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By
Teresa Malcolm
It did not take Chicago artist Jean Morman
Unsworth long to collect photos for her collage “By His Wounds We Are
Healed.” Two weeks of TIME and Newsweek back in 1999
provided many images to represent the suffering of Christ. “There was so
much violence,” said Unsworth, whose resulting work of art is featured on
NCR’s Easter cover this week.
Full
story
 Building strength
By
Arthur Jones
A decade after the death of César
Chávez, the union he founded seeks to preserve his legacy of justice for
farm workers.César Chávez was buried here at La
Paz 10 years ago. Two hours out of Los Angeles, La Paz is the United
Farm Workers central headquarters. The administrative center is a steel,
expandable Butler building on 200-acres of rough, sandy paths, rock, tough
grass, shrubs and some trees, acreage pockmarked still by a few tumbledown
buildings from its 1930s heyday as a tuberculosis sanitarium.
Full
story
César Chávez: Heart of a
movement By
Arthur Jones
Césario Estrada Chávez was born on
his grandfather’s small farm near Yuma, Ariz. His father, Librado, was
forced from his farm. Chávez quit school in eighth grade to work in the
fields full-time to help support the family. In 1944 he volunteered for the
U.S. Navy and served in the Pacific. While waiting to be shipped out he was
arrested in a Delano, Calif., movie house for sitting in the “whites
only” section.
Full story
A flagship of organizing
By
Arthur Jones
The United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO, is
not so much a union as a movement, said current president Arturo Rodriguez,
himself a member of the AFL-CIO’s governing executive council.
Full story
On the Web, alternative views of the
Middle East By
Dennis Coday
As the war in Iraq got underway, NCR (March
28) published a list of Web sites that offered news and views of the war and
the Middle East. Below is a continuation of that list, naming sites NCR
found and reviewed.
After that are some of the more than 200 Web sites
readers suggested be added to the list. NCR has not yet reviewed
all of these sites.
Full
story
 Policy experts warn of precedent set by
‘preventive war’ in Iraq
By
Joe Feuerherd
Even prior to the fall of Baghdad, senior Bush
administration officials were citing the military success of their Iraqi war
plan as a warning to other governments.
“I think a lot of countries, including Syria,
will eventually get the message from this, that it’s much better to come
to terms peacefully with the international community, to not acquire these
weapons of mass destruction, to not use terrorism as an instrument of national
policy, and to take care of your own people,” Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz said April 6 on “Meet the Press.”
Full story
Commentary
Eye on the Media
Five
scenes in a week
By
Raymond A. Schroth
I. An ethics case
Sydney Schanberg stands up in a boat smoking a
cigarette crossing the Mekong River, Cambodia, 1975 (The Village Voice,
March 26- April 1). His article, “The Itch,” explains why a reporter
is drawn to war.
Schanberg is a “case study” in my media
ethics class. We read his New York Times Cambodia dispatches from the
Vietnam war and watch “The Killing Fields” and consider the moral
choices journalists face when their lives -- and the lives of those they love
-- are at stake.
Full story
Peace activists seek return to Iraq to
witness against war
By
Chris Herlinger
Religion News Service
By turns angry, hopeful and a bit exhausted, a
group of American, British and Canadian peace activists find themselves today
in a kind of no man’s land -- stranded in neighboring Jordan, wanting to
return to Baghdad to demonstrate what they believe is needed solidarity with
the people of Iraq.
Full story
Mixing aid with proselytism provokes debate among
relief groupsBy
Mark O’Keefe
Religion News Service
Will proselytizing in Iraq offer comfort and hope
to a nation that is 97 percent Muslim?
Or will it reinforce the growing perception of
Muslims worldwide that the war, no matter what President Bush says, is against
Islam, not Saddam Hussein?
Full story
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After the symbols fall, then
what?
The cameras lingered long on the statue. A rope
was slung around its neck, and Saddam came tumbling down amid a cheering
crowd.
It is an exhilarating sight when the symbols of
tyranny fall, and in Baghdad, as the television crews soon made clear, the
symbols exist in abundance. In this capital city it is impossible to walk for
more than a block without coming upon some representation of the brutal Saddam
Hussein.
Full editorial
 When all the Earth is holy
ground
By
Patricia Lynn Morrison
Like the rest of her family, Wazma, who is 18, is
a recent refugee from Afghanistan and a Muslim. Since she hadn’t yet had
the opportunity to visit many American homes, I offered to give her the
“grand tour” of mine, unassuming rental that it is.
The first stop was the living room, then on to the
kitchen.
Full
story
Sr. Madeleine and the House of
Peace
I swear I’ll only stay five minutes. The
roads are getting slick, I’ve got laundry in the washer at home and
groceries in the trunk, and I’m only dropping something off.
I stay an hour.
It’s almost a gravitational
force, the peace that swirls through the tiny South St. Louis bungalow Sr.
Madeleine Lane shares with another School Sister of Notre Dame.
Full story
Sheen and Moore: virtual ticket for
2004
In the pure media era, Democrats need to
entice ‘West Wing’ president and Oscar
pontificator.
Maybe Ronald Reagan was the wave of the
future. And I didn’t want to recognize it at the time. Perhaps all our
politicians should come from Hollywood. How did we fare after Reagan? We went
from a well-scripted B actor to bring on the gubernatorial and ex-Congressional
clowns: Goofy, Fatty Arbuckle, and English-as-a-First-Language-plagued
Mickey-Rooney-goes-to-Washington (AKA, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II).
Full
story
 Patriotism is not the highest
calling
By
Michael Welch
Christians are obliged to set their country
right when it is in the wrong.
In her readable yet scholarly book, The Vietnam
Wars: 1945-1990, Marilyn B. Young defines the major premises of U.S.
foreign policies following U.S. victories in the Second World War. The first
axiom she lists is surely pertinent today; it exists, in an unwritten form, in
the minds of many of us.
Full
story
Homosexuality a risk factor,
Vatican told
By John L.
Allen Jr.
Experts emphasize it is not cause of abuse;
message may derail document on seminaries.
Homosexuality is a risk factor in, but not the
cause of the sexual abuse of adolescent males, according to experts who
addressed a private April 2-5 Vatican symposium attended by officials charged
with handling the abuse crisis that has rocked the Catholic church.
Full
story
Catholic church takes lead in
child protection industry
By Joe Feuerherd
Cost and control among issues as dioceses
push to establish ‘safe environments’ for children.
The child protection business is a growth industry
-- and the U.S. Catholic church is leading the way.
Full
story
By
Keith J. Egan
“The times are nightfall, look, their
light grows less; The times are winter, watch, a world
undone.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins(1) knew all too well, as he
wrote above, much darkness and winter, but he also knew that “Nothing is
so beautiful as Spring.” An earlier fellow poet also knew the movement
from darkness to light. In a dark, dingy cell along the Tajo River in
Toledo, Spain, John of the Cross(2)
was brutally “degraded” nearly to death by his brothers.
Full story
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FROM
THE EDITOR'S DESK
Under normal circumstances,
understanding the power of Easter is a difficult matter.
I know the words, the
concepts, and in personal moments I have known the profound and deep touch
of God’s love. I also know, however, that the Easter Alleluia did not
remain a personal moment for long. The community, we are led to believe,
fairly quickly buzzed with the rumor, the crazy rumor, and then with the
reality.
Full
story
 Care of the soul
By Margot
Patterson
A small center for religious instruction in
Paris made history by making the individual its priority
La Maison d’Ananie, or House of Ananias, sits
on a residential street in Paris’ 7th arrondissement. Built
centuries ago for aristocrats who couldn’t afford the high price of living
at Versailles, this part of Paris is lined with dignified white stone mansions
and popular with foreign embassies. Here, up the street from the Swedish and
Tunisian embassies, the House of Ananias is reached through a quiet courtyard.
Inside, the atmosphere is calm, hushed, determinedly discreet.
Full
story
A priest who inspirited intellectuals and
artists
By Margot
Patterson
The House of Ananias was founded in 1938 by
Jean-Pierre Altermann, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who went on to become a
priest. A well-regarded poet and writer, Altermann moved in literary and
artistic circles and became a friend and spiritual adviser to some of France’s
most celebrated writers, musicians and artists in the period between the two
world wars. Now demolished, a well-known Benedictine monastery on the nearby Rue
Monsieur served during that era as an oasis of prayer in the middle of Paris.
Full
story
Human moments
By Joseph Cunneen
Adventurous directors put Iran on
the movie map. The Oscar
show at least managed to get finished by midnight, but seemed merely a movie
version of the military overkill unfolding in Iraq. The fact that many who
appeared in the proceedings are appalled by Bush’s war didn’t make the
proceedings any less the annual celebration of Hollywood’s ability to impose its
product on the rest of the world.
Full review
 Music echoes across centuries
By
Matt Stoulil
Collection re-creates sacred
songs Jesus might have heard 2,000 years ago.
A new collection of sacred music, aptly
titled “Ancient Echoes,” lets the Western world hear what Jesus and the people
of Israel might have heard and sung around the turn of the first century.
Full story
Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism
Reviewed By James Fredericks
The Feb. 18, 2002, cover of
Der Spiegel caught the attention of Daniel Coats, the U.S. ambassador to
Germany. The cover depicted “the Bush Warriors” (die Bush Krieger). Colin
Powell was portrayed as Batman, Donald Rumsfeld as Conan the Barbarian. Dick
Cheney was depicted as the Terminator, flanked by Condoleezza Rice as Xena, the
Warrior Princess. The president himself was given pride of place in this band of
warriors as Rambo, in the classic pose with a bandoleer draped manfully over his
chest.
Full review
Poetry for April 18, 2003
Letters for April 18, 2003
Classifieds for April 18, 2003
News Briefs for April 18, 2003
Last Words
| ‘It is time to
beg God/Allah to bless all peoples; to drive the demons from all hearts,
whether those hearts belong to the vanquished or to victors.’ |
|
Keith Egan |
A memorable
quote from this week's issue.
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