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The US Conference of Catholic Bishops yesterday overwhelmingly approved a new statement of opposition to capital punishment, asserting that it contributes to a culture of death and violence in the United States. It was the bishops' first comprehensive statement on the death penalty in 25 years, and coincided with the debate in the Massachusetts House of Representatives on a proposal to reinstate capital punishment in the Bay State. Massachusetts is one of 12 states in which the death penalty is prohibited. The bishops, who are holding their annual meeting in Washington, said their longtime opposition to capital punishment is being...

US bishops mark anniversary of atomic bombings, condemn ‘total war’Washington DC, Aug. 04, 2005 (CNA) - The 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provides an opportunity to reflect on the lessons of the Second World War and to recommit to efforts for a lasting peace built on justice, said the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). “Hiroshima and Nagasaki are permanent reminders to the entire human family of the grave consequences of total war,” said USCCB president Bishop William Skylstad yesterday in a letter to Bishop Augustinus Jun-ichi Nomura, president of the bishops’ conference of Japan.The...

Second of two parts. What is the artist's role in society? Artists have been debating the question throughout history. The former U.S. poet laureate said he thought about the election results all day -- "when I could think." "The question of how the rest of us should behave seems pressing," he said. "Erosion of civil liberties? The courts? Further and deeper predations on the environment? It's hard to see how the Endangered Species Act will survive, except perhaps in name. An interesting indicator of the intentions of that Bush clique will be to see whether they punish Republican dissenters like...

From the Blog The Final Frontier... Man, I'm so tired of the Jason Blair incident. Does anyone out there view the Jason Blair incident as anything other than an isolated incident? The fact that President Clinton lied says nothing to me about the character of Presidents. The fact that Jason Blair lied says nothing to me about the integrity of Journalists. However, there is a problem with journalism that I've not been able to put my finger on until reading Richard Cohen's inciteful article in the New York Daily News today. Here's the relevant passage: Why does this happen? Partly...

Vargas Llosa on Friday took a swipe at the Colombian Nobel Literature Prize winner and longtime friend of the Cuban leader, calling him "a writer who is a courtesan of Fidel Castro, whom the dictatorship holds up as an intellectual alibi." "And he so far has come to accept very well all the abuses, the trampling of human rights that the Cuban dictatorship has committed, saying that secretly he helps some political prisoners get released," the Peruvian-born Vargas Llosa told Caracol radio. "It is no secret to anyone that Fidel Castro hands over some political prisoners to his courtesans once...

The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky By Keith Windschuttle NewCriterion.com | May 2, 2003 There’s a famous definition in the Gospels of the hypocrite, and the hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards he applies to others. By that standard, the entire commentary and discussion of the so-called War on Terror is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception. Can anybody understand that? No, they can’t understand it. —Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror, 2003 Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, he...

More than 160 foreign artists and intellectuals, including Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, have come out in defense of Cuba even as many of their peers condemn recent repression on the Communist-run island, one of the campaigners said on Thursday. Reuters Photo   Latin American Nobel laureates Garcia Marquez, Rigoberta Menchu, Aldolfo Perez Esquivel and South African writer Nadine Gordimer, also a Nobel prize winner, have signed a declaration of support, Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzalez said. U.S. singer Harry Belafonte and U.S. actor Danny Glover are also among the personalities who have signed the two-paragraph declaration "To the Conscience...

The Petition Middle East Scholars Would Rather ForgetBy Martin Kramer History News Network | April 30, 2003 Among the predictions about the war that didn't pan out, there is one that hasn't been subjected to post-war ridicule, but that very much deserves it. This is the December letter, signed by over 1,000 academics, predicting and warning against Israel's possible "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians in the "fog of war." The letter ended with this recommendation: "We urge our government to communicate clearly to the government of Israel that the expulsion of people according to race, religion or nationality would constitute crimes...

In Reviews, Scholars Cite Bush's Discipline But Question Policies PRINCETON, N.J., April 26 -- President Bush has not been particularly friendly to historians: He signed an executive order making it easier for officials to classify documents, gave former presidents a veto over the release of their papers, and in most cases allows his staff to give only the most sanitized accounts of life in his White House. But the 43rd president is providing rich fodder for those historians, offering a colorful and elusive target for a raft of professors trying to explain how a semi-prepared Texan, armed with simple eloquence...

Scholars ponder Bush's presidency at midpoint Academics gather at Princeton for forum and give mixed reviews04/26/2003 By G. ROBERT HILLMAN / The Dallas Morning News PRINCETON, N.J. – For White House scholars, a new president is a phenomenal find. "It's like an entomologist discovering a new insect," said Fred Greenstein, professor emeritus of political science at Princeton University. "You don't learn much in the first year," he explained. "But ... by the time you get past the second year, the presidency has really begun to leave its fingerprints on history." So, three months past his midterm, George W. Bush is...

"I wish to deny the effectiveness of intellectual work. And especially, I always wish to counsel people against the decision to go into the academy because they hope to be effective beyond it." That's what Stanley Fish had to say at what was billed as historic "intellectual town meeting" at the University of Chicago on April 11. Stanley Fish, as you may know, is one of leftist academia's all-stars. If he was an athlete, they'd have retired his number and inducted him to the Hall of Fame already. And so when he says "intellectual work" is ineffective, it means something....

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? by Robert Nozick It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly. Not all intellectuals are on the "left." Like other groups, their opinions are spread along a curve. But in their case, the curve is shifted and skewed to the political left. By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in...

These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century — psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism — have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating. In the latest sign of mounting crisis, on April 11 the editors of Critical Inquiry, academe's most prestigious theory journal, convened the scholarly equivalent of an Afghan-style loya jirga. They invited more than two dozen of America's professorial elite, including Henry Louis...

These are uncertain times for literary scholars. The era of big theory is over. The grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th century — psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, post-colonialism — have lost favor or been abandoned. Money is tight. And the leftist politics with which literary theorists have traditionally been associated have taken a beating. In the latest sign of mounting crisis, on April 11 the editors of Critical Inquiry, academe's most prestigious theory journal, convened the scholarly equivalent of an Afghan-style loya jirga. They invited more than two dozen of America's professorial elite, including Henry Louis...