drunk," "wrestling," and "building sand castles...
...To him, "America means democracy...
...Today there are literal gaps in the city, especially in the south center, where the market was cleared and remains empty and boarded up...
...Like the Pentagon, it doesn't look that big because it's a lot broader than it is tall and because, from the front, its full dimensions are not observable...
...By day, the grime visibly coats the buildings and dusts the cars (mostly Dadas, locally assembled) that crowd streets and clutter sidewalks...
...Or mention of the Rom, or gypsies, who are, sooner or later, mentioned by everyone...
...cindy nolan Lincolnshire, III...
...What might the center's next program be, "Mormonism: A Weird Religion for Weird People" or "The Hasidim: Haven't They Heard of Birth Control...
...REV...
...His bare legs and arms were a mass of angry red welts and his entire body was trembling violently...
...We left finally, knowing that our response had been inadequate and perhaps futile...
...He described them as a blunt instrument which "hurt large numbers of people who are not their primary targets...
...The only (mildly) anti-American sentiments were expressed by a performance artist from San Diego...
...The man was a known criminal and by "interrogating" him for two days, he had already recovered a huge collection of keys and several stolen items (he gestured across the room toward a stack of VCRs, cassette players, and TVs...
...Ravi looked at him for a long moment, speechless...
...And Alan Greenspan's mixed blessing a few days later (cut, but not too much...
...Romanians are even more enthusiastic about the American political system, though they express wonder and dismay at the confusion about our recent election...
...Little did I know that Romanians would soon face their own disputed election...
...Sex & the pope Luke Timothy Johnson has gotten it right ("A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body/" January 26,2001...
...He had no choice, he assured us...
...The article by Luke Timothy Johnson attempts to take Pope John Paul II to task, thereby defining his deficiency, for not showing some "appreciation for the goodness of sexual pleasure...
...ANTHONY DI RUSSO Greenville, N.H...
...A crowd had gathered at the police station which is at the top of our road...
...Polio, meningitis, and typhoid—all nearly eradicated before the war—are also on the rise, and cases of cholera quadrupled between 1997 and 1999, from 486 to 2,398...
...Gordon was there to "pay homage" to James Carroll, who was launching the publicity tour for his new book, Constantine's Sword...
...6 NOTEBOOK SANCTIONS ON IRAQ Ten years & counting Last month, a wave of medical concern raised a hot debate in Western Europe...
...As we were pulling out of the driveway, the chief walked toward the car and motioned to us to wait...
...People in former Communist countries tend to blame party ideology for what is merely official bad taste...
...Larger things are at stake than one politician's cynicism or one pope's bad decisions...
...Some, like "Am I capable of understanding basic logic or not...
...But here today—caught between the devastation in Gujerat and the police station in Dehra Doon—I can only say like Peter: "Lord I believe...
...According to Dennis Halliday, the UN's former coordinator of aid to Iraq, the UN embargo has "pushed the Iraqi people back toward Saddam," undermining the sanctions' stated goal...
...If I have an open mind to the Bible and to the magisterium, then those ideas can result in very wholesome and faithstrenghening thoughts...
...Ravi spoke with him at length about the difference between interrogation and torture, and reminded him of the Supreme Court decision against the use of excessive force in extracting confessions...
...He had been tied in the "chicken" position (knees to his head) and then hung upside down on a pole stretched across two chairs...
...I'm sending in my check today...
...But that was last January...
...It was his duty...
...Yet everything that the Bush administration hopes to accomplish, from education reform to modernizing the military to providing Medicare prescription coverage, may depend on marshaling resources that lie in those surpluses, to say nothing of all that needs doing and currently goes unattended...
...What a woman...
...and British experts say no...
...In a time of budget surpluses, it is an offer that few will resist...
...Furthermore, down the line the cuts could turn out to be inflationary, bringing back the huge deficit that the Clinton administration inherited from the last Republican interregnum and finally tamed with the discipline supplied by the aforementioned Alan Greenspan...
...I caught her last month at the Interfaith Center of New York...
...The new seems to have the edge...
...Off the main streets, one can see women teetering on spike heels across cobblestones, a symptom of Romania's struggle to accommodate new and old...
...Carroll, a laicized priest, has done that too often in upscale magazines and newspapers like the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Boston Globe...
...Theaters and cabarets mount avant-garde works that combine lyrical reading with intricate choreography, for example, the use of shopping carts, that would have delighted Busby Berkeley...
...Even nihilists can find a home in cyberspace at the Web site "Am I not or not...
...And morally, if not politically and militarily, when do sanctions become objectionable...
...Even more stark than the effect of radioactive contaminants on veterans and local populations, however, is another, continuing action against Iraq...
...Gordon also warned the audience that the growth area in religion was not among the broadminded, compassionate New Yorkers gathered in the room...
...He was on the phone to friends in the United States to mobilize funds, speaking to the prime minister's office to determine the areas of greatest need, receiving reports from friends in the affected villages and towns, and meeting with his team to plan strategies for temporary shelters as well as long-term reconstruction and relief...
...And sometimes, as in last December's election to the presidency of former Communist Ion Iliescu, who served from 1990 to 1996 as the country's first president after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, they make progress by going backward...
...John Paul II's behavior in relation to the Jews is "simply an outrage," she said...
...Gordon was oblivious to the absence of humility and the unwarranted certainty with which she caricatured the pope's actions as well as the beliefs of those she deems "fundamentalists...
...One Canadian expert, the Courant reported, has warned of likely lung cancers developing among Gulf War veterans...
...I think he's too easy on the pope," Gordon began her remarks about Carroll's book, which, incidentally, does acknowledge that John Paul II has done more than any other pope to bring Catholics and Jews together...
...His widely praised overtures, such as his apology for historic violence against the Jews, his visit to Israel, and his pilgrimage to the Western Wall, are a fraud and a lie...
...I thought...
...Lewis's Mere Christianity and his comparison of contemporary sexuality and gluttony...
...Twenty?...And who is doing the counting...
...The January 26 issue was the last straw...
...Just to clear my head a little, I went out for a walk...
...Knowing that my Hindi would never rise to this occasion, to say nothing of needing more courage than I possessed alone, I ran home to get Ravi and we dashed back in our car...
...As noted in the original letter, until such time as the church can adopt a more neutral stance on the interpretation of the orientation itself, the dialogue will remain one of defensive posturing...
...This was a bit of a hoot, since the substance and tenor of her remarks rarely deviated from her outrage over the pope's refusal to do things the way she thinks they should be done...
...No small irony in the title of that venue...
...By night, the haze, not quite as thick as that in Blade Runner, softens signs and street lights, making the vendors' stalls and the cobbled side streets of the Old Court district look like the Left Bank in Paris...
...You can upload pictures of yourself and be rated by visitors to the site...
...Such facts are slowly beginning to dawn on the American public...
...Tudor, head of the Greater Romania Party and fierce opponent of Jews, Hungarians, and gypsies, then asked Romania's highest court to set aside the vote on grounds of fraud, bribery, collusion, and a number of other allegations...
...It is rare to find this in a single voice...
...C ORRESPONDENCE A clarification In my letter inquiring about the church's agenda regarding a sexual orientation that it considers objectively disordered, the editors of Commonweal replied, "We doubt that the official church is supporting research to eliminate gays through genetic surgery, or otherwise" (January 12, 2001...
...AmICatholicOrNot.com hasn't yet emerged...
...In a runoff with Corneliu Vadim Tudor, Iliescu received over 66 percent of the vote, much of it from moderates whose candidates failed to make the second round of voting...
...Think of your own humanity...
...A plea beneath the photo reads "Please help keep this site fun, clean, and real...
...But the Romanians will insist that every visitor see it, so prepare to be appalled...
...Since then there have been an additional sixty thousand sanction-related deaths—more than the number of U.S...
...Furthermore, since widespread water contamination persists, a result of bombed-out infrastructure and the curtailment of chemical production and importation, dysentery and gastroenteritis are rampant, affecting both the old and the young...
...Sources dose to the curia claim the Vatican is in talks with AOL / Time Warner to develop a site...
...According to a series published last fall in the Hartford Courant (October 22-25,2000), birth defects in Iraq have nearly tripled since the end of the war, raising the issue of whether the use of depleted uranium-tipped weapons bears greater scrutiny there...
...By the time we returned, the man had been untied and now lay quivering on the ground...
...Submit your picture and find out...
...Romanians have tried to bridge cultural and social as well as ethnic gaps...
...Johnson is careful to be inclusive of concerns of men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, single and married...
...Ethnocentric racism, as Tudor's popularity attests, is a real problem...
...Why is contraceptive intercourse not like the Romans' vomitorium...
...Humility," she said, "that is the virtue most called for in a pluralistic world...
...From these, one can see what early twentieth-century Bucharest must have been like...
...AmIGeekOrNot.com asks "How much of a geek are you...
...It's not hard to play to the worst suspicions of those who are either wholly ignorant of Catholicism or passionately disaffected from the church...
...What if there were an earthquake...
...Romanian Orthodox churches, the older ones aged into individuality and distinction...
...Paul O'Neill, secretary of the treasury, acknowledged at his confirmation hearings the high priority a tax cut has in the new administration...
...In the immediate future, the Federal Reserve's lowering of interest rates is likely to work more smoothly and more quickly...
...RAY TOLOSKO West Newbury, Mass...
...and mortality rates for children under five have quadrupled (UNICEF estimates some 500,000 premature deaths in that subgroup...
...It was half an hour before I realized it and the story from the novel came back to me immediately...
...One doesn't denounce the state of Israel, for example, because of the passing (we hope) popularity of Ariel Sharon...
...Much of the gray is literal...
...By American standards, the buildings aren't bad—or at any rate are no worse than most of our municipal architecture...
...and John Conyers (D-Mich...
...The Church and the Jews, A History...
...That evening, as still more heartbreaking images of infant corpses and grieving fathers were shown on television, I could think only of that man—a thief perhaps, but also somebody's precious child—beaten senseless by another human being and I wondered if there was any hope for us at all...
...It cost him nothing...
...Absent the particulars, examine and consider the justifications for the cuts frequently repeated by Bush and Company: "The surplus belongs to the taxpayer, not to the government...
...In March 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan openly expressed concern about sanctions on Iraq...
...Within hours of the tragedy our living room had become a kind of command center...
...She could never shake the image of the parents who must have sent their babies off that morning as if it had been any other day...
...He did a quick take and agreed...
...I sure would like to know...
...their building collapsed and all but four died...
...the deficit could reemerge if surpluses fail to materialize) was taken by Republicans as an order to move full speed ahead...
...As we walked past him and into the station, he stared at us dully, dearly in shock...
...One is forced to ponder: If the purpose of sanctions is to oust Saddam Hussein, are they working...
...One of the joys and burdens of being alive today is that we know too much," she said...
...The House of the People could be worse...
...In looking at the ecumenical movement, Ryan pointed out real possibilities and opportunities to come together and share our faith without our traditions inhibiting our worship and dialogue...
...The court quickly rejected Tudor's appeal only three days after votes were cast...
...That bias leads directly to another: the government that governs least _5_ Hot or not...
...Her barely contained anger at the pope prevents her from seeing what James Carroll honestly acknowledges: for all his failings, John Paul II sincerely reveres Judaism and has taken once unimaginable steps toward Jewish-Catholic reconciliation...
...Johnson is also sensitive to the hidden sexist underpinnings of much of the current church teaching and to the basic logical flaws in many of its supportive arguments...
...Do you want to do this to yourself...
...Who needs it...
...Halliday warns that although the sanctions have failed to dislodge Hussein, they have turned a whole generation of younger Iraqis against the West, creating a veritable breeding ground for future extremists...
...Goaded on by Gordon, the crowd turned the evening into an orgy of anti-Catholic speechifying...
...The principal issue, of course, is how to interpret orientation itself...
...My thought was: with my weak faith, do I really need to read discussions about the deficiencies in the Catholic church as perceived by others...
...She had been deeply affected by an account of a school in Italy that had collapsed in an earthquake, killing every single student inside...
...Patrick Jordan I PAUL BAUNANN CATHOLICISM & ANTI-SEMITISM An evening with James Carroll & Mary Gordon When it comes to Catholic bashing—and especially pope bashing—the novelist Mary Gordon is in a class of her own...
...For the Exposition Center, the builders dug a large circular hole and put a dome over it, but the symmetry is much more pleasing than the Stalinist block nearby...
...9 Robert Murray Davis REPORT FROM ROMANIA Ceau§escu's legacies Eleven years after the end of Communist rule, Romanians still try to fill the gaps and resolve the contradictions created during four decades of repression and isolation from the West...
...But he knew there was much more and he was determined to get it back...
...On January 26, my son had slipped out of the house while I was busy making my daughter's lunch and I didn't say good-bye to him...
...Indeed, the promised cut of $1.6 trillion was the first order of business in the Senate the Monday after inauguration day...
...As an educator of adolescents and a married mother of three, I have searched for writings that present a balanced view of the gift of sexuality, including both its pleasurable and difficult aspects...
...And this leaves out of the account the Jews, who suffered under the Iron Guard in the 1930s and even worse under the Nazis during the war...
...Reducing the federal deficit used to be a Republican mantra...
...Glitzy signs for Western consumer products only partly mask Communist gray...
...When the home page appears you are greeted with an image of a man or a woman underneath a beauty ballot...
...I think we need to remember that John Paul II is a consummate actor and a media expert," Gordon said...
...And I believe it is a greater insult to the murder of the Jews than if he had simply been silent...
...Taxpayers know better than the government how to spend their money...
...As a candidate, George W. Bush called for a strengthening of sanctions, and Hussein will no doubt be a primary focus of Bush's foreign policy—in terms of energy security and family honor...
...Increasingly, religious people were "fundamentalists," true believers whose faith was rooted in "hatred and terror and uncertainty...
...casualties in Vietnam—and there has been a change in U.S...
...Postmodern people know that there is not just one truth, and consequently must embrace what she called the "challenge of de-evangelization" (few people in the room evidently caught the reference to John Paul II...
...Not for the lukewarm "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body'" reminded me to look again at C.S...
...He urged that we think of ourselves as "citizens, not spectators...
...to the philosophical ("Am I an existentialist or not...
Vol. 128 • February 2001 • No. 3
