“Contemporary quarrels over Catholic liturgy resemble clashes between competing forms of gay sensibility. Indeed, they are often those very same clashes in a different venue.” This is one of “9.5 Theses on Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism” posted by Mark Jordan, author of The Silence of Sodom, on the University of Chicago Press Web site (press.uchicago.edu).
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We’re Number 20! Chicago’s poverty rate dropped 2 percent, to 19.6 percent, during the 1990s (“A Decade of Mixed Blessings,” Brookings Institution Center on Urban & Metropolitan Policy, August). That still leaves us well above the national average, but it was the 20th greatest poverty rate decline among U.S. cities. The rate in Gary dropped to 25.8 percent, the sixth largest decline.
Mexican-American babies in Chicago whose mothers were born in Mexico have a lower mortality rate than those whose mothers were born in the U.S., report James Collins Jr. of Children’s Memorial Hospital and colleagues in Ethnicity & Disease (Late Autumn 2001). The death rate for Mexican-American infants in Chicago ages one month to one year is 3.2 per thousand if their mother was born in this country but only 2.1 per thousand if she was born in Mexico. Living in poverty-stricken areas accounts for only some of the difference; the authors suspect that “maternal lifelong minority status” of U.S.-born mothers may be an important factor. “We speculate that household composition, family cohesiveness, and access to safe child care contribute to the nativity disparity…among urban Mexican- American infants.”
