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Aug 27, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
On July 26, a coup in Niger removed the country’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum. The junta insisted it acted because of the government’s inadequate response to Islamic extremism, but the man who has emerged as the coup leader, General Abdourahmane Tchiani, led the presidential guard for twelve years and reportedly moved against Bazoum because he feared that Bazoum was about to fire him.
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Aug 26, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Isabella Simon |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
Home to some of the largest and most beloved national parks in the country, Montana is known for its natural beauty and access to the outdoors.
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Aug 23, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Griffiths |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
I arrive in Helsinki on June 18 for a six-week stay. I’m close to the end of a book I’ve been working on for more than a year, and I want a bolt-hole where I can complete a draft. I choose Helsinki because I’ve not been there before, because I know no one there, and because I don’t know any Finnish. I’ll be able, I think, to write for half of each day and explore the city for the other half. I hope, too, for light.
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Aug 17, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Moses |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
After being sentenced to one hundred years in prison for his racketeering conviction as head of the Genovese organized crime family, Anthony Salerno penned a letter to a newspaper columnist who had expressed alarm about the powerful law that prosecutor Rudy Giuliani had used in the case. “Roy Cohn, my former attorney, always stated that you were an honorable man,” Salerno wrote to columnist Murray Kempton in 1987.
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Aug 17, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Robert P. Imbelli |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
Peter Steinfels’s polemical response to two pieces I wrote about the forthcoming Synod on Synodality and its Instrumentum Laboris should not go unanswered. Let me reply to it by focusing on three key issues. First, Steinfels’s response wrongly suggests that my reflections were directed against Pope Francis himself. I fear Steinfels’ animus against Sandro Magister has skewed his reading of my article on Magister’s blog, Settimo Cielo.
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Aug 16, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Moses |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
After being sentenced to one hundred years in prison for his racketeering conviction as head of the Genovese organized crime family, Anthony Salerno penned a letter to a newspaper columnist who had expressed alarm about the powerful law that prosecutor Rudy Giuliani had used in the case. “Roy Cohn, my former attorney, always stated that you were an honorable man,” Salerno wrote to columnist Murray Kempton in 1987.
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Aug 9, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Peter Steinfels |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
Even in my undergraduate days—way back in the middle of the last century when JFK, Pope John XXIII, and Elvis Presley were still alive—I was made aware that Joachim of Fiore was one of the bad boys of Western history. Holy as he might have been, the twelfth-century monk and exegete was the Ur-millenarian whose apocalyptic vision, I learned, was responsible for the Jacobin Terror, Lenin’s Marxism, Stalin’s Gulag, and many lesser bloody follies. Writing on the website of First Things, Robert P.
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Aug 8, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Massimo Faggioli |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
The charming medieval town of Brixen, in South Tyrol (the German-speaking part of Italy near the Austrian border), plays a significant role in the history of the Church and the history of theology. The German theologian Nicolaus Cusanus was named its bishop in 1450, at the height of the conciliarist controversy, a defining moment in shaping the Catholic doctrine on the papacy. In 1967, theologian and future pope Joseph Ratzinger started to spend vacations there.
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Aug 7, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz |Anthony Domestico
Religious life stands in radical opposition to much of modern culture. But what is it, exactly? On this episode, philosopher Zena Hitz speaks with senior editor Matt Boudway about her new book on religious life—a crucial part of the Catholic Church, and one that remains poorly understood. Religious life is not primarily about what you give up, Hitz explains. Rather, it’s a way of orienting your whole self around a single purpose: loving God, and serving God’s people.
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Anthony Annett |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
Thomas Robert Malthus was possibly the most pessimistic economist of all time. Writing in the early nineteenth century, he argued that technological advances were ultimately futile as they would not raise living standards. In his telling, any rise in living standards would just lead to an increase in population, which would push per capita income back down to subsistence levels. This is the famous Malthusian trap.
