Et ceteras
Department of promotion ¦ From a kind, but annoyed subscriber, we received the following: "I love the magazine, I subscribe myself and send an annual subscription to friends." (That's the good...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...6 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Why send me a new member promo...
...The explanation: Paul Q. Kane, Commonweal's ever-vigilant business manager (and a pretty kind guy himself) replied: "You received the recent promotion mailing because we are working to build a base of new subscribers...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...Maybe he or she would like to subscribe...
...From the editors: We are sorry, too...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...God will hear you...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...That's the good part...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...Although we try to eliminate duplicates and the names of subscribers, they sometimes slip through the cracks because they are listed differently (for example, a subscription may be under a spouse's name, or it may use initials rather than the actual first name...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...This means we have to purchase lists from other publications...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...The complaint: "Imagine my confusion, therefore, when I received your impressive mail solicitation for new subscribers...
...REV...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...Maybe I will...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...REV...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...Marvin, S.D...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...I am sorry that you received the promotion mailing unnecessarily...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...Readers so plagued could recycle Commonweal's promotion mailing, or better, give it to a friend (or enemy...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
