America Magazine - Current Issue

Of Many Things

The Quadrennial Defense Review is a Congressionally mandated report by the Secretary of Defense on U.S. strategic goals and the personnel, hardware and financing required to realize them. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates presented the 2010 Q.D.R. on Feb. 1. His willingness to cut big-budget weapons systems that are relics of the cold war helped to bring the defense budget in line with meeting actual threats and the ongoing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they yielded no overall savings in defense spending.

The report pays attention to the needs of the active military, veterans and their families, who have disproportionately paid the price for war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Administering Justice

Recession-driven prison closings may provide state lawmakers an opportunity to promote a more rational approach to criminal justice that still puts public safety first. Draconian sentences even for low-level offenders have long crowded penal facilities, and over the past two decades the building of new prisons has increased dramatically. In the 1960s and 70s an average of four prisons a year were under construction, but in the 1990s the average jumped to 24 a year. Correctional costs now swallow up huge portions of many state budgets. According to a March 2009 report by the Pew Center on the States, total corrections spending has reached an estimated $68 billion, an increase of 336 percen

Current Comment

The Urgency of Now

The health care summit meeting on Feb. 25 ended not with a bang but with a grimace. With the Republican opposition determined to remain only that, Democrats are left scrambling to salvage health care reform before its momentum peters out completely. To start over, as Republicans disingenuously suggest—as though they were not present and had no responsibility to participate in the yearlong process—would be to postpone reform indefinitely.

But Congress cannot merely shrug off the vexing problem of health care in the United States or pretend to “fix” it through tepid efforts at cost con

A Troubling Disconnection

Although it may seem counterintuitive, surveys show that the military operators of drones (note that C.I.A. operators were not in the survey) suffer post-traumatic stress disorder at higher rates than do soldiers in combat zones. Why? First, instead of going to war with a unit that offers community, cohesion and military support services, drone operators are commuter warriors who go to their battle stations alone, with few support systems.

Second, the operators see in detail the destruction and grisly human toll from their work, whereas a traditional bomber sees little of what happens after dropping a bomb. As Col. Pete Gersten, commander of Unmanned Aerial Systems at Creech Air F

Flying Blind

On Dec. 30, 2009, a trusted Central Intelligence Agency informant walked into a base in Khost, Afghanistan, which borders Pakistan, and blew up himself and seven others working for the agency. In the weeks that followed, the United States, possibly for revenge, dramatically increased the number of attacks into Western Pakistan using unmanned aerial combat vehicles, better known as drones.

The attacks in response to the Khost bombing are rekindling the controversy surrounding this new technology of war. The C.I.A., which runs the drone operations in Pakistan, has called them “lawful, aggressive, precise and effective” (New York Times, 1/23), and its director, Leon Panet

A Season of Grace

We did not get ashes on Ash Wednesday last year. Late in the evening a few days after our three-year-old daughter’s heart surgery, I realized what day it was. We would not make it to the parish in time to receive ashes, I told my wife. With pitch-perfect insight, she turned to me. “Babe,” she said, “we’ve been wearing ashes for a month.”

I do not feel guilty about it. We couldn’t pull it off. Our heads were somewhere else: the hospital, doctors, medications, five weeks of appointments, medical testing, sleepless nights and nightmares when we did doze. Yet there we were on Ash Wednesday with an excellent prognosis for our little girl. The p

Antidote for Anomie

In early February, I received a packet of letters from eighth-grade students at Saint Joseph School in New York City. The students suggested ways to be both challenging and respectful while discussing politics, and many sounded more mature and honest than some adult Democrats and Republicans or MSNBC and Fox News commentators. I hope that as they grow up, they will not become contaminated by the degraded discourse of our politics and media.

Our political discourse suffers anomie, or normlessness. There is little respect for any position other than self-interest. Instead of thoughtful critique we hear knee-jerk expletives. If you watch the three major networks and PBS, you may not

A Window to the Divine

In his provocative book Christianity and Evolution, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., raised the question, “Who will at last give evolution its own God?” Teilhard grappled with this question throughout his life, as he sought a new understanding of God at work in an evolutionary universe. Similarly, the theologian John Haught confronts the question of God and evolution, and one might see in Haught’s work an answer to Teilhard’s question. Unlike Teilhard, who pursued a new synthesis of God in the world, Haught assumes a conversation “between Charles Darwin and Christian theology on the question of what evolution means for our understanding of God and w

God�s Creatures on the March

A good book is hard to find. It is a doubly rare treat to find one worth reading aloud to your children. As a father of four boys, three of whom have reached the ages of heavy book consumption (nine, five and three), I have plodded through my share of disappointing children’s books, cringing every time my child reaches for The Berenstain Bears, or the latest installment in the Franklin series, gratefully smiling when they turn instead to the old-school Beatrix Potter or Winnie the Pooh.

And so it was with cautious trepidation that I first cracked open The Purples Are Coming! To my relief, I was not disappointed. Here is a children’s

Playing God

Despite all the experts, technology and intelligence available to the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, now going into its eighth year, was undertaken with “ardent devotion to a misplaced faith,” maintains T. Walter Herbert, emeritus professor of American literature and culture at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Tex. and author of this insightful new book. This faith was derived from a faith-filled narrative with roots in our Puritan heritage.

The Puritans saw themselves as God’s chosen people, to whom was given the Promised Land in America. The only thing stopping them from settling it were the savages who sought to kill them. The frontier hero emerge

Ahimsa

He let the flies land freely on his face
as if they were not there, or he were not,
then ate his porridge with a simple grace
without an urge to move, or move to swat,
and in the wild untouched and timeless wood
he’d made his home years back unto his youth
he spoke of ways that I—and all men—could
approach the substance of our deepest truth.
But I of stubborn old unbending ways
had settled fancies, and still loved them too,
so left his side, though filled with newfound praise
for things that monks and martyrs tend to do,
and back within the city, thought it quaint
that, swatting flies, I could not be a sain

The Finger of God

It is easy to point a finger at someone caught red-handed in a sinful act. While someone else is in the spotlight, the chances diminish that my own wrongdoings will be found out and draw others’ attention—at least for the moment. Joining the mob of accusers also keeps me from self-examination and the possibility of repentance. It is much easier to point out other peoples’ shortcomings.

In the Gospel today the case seems clear-cut. A woman is caught in the very act of adultery. The evidence is indisputable, and the law is clear. It is just a matter of carrying it out. Jesus’ opponents are not interested in the circumstances that led to the woman’s acti

Letters

States Right$

Maryann Cusimano Love (“The Defense Dilemma,” 3/8) points out the incredible waste in defense programs. To her credit she allots blame not just to the military and their contractors but also to the legislators. Bureaucracies are inherently wasteful and inefficient. The Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services are bureaucracies.

In my opinion, the root of the problem with defense spending rests with the Congress, not with the military. Take as an example, the F-35 fighter jet program. It is unnecessary and should be replaced with considerably less expensive Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. But the problem is th