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3 weeks ago | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch
Anyone who has ever been pregnant is familiar with the barrage of advice and opinions that comes their way. Eat this, not that; try swimming or prenatal yoga to relieve backaches; go to this obstetrician or that pelvic-floor therapist. It could be your own sister or a stranger in the grocery store haranguing you about C-sections or water births. Everyone has a story to share, either their own or that of someone they love.
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1 month ago | 
johnmenadue.com | Regina Munch
October 8, 2020 White Christians are not simplycomplicit in racism and white supremacy, argues scholar Robert P. Jones. Theyre actually culpable. Without their deliberate consent, white supremacy in America could never have been built. Regina Munch: Tell us about the argument of White Too Long. What makes it so urgent today? Robert P. Jones: The subtitle of the book is The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.
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2 months 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.
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Jan 29, 2025 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch |Santiago Ramos |Vanessa R. Corcoran |Jonathan Malesic
In college, a guidance counselor regularly lectured our cohort on the importance of being “impactful.” Impactful people are “doers”: they see a problem, need, or inefficiency, and through relentless grit and superior vision, they make change. Impactful people have their elevator pitch down. They have diverse interests and strengths while also being obsessively focused on their goal. They’re on the cutting edge, but they make it look effortless and obvious.
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Dec 26, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch
In an August interview with Donald Trump conducted on X, Elon Musk pitched the idea of a special commission that would look for ways to drastically reduce government spending. “I’d be happy to help out on such a commission,” Musk said in the interview. “I’d love it,” Trump replied. “You’re the greatest cutter.”This is the origin story of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will be headed by Musk as well as entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | William Davis |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
NativityIf you squint slightly you will be able to see,deep in the donkey’s slitted eye, the whole scenereflected. Used to being pushed off to the side,he stands stolid and docile beside an overturnedbucket and a bale of hay hurriedly strewn aboutwithout much thought, or afterthought. The lightis dim except for some unaccountable glimmerthat seems to come from above, circling the smallcentral scene.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
A Desert CompassI read the article “Elegy” by Kathleen Hill (September) with a mix of delight and misplaced nostalgia, as the nostalgia is not mine. My parents met in Zinder in the early 1970s and maintained a mostly written correspondence with Fr. Guy Romano until his passing a few years ago. My childhood was peppered with anecdotes, goatskin wall hangings, and songs in Hausa—so much so that it inspired me to launch my own nonprofit organization, Akoma Ntoso Foundation.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Patrick T. Reardon |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
Lucy Richardson was deceivedby the voices, overpoweredby the visions, covered over. She let herself be duped. She embraced her deception,locked it in her heart with a thousand keys. Ridiculed the livelong day,mocked by every mouth. She shouted. Warned violence,destruction, thunder and fire. Taunted by passersby. A womanof sorrow, acquainted with infirmity. Insult and reproach were her dailybread. Her good they made evil,her evil good. She determined to warn no more. No more spew grim prophecies.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Stuart Dybek |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
The tracks of whatever he’s been following endat an abandoned mill where a river exhalesfrom a beaver dam, without pausing to breathe in. He needs to retrace the waffled prints he’s stampedon fields and pastures whose barbed fencesare drifted over, and that wind is swirling away. He didn’t set out snowshoeing across an erasedlandscape to wait beside a river while it prayed.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Lauritzen |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch
I have always enjoyed walking in cemeteries. They can be places of serenity where it is possible to escape the noise of everyday life. But when I strolled through Montparnasse Cemetery in 2019, it was not as refuge from the hectic pace of a trip to Paris. My visit was, instead, a kind of pilgrimage to the final resting place of many important writers, including Samuel Beckett, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
