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May 29, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Gilbert Meilaender |Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic
Interested in discussing this article in your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community? Click here for a free discussion guide. In the process of preparing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, UNESCO convened a committee of philosophers to examine the theoretical basis for universal claims about human dignity and rights.
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Dec 30, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Marcia Chatelain |Brad East |Gilbert Meilaender
This week, as we near the conclusion of an eventful year, we’re highlighting ten stories Commonweal published in 2023 that most immediately resonated with readers and, in our estimation, best represented our coverage of religion, politics, and arts and culture. Throughout the year, Austen Ivereigh and Massimo Faggioli delivered exceptional analysis of the Synod on Synodality and Pope Francis’s papacy, as well as the politics surrounding them. Two stories exemplify their work.
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Dec 22, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Marcia Chatelain |Brad East |Gilbert Meilaender
Before leaving Washington for the December holiday recess, House Republicans devoted the waning hours to authorizing an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Despite heated claims and breathless promises, Republican investigators have yet to turn up evidence of wrongdoing—to say nothing of high crimes and misdemeanors—on Biden’s part. As more than a few GOP legislators admit, they probably never will. Still, the measure passed with every Republican in favor.
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Dec 21, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Marcia Chatelain |Brad East |Gilbert Meilaender
On this special year-end episode, we’re revisiting four of our favorite conversations from the past year. Sociologist Matthew Desmond explains how the United States can choose to abolish poverty. Sr. Helen Prejean and singer Ryan McKinney discuss the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Dead Man Walking. Poet-scholar and slam champion Joshua Bennett talks about the history of spoken word. And philosopher Zena Hitz unpacks the spirit of “wholeheartedness” at the center of religious life.
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Dec 7, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Marcia Chatelain |Brad East |Gilbert Meilaender
American workers have fared poorly in recent decades, suffering the loss not just of purchasing power, but of political power, too. On this episode, Commonweal senior editor Matt Boudway speaks with journalist Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative political commentator and editor whose new book Tyranny, Inc critiques corporate power in a way that will resonate with left wing progressives.
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Nov 29, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Marcia Chatelain |Brad East |Gilbert Meilaender
Between Korea and Vietnam, it was my favorite dime-store gag. The soily smell thrilled me sick. A cardboard coin, a smudged visage of some leader’s solemn profile, a Lincoln, Ike, or FDR. I snap a match against my nail and kiss our leader’s face with it then watch it flare, smoke, and stink:it blooms a pleated, pinkie-sized squirming Chinese New Year grub: the President plumps, implodes, crumblesinto a compost nubbin of ash. His lies die with him. My world, ten years old, is no better place.
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Nov 29, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Marcia Chatelain |Brad East |Gilbert Meilaender
This year began with one war in the headlines and ends with two. The war in Ukraine, so shocking when it began in February 2022, is now a dismally familiar feature of the news, grinding on as destructively as ever with no end in sight. The war in Gaza, which began less than two months ago, has already changed the Middle East forever.
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Nov 1, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Marcia Chatelain |Matt McManus |Brad East |Gilbert Meilaender
In the early spring of 1860, E. M. Dudley of Livingston County, Kentucky, ran an ad in the local newspaper offering a “Two Hundred Dollars Reward” for the safe return of his “boy Manuel.” The alert wasn’t an appeal for the return of Dudley’s child. Rather, he was hoping that someone would return the thirty-five-year-old man that Dudley enslaved.
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Nov 1, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Gilbert Meilaender |Gareth Dale |Alice McDermott |Phil Christman
Interested in discussing this article in your classroom, parish, reading group, or Commonweal Local Community? Click here for a free discussion guide. Adam Kirsch’s examination of “Anthropocene antihumanism” and “transhumanism”—two quite different ways of revolting against humanity and welcoming the end of human life as we know it—is readable, informative, and bracing.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Marcia Chatelain |Brad East |Gilbert Meilaender
In joint statements about Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, which left more than 1,400 people dead—including more than a thousand civilians—both U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the phrase “moral clarity.” Netanyahu called it “the first prerequisite of victory” in the coming war, while Blinken invoked it in a call for everyone to “unambiguously condemn” the attacks.
