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Oct 23, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Alice McDermott |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
Interested in discussing this article in your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community? Click here for a free discussion guide. Forget your Madonnas with upturned eyes. Forget your downcast pietàs. Forget even your ravished, hands-in-the-air virgins, or your open-mouthed martyrs, ever resigned. Lounging concubines, too, for that matter. Also clear-eyed goddesses emerging from their baths.
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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.
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
bibliosurf.com | Alice McDermott
Accueil >Data visualisation littéraire > Littératures nord-américaines > Littérature américaineque dit le web ? Ce romandont le titre original est Absolutiontraduit parCécile Arnaud n'a pas encore de revue du web. veille littéraire : du 30-08-2024 au 30-08-202430-08-2024 -Absolution – Alice McDermott. Absolution est porté par des personnages attachants ou mémorables.
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Jul 3, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Richard Schiffman |Gareth Dale |Alice McDermott |Phil Christman
We call it a mourning dove, a misnomer,as if its placid call were plaintive,as if it shared our plumbless ache of loss. But hereabouts it’s simply morning’s doveriffing daily with the sun’s first raysa refrain that’s never differentyet never fully the same—a thousand and one versionsof hello, hello, hello and hello. It throws its heart into every utterance,so it never rushes to sayanything more than it actually knows. Greeting no one in particular—just joy pretending that it is sorrow.
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Jul 3, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Jo McGowan |Gareth Dale |Alice McDermott |Phil Christman
India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power since 2014, increasing its hold on the country with each election. About six months ago, my husband, Ravi, and a few others began telling people here that its projected win in this year’s elections was far from certain. Few believed them. While everyone wanted it to be true, all the signs said otherwise: not only would the BJP win, but the win this time would be historic. Our children in the United States and the United Kingdom concurred.
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Jul 1, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Gareth Dale |Alice McDermott |Phil Christman
Some Democrats pole-axed by Joseph Biden’s disastrous debate performance took heart in his relatively rousing appearance at a North Carolina rally the next day. The candidate did everything he wasn’t able to do the night before: speak with energy, deliver punchy one-liners, and, critically, make sense. He also coughed a few times, lending credence to the spin that a cold might have impaired him at the debate.
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Jun 24, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Massimo Faggioli |Gareth Dale |Alice McDermott |Phil Christman
Recent months brought two developments that could (and should) give influential voices within conservative Catholicism the opportunity to distance themselves from Donald Trump as the Republican party’s candidate for president. The first was Trump’s statement in April that he would not support a nationwide abortion ban, thus putting him at odds with, among others, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has continued to characterize abortion as the “pre-eminent” issue for voters.
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Jun 21, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Griffin Oleynick |Anthony Domestico |Gareth Dale |Alice McDermott
It’s been a minute, Griffin. Our Summer Readings and Screenings series last ran in 2020. At the time, we discussed the “hyperviolence” of American political rhetoric and worried over the “false-voiced God-talkers and power freaks / who think not at all about what they bring down.” Four years later, it’s Biden vs.
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Jun 19, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Nick Fagnant |Gareth Dale |Alice McDermott |Phil Christman
Last February, a sixteen-year-old nonbinary student named Nex Benedict died after an altercation with three other students in a women’s bathroom at Owasso High School in Oklahoma. The tragedy generated national attention as well as an outcry from LGBTQ+ rights groups. Benedict, whose death was later ruled a suicide, had been bullied for more than a year before the incident.
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Jun 16, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | John Rodden |Gareth Dale |Alice McDermott |Phil Christman
Born in 1925 into a family of fifteen children, my father, who died a decade ago, would be a centenarian in a few months if he were still alive. Although he went no further than third grade in a one-room Donegal schoolhouse in Curran, I appreciate more and more with each passing year how much he taught me. By word—sometimes a single word!—and by example. My father was not one for speechmaking. Words were awkward tools; he used them sparingly.
