Protecting the guilty: did John Salvi deserve his fate? – mentally ill murderer was not given proper psychiatric treatment Stephen J. Pope On December 30, 1994, John Salvi III went on a murderous rampage at two Brookline, Massachusetts, abortion clinics that left five people wounded and two women – Lee Ann Nichols, thirty-eight, and Shannon […]
Category: Commonweal
The moral vision of Robert Stone: the transcendent in the muck of history – author James Finn Robert Stone is a highly ambitious author whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp. (But what’s a writer’s heaven for?) He is an imposingly confident writer whose self-assessments, nevertheless, sometimes seem off the mark. However, on the basis of […]
Categories
The End of Equality.
The End of Equality. – book reviews Wilson Carey McWilliams Mickey Kaus, an editor of The New Republic with a basket of other credits in political journalism, is one of our better gadflies, nipping American liberals into intellectual uneasiness, if not serious thought. His The End of Equality, a mistitled book, has already created some […]
Beyond Naive Belief: The Bible and Adult Catholic Faith. – book reviews Dennis O’Brien Paul Dinter spent fifteen years as Catholic chaplain at Columbia University. Beyond Naive Belief is best appreciated as a reflection on preaching to college congregations: Sacred Scripture for Skeptics. The university community is most likely to be dominated by two different […]
By the book – theater reviews of ‘Man Who Was Thursday’ and ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ Celia Wren ‘Man Who Was Thursday,”Diary of Anne Frank’ A few months ago, two shrewd ballet companies co-produced a dance version of Dracula. The success of the vampire ballet is a curious – not to say monstrous – instance […]
Categories
Finding our voice. – Review
Finding our voice. – Review – book review Robert Burns A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture with Responses Edited and with an Introduction by James L. Heft, S.M. Oxford University Press, $22, 130 pp. This short book contains a remarkably succinct and explicit statement of the most basic religious commitments of philosopher Charles […]
Categories
Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography
Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography Lawrence S. Cunningham by Gregory Wolfe Eerdmans, $35, 462 pp. I have a soft spot in my heart for Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-90) because he once said something nice about my first book – in Esquire, of all places. The book was about Saint Francis of Assisi. Beyond that episode, what I […]
The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. – Review – book reviews David McCabe William J. Bennett The Free Press, $20, 154 pp. David McCabe Bill Bennett’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. You can’t blame him, really. Even though events of the last year […]
‘Intelligent’ design? Relax, God is stranger still John Garvey There has been some debate, even at local school-board levels, about the theory of evolution vs. creationism and the more recently offered idea of “intelligent design.” Now Cardinal Cristoph Schonborn has weighed in with an op-ed piece in the New York Times (July 7), claiming that […]
CLASSICAL DILEMMA : Paying for that symphony orchestra – Brief Article Benjamin Ivry Astagnant U.S. economy and complex world events have cast a shadow over North America’s orchestral landscape. In California, the San Jose Symphony, with a $2.5 million deficit and declining attendance after 123 years of performances, has gone out of business. The orchestra […]