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Sep 29, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos
The Farm Bill doesn’t usually get as much press as some other congressional actions. Something like raising the debt ceiling or nominating a Speaker of the House draws attention to the too-good-to-miss partisan fights in which one side must vanquish the other. But every five years, the Farm Bill, which determines national food and agricultural policy, is usually passed with bipartisan support.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos |Frank B. Farrell
Welcome InterruptionsMatthew Rose’s essay on Robert Bellah (“Serious Play”) and Peter Schwendener’s meditation on Midwestern roads (“Two Roads Home”) seem well-placed back to back in the July/August issue. Coming right after the article on Bellah, Schwendener’s observations feel like a particular illustration of the “cultural catastrophe” Bellah theorized.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Isabella Simon |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos
“There are bodies everywhere,” said one CNN correspondent. Another described how, “looking into the sea, what we see is people’s lives…. Door frames, windows, furniture, clothes, cars.” The reports came from Derna, in eastern Libya, where torrential rains led to the collapse of two dams on September 11 and washed a quarter of the city out into the Mediterranean Sea. The Libyan Red Crescent initially estimated the death toll could surpass ten thousand.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Christian Wiman |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos
Over the years I’ve heard countless ministers, ministers-in-training, and even divinity-school professors tell me, often quite cheerfully, that they just don’t “get” poetry. Ancient theology, modern novels, academic philosophy so fanged and rebarbative it would make a layman’s brain bleed—no problem. But slip a sonnet into the mix and the gears grind to a stop. On one hand, this makes sense. Poetry is a particular way of thinking.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Evan Bednarz |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos
“You have picked a bad night to cross,” the man tells the shivering couple in the kitchen, as they watch snow falling outside the window. The other man replies, “Every night is bad.” This observation, recounted in Octavio Solis’s Retablos, a coming-of-age memoir set in El Paso during the sixties and seventies, still applies in the borderland.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos
The Farm Bill doesn’t usually get as much press as some other congressional actions. Something like raising the debt ceiling or nominating a Speaker of the House draws attention to the too-good-to-miss partisan fights in which one side must vanquish the other. But every five years, the Farm Bill, which determines national food and agricultural policy, is usually passed with bipartisan support.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos
In announcing his retirement this month, Utah senator Mitt Romney called on the two likely major-party presidential nominees to step down as well. “I think it would be a great thing if both President Biden and former President Trump were to stand aside and let their respective party pick someone in the next generation….
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Sep 24, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Tom Verde |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos
Perhaps the most famous image in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, painted around 1511, is The Creation of Adam, the moment when God is a divine breath away from imparting life to Adam with the near touch of their outstretched fingers. Yet before God created human beings, Scripture tells us, he created the sun, the stars and “the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,” an act depicted in a previous panel, The Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants.
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Sep 24, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos |Frank B. Farrell
It’s been a little more than six years since Republican senator John McCain of Arizona cast the dramatic “thumbs-down” vote that doomed his party’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and preserved health care for millions of Americans. Obamacare may be imperfect, with its patchwork of providers and marketplaces and confusing plan tiers.
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Sep 21, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Anna Surinyach |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos
Separating Europe from Africa, the Mediterranean Sea has long been an important migration route for refugees. But it is only since 2014 that the number of people who die trying to cross the Mediterranean each month has been reported. Since 2014, more than 27,845 missing persons have been counted, although only God and the sea really know how many people did not make it. We have all seen images of capsizing boats overloaded with migrants, of people jumping into the sea to escape.
