Alejandra Oliva

Chicago

Contributor at Christian Century

writer, embroiderer & translator | Rivermouth (@AstraHousebooks 2023) | she/her | repped by @manadurphy

Articles

The Mysterious Last Days of the “Lieutenant Nun”

3 weeks ago | americasquarterly.org | Alejandra Oliva

Reading Time: 3 minutesThis article is adapted from AQ’s special report on Guatemala. When you google Antonio de Erauso, the little biographical box at the top of the search page sums him up in one word: “Nun.” That semi-contradiction suggests an intriguing life—but the reality is more fascinating still. The Lieutenant Nun—as Erauso was widely known in the 17th century—was born in 1592, as Catalina de Erauso. Raised in a convent as a novitiate, Erauso escaped at the age of 15.
A Way in the Wilderness

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Alejandra Oliva

During the first Trump administration, I learned about the immigration legal system—first, as an interpreter and advocate for asylum applicants, then as a court observer, and finally as a communications staffer at an immigration legal-services provider. I learned the acronyms and the names of forms, learned what made one asylum claim stronger than another, learned enough to become outraged when a new executive rule had violated existing law and precedent in some way.
‘And You Did Not Welcome Me’

2 months ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Alejandra Oliva |Terence Sweeney |Brett Hoover |Nuria López Torres |Núria Torres

Article Visibly Invisible The Trump administration hopes not only to deport migrants, but also to make them feel so unsafe they no longer participate actively in our communities. The New ‘Preeminent Urgency’ A special episode about how the Catholic Church is responding to the Trump administration’s ‘crackdown’ on migrants and its plans for mass deportations. Article Will the Bishops Stand Up to Trump?
Faith in the Streets

Jan 29, 2025 | commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Baumann |Alejandra Oliva |Thomas Banchoff |Antonio Spadaro

Last summer, the Horcynus Festival in Messina, Sicily, hosted a conversation between director Martin Scorsese, speaking via Zoom from his home in New York City, and Antonio Spadaro, SJ, an undersecretary for the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education.
The Fire Goes Somewhere

Dec 26, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Daniel Rober |Paul Baumann |Alejandra Oliva |Todd Shy

I used to think there could be no such thing as a lukewarm Evangelical. By definition, by constitution, to be an Evangelical was to commit fully to every implication of your beliefs. T. M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (2012) confirmed the “intense inner attention” at the heart of Evangelical experience.
Now You See Her

Oct 23, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Alejandra Oliva |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch

A few years before her death at the age of thirty-four from tuberculosis, exacerbated by self-starvation undertaken in solidarity with those living in her native Nazi-occupied France, Simone Weil mused about how vanishing might bring her closer to the divine: “If only I knew how to disappear there would be a perfect union between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear.” She called this work of disappearance “decreation,” a neologism meaning something that isn’t quite destruction, but...
On Death & Resurrection

Oct 23, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Baumann |Alejandra Oliva |Alice McDermott |Paul Griffiths

The Christian account of human death is a story of bodies and souls. Bodies are given the lives they have by their souls. Their souls are their lives, what animates them. Bodies, however, are mortal, and eventually die, resolving into corpses. When a body dies, its soul separates from it and continues to live, but now in discarnate form, without a body. Souls cannot die: they are immortal.
The midsummer of life

Aug 29, 2024 | christiancentury.org | Rebecca Weiss |Jack Jenkins |Aleja Hertzler- McCain |Alejandra Oliva

The long, hot days of August are mostly behind us now, and here in Chicago we can expect another month or so of time in the garden before the first frost hits. I moved into a house—with a yard!—two summers ago, but the first summer was spent in a post-move exhausted haze, and last summer was spent on the road, so other than a few scraggy, half-hearted tomatoes, the garden part of it lay neglected.
Migration's Doom Loop

Jul 3, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Alejandra Oliva

When I first started interpreting for asylum seekers who had landed in New York City in the winter of 2017, I stepped into the immigrant-rights movement with all the zeal of a convert. It felt like the group I was working with, the New Sanctuary Coalition, was inventing solutions to a problem that had only recently become understood in this city.
Movement of the soul

Apr 24, 2024 | christiancentury.org | Elizabeth Schrader Polczer |Austin Shelley |Samuel Wells |Alejandra Oliva

I was a ballet dancer for about ten years, from age 5 to 15, when my feet rebelled against the strictures of pointe shoes and I had to give it up. I wasn’t ever particularly serious about it—I didn’t want to take more than two classes a week; no ballet teacher ever said I had it, whatever indefinable thing makes a ballerina a ballerina; and I certainly am not genetically predisposed toward the tall, willowy slimness of a Balanchine girl.