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Articles by Richard Alleva
Remembering Cormac McCarthy
For those of us who have a visceral objection to Confederate Memorial Day, how should we engage a worldview that embraces the mythology of the Lost Cause?
Cormac McCarthy
For those of us who have a visceral objection to Confederate Memorial Day, how should we engage a worldview that embraces the mythology of the Lost Cause?
'The Birth of a Nation'
There is no way to turn the story of Nat Turner into an entertainment that is morally neat and emotionally digestible. The worst thing about The Birth of a Nation, the debut film of writer-director Nate Parker, is that it tries to be just that and inevitably fails. The best thing about it is that, even in failing, it holds the viewer’s attention with occasional psychological insights and constant cinematic skill.
Christmas Deserves Better
The Shop Around the Corner (1940). The film was directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch, whose famous “touch” was never more supple or humane. Here James Stewart (every bit as compelling as his George Bailey performance, albeit less intense) is the head salesperson of a perfumery in pre–World War II Budapest. It’s a comedy built around a simple device: Stewart and his most irritating staffer (an electric Margaret Sullavan) trade barbs at work, but carry on an epistolary romance after hours.
The Right Man for the Job
I really wanted to hate Pope Francis: A Man of His Word but couldn’t bring myself to do it. In fact, I ended up kind of…uh…loving it. What’s worse, by the time the final credits rolled, one tiny tear managed to roll its way down my cheek. Much to my resentment. The thing is, it’s the kind of documentary I usually hate.
The Catholic Hitchcock
“I don’t think I can be labeled a Catholic artist,” the director Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut, “but it may be that one’s early upbringing influences a man’s life and guides his instinct.” Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, a district of London’s East End, to a grocer named William, and his wife, Emma. On his father’s side, Catholicism went back perhaps only two generations, but Emma was of Irish stock and her traceable ancestors were all Catholic.
Sex Is Not 'Fun'
For a long time, the problem was pregnancy, which set sharp limits to the idea of sex as unalloyed pleasure. But then came what John Updike labeled the “post-pill paradise” and, as Philip Larkin noted, sometime around 1963, “sexual intercourse began.” But the paradise—if it ever existed—is now long gone, and sex is once again a center of anxiety and accusation.
How to Survive Trump
Publishing a hot-button political treatise that aims to assess the meaning of “current events” while transcending their moment, in order to propose sweeping reforms is an act of supreme self-confidence, if not hubris, even in ordinary times. To do so seven months into the all-bets-are-off presidency of a possibly deranged, morally bankrupt, wildly careening one-man wrecking ball risks folly.
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste
Surveying the American scene shortly after the end of the Civil War, Walt Whitman recoiled from another pandemonium unfolding before his eyes.
Late-Night TV Turns Political
Some of the most notable late-night political commentary has come from ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, previously known as a prankster more in the vein of Fallon than of Colbert. The host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! tearfully denounced Republicans’ efforts to repeal Obamacare and, after the last year’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, appealed for gun-control legislation. When a senator broke his promise not support any health-care bill that did not pass what he called the “Jimmy Kimmel” test, Kimmel called him out.
Profits First, Workers Last
Spin the newsreel to the present day, and sure enough, there are Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan, claiming that a massive tax cut for the top 5 percent will be a bonanza for the working stiff. At one point the Council of Economic Advisers put out a pathetic defense of that claim, but that paper was removed from the CEA website. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin vaguely promised another paper, but the passage of the bill let him off the hook.
Don't Over-Spiritualize ‘Temptation’
Pope Francis has voiced an objection to the Italian translation of the Lord’s Prayer. He made his case briefly in a recent interview on TV2000, the television network of the Italian bishops’ conference. Like many people, Francis finds it odd to imply that God leads people into temptation. “The one who leads you into temptation is Satan,” he says. “That’s Satan’s office.” Major news organizations have run exaggerated headlines.
Resist & Be Not Afraid
I live in Washington, DC, home to the highest concentration of Salvadorans in the United States. Many first received temporary protected status during a brutal, twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, a conflict exacerbated by the Reagan administration’s financial and tactical support for a repressive Salvadoran government that unleashed military death squads that killed thousands of people, including six Jesuit priests, a housekeeper, and her teenage daughter in 1989.
Letters | Debating Ta-Nehisi Coates & Racism
As a white Catholic whose eyes were further opened to the reality of racism in the United States after recently reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, I was shocked and dismayed at Margaret O’Brien Steinfels’s arrogant and shallow dismissal of this extremely important work. Steinfels repeatedly accuses Coates of “downplaying” reasons other than racism for Trump’s election, and completely ignores the overwhelming evidence Coates offers to back up his argument.
Surviving the Last Century
The overwhelming sense that Mazower conveys is the tendency of history to be like a “slalom course, a battle of wits with whatever lies round the next corner.” Rather than a predictable, reasoned path, people find themselves engaged in a “wager on fate,” and there may be no explaining why some wagers pay off and others do not. This is its own kind of trauma, and the members of the Mazower family find their own ways to cope with this uncertainty and the defeat of their ideals.
Hard to Watch | Commonweal Magazine
The feminist professor wasn’t countenancing racism. She was wearing bifocals and looking through the feminist lens rather than the lens that would reveal GWTW’s racial insensitivity (just as Kael was looking through the aesthetic lens and not the historical one). And those of us who enjoy this film do this, too. For who can resist Scarlett as portrayed by Vivien Leigh?
Poem | January | Commonweal Magazine
Norita Dittberner-Jax has published four collections of poetry, most recently, Stopping For Breath from Nodin Press. Crossing The Water, her fifth collection, will be published by Nodin in June, 2017. Norita has won numerous awards and fellowships, among them several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. One of the poetry editors for Red Bird Chapbooks, Norita lives with her husband in Lilydale, Minnesota on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Borne Back into the Past
History remembers F. Scott Fitzgerald as the author of The Great Gatsby, but that reputation arrived posthumously. While he was alive, his 1920 debut novel This Side of Paradise was his calling card. Its descriptions of the loosened morals of his generation established the twenty-three-year-old writer as the voice of the Jazz Age, and its publication convinced Zelda Sayre to offer him her hand in marriage.
Commonweal’s Best Film Essays
In 2005, William Blatty invited me to his home and said that as a philosopher I might be interested in his ideas about good and evil
Delight Is Where the Mystery Lies
AM: In my experience, it’s the novel itself, the story being told, that dictates how it opens. I can’t imagine choosing to begin a novel with a death scene simply to signal to the reader that I’m out for greatness here—brace yourself. I agree that literature does indeed deal seriously with issues of life and death, with what it means to be human, which includes, of course, what it is to be mortal.
Blockbusting | Commonweal Magazine
In the world of moviemaking, where genre entertainments can rake in big profits but also grind a filmmaker’s artistic idiosyncrasies into pop mush, we may well wonder what happens to the likes of independent filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola, Patty Jenkins, and Edgar Wright when they embark on genre projects. Do they bring a personal touch or do their personalities disappear?
How Are New Ecclesial Movements Changing the Church?
Priests incardinated within new ecclesial movements would not be subject to local ordinaries, that is, diocesan bishops. For the Vatican this would mean acknowledging something about how these movements have evolved from around the time of Vatican II. Originally, they were supposed to have helped renew the laity.
‘Belief Does Not Embarrass Me’
AD: The Chalk Artist opens in one of my favorite places in the world, Grendel’s Den—“the old Cambridge dive, loud, warm, and subterranean”—and it includes lots of other local Cambridge color. Intuition and The Cookbook Collector were also, among other things, great Cambridge novels. Henry Adams wrote, “The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility—a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it.” What is the chief charm of Cambridge for you?
Not the ‘Age of Trump’
Melodramatic references to an “Age of Trump” that suddenly commenced in November 2016 obscure this reality. Simply put, our collective fixation on the person and foibles of Trump the individual causes us to overlook what is actually going on. And what is actually going on is something that Donald Trump hasn’t, won’t, and can’t affect. Let me illustrate the point by citing a pair of recent articles in the New York Times.
On Mecca’s Front Porch
We were just murmuring a low-profile grace before dinner at an Italian restaurant expats favor in Banda Aceh when the evening call to prayer, loudspeaker-strong, blared from a nearby mosque. It gave our pizza slices a certain savor. Aceh is best known for the tsunami that drowned this coastal region of Indonesia in December 2004. But I was there recently because of Aceh’s other claim to notoriety. It’s the only province of Indonesia to have implemented sharia law.
Obama the Other | Commonweal Magazine
Since Barack Obama first ran for president, conservatives have often complained of feeling unable to criticize him without being accused of racism. Obviously not all criticism of Obama is racially motivated. But a lot of it has been, plainly and shamelessly so, and that fact is important to recall as we enter a new presidential campaign marked by overt appeals to racial suspicion and resentment.
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