As former student of a number of very fine nuns, it grieves me to see members of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious treated by bishops as if they were their property.
It was the nuns at our school in Oregon who tried to show us right from wrong and instilled their concern for having an education — how to speak, how to write, how to figure sums, how to feel the worth of every person in class. It was these women who hiked up their gowns to pitch the softball game, to make sure that every child was included, to get the leaders in the class to become surrogates for the self-esteem of those slower, less athletic, more shy children.
One has to wonder how the male-dominated church expects to survive as anything more than a men's club with the dedicated women expected to be their servants.
Patrick O'Brien
San Juan Capistrano
Solar choices
Re "Standing their sacred ground," April 24
The choice is not between disturbing Native American grave sites or building clean-energy projects; it's between continuing these huge, inefficient, enormously expensive and environmentally destructive boondoggles in the desert or using solar the way it should be used: with panels on every rooftop supplying that building's energy needs.
The attempt to fit solar into the portfolio of big energy companies is a doomed strategy that may be good for Southern California Edison's bottom line but is bad for the desert environment and the species that live there. Turning every building into its own miniature solar energy collector might imperil Edison and its fellow utilities, but hey, isn't that what capitalism is supposed to be about — creative destruction?
Mark Gabrish Conlan
San Diego
Aunt Vera's gift
Re "The gift of words," Opinion, April 22
What a delight it was to read the lovely Op-Ed article by Susan Straight. Her words immediately took me back to my grandparents' apartment in the Bronx on Christmas Day 1951, when my Aunt Vera presented me with a shiny, fat book titled "Fairy Tales." I remember taking the book to a back bedroom and reading it in its entirety that very night. This is such a vivid memory that I believe it marked the beginning of my lifelong love of books and reading.
Thank you to Straight and all the other people who put books in the hands of children.
Linda Mele Johnson
Long Beach
