Editor’s note: This time around, we heard from readers more in color than in black and white. Click on any thumbnail at the bottom of this page to enter a gallery of their colored commentary.
Getting squirrely
My husband asked me why a squirrel was featured on the cover of the spring issue. I told him what Cyndi Lauper sang: “Squirrels just wanna have fun.”
Clarice Kwasnieski ’81
Middletown, Delaware
A violation of human values
I was beside myself upon reading “The Truth Uncovered” in the spring issue. Could it be that the University, supposedly a beacon of Catholic values, was ever proud to own a book it thought to be bound in the skin of a human being?
I was somewhat relieved on learning that the binding has been recently discovered to be most likely made of pig skin (though the author indicates this is not 100 percent certain). Still, I am appalled that for 100 years, the University believed the skin to be human, and not only made no effort to bury it properly or atone for its participation in this barbaric practice, but actually put the book on display as some sort of interesting artifact. What happened to the sanctity of the human body?
I fear the answer is all too obvious: the fact that the skin was thought to belong to a Moorish chieftain — a “nasty Islamic foe of Christianity” — belies the sickening truth of racism within our white, Eurocentric Church. In my 37 years as a Catholic, I have been under the impression that any human body — whether the unborn body of a baby or the 500-year-old body of a Muslim — deserves to be treated with the utmost respect and care, and not as a tool to serve the purposes of science, entertainment or sheer curiosity.
Brenna Cussen Anglada ’03M.A.
Dubuque, Iowa