America Magazine - Current Issue

Of Many Things

This last week the stories of two women brought home to me the pains inflicted by the absence of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. One is is Sharihan Hannoun, a young woman who has been living on the street in Jerusalem after her home was seized and occupied by Israeli settlers. The second, a student at Bethlehem University named Berlanty Azzam, was peremptorily deported by Israeli authorities to Gaza.

A third woman, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, demonstrated how, when unmoored from history and experience, American policy in the Middle East can cause pain to all those who had come to hope for change from the Obama administration. Secretary Clinton backed away from the administrat

Current Comment

Artful Dodgers

Every year the federal government loses some $100 billion in tax revenue to international tax cheating. That is a staggering sum, enough to pay for 27 months of the war in Afghanistan at the current rate of $3.6 billion per month. A recovery of eight years’ worth of these losses could pay for the entire health care reform package proposed by the House. Instead, year after year U.S. citizens hide their earnings abroad, and foreign firms earning money in the United States underreport or refuse to report their earnings.

Plugging the leak is the goal of a new bill sponsored by two Democrats, Charles B. Rangel of the House Ways and Means

The Iron Pipeline

Should residents of local communities have the right to keep handguns in their homes? This Second Amendment issue is a question that the Supreme Court will consider in 2010, perhaps as early as February. The specific case before the court is McDonald v. Chicago, in which a few of that city’s residents, strongly backed by the National Rifle Association, are challenging Chicago’s strict gun control laws.

Setting the stage for this case was last year’s Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. To the dismay of gun control advocates, the court ruled then that the district’s prohibition against the possession of handguns in the home for self-defe

Basketball Diary

I am looking over a student’s transcript in the offices of International Christian High School, where I have labored for the last 10 years as a basketball coach, writing teacher and counselor, when a new colleague asks a question someone here asks me every year, “What church do you go to?” I pause, then look at her with a wry grin, knowing the answer is not going to be what she expects.

“I go to a Catholic church.” A momentary, awkward silence seizes her before she replies, “Oh.” I could hear her inner voice: He’s one of those.

Yes, I am. I’m the only Catholic at an evangelical Christian, mostly minority school

Bridge Over The River Tiber

Papal Gambit Stuns Church” was how The Times of London headlined its front page Oct. 21. Inside, an editorial thundered that Rome’s newly announced legal structure allowing Anglicans to join the Catholic Church without giving up their rites and traditions had “dangerously weakened” Anglicanism. The editors said that Pope Benedict XVI stands accused of damaging church unity and ecumenical cooperation.

It was gloriously retro, as if out of an 1850 Punch cartoon showing a sinister pope and cardinal trying to force their way through a door over the caption: “Daring attempt to break into a church.” The Times’s metaphors—Rome was “an

The Road From Aguilares

A group of highly trained Salvadoran soldiers entered the campus of the University of Central America in San Salvador shortly past midnight on Nov. 16, 1989. While their primary target was the president of the university, Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., they murdered and mutilated nearly the entire Jesuit community—Ignacio and five others. A seventh member of the community, Jon Sobrino, S.J., was in Thailand teaching a course on Christology. The soldiers also murdered Elba and Celina Ramos, the Jesuits’ housekeeper and her daughter, who slept on campus that night to escape the anxiety caused by the bullets and artillery around the neighborhood where they lived.

What ha

Birth Plan

Pregnancies in which there is a diagnosis of fatal, congenital anomalies are rare but profoundly tragic. There exists within the Catholic tradition a developed moral debate about the appropriateness of inducing early labor in such pregnancies. The debate has largely focused upon whether, given the impending death of a baby upon or shortly after birth, labor may be induced when a pregnancy reaches viability but prior to full term in order to alleviate the potentially grave psychological burden to parents that can accompany these diagnoses and the inherent physical burdens of pregnancy that come to all expectant mothers.

In 1996 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops contributed to

A Surge in Clarity

As President Obama and the Congress consider what policy options to pursue in Afghanistan, we must understand that Afghanistan is not Iraq, and that Afghanistan is not a failed state.

In the current policy debate, Afghanistan is repeatedly and erroneously compared to Iraq. People who ought to know better argue that an additional surge in U.S. troops in Afghanistan will quell the rising violence there and allow the Afghan government to take over, as supposedly happened in Iraq. U.S. military forces invaded both Iraq and Afghanistan; the comparison between the two should end there.

Prior to the U.S. invasion, Iraq had an industrial and prosperous oil economy and an urban, li

A Long Way From Home

Perhaps Ms. Moaveni, a savvy young Iranian-American journalist, has spent too much time working for Time magazine—she has a penchant for snappy but misleading titles. Her previous book, Lipstick Jihad (2005), was not about seductive suicide-bombers but about her own quest for identity during an eventful stay (2000-1) in Iran. The title Honeymoon in Tehran is similarly unhelpful: Moaveni did fall in love, marry and have a baby during her second exploratory journey (2005-7); but she mostly continues her earlier theme of finding herself within the vexing confines of the Islamic Republic and against the splendid backdrop of age-old Persian culture. (In any case, she we

Reconcilable Differences

The history of science,” John William Draper wrote in 1874, “is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.” That science and religion are locked in a fight to the death, and that science will eventually be victorious, is the main message of Draper’s influential book, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. In 1896 Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University, published a two-volume work whose title makes explicit the same thesis. He called it A History of the Warfare of Science W

Take Six

Here is a small book of images, artfully constructed and melancholy, with only one story to tell, but a story with two parts: the end is coming, life goes on.

As the title indicates, each poem in this, the 19th volume from Charles Wright, contains six lines, but six lines visually attenuated (always) by his characteristic use of the dropped line, or more precisely the dropped portion of a line. The effect is a more balanced page, a greater use of the right-hand side of things. The lines are metered out in syllables, usually an odd number, usually between 9 and 17 per line, but contracting or expanding to as few as 5, as many as 21. These strategies are not new;

Body Language

The birds of the hands:
feathery fingers, arms
arched in parentheses.
Breathing in rhythm,
a forest of branches,
a pod of dolphins,
steel-spined camels:
“we can be anything.”

The body a playground:
swings, loops, slides
winged postures like stars
yoga dance as of language
freed from stodgy syntax.

Breath crests; wave
spills its liquid silver.
Toes sculpt commas,
punctuate the sentence’s
coiled energy, verb-driven
to the quiet pool of rest,
curled in balls like children.
Stillness hushes
eloquence: sweet period.

Unmasking Kingly Power

There’s something about royalty that fascinates us. Princess Diana and Prince Charles repeatedly captured the world’s attention. In the United States we watch with interest the doings of Queen Elizabeth, even though our founding ethos is grounded in overthrowing monarchical rule. It may be that the lives of kings and queens represent a fairy-tale-like imagining of the good life that we just can’t help dreaming about. For peasants in biblical times, the notion of a benevolent, kindly king who has the good of the people at heart and who would hear their cries for justice and act upon them may have held just as much attraction. When one’s life is a constant struggle,

Letters

Family Reunion

Re “Rome Open to Anglican Return” (Signs of the Times, 11/2): We are told that this promised apostolic constitution is a response to the many and frequent knocks that our separated brothers have made at the door of the Catholic Church. This easily brings to mind the parable of the prodigal son. How many times did he have to knock at his father’s house, and what list of conditions did his father put on him before he opened his door to him? And it remains to be seen how his elder brothers would react to the cautious admission of their younger brothers!

George Calleja

Caloundra, Queensland, Australia