-
Dec 26, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Sharon Mesmer |Santiago Ramos |Vanessa R. Corcoran |Jonathan Malesic
Is saintly sexy? Yes, if Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous Italian Baroque sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa is to be believed. Depicted in white marble, the young nun swoons with her head flung back, eyes half-closed, mouth open, as an angel aims a golden-tipped arrow at her heart.
-
Oct 25, 2024 | 
thegirlfriend.com | Sharon Mesmer
Do you like to read? Do you like to win free books? Do you like to connect with your favorite authors? Then join our closed Facebook group, The Girlfriend Book Club, today! We think you'll love it!The book club was my idea. After my husband, David, and I were priced out of our Park Slope apartment, I invited my best friend Annie to our new place in Flatbush to talk tomes and sip wine.
-
Sep 24, 2024 | 
teachersandwritersmagazine.org | Sharon Mesmer
A nun introduced me to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. Back when I was a 14-year-old misfit troublemaker, I re-shelved books in my high school library during study period to work off my steadily accruing detentions. One day, Sister Patrice Marie, the library supervisor, approached me with an open book in her hands—a poetry anthology, I could see by the cover. She pointed to a poem that looked like a story, with long lines in paragraphs.
-
May 15, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Burke Nixon |Thomas Geoghegan |Beverly Willett |Sharon Mesmer
Every few years, from childhood until my late teens, my granddad would take me along with him to the small Texas town where he grew up—Normangee, population 522—to visit old relatives and even older graves. The drive took us up I-45, beyond the Houston sprawl, past pine forests, and eventually through Huntsville, epicenter of the state prison system.
-
May 9, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Ariana Orozco |Thomas Geoghegan |Beverly Willett |Sharon Mesmer
“Where you go I will go my friend / Where you go I will go / Your people are my people / Your people are mine…” A nightly song hummed on as hundreds of Columbia University students linked arms on the school’s south lawn to protest the university’s investments in Israel. As some students sang adjusted lyrics from the Book of Ruth in the Hebrew Bible, others performed a Palestinian dabkeh dance, banged Malian djembe drums, and scraped Dominican güiras.
-
May 7, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Moses |Thomas Geoghegan |Beverly Willett |Sharon Mesmer
When investigators in Henrico County, Virginia searched twenty-three-year-old Xavier Lopez’s bedroom, they photographed a large Nazi flag hanging vertically on the wall, with a crucifix and rosary fastened above the swastika. But that wasn’t what prompted police and federal agents to arrest Lopez in the case that led to what’s been dubbed the FBI’s “anti-Catholic memo.”Rather, the issue was the weapons Lopez had accumulated in violation of federal law.
-
May 2, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Griffin Oleynick |Thomas Geoghegan |Beverly Willett |Sharon Mesmer
One of the misconceptions about Judaism is that the religion is concerned primarily with justice and the law, not love and grace. That’s precisely backward, argues Rabbi Shai Held, president and dean of the Hadar Institute in New York and author of the new book Judaism Is About Love. Jewish theology, spirituality, and ethics emerge as free responses to a generous, loving God.
-
Apr 24, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Brad East |Thomas Geoghegan |Beverly Willett |Sharon Mesmer
In seven years, the Church will celebrate the 1,600-year anniversary of the Council of Ephesus, the third of seven great ecumenical councils common to East and West. The Council came at a time of civil and ecclesial unrest. Rome had been sacked in 410; in 430, St Augustine died as Vandals besieged the walls of Hippo. The controversies of the previous century over Christ and the Trinity were more or less settled. As ever, however, settled business begets more business.
-
Apr 24, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Alexander Stern |Thomas Geoghegan |Beverly Willett |Sharon Mesmer
When I described using the new Apple Vision Pro virtual-reality headset to my mother, she said, “Maybe they come out with all these gadgets so that old people won’t feel so bad about having to die.” From friends I heard similar, if less morbid, reservations. “They should just stop with technology. It’s enough already.” “I want nothing to do with this.”Of course, it’s not unusual for technological innovation to be met with criticism.
-
Apr 24, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Philip Metres |Thomas Geoghegan |Beverly Willett |Sharon Mesmer
Fed by the brazen gift of drought’s famine,Her tongue tasting language after languageHere at our search-burned landfill of garbage,A migrant woman scrounges for samplingsThat might fill her children’s insides. Scavenge,Mother of Exiles, on your paltry stage. You play the part of a human bandageOn a body that will not stop bleeding. She says: “Storied landlords, open your doorsTo us, the roofless.
