As I write these words, it is exactly one week before my seventieth birthday”“the days of our years,” according to the Psalmist; the day “the warranty runs out,” according to a friend of mine. Today is also the twenty-fourth anniversary of my father’s death, four months and ten days . . . . Continue Reading »
Real Presencesby george steiner university of chicago press, 236 pages, $19.95 Of the major literary critics of our period there is, apart from Northrop Frye, but one other whose work requires us to reach toward such a term as “greatness,” and this is George Steiner. The shocking . . . . Continue Reading »
Dull, restless mornings, crawling with hungers— To have something to do and to have done it. Blackbirds, treading the rubbery rowan branches. Sucking down the berries like juju beads. Walkers heading for work, pointing like windsocks. The indifferent trees around them, letting their leaves . . . . Continue Reading »
Forget the romance purveyed of windowseats, knocked as they be by the winds that skim drowned lawns of all but fleets of scavenger gulls. Summer, a dandy assures us from his portrait next to horse and hounds, grooms the hay just out of sight. Marquis, field marshal, bishop, mistress of the king, . . . . Continue Reading »
Settling the estate, the lawyer said. It seemed too grand a way of putting it— bills to be paid, a bank account to close, and finally her mother’s house to sell while her own, half-a-continent away, sat waiting for her with its lights on timers and neighbors dropping in to feed the fish. . . . . Continue Reading »
Abortion and Morality If abortion is to be one of your major concerns, as it was in the premier issue, shouldn’t it be discussed as the tragedy it is for those persons, mostly young and unmarried, who have neither a moral nor a legal right to bear children? Why is fornication itself immoral? . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1984 a federal court held the public schools of the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to be in systematic violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Both the district (KCD) and the State of Missouri had consciously worked to maintain racial segregation in the district's schools. The pupil . . . . Continue Reading »
By now it should be axiomatic that surveys and polls tell us as much about the people who conduct them as they do about those they query. What's involved is the census-taking equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the notion that pollsters affect the content of the responses they . . . . Continue Reading »
The U.S. Catholic Bishops' Statement on the Middle East, adopted unanimously during the bishops' fall 1989 bicentennial meeting in Baltimore, is a surprisingly straightforward document. When the U.S. government deals with the Arab-Israeli conflict, its language is often more ambiguous. President . . . . Continue Reading »
Elizabeth Achtemeier, professor of Bible at Union Theological Seminary, Virginia, has flatly asserted that radical feminist theology is “another religion.” Some may think that judgment excessive. After all, there are many women who think of themselves as feminists and are also determined to be . . . . Continue Reading »
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