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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | William Davis |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
NativityIf you squint slightly you will be able to see,deep in the donkey’s slitted eye, the whole scenereflected. Used to being pushed off to the side,he stands stolid and docile beside an overturnedbucket and a bale of hay hurriedly strewn aboutwithout much thought, or afterthought. The lightis dim except for some unaccountable glimmerthat seems to come from above, circling the smallcentral scene.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
A Desert CompassI read the article “Elegy” by Kathleen Hill (September) with a mix of delight and misplaced nostalgia, as the nostalgia is not mine. My parents met in Zinder in the early 1970s and maintained a mostly written correspondence with Fr. Guy Romano until his passing a few years ago. My childhood was peppered with anecdotes, goatskin wall hangings, and songs in Hausa—so much so that it inspired me to launch my own nonprofit organization, Akoma Ntoso Foundation.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Patrick T. Reardon |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
Lucy Richardson was deceivedby the voices, overpoweredby the visions, covered over. She let herself be duped. She embraced her deception,locked it in her heart with a thousand keys. Ridiculed the livelong day,mocked by every mouth. She shouted. Warned violence,destruction, thunder and fire. Taunted by passersby. A womanof sorrow, acquainted with infirmity. Insult and reproach were her dailybread. Her good they made evil,her evil good. She determined to warn no more. No more spew grim prophecies.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Stuart Dybek |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
The tracks of whatever he’s been following endat an abandoned mill where a river exhalesfrom a beaver dam, without pausing to breathe in. He needs to retrace the waffled prints he’s stampedon fields and pastures whose barbed fencesare drifted over, and that wind is swirling away. He didn’t set out snowshoeing across an erasedlandscape to wait beside a river while it prayed.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Lauritzen |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
I have always enjoyed walking in cemeteries. They can be places of serenity where it is possible to escape the noise of everyday life. But when I strolled through Montparnasse Cemetery in 2019, it was not as refuge from the hectic pace of a trip to Paris. My visit was, instead, a kind of pilgrimage to the final resting place of many important writers, including Samuel Beckett, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Christian Göbel |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
On June 11, 1827, the Catholic Church placed German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. A report from the Index Congregation that day, given to the pope to make a final decision, simply states: “Kant’s dark, sophistical, and incomprehensible philosophy is already well known, as is his irreligion.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt Mazewski |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
In the wee hours of the morning after Election Day, when it had become apparent that Donald Trump would prevail in the race for the White House, political writer Jim Newell attempted to grapple with the monumental implications of the result. “We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that,” he lamented in a predawn post at Slate.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
Before November 5, it was still possible, if a little naïve, to hope that Donald Trump’s political career would go down in history as a relatively small stain on the American project. Had Trump lost, one could claim that—though a uniquely mendacious, corrupt, and obscene candidate took the White House once—common sense and decency eventually prevailed. The 2024 election has shown definitively that what ails us as a country is a chronic condition, not a passing distemper.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Baumann |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
One politician often described as a liberal Catholic is leaving the White House, and another politician, a convert who describes himself as a conservative Catholic, is moving in (at least to the West Wing). What might J. D. Vance’s ascendency to the vice presidency tell us about American Catholicism, and how should Catholics understand this shift in the likely public perception of the faith? How do liberal and conservative Catholics reconcile their faith and their politics?
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | William T. Cavanaugh |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
What an election! The U.S. election system, which was supposed to be riddled with fraud, has apparently cleaned itself up overnight, as the results demonstrate. Or was it that all the undocumented migrants who were supposed to be voting illegally decided to cast their ballots for Trump this time? Whatever the case, we can be thankful that this election is not disputed; Vice President Kamala Harris has already conceded.
