Thomas Banchoff

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Richard Schiffman |Alexander Stern |Thomas Banchoff |Naomi Fisher

In order to understand the debt that we owe to the natural world, Robin Wall Kimmerer recommends berry picking, one of humanity’s older and most quietly enlightening occupations. To harvest these wild fruits is to receive a gift. We didn’t plant the berry bush. We are not responsible for the rain, the sunshine, or the finely balanced soil which allows it to grow. Still, it offers up its sweet fruit without any expectation of return.

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Christopher Ruddy |Alexander Stern |Thomas Banchoff |Naomi Fisher

His door was always open. Lawrence (known universally as “Larry”) Cunningham, Notre Dame theologian and longtime Commonweal contributor, died on February 20 at the age of eighty-nine. There were few scholars who were either more productive (author or editor of twenty-five books and of hundreds of articles) or more available, but certainly no one was both more productive and more available than he was. Larry always seemed delighted to see you and to have all the time in the world for you.

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Alexander Stern |Thomas Banchoff |Naomi Fisher

A few years after buying The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos said that “certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light,” an idea that inspired the paper’s instantly famous slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Officially introduced in 2017, the slogan had been decided on before Donald Trump took office—serendipitously, given what soon unfolded. But Bezos has since had a change of heart.

2 months ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Anthony Domestico |Thomas Banchoff |Vincent Lloyd |Jessica Swoboda

“Uneasy Equations,” the final poem in Scott Cairns’s latest collection, begins, as so many of his poems do, in the middle of a conversation:I, also, have begun to press each promising page for that elusive form, the likelyshape that might yet serve to at least suggest the rolling spaciousness one suspectsin most prágmata one happens upon—the sea, the shore, even the odd black shelljust now recovered during my morning snorkel.

Jan 29, 2025 | commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Baumann |Alejandra Oliva |Thomas Banchoff |Antonio Spadaro

Last summer, the Horcynus Festival in Messina, Sicily, hosted a conversation between director Martin Scorsese, speaking via Zoom from his home in New York City, and Antonio Spadaro, SJ, an undersecretary for the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education.