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Dec 3, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | César J. Baldelomar |Mary Gordon
The morning after the election, my social-media feed was flooded with posts expressing shock and dismay over Donald Trump’s return to office. But there was also relief and joy, and even celebration over what some hailed as a victory for Christianity. Many of those celebratory posts came from Latinos, including some of my own family members. I’m a close follower of voting trends and take pains to speak with people outside of my “bubble,” so I was not surprised by the results of the election.
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Nov 29, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Céire Kealty |Mary Gordon
In the range of social-justice issues clamoring for our attention, clothing doesn’t tend to rank very high. We often think of what we wear as an individual choice of self-expression rather than an ethical decision. But more and more, consumers, activists, and legislators have come to understand the complex set of issues that come with making, selling, and buying clothing.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Moses |Mary Gordon
For four decades of its century-long history, Commonweal feuded with the Brooklyn Tablet, a diocesan newspaper with a national, right-wing audience drawn by support of 1930s radio preacher Fr. Charles Coughlin and, later, Sen. Joseph McCarthy. To the Tablet and its fiery managing editor, Patrick Scanlan, Commonweal was “masquerading” as a Catholic publication, written by elitists who catered to a secular media that was hostile to the Church.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | James Chappel |Mary Gordon
W. H. Auden has long been a name to conjure with. The English-born poet, who spent much of his life in exile, had a long and restless career. Most famous, perhaps, is the left-wing Auden: the one who drove an ambulance in Spain and wrote the immortal “Spain 1937.” Others prefer the cerebral critic of modernity, whose classical learning alerted him to the ways that human flourishing was being impeded by modern forms of bureaucracy and control.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Mary Gordon
Reading Elizabeth Cullinan is for me both a pleasurable and a painful experience. Pleasurable because of the fineness of the style, what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!” But painful because she so perfectly captures the midcentury Irish-American habit of mistrusting joy, the acceptance of begrudgement, the fear of taking too much that results, finally, in taking nothing.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Dorothy Fortenberry |Mary Gordon
I have been thinking a lot recently about what lasts and what is lost. Maybe this is what comes from spending a couple of years working on a television show about climate change in an imagined late twenty-first century. A person can’t spend her days flooding buildings on set to simulate sea-level rise or writing dialogue about endangered species without certain truths sinking in. Maybe it’s living through yet another election season where the risks seem enormous, but the daily content is absurd.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Max Foley-Keene |Mary Gordon
One of the most influential environmental philosophers of the past two decades has found Jesus. Timothy Morton, who trained as a scholar of Romantic poetry, first came to prominence as a theorist of hyperobjects, a critic of the concept of “nature,” and a collaborator with the Icelandic experimental-music superstar Björk. Now, in Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, Morton argues that contemporary environmental movements lack the feel of the sacred.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Mary Gordon |Paul Baumann |Phil Klay |George Scialabba
Article Tense Necessities Elizabeth Cullinan’s recently reissued collection paints a messy, rich, and tragic portrait of Irish-American womanhood. Article Keeping the Windows Open “The history of Commonweal is a history of hope and confidence.” Feature Where Secularism Fails It will be the job of Commonweal, as it always has been, to resist the pressures of contemporary secular culture.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch |Mary Gordon
My seventh-grade English teacher liked to mix life advice into her lessons on sentence diagrams and Robert Frost. One day, she gave us a talk about the importance of choosing the right person to marry. “Marriage doesn’t change people,” she insisted. “If your girlfriend is rude to you, marriage won’t make that better. If your boyfriend drinks too much before your wedding day, he’ll drink too much after.” In other words, don’t marry someone because of who you hope they’ll become.
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Mary Gordon |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz
It is July 4, 1961. In three months, I will be twelve years old. John Kennedy is in the White House, and we Catholics are very, very proud. My mother says that since Kennedy has been president, she has, for the first time as a Catholic, felt like a complete American.
