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Nov 29, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Christian Wiman |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
To be conscious is to be conscious of suffering. Our own pain wakes us to the pain of others. These are truisms, which like most truisms gloss a complicated truth. Pain erases other people as often as it engenders sympathy for them. We may become more conscious, but consciousness itself becomes a cage.
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Nov 29, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
The 2018 Synod on Young People celebrated the boldness of young people and the transformational role they can play in the Church. In Christus vivit, his post-synod exhortation to young people, Pope Francis wrote that they help the Church remain young.
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Nov 25, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Miles Doyle |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
A few hours before the House of Representatives passed a short-term funding bill to avert a government shutdown, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reportedly elbowed Tim Burchett, one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy from the speakership. It was “a clean shot to the kidneys,” Burchett claimed.
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Nov 24, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Christian Wiman
Mid-November brought more dispiriting signs of the state of the Catholic Church in the United States. On November 11 came the firing of conservative bishop Joseph Strickland as head of the Tyler, Texas, diocese. It was understandably welcomed by those fed up with Strickland’s MAGA-aligned grandstanding and increasingly extremist attacks on Pope Francis for “undermining the Deposit of the Faith.” Uncertain is the degree to which mismanagement of the diocese might also have been a factor.
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Nov 21, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Christian Wiman
Last month’s Synod on Synodality in Rome is perhaps one of the most important ecclesial gatherings to take place since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. But what exactly happened remains unclear. On this episode, Commonweal editor Dominic Preziosi is joined by two experts on Vatican affairs to help explain and contextualize the synod’s work.
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Nov 19, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Matt McManus |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
Karl Marx famously wrote that all history repeats itself—first as tragedy, then as farce. So it has proven with the political movements inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche. Weimar Germany went through a Nietzschean-inflected “Conservative Revolution” in the 1910s and ’20s, which contributed to the tragedy about to occur there and throughout Europe.
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Nov 17, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Joan Myers |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
OFFERTORYDenied ordinationby virtue of sex,I find it ironicthat God sends mea consistory of cardinalsred-robed and chattering. Within yards of my touchthey rest on the hedgenear the windowand must understandthe wall they can’t seewould break their bonesif they flew full-force against it. One move from meand they’d disappearunless glass this thin works like a mirror in the day’s early light.
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Nov 15, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Miles Doyle |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
Early on the morning of November 6, Donald Trump took the stand during his civil fraud trial in a downtown Manhattan courtroom. Almost immediately, the former president——who has already been found guilty of inflating the value of his assets—dismissed the case against him as a witch hunt and derided Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, as a “political hack.”When Judge Arthur F.
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Nov 14, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Thomas Powers |Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly
Everyone in the United States is in favor of a free press, until you get down to particulars. Then qualifications abound. Justice Hugo Black was almost unique in saying that freedom of the press was absolute and anyone could print anything he liked, from libel to pornography, without exception.
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Nov 10, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Shaun Blanchard |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Christian Wiman
I’m a fourth-generation American, the fourth generation to move to Israel and then return to the United States. My great grandparents, who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe, were great Zionists and moved to Jerusalem—with my already married grandparents—in the 1930s. When life became too hard, they moved back to New York. In 1979 my parents, young academics with two very young children in tow, including me, tried again.
