Matt McManus

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Antonio Graceffo |Matt McManus |Todd Shy |Vincent Lloyd

Having both of their sons forcibly conscripted into opposing armies in Burma’s seventy-five-year civil war was the final straw for fifty-two-year-old Loung Aw Sey Ya and his wife, Ba Seng Kham. For years, they and their neighbors in northern Shan State had endured airstrikes and clashes between various factions, with civilians often caught in the crossfire.

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch |Matt McManus |Todd Shy |Vincent Lloyd

On February 4, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released photos of the first “criminal aliens” to be flown to Guantánamo Bay. The migrants, shackled and wearing uniform grey sweatsuits, are guarded by masked troops as they prepare to board a C-17 jet.

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Christian Wiman |Matt McManus |Todd Shy |Vincent Lloyd

She had a vision of the vowels of dovesfloating like snow in a common dawn,not so much freed from gravity, she said,as in league with it, a slow, deliberate danceof chance and law. She spoke of loneliness as a kind of sleep,nocturnal sorrows that mark the mindas lightly and palpably as prints in damp sand. We cannot eat an image, we cried. Say it: what must we do to be saved?

2 months ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Griffin Oleynick |Matt McManus |Todd Shy |Vincent Lloyd

Somehow amidst his presumably demanding duties as vice president, J. D. Vance also found time to spark an intra-Catholic debate over the meaning of ordo amoris, or “rightly ordered love,” a phrase that appears in Augustine’s City of God as well as Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.

2 months ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Marcus Hijkoop |Matt McManus |Todd Shy |Vincent Lloyd

You should always be skeptical when writers announce that they are finished writing. In 2011, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård closed his six-part, 3,600-page autobiographical novel My Struggle by celebrating that he was “finally finished” and by “revel[ing] in, truly revel[ing] in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.” He went on to publish more than a dozen books in as many years.