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Feb 28, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
Rose Is a RoseThank you for David Mills’s reflection on Ann Schmalstieg Barrett’s arresting painting of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (“A No-Nonsense Thérèse,” January 2024). Like the painting you so beautifully reproduce, St. Thérèse Martin was a force to be reckoned with. In one of the most important and powerful theological examinations of Thérèse and her significance (The Hidden Face, 1959), Ida F. Görres tells of her own initial encounter with a photograph of Thérèse.
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Feb 28, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Miles Doyle |James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
In May 2023, the state of Oregon quietly broke with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Covid-related quarantine recommendations. Rather than asking infected Oregonians to isolate at home for at least five days, the Oregon Health Authority allowed people infected with Covid to break isolation as soon as they were fever-free for at least twenty-four hours without the aid of medication.
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Feb 28, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Lawrence Joseph |James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
It is this that is intended, an execution regime death row prisoners must propose an alternative killing method preferred to lethal injection, prison officials providing forms to opt-in for suffocation.
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Feb 28, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Lee Oser |James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
Over the flaking tideThe ferry creeps to the dock. Its braggy bullhorn tapsThe lighthouse like an egg. The lighthouse sweeps its funnel—Oak loom in relief,Stitching and repairingStem and branch and leaf. Whisky clears the visionAnd helps the Dippers steer:The pilot twists the bottleAnd squints to find the pier. Gently by the buoy,To the tune of grunt and glug,He juggles with both hornAnd helm and emerald dug. From lips that cannot kiss: Hail Mary! and he’s home.
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Feb 28, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Tom Deignan |James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
There is a scene in Nathan Hill’s hilarious, terrifying, and dazzling new novel in which his married protagonists, Jack and Elizabeth, stroll into a certain kind of Chicago watering hole—lots of hipsters, “no Budweiser on tap.” Jack thinks back to his dad in rural Kansas who wore a John Deere hat “sincerely” and “drank nothing but Budweiser.” Ironically enough, in 2023, a Midwestern farmer—who has plunged into Facebook’s deepest right-wing rabbit holes, as Jack’s father has—would actually be...
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Feb 18, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Thomas Banchoff |James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
In February 2023, global religious leaders met in the United Arab Emirates to celebrate the opening of the Abrahamic Family House, a soaring multifaith complex encompassing a mosque, a church, and a synagogue. The grand opening came exactly four years after Pope Francis travelled to Abu Dhabi to sign a Document on Human Fraternity with Grand Imam Al-Tayeb of Al-Azhar, an event which marked a high point in international religious diplomacy.
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Feb 17, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Claudia Avila Cosnahan |James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
Last summer’s wildfire in Joshua Tree National Park was the largest to burn through the eastern Mojave Desert in recorded history—surpassing the 71,000-acre Hackberry complex fire of 2005, and, as The Los Angeles Times put it, “searing through a delicate ecosystem already strained by invasive species and the burning of fossil fuels.” James Cornett, an ecologist specializing in Joshua trees, was quoted in the same story: “I can say with the utmost certainty that the areas that burn — whether...
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Feb 14, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Daniel M Walden |James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
On Sunday a Super Bowl ad titled “Foot Washing” showed people in various configurations, often from disparate racial or social groups, washing one another’s feet. Toward the end of the ad, words flashed across a black screen: “JESUS DIDN’T TEACH HATE. HE WASHED FEET. HE GETS US. ALL OF US.” In the final two sentences, the syllable “us” is highlighted in yellow, and that same highlighting persists as the name “JESUS” is shown on the same black background.
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Feb 9, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Joseph Sorrentino |James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
Pilgrims arrive at the Villa Guadalupe in Mexico City between December 9 and December 12, the Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe. They walk, bike, drive (or are driven) from all across Mexico. No matter how they travel, once they’ve arrived, many of them will walk on their knees into the basilica while others will wash their faces with the water that flows by statues of the Virgin. A short distance away in the large plaza, Indigenous and traditional groups dance to the beat of drums.
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Feb 8, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Baumann |James Chappel |Anna Ballan |Rand Richards Cooper
I recently had occasion to attend Mass at two different local parishes. The church I more frequently visit is a plain, vaguely Romanesque wooden structure built in the nineteenth century. It looks very much like the church I went to as a child and where I received my First Communion and was confirmed, although it is smaller and the interior is not as ornate. My childhood parish is in Connecticut’s much more prosperous Fairfield County, while we now live Eastern Connecticut.
