Commonweal

Letters

NOT HYPOTHETICAL Rev. John F. Tuohey ("A Fatal Conflict," January 28) notes that when the U.S. bishop's Committee on Doctrine issued a statement on the dilation and curettage performed at an Arizona Catholic hospital in November 2009, it cited a hypothetical maternal-fetal conflict to illustrate the difference between direct and indirect abortion. ACKNOWLEDGING EVIL Regarding the January 28 editorial, Killings in Tucson: As the finger-pointing started after the tragic events in Tucson, I was...

Senior Editor

Reporting to Commonweal's Editor, Paul Baumann, the Senior Editor will take a leadership role in helping to plan future issues, commissioning articles, working with key writers, and ensuring the continued high quality of the magazine's writing and appearance.

Joys (& Fears) of Cooking

First drafts, though, are always too long. [...] any rough edges are smoothed off with a couple of rounds of practicing out loud.

Alternate Ending

[...] We breathed Our spirit into her and made her and her son a sign to the world (Qur'an 21:91). According to the Qur'an, in other words, discord among Christians is a divine curse that will not be lifted before the last day.

Roll Call Fourth Grade

Lay That Pistol Down

Some commentators don't believe we need simply more custodial care of the severely mentally ill and more scrupulous implementation of existing laws and guidelines, but a rewrite of the relevant statutes with probable implications for constitutional law. Bridge water, Massachusetts's facility for the criminally insane, has room only for the egregiously violent and a disproportionate number of sex offenders. Since I began my training in psychiatry in 1965, a great deal of my work has been in ...

The Crucifixion

A Sensitive Head

Pius XII, the pope in office I entered grade school in the 1950s, no individual reality for me, nor did immediate successors: they were different versions of "the pope," a at once sinister and ridiculous. When Seewald poses a long question about the World Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, complete with scenarios of global disaster and the failure of collective action in the face of such threats, the pope responds:

Forgotten History

While Msgr. Charles Owen Rice (1908-2005), the famed labor priest who fought Communists in Pittsburgh's unions, later apologized in the journal Labor History for some of his harsh tactics, he never expressed regret for resisting Communist attempts to gain union control. In his final pages, Baker quotes the perceptive liberal Catholic social activist Msgr. George G. Higgins, who asked plaintively in his own important 1993 book Organized Labor and the Church: "Will the Catholic Church, my chur...

Stability First

[...] in 2004 he entered into full communion with the Catholic Church, though his wife, Joetta, remains a Mennonite (see his Commonweal article "You Converted to What?" June 1, 2007). [...] the need for loyalty, even in exile.