Word: schall
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These are the words of James Schall, 43, a crew-cut Jesuit priest and teacher who takes a dim view of ecology, American style. The environmental movement that has captured the nation's imagination, says Schall, who divides the year between Rome's prestigious Pontifical Gregorian University and the University of San Francisco, is really little more than heresy...
Writing in the Jesuit magazine America, Schall says that the nation's growing commitment to the environment is a "dangerous" and "unbalanced" trend. Rather than being a "pragmatic recognition of cleanliness and conservation," it seems all too often to be a "kind of subtle undermining, in its theoretical origins, of the destiny and dignity of man himself...
...most undermined, Schall believes, by ecologists who want to limit population for fear that the earth's growing mass of people will soon use up available space and the dwindling natural resources. Schall takes exactly the opposite view. As the population of the United States grows and settles into urban areas, he says, there is actually more space in the country, not less. "We don't know what man can be," he argues, "and when we limit our capacities and our future [through birth control], we are basing this on the technological and social limits of today...
Moving into even deeper waters, Schall contends that the new faith in the environment has widened political differences between nations. Both Communists and leftists in the emerging countries, he says, believe that man is supreme. Therefore, "the old-line revolutionaries of the Second and Third Worlds, who are firmly fixed on the Christian dogma of the dignity of man, are quickly parting company with the new American ecological heresy." If this heresy were generally accepted, he warns, it would "deflate the revolutionary's whole claim to renew the face of the earth for man-to 'hominize...
Much credit for any of my success should be given first to my surgeon, Dr. Le Roy A. Schall, and then to the many men and women who have had the courage and faith in me to accept whatever little I could offer to them. They are truly the unsung heroes. (MRS.) MARY A. DOEHLER...