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February 19 2000

February 19, 2000 / Vol. 182 / No. 5

Globalization: Myth, Reality, Problems

The demonstrationunprecedented since the Vietnam war erathat convulsed normally laid-back Seattle late last fall had two results. It brought the work of the World Trade Organization to a halt, and it reintroduced the issue of globalization to the American political scene. Labor had unsuccessfully fo

Catholic England

The announcement in London that 45-year-old Cherie Blair, wife of the British prime minister, is expecting her fourth child produced the expected acres of newspaper column inches. But one historic angle of the story was completely ignored by journalists. For the first time ever a British prime minis

Killing Unborn Patients

'A time to offend and be offended.' There were two groups conspicuously absent from the State of the Union Address, 2000. The first was nine Supreme Court justices. Our most judicious body seems to have had a case of the collective flu. The other absent group was third-trimester unborn human

Of Many Things

Of Many Things

Praying on a New York City subway train? Those who view New York as chaos incarnate might consider such an undertaking impossible. In fact, though, many commuters find some of the very conditions of subway travel to be ideal for prayer. If you are lucky enough to have a seat, the fixed position is i

Letters

Letters

Gospel FirstThe theological education issue (1/29) contributed many good points for reflection. But there is a troubling undercurrent here that occurs also in other literature, as well as in comments from pulpit and chancery. It is a shift from the Ascension commission to proclaim the Good News to p

Editorials

Survey From a Mountaintop

President Clinton’s State of the Union address on Jan. 27 left Republicans and Democrats in agreement on at least two points: The speech was very long, and its delivery was a great performance. It was bound to be a long speech, because in pursuit of his two main purposes Mr. Clinton had a lot

Books

Behold the Mother

Is there a more remarkable spiritual writer today than Kathleen Norris And how full of paradoxes she is quot containing multitudes quot to take a leaf from Walt Whitman Coming from what she calls a quot thoroughly Protestant background quot her meditations have been both widely read and grea

Searching for Salvation

The T S Eliot industryall those library shelves of dissertations and articles and book-length studieshas issued at last in a model biography In it Lyndall Gordon sharpens and expands two earlier volumes on Eliot Early Years 1977 and New Life 1988 She has drawn on much correspondence and mat

Smart Rebel

With his latest novel Roddy Doyle the laureate of Dublin rsquo s present quot lower middle classes quot moves down the social ladder a notch or two and a century back in time His sympathy remains however clearly with the proles and in Henry Smart he has found his ideal protagoniststreet-sma

Television

A Wasteland Less Vast

Not long ago I came across an article about one Mr. Newton Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who famously described television in the 1960’s as "a vast wasteland." Doubtless it would have surprised Mr. Minow that his phrase still sums up the current

The Word

A Wedding Invitation: Please Respond!

Late February with Lent around the corner is not a time when we ordinarily think of weddings yet nuptial imagery sets the tone for the liturgy In the first reading the eighth-century prophet Hosea enacts in his life God rsquo s enduring love for a people that has turned away to worship Canaanit

Columns

Not Born to Do Evil

'Even the monsters Hitler or Stalin are fallen sinners, and we cry and pray for them.' In recent months, while a war-time pontiff’s attitudes toward mid-century European totalitarianism became a subject of written discussion (as in Hitler’s Pope and the response to it by reviewer


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