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Against Peer Fear

In response to many inquiries, we are pleased to report that Father Neuhaus continues to recover very satisfactorily from early January’s emergency surgery for colon cancer. As this issue goes to press, the usual battery of tests, plus exploration during surgery for the reversal of a temporary . . . . Continue Reading »

May Letters

Gays on Parade? In his article “Homosexuality in Uniform: Is It Time?” (February), Eugene T. Gomulka would have been better off arguing his point from a pure theological/moral basis instead of relying on the same old myths concerning gay men and women that society is slowly rejecting as . . . . Continue Reading »

National Service as Duty and Perk

I know a man who spends four or five weeks of every year in the army. He is a young man, but not all that young—fortysomething—and has a wife and four small children. He lives in Jerusalem. His annual five-week tour of service in the Israel Defense Force is called in Hebrew by a term . . . . Continue Reading »

Man in a Glacier

The mountainside failed. But when  we saw that deep spot the dead sun  came back heavy as an engine  and my pick rattled like a gun. The ice unravelled; we peeled it from  his toothy face, glittering brown,  a woody rubber round his mind,  the Bronze Age still stuck to . . . . Continue Reading »

Black Spruce

From a distance  it looked like ordinary  wood, a snuff-colored twig one might rake for burning. Surfaced  by the bulldozer from a sarcophagus of clay, it  could have been the brittle  finger-bone of a prophet, or a phalange of an extinct ape  from another age. Black . . . . Continue Reading »

Contraries

Tell me everything you know, the sapient sage asked the seeker, and, since the former was, in his role, an editor, the latter filled page after page of all that followed and preceded cause and wherefore and why and when. Which he gave to waiting world and bookman with a flourish, so: here’s the . . . . Continue Reading »

Aceldama

Eternity is uncorrupted light; the world proceeds by interrupting sight, exchanging day and night. Half the acts of earth avoid the sun; much that's done may be begun by day but end at night: aborted, buried light is customary here; it shocks no more than does a war such as the one we wage against . . . . Continue Reading »

Briefly Noted 96

Prospects for a Common Morality edited by gene outka and john p. reeder, jr. princeton university press, 302 pages, $47.50 cloth, $16.95 paper Eleven distinguished ethicists weigh in on the question of whether there is a universal morality, relevant to all cultures and traditions by virtue of . . . . Continue Reading »

Grandparents

Thinking of my grandparents, I stand for a moment on the curb of a street they often walked, the old walks cracked and chipped, and I want to call out to them, as if they were climbers just ahead moving across rock and fields of ice,  rubble in the slip of years past. But if they spoke, would . . . . Continue Reading »

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