• Charting a Battle Royal
This country will soon witness the contentious nomination of at least one and perhaps as many as three Supreme Court justices. According to Kevin Ring, J.D. 1996, what’s at stake is the direction of American government, currently split between two philosophies of how the judiciary should rule. In Ring’s view, the philosophical divide is between judges who create laws based on their own policy preferences, and judges who limit themselves to interpreting the constitutionality of the laws that Congress and other elected bodies have legislated.

Having read more than 600 court opinions written by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Ring says that the justice’s writings “represent the most coherent methodology for interpreting the Constitution in modern times and perhaps ever.” To help readers decide for themselves on that question, Ring has published an anthology of what he considers to be the justice’s most interesting opinions: Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice (Regnery Publishing).

As a textualist, Scalia believes justices should rule based on what the Constitution says, and that the Constitution does not allow the Supreme Court to create new laws or to change laws to suit its own policy preferences. The Constitution is set, not “living” (i.e., its meaning doesn’t change to reflect the popular sentiments of a given period). It was in this sense that Scalia has quipped ironically, “I defend a dead Constitution.”

Before each of Scalia’s opinions that are reprinted in the book, Ring provides background on the case in question, the relevant text of the Constitution, Scalia’s general view of the text, the Supreme Court’s previous decisions in the area, the relevant facts that led to the case, and the opinions of the other justices.

Readers of the book can come to an informed opinion on a controversial figure. Appointed to the high court by Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia has a reputation for bitingly critical or — depending on one’s opinion — deeply passionate and witty dissents to the decisions reached by the court. On the one hand, Supreme Court expert Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago professor, has called Scalia one of the three finest writers the Supreme Court has ever produced. On the other hand, Georgetown law Professor Mark Tushnet has jibed that Scalia’s “writing style is entertaining in the way that shouting matches on ‘Hardball’ [a cable TV talk show] are entertaining.”

• Breaking the Ties That Bind
When Adolf Hitler was 10 years old his father beat him so severely that he was left in a coma for four days. This is an example of what Beverly Hubble Tauke, M.S.W. 1995, calls the multi generational nature of human brokenness and sin.

Although we are each responsible for our own choices, the truth is that the addictions, fears and dysfunctions in our lives often stretch back to our fathers and mothers and their parents and ancestors. That legacy of brokenness can be ended and replaced with healing and joy, according to Tauke, a CUA-trained psychotherapist who has written the book Overcoming the Sins of the Family: Becoming the Redemptive Generation.

Her purpose: to show the way to the remarkable healing that she has seen in herself and in patients she has counseled. Published by Tyndale House, the book combines psychological insight and Christian spirituality. – R.W.

• Biography of a Cold War Hero
My father, Joseph Paul Kelly, graduated from Catholic University with a degree in electrical engineering in 1937. He became the project manager of SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System), which was the U.S. Navy’s top-secret undersea system to detect enemy submarines.

My father’s life’s work protected our nation from nuclear attack during the Cold War, yet the work was never touted in any public way. Even today, SOSUS (which became known as IUSS) remains top secret. Submarines with nuclear capability are still a threat. And the peacetime uses of SOSUS include whale tracking and earthquake and tsunami detection.

Catholic University played a major role in my father’s formation. He was always grateful for the teachers who taught him there. He loved to talk about Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen and Father Gilbert Hartke. Professor Thomas MacKavanagh gave him the foundation for his work in laying undersea cable.

I wrote my father’s biography, Listening for Leviathan, based on taped interviews, records in my father’s files and personal memories. It is the story of his boyhood in Washington, D.C., of his military career and also of his Catholic faith. To order the book, visit http://www.captainjoekelly.com on the Internet.

His life was an inspiration to many. He was a man of great intelligence, humor and kindness.

Mary Joe Kelly Wilhelm
Hagerstown, Md.

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Revised: August 2005

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The Catholic University of America,
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