To the Editors

By coincidence, your January 25 issue on Darwinism included Luke Timothy Johnson's piece on Chesterton [a review of Garry Wills's Chesterton], whose comment I cherish and lamely quote: "The controversy goes on between theologians who know little about science and scientists who know little about religion, and this confrontation between two kinds of ignorance is called the quarrel of science and religion."

LEON LUKASZEWSKI
Walnut Creek, Calif.

Lift every voice

Thank you for including Benjamin Ivry's review of Harry Belafonte's collection The Long Road to Freedom, in the February 8 issue ("Black America Sings"). If anything, Ivry underpraised this truly splendid production. Two other collections deserve your attention as well. The first is Rhino Records' Say It Loud: A Celebration of Black Music (six discs), and the wonderful assembly published by the Smithsonian, The Best of Broadside (five discs). Both of these also contain extensive documentation, and are beautifully presented.

RONALD TROJCAK
London, Ontario

Marriage, Orthodox style

As usual, John Garvey wrote an excellent and thought-provoking column ("When Christians Kill," January 25), which included the idea that violence and war are sometimes truly necessary evils--truly evil, yet at times necessary, so that the conquering heroes, at least if they profess Christianity, do not need medals so much as they might need a penitential service.

I do not know a great deal about Orthodoxy, but do not members of that ancient sister church of ours also believe much the same thing about divorce and remarriage? Perhaps John Garvey would be so good as to write an instructive article on that subject, which I think his co-believers call oikonomia. After all, we Romans with our stringent teachings of indissolubility and annulment do not claim to have a corner on all wisdom and compassion, do we? Maybe we could learn something truly worth pondering there too.

ANDREW A. GALLIGAN
Tracy, Calif.

Defining conception

Regarding the Jean Porter ("Is the Embryo a Person?") and John Collins Harvey ("Distinctly Human") articles in your February 8 issue: I am increasingly convinced that we should separate the notions of fertilization and conception. The former is a precise physical process, the fusion of sperm and ovum; the latter is an estimated moment of human origin.

Harvey provides us with an informative course on embryology. Only in his final paragraphs does he take an ethical stance, but there seems to be a disconnect between this and two points he makes earlier in the piece. He has informed us that there is a process, and not a rare one, of wastage or discharge of flawed fertilized ova. Surely such a natural process must be a pre-human phenomenon, not a perpetual pandemic of human death. The other point has to do with the matter of identical twinning, which we are told can "happen up to six days after fertilization." How can there be one integral human being and later two or three using the same material? Applying Saint Thomas's concept of "ensoulment" and Porter's term "hominization," it would seem that each of us human beings arrived on the scene no earlier than implantation in the uterus, perhaps even a little later. Let's call that moment "conception." That still allows for a respectful caution as to how sperm and ova are utilized, but opens the way for those cases in which stem-cell research and postcoital contraceptives respond to critical needs. The church has made allowance for human evolution from a base of lower animals. It would seem that the same allowance might be extended to the preparation of individuals in the earliest days of the nine-month incubation.

WILLIAM J. PEASE
La Mesa, Calif.

We don't know

One of the strongest attractions of Catholicism to me is the ability at times to say, "We don't know." We don't know if Mary actually appeared at Fatima. We don't know exactly how God's everlasting covenant with the Jews coexists with Jesus' message. We don't know exactly what happens to unbaptized infants. We don't know if a particular person who committed suicide is saved. We don't know the specific biological mechanics of Jesus' rising from the dead. And we don't have to know; faith is not a trivia game with salvation going to the winner.

At other times, it seems we Western Christians are obsessed with certitude and "that magic moment." We have to know precisely when a human comes into being. We have to know precisely when the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. To others, especially our brothers and sisters in the Eastern Churches, this odd preoccupation with precision is puzzling, and has led to the Western Church being described as the church of scientia (knowledge) and the Eastern Church as the church of sapientia (wisdom).

To me, "We don't know" is a far more powerful argument against abortion, and is elegant in its appeal to wisdom: if we don't know exactly when human life begins, should we not be very careful and err on the side of caution? (I was pleasantly surprised to see Jean Porter quote John Paul II to this effect in her February 8 article.) Why do we need a precise moment? Is the gospel characterized by precision, like some sort of transcendent BMW? Consider the mind-numbing detail of John Collins Harvey's article in the same issue, the ultimate exemplar of the knowledge-based approach. Is this the stuff of the gospel? Does one really need to be familiar with the opinions of Boethius or know the difference between zygote and blastocyst to interpret the events of our day in the light of the gospel?