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Nov 1, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Katherine Lucky |Cathleen Kaveny |Alexander Stern
“I didn’t want to write a memoir,” writes Danielle Chapman in the preface to…her memoir. In the hands of another writer, the sentence might feel like false modesty: My story simply had to be told, despite my own best efforts. Or like advertising: My story is so shocking, so shameful. Turn the page!But Danielle Chapman is a poet. She knows that words matter; she chose these introductory ones carefully, and she means them.
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Jul 27, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey |Katherine Lucky
The border is a place, but it is also a metaphor: for our complicated personal identities and political allegiances, and for the moral claims made on us by those born on the other side. On this episode, interpreter and activist Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration, shares insights from her work with asylum seekers along the U.S.-Mexico border.
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey |Katherine Lucky
The Impossible Dream? Kudos to Ryan M. Brown for his incisive review of Will Bunch’s eulogy to American higher education, After the Ivory Tower Falls (“Higher Ed Laid Low,” May 2023). Isn’t it jarring how so recently, from post–World War II through the sixties, the United States largely insisted college education should be accessible, affordable, and an integral part of our national well-being?
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey |Katherine Lucky
A tale that opens with the improbable and comes tantalizingly close to the hard-to-believe—though, as the subtitle says, it’s all true. Found footage from the shoot of Marilyn Monroe’s infamous The Seven Year Itch scene spurs a search into the life of Jules Schulback, Siegler’s grandfather and the man who captured the moment with his 16-mm camera.
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey |Katherine Lucky
The Right has only survived and thrived by offering a vision of the future. Understanding the Right’s power requires understanding its rhetoric.
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Jul 13, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey |Katherine Lucky
Though you’ve probably never heard of him, book editor Eugene Exman (1900–1975) exerted tremendous influence on the shape of American religion in the twentieth century. On this episode, special projects editor Miles Doyle speaks with Stephen Prothero, author of the new Exman biography God the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion One Book at a Time.
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Jun 29, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey |Katherine Lucky
What should philosophy do? Despite record numbers of practitioners, today the discipline is in crisis, awash in abstraction and increasingly isolated—even within the academy. But there’s a way out, argues veteran philosopher Philip Kitcher. It starts with attending to the ordinary concerns of human life, then illuminating them with clear, rigorous thought. On this episode, Kitcher speaks with Commonweal features editor Alex Stern about Kitcher’s most recent book, What’s the Use of Philosophy?
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Jun 15, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Richard Brown |John Rodden |Jennifer Banks |Katherine Lucky
At first glance, John West’s Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery is an unconventional memoir about addiction and the healing power of community. But it also addresses the challenges of belief today, when almost everything—the nation, religious institutions, the environment—appears on the verge of collapse. On this episode, West speaks with associate editor Griffin Oleynick about the paradoxes of autobiographical narrative, grief and loss, and the power of art.
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May 30, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Katherine Lucky |Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey
His style of argumentation also resonated with secular people, and with people from other faith traditions. He wrote and preached assuming that they were in his audience; he stayed after his sermons for question-and-answer sessions. “I cannot despise those who do not believe as I do,” he writes in The Reason for God: That message was appealing to outsiders, and sobering for those of us already in the Church.
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May 29, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey |Katherine Lucky
A robot equipped with artificial intelligence is seen at the AI Xperience Center in Brussels Feb. 19, 2020 (OSV News photo/Yves Herman, Reuters). In the United States, a country that came of age with the Industrial Revolution, progress and the advance of technology have been so closely associated that many of us have trouble imagining one without the other.
