WHAT THE CHURCH DOES RIGHT The Roman Catholic Church is at its most powerful and meaningful when it takes up the cause of the oppressed. Unfortunately, that seems to happen with less frequency and passion, especially in the United States. But Pope John Paul's latest papal document hit the right notes on his 25th anniversary.

Pope John Paul, in a major document released on his 25th anniversary, has issued a ringing indictment of rich nations and says a "war of the powerful against the weak" seems to be embroiling the world.

"In many areas the world resembles a powder-keg ready to explode and shower immense suffering upon the human family," he said in the 192-page booklet published on Thursday...

...Pastores Greges (Shepherds of the Flock) tackles a wide array of issues that arose in a synod of the world's Roman Catholic bishops two years ago.

The document includes a heartfelt appeal for rich countries not to lord it over the wretched of the Earth.

"The war of the powerful against the weak has, today more than ever before, created profound divisions between rich and poor," he said. "The poor are legion!"

"Within an unjust economic system marked by significant structural inequities, the situation of the marginalised is daily becoming worse," he wrote.

"Today, in many parts of the world, people are starving, while in other places there is opulence."

The Church's mission was to defend the downtrodden and oppressed "because if there is no hope for the poor, there will be no hope for anyone, not even for the so-called rich".

The pope, who signed the document at a brief ceremony in the Vatican's vast audience hall, said the primary victims of inequality today were the poor, the young, refugees and women.

In phrases applicable to the Middle East and parts of Asia, he condemned "the unacceptable exploitation of religion for violent purposes" and branded religious fundamentalism "a constant enemy of dialogue and peace".

FOLLOW THE MONEY I wouldn't call George Soros an unbiased source of funding, but his establishment of Iraq Revenue Watch has created at least one body interested in examining the costs of doing business -- financial and political -- in Iraq. Their latest report questions the transparency of Coalition spending, especially of Iraqi revenue. While the sums in question are small compared to the billions being spent by the U.S. government, a valid concern is that the sums will grow. And certainly the lack of transparency brings the motives of the U.S. government into question, rightly or wrongly.

IT'S SUCH A GOOD FEELING It's been a while since the people of the United States have stopped in their collective tracks to share a moment of awe and wonder. Our most recent collective memories are of terror and loss. So it's nice to see that somewhere in the world time stopped and people felt genuinely amazed.

Passers-by stopped in their tracks, commuters brought their bicycles to a halt and those on lunch breaks postponed meals as people learning of China's first manned space flight glued their eyes to television screens.

Few knew the launch would happen Wednesday morning as China's state-controlled media had downplayed coverage in the runup to the 9 amliftoff.

But soon after the official China Central Television began a delayed broadcast of the launch from northern Inner Mongolia with astronaut Yang Liwei on board, small crowds began gathering near giant television screens outside shopping malls.

One man could not keep his eyes off a screen outside the Wonderful supermarket in central Beijing and nearly ran his cycle into a car.

BLAME MY FATHER Michael Dirda, editor of the Washington Post's Book World, has taken up the pen to discuss the origins of his love of literature. His personal story, laced with capsules of literary encounters, does a masterful job of explaining his love for the written word.

But that's only part of this engaging personal history with its own version of the prodigal son story. Dirda used books as a way to separate himself from family tensions and from his blue-collar father, who never read a book in his life. The story begins as Dirda (born in 1948) recounts one of his earliest memories: himself as a four-year-old on his mother's lap, listening to her explain "bright pictures." It ends as a middle-aged Dirda remembers his dad and wishes he could hear him yell at him "to do something useful ... just one more time."

In between, there's a running list of what Dirda read, when he read it, and how he was affected, along with evocative descriptions of his boyhood. The family would drive down Oberlin Avenue in a green slope-roofed Chevy, past the soon-to-vanish farmhouses, while the father sang about Marianne "down by the seashore sifting sand."

And there are insights about literature. Dirda defines the pleasure of reading as sound, "the resonance of a narrative voice in your head." The best writing, he explains, one wants "to listen with appropriate deliberateness ... to savor the nuances and admire the flourishes."

VISIONS David Gutterson has returned with a third novel. "Our Lady of the Forest" tells the story of an abused teen-age girl who has visions of the Virgin Mary, and of the human consequences of her spiritual encounter.

THE WATER'S FINE Salam Pax is back in Baghdad after his whirlwind media blitz in London to celebrate the publication of his book detailing the lead-up to war from his perspective in Iraq. In his Guardian column, he says on the balance things seem to be improving. Even if the Coalition has retreated behind concrete barricades.

MEDIA RETRAINING Sometimes the irony is just too rich. Sometimes you can't believe you're not reading The Onion. Yesterday's news story about White House leaks was just one of those times.

WASHINGTON - Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush - living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge - told his top officials to "stop the leaks" to the media, or else.

News of Bush's order leaked almost immediately.

Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.

IT'S AN ATTITUDE. AND A NAME Singer Holly Golightly has an obvious gimmick -- her name. But she also has style and talent, and the buzz about her new album is increasing. She'll be performing in Carrboro (North Carolina), at the Black Cat in D.C., and in New York City in the coming weeks.

DRIVEWAY TO DRIVEWAY DROVE Superchunk's a'comin' to town. The alternarock steadies roll through Richmond tonight to demonstrate how a band can sound fresh after a dozen years of rocking out.

Back in the early '90s when Seattle was the new New York, flannel was the new black, and misery was the new happiness, an alternative to alternative firmly took root across the country in the small college town of Chapel Hill, NC. Indie rock groups like Polvo, Archers of Loaf, and Ben Folds Five began attracting ears by making music wholly independent of what was currently getting airplay. The antiheros of this anti-scene were a rock band by the name of Superchunk.

Singer/guitarist Mac McCaughan and bassist Laura Ballance formed Superchunk in 1989. In 1990 guitarist Jim Wilbur came aboard, and a year later Jon Wurster replaced the original drummer, Chuck Garrison. Throughout the next decade Superchunk released a string of consistently excellent albums, eschewing each major label that came courting. After a brief stint on a newly-formed Matador, McCaughan and Balance founded Merge Records, which has grown to become a salient indie label.

BANNED FROM THE ROXY The Washington Post decided not to run "The Boondocks" in this week's paper, and curious to know why they would do something so trite, I wandered over to Yahoo. And, you know what? This week's strips reminded me what I've enjoyed so much about Aaron MacGruder's work. Peruse the whole week for best laughs.

LISTEN UP Thomas Friedman is one of the few remaining columnists who thinks the Bush administration might use his advice -- this week, he wonders if it is possible for the Bush team to learn to listen to dissenting ideas, and to reframe its view of the world. [login: buttermilk.com, password: buttermilk]

And learning to listen may be the only way the Bush team is going to muster and sustain the support it needs to succeed in Iraq.

To begin with, listening might actually force the Bush team to frame its vision of U.S. foreign policy and its rationale for the Iraq war on our hopes for the world, not just our fears of it. Every other word out of this administration's mouth now is "terror" or "terrorism." We have stopped exporting hope, the most important commodity America has. We now export only fear, so we end up importing everyone else's fears right back.

Yes, America faces real threats, and this administration, to its credit, has been serious about confronting them. But America also has many more friends, actual and potential, and nurturing them is also part of our national security. We cannot spend so much time talking about our enemies that we forget to listen to our friends, because without them, ultimately, we cannot win either a war of terrorism or a war of ideas.

Had this ingrown administration ever exposed itself to people even mildly opposed to its policies, let alone foreigners, it might have avoided some of its most egregious errors. Had it listened to its own Army chief of staff, who had served in Bosnia, it might have put more troops into Iraq, as he advocated. Had it listened to its own State Department, it might not have recklessly disbanded the Iraqi Army without having enough U.S. troops to fill the security vacuum.

HOW TO LOSE AN ELECTION As the Democratic candidates line up for this winter's primary slalom, and the Democratic National Committee begins to play Electoral Dominos, the topic of war continues to echo on the airwaves with a peculiar, hollow sound. The war against terrorism struggles for oxygen with the war in Iraq, and skulking in the shadows the faint outlines of Palestine and Syria and Iran and, most ominously, North Korea, can be seen.

These are real threats. The world faces real problems. And real alternatives exist to the Bush administration's strategies to each of these issues. But listen to the Democrats, or read the headlines -- the political campaign for the Presidency, if the Democrats stay the course, is based on the wrong issue entirely. The candidates are hamstrung by a phrase -- "imminent threat."

The topics of conspiracy and nuance, of misleading the public, can only take a candidate so far. Based in speculation and subjective interpretation, they are fodder for believers -- the Democrats who want to regain the White House at any cost. But whether the Bush administration made a wise decision or a foolish one will not win next year's election for the Democrats. By November of 2004, Bush's decision will be 17 months old. If it isn't resolved by success, it will have been displaced by another crisis or the situation in Iraq will have imploded so catastrophically that the rationale for war will be a moot point.

The decisions that led the United States into Iraq are important. They deserve examination, and invite skepticism. And further exploration may yet determine that there was some degree of duplicity involved on the part of Bush's team. But the issue -- the one real issue -- that the Democrats have failed to address is a global one, and it has to do with a vision for U.S. foreign policy.

The Republicans have such a vision, fractuous as it is. It is a vision of suspicion and mistrust, one of preemption and anticipation. The Bush administration's foreign policy is one of offense, and it is dangerous and often misguided.

If the Democrats want to campaign to win, they'd do well to begin to craft a different vision for world affairs and international security. Such a vision might remind voters that nuclear proliferation is a disease and that North Korea (and Pakistan and India and Iran) is a symptom; that disenfranchised youth are a symptom and global poverty is the disease; that SARS is just part of a milieu of diseases (AIDS and malaria, among them) that threaten global health. Such a vision might partner with Kofi Annan to dramatically reform the United Nations, to reinvent or dismantle NATO, to take a holistic view of teetering countries like Haiti and Somalia and Liberia and Afghanistan and to develop a strategy to begin to address the root causes of chaos.

A Democratic foreign policy strategy should show voters what the world could look like under different conditions. It should allow candidates to demonstrate that the current state, under Bush, is unhealthy or wrongheaded or dangerous, while showing how a future state, under the Democrats, corrects an imbalance or eases existing threats.

Under such an umbrella, Democrats can not only confront the Bush administration's poor policy choices directly, but they can offer up alternatives that are strategically linked to a vision for the future. Unfortunately, the best applause lines tend to come from from-the-hip attacks. And the current crop of candidates want you to applaud.

FAIR FOOD Coming soon to a grocery store shelf near you -- Fair-Trade food. A new label should begin to appear on more and more products, letting consumers know that what they are buying was produced in a way that was fair and equitable to the producers (usually in poorer countries).

The fair-trade label is currently found on chocolate, coffee, and tea in the United States, and is scheduled to appear on bananas by the end of the year. The label assures shoppers the item was originally purchased at an above-average price. That extra money is intended to enable farmers to feed their families and send their children to school rather than to the fields.

TransFair USA, based in Oakland, Calif., began issuing the American fair- trade label in 1999 as part of a consortium of 17 national fair-trade labeling organizations in North America, Europe, and Japan. The group's inspectors make annual visits to producers throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America to ensure that the producers operate democratically and use some of the fair-trade premium for social, economic, or environmental projects.

GLUE EATERS HIT GOLD WITH MUSIC MAG The University of Georgia's alumni magazine profiles the minds behind one of the newer, better music magazines out there -- Paste.

A PROVEN WORK OF ART The Arena Stage production of the award-winning play, "Proof," is the production to see if you're heading to D.C. this autumn.

Arena Stage delivers as well, in a smooth, down-to-earth production directed with an abundance of intelligence by Wendy C. Goldberg. The cast is uniformly persuasive, from Barnaby Carpenter's handsome geek, Hal, to a scolding sibling played by Susan Lynskey, to the disturbed father portrayed by Michael Rudko. The evening's charismatic glue, though, is supplied by the terrific Keira Naughton, as the central character, Catherine, a troubled young college dropout who may or may not be the country's next great math whiz.

Catherine is an attractive train wreck, just the sort of caustic, brilliant, damaged underachiever whom audiences love to adopt. She's the unrealized potential in all of us, the embodiment of our secret sense of being inherently special. (Could she exist anywhere but in a playwright's mind? Naughton is so dynamic that she's a bulwark against doubt.) That Catherine professes not to care about whatever gifts she might possess only adds to her seductiveness. The more profanely she rejects being ministered to, the more ardently we want to stand by her.

WINNING BY THE MERITS OF THE WORDS Author DBC Pierre certainly didn't win the Booker Prize award for his personality or solid morals, so perhaps he won on the merits of his book, "Vernon God Little."

Pierre, nom de plume of the now repentant Mexican-Australian wildman Peter Finlay, is the oddest and most controversial character to have won the award, which made the careers of Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee and Margaret At wood. Last week he confessed to the Guardian to betraying and fleecing friends in a 10-year rampage over three continents that culminated in swindling an elderly American artist out of his home.

But three years ago, a contrite Finlay - who insists he worked up most of his "lurid debts" on schemes to right that original wrong - began to swap the life of a fantasist for that of fiction writer and created a character in Vernon God Little who has been called the Huckleberry Finn of the Eminem generation.

The book, which takes its title from its lying teenage Texan protagonist, beat the favourite, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, to the £50,000 prize, after a strong surge of betting on Finlay over the weekend. But last night, in an effort to prove that his rehabilitation was genuine, Finlay said that the cheque would go straight to the people he owed, chief among these the 75-year-old painter, Robert Lenton, who was left homeless and penniless by the man he thought was his best friend.

A VOICE IN THE MOUNTAINS Gillian Welch is heading to Charlottesville in November. Pull on your boots and head down the road for a chance to hear her spectacular music.

YIN-YANG OF A CARTOONIST It's hard to know whether illustrator and storyteller Art Spiegelman is an entertainer, a historian or a conscience. More often than not, he's a little of all three. Spiegelman first gained notice in the late 1980s with "Maus," a graphic novel that retold his parents experiences in the Holocaust. Today, he spends his time on a children's book, "It Was A Dark and Silly Night..." and a recounting of his memories of the September 11 attacks. (login: buttermilk.com, password: buttermilk)

BY JIMINY David Rees' pace has slowed, but his wit remains pointed.

JUST ADD WAR A new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies suggests that al Qaeda's ranks have swelled as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Washington must impose security in Iraq to prevent the country from "ripening into a cause celebre for radical Islamic terrorists," it concluded. "Nation-building" in Iraq was paramount and might require more troops than initially planned.

"On the plus side, war in Iraq has denied al Qaeda a potential supplier of weapons of mass destruction and discouraged state sponsors of terrorism from continuing to support it," the report said.

"On the minus side, war in Iraq has probably inflamed radical passions among Muslims and thus increased al Qaeda's recruiting power and morale and, at least marginally, its operating capability," it said.

"The immediate effect of the war may have been to isolate further al Qaeda from any potential state supporters while also swelling its ranks and galvanizing its will."

AND CHINA MAKES THREE Yesterday, China became the third nation to send a manned flight into space.

THE HALIBURTON THAT CHENEY BROKE A surprising bit of news work at Slate.com with this look at how Haliburton is missing its earnings marks lately, despite the perception that the giant corporation is rolling in U.S. taxpayer money. Even more interesting is how much of Haliburton's red ink can be traced back to the poor deal-brokering by its former head honcho, current Vide President Dick Cheney.

GREEN GROW THE RUSHES GROW Constance Casey, an assistant gardener with NYC's parks department, shares the trails and joys of urban gardening in this week's Slate.com journal.

happy birthday, e.e. As a teenager, I found him amusing, confusing and, naturally, inspiring. I just didn't know what I was aspiring toward for a while. Now, for some reason, I find e.e. cummings to be thoughtful and sad. He was born 109 years ago today.

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
that if(so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which
floats the first who,his april touch
drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

and should some why completely weep
my father's fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry
for he could feel the mountains grow.

SUCKER PUNCHING "BILL" The New Republic's Gregg Easterbrook lights into director Quentin Tarantino with a passion, making a compelling case that Tarantino minus the gore is a zero. Or at best, the director of a bleaker "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers."

WATER OF LIFE The past has returned to the marshes along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. So has life. The vast marshland, virtually destroyed by Saddam Hussein in an act of ecological oppression against the Marsh Arabs who fished and farmed here, is beginning to make a comeback.

Thin reeds now sprout on the glassy surface. Aquatic birds build nests on tiny islands. And lanky young boys in flowing tunics spend the first few hours of each day as generations of adolescent males in their families have: gliding across the water in narrow wooden boats to collect fish trapped in homemade nets.

"The water is our life," Kerkush said as he gazed at the marsh that now comes within a few feet of his house and stretches as far as the eye can see. "It is a gift from God to have it back."

A dozen years after Saddam Hussein ordered the vast marshes of southeastern Iraq drained, transforming idyllic wetlands into a barren moonscape to eliminate a hiding place for Shiite Muslim political opponents, Iraqi engineers have turned on the spigot again.

The flow is not what it once was -- new dams have weakened the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers that feed the marshes -- but the impact has been profound. As the blanket of water gradually expands, it is quickly nourishing plants, animals and a way of life for Marsh Arabs that Hussein had tried so assiduously to extinguish.

UMA SPEAKS OUT Several weeks before "Kill Bill" hit the theaters, Uma Thurman seemed to know it was destined the batter its competition in the box office.

SPACE RACE When China launches its first manned spaceflight tomorrow, don't look for the country to rest on its laurels. China's longer term goal is to establish a manned base on the moon, which might provide some inspiration for a creatively flagging U.S. government to recharge NASA.

THE FINAL FRONTIER A new study of the stars says the 37th brightest star in the constellation Gemini is the most likely place to find life compatible with our own.

PROFITS OVER PEOPLE Upstart economist Joseph Stiglitz, a former Nobel prize recipient, lays into the Clinton administration, Wall Street and himself in a new look at the economic policies of the 1990s, which he says deliberately blurred the lines between the needs of Wall Street (profits) and the needs of people (sustainability).

Now the Columbia University professor's new book "The Roaring Nineties" says President Bill Clinton's economic team, in which he played a key role, doomed the very recovery they had tried to engender by equating the interests of Wall Street with those of the nation at large.

"It was an overly zealous, even naive faith in the market," Stiglitz told Reuters in an interview.

"We had a chance to try to shape globalization, to shape the new economic order, on a new set of principles. Instead, we wound up trying to shape it reflecting our commercial and financial interests."

Worse yet, the United States exported a harsher, more extreme version of its policy mistakes to developing countries, with disastrous consequences, said Stiglitz, who was chairman of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1997.

"We in the Clinton administration did not have a vision of a new post-Cold War international order, but the business community did. They saw new opportunities for profits," he writes in the book.

AS IF THERE WAS A BETTER CHOICE Steve Martin is the top pick to play the lead role in a remake of "The Pink Panther," which originally starred Peter Sellers.

HEY, MONKEY BOY! From science fiction to science fact -- scientists have actually used a brain implant (in a monkey's brain, naturally) to control the movement of a robotic arm. Pretty soon, I'll be wirelessly directing a monkey to update my weblog for me.

The new work is the first in which any animal has learned to use its brain to move a robotic device in all directions in space and to perform a mixture of interrelated movements -- such as reaching toward an object, grasping it and adjusting the grip strength depending on how heavy the object is.

"This is where you want to be," said Karen A. Moxon, a professor of biomedical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "It's one thing to be able to communicate with a video screen. But to move something in the physical world is a real technological feat. And Nicolelis has taken this work to a new level by quantifying the neuroscience behind it."

THAT CRACKER SOUND Richmond has a handful of really good things on its side. David Lowery and Cracker rank pretty damn high on the list.

GIVE THE DEVIL HIS DUE Welcome to the weblog of Presidential candidate George W. Bush.

THE GEOMETRY OF PHOTOGRAPHY There are well over 13,000 confluences on Earth, and you are standing (or sitting) within 49 miles of one right now. To make matters even more boggling, there is a website dedicated to posting one photo from every confluence that is not in an ocean. Which is a pretty damn cool idea.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN The Morning News offers guidance for anyone embarking on the mandatory roadtrip across America. Here's a sample for you about the use of the back seat:

It’s tempting to crap up the back seat with a bunch of junk for easy access, but the only items allowed in the car are snacks, a small cooler, camera, CDs (or a tapes if you still roll like that), one book or magazine per person, sunglasses, a map, and a light sweater. Otherwise the physical chaos permeates into the psychic space. Sounds a little new age, but I assure you this is old-school wisdom.

THE POKEMON APOCALYPSE Quite possibly one of the more clever collisions of bad pop culture, Flash media and the Book of Revelations I've ever seen. Not for the faint of heart, or anyone who is nervous about being struck down by God for impure thoughts.

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT IRAQ The Future of Iraq Portal is your entryway into just about anything you ever wanted to know about Iraq.

TERROR FROM TEXAS If you want a startling view of what an extremist Republican platform looks like, take a gander at the Texas Republican Party Platform for 2000. It's pretty straightforward and pulls no punches -- abolish the Federal Reserve, ban the Supreme Court from getting involved in abortion rights or religious issues, outlaw homosexuality. Calpundit provides a startling look at the conservative Texan view of the world. It's frightening.

RUMSEFELD'S WALKING AROUND MONEY Buried within the appropriations bill for Iraq -- that $87 billion request that is partially earmarked for reconstruction and primarily earmarked for the military -- you'll find (or not find, if you're in Congress) some $9 billion in discretionary funds. Those funds can be spent by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for, well, pretty much anything he wants.

APPALLED BY APPEAL As the rise on standard women's jeans has fallen, the obvious question is how low can they go. Slate's Amanda Fortini explains:

The crotch-to-waist measurement, or rise, on a standard pair of jeans (the sort we haven't seen much of since the early '90s) is somewhere between 10 and 12 inches. Early low-riders had a rise of about 7 inches. Over the past couple of years, the rise has dipped as low as 3 or 4 inches. Low-rise, it seems, has become synonymous with no-rise. Gasoline, a Brazilian company, has even created Down2There jeans, which feature a bungee cord that allows the wearer to lower her pants as she sees fit, as though adjusting a set of Venetian blinds.