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1 week ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | George Scialabba
THE SCENE: The Last Judgment. THE CHARACTERS: Jesus, seated at the right hand of the Father; the twenty-first-century American Christian nationalist leadership (hereafter “the godly”). THE GODLY: O Lord, we thank Thee that we were not like other men (or, needless to say, women): the woke communists, the Marxist socialists, the baby-killers, the sodomites.
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1 month ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner
An acquaintance employed by a Catholic university recently expressed frustration at the lack of a collective response from Catholic higher education to the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom, due process, and human dignity. Surely a joint statement—clear about convictions and obligations, cosigned by Catholic university presidents—would send a message. I was sympathetic to the idea.
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1 month ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Anthony Domestico |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner
Nate Klug’s chapbook Beautiful Meteor (The Economy Press, $15, 22 pp.) gets its epigraph and title from a speech Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered to Harvard Divinity School’s graduating class of 1838. In it, the ex-Unitarian Emerson criticized institutional Christianity: partly on the grounds that believers must “dare to love God without mediator or veil,” partly because ministers seemed to suggest that, while miracles once happened, they no longer did.
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1 month ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner
All it would take is a phone call from the White House, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the thirty-year-old sheet-metal apprentice and father of three whom the Trump administration “mistakenly” detained as an alleged gang member and sent to an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador, would be back home with his family in Maryland.
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1 month ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Gus Mitchell |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner
In the English-speaking world today, Goethe is still, in A. N. Wilson’s pithy phrase, “the Great Unread.” This was not always the case. “Close thy Byron,” wrote the reactionary prophet Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s; “Open thy Goethe.” The Victorians––Hapsburg-descended Queen Victoria and Saxon Prince Albert among them––were steeped in Goethe.
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1 month ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Carmen Nanko-Fernández |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner
In its campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Trump campaign is intent on imposing cultural amnesia. The president’s March executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” made clear his intent to delete from the national memory all that is unsettling, shameful, and sinful.
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1 month ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Massimo Faggioli |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner
Pope Francis’s slow, ongoing recovery after his five-week hospitalization makes for a scenario full of uncertainties about the governance of the Vatican and the Catholic Church. It is indeed a complex picture, as Austen Ivereigh writes in the April issue of Commonweal. It’s also a test for the institutional system of the Catholic Church in an age of crisis of institutions, especially institutions of government. One easily targetable Church institution is the papal conclave.
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2 months ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Céire Kealty |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner
In the late hours of January 1, a fire broke out in Kantamanto Market, the world’s largest secondhand clothing market, located in Accra, Ghana. Surveyors from the Or Foundation, a Ghanaian-based nonprofit organization, found that the disaster impacted over ten thousand people who made their livelihoods there, with over 60 percent of market businesses destroyed. At least two people died and hundreds more sustained injuries or illnesses from the fire and its aftermath.
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2 months ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Griffin Oleynick |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner
Whatever your opinion of New Jersey senator Cory Booker—I confess I’ve often dismissed him in the past as histrionic, a little too thirsty for attention—it’s hard to deny that his marathon speech on the Senate floor was impressive. Sen. Booker’s “vigil,” which lasted for more than twenty-five hours, set a new record for the longest speech ever recorded in the chamber.
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2 months ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Baumann |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner
A lot of ink has been spilled trying to make sense of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s calamitous Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The meeting was supposed to finalize a deal giving the United States rights to Ukraine’s rare minerals in return for more military aid. The deal fell through, at least temporarily, when Vance determined that Zelensky had disrespected Trump by not thanking him sufficiently for his largesse.
