-
May 29, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Robert Rubsam |Clifford Thompson |Xiao Situ |Gareth Dale
Years ago, when I was on the teaching staff of a museum, I led a group of schoolchildren to view an installation of sculptures made by the American ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011). The assemblage included several multicolored orbs, each about two feet high, positioned a few inches apart from each other on the floor. One child exclaimed that the sculptures were like “giant bath bombs,” the kind that fizz and dissolve when you drop them in water.
-
Apr 24, 2024 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Xiao Situ |Robert Rubsam |Clifford Thompson |Gareth Dale
“For generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.” So wrote Alain Locke in the anthology The New Negro (1925), often considered the founding document of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic movement of which Locke is generally recognized as...
-
Nov 29, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Xiao Situ |Robert Rubsam |Anna Ballan
Most pictures of Joan of Arc depict her in the midst of glorious battle or martyrdom, but here we witness the moment that set it all in motion, the very instant she heard the voices: you can see it in the flashing eyes, flushed cheek, clenched jaw, and outstretched arm. She looks outward at something beyond the frame, possessed by a vision as immense as her eyes are wide. Her loom is behind her and her chair overturned.
-
Nov 1, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Alexander Stern |Susan Reynolds |Xiao Situ
Like many fathers God had no patiencefor infants. So he made us olderbut naïve. We never neededto crawl, bruise bone on stoneor feel the sting of his rod. We lacked experience with failure. Unlucky that way, our lost childhoodwas like a death from the opposite end. He may have been bored as hellin heaven, alone with his stars, emptyspace and that initial Word yet undefined. He had little to do but playwith the things he’d made.
-
Nov 1, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Brian Swann |Alexander Stern |Susan Reynolds |Xiao Situ
milkweed so it speaks monarchs, and the windsings stones with voices from where there are none,from even before there was anything to give voice,calling in that gull’s shadow angling in then gonesumptuous as this pebble balanced on my palm.
-
Nov 1, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Alexander Stern |Susan Reynolds |Xiao Situ
In our preparatory document outlining broad guidelines for the Synod on Synodality, we wrote that the synodal process would require “remaining open to the surprises that the Spirit will certainly prepare for us along the way.” This was right and just. However, it is also crucial for Catholics to remain open to the possibility that nothing will surprise us at all. Many delicate issues were raised in our discussions during this month-long Synod, and many areas of divergence were identified.
-
Oct 31, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch |Alexander Stern |Susan Reynolds |Xiao Situ
In Poland’s October 15 parliamentary elections, the governing Law and Justice Party (known by its Polish acronym PiS) faced a challenge from the centrist Civic Coalition. Almost three-quarters of the Polish population cast their votes, the highest voter turnout since the country won its independence from the Soviet Union more than thirty years ago. Ultimately, PiS won more votes than any other single party but could not form a parliamentary coalition.
-
Oct 28, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Miles Doyle |Alexander Stern |Susan Reynolds |Xiao Situ
On May 4, 1969, Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas resigned following revelations that he had accepted $20,000 in payment from a foundation controlled by Louis E. Wolfson, a friend and former client then under federal investigation for violating securities laws. Though Fortas had previously returned the money to avoid the appearance of impropriety, he ultimately decided to step down amid intense political pressure and increasing public concern.
-
Oct 24, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Evan Bednarz |Alexander Stern |Susan Reynolds |Xiao Situ
“You have picked a bad night to cross,” the man tells the shivering couple in the kitchen, as they watch snow falling outside the window. The other man replies, “Every night is bad.” This observation, recounted in Octavio Solis’s Retablos, a coming-of-age memoir set in El Paso during the sixties and seventies, still applies in the borderland.
-
Oct 18, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Alexander Stern |Susan Reynolds |Xiao Situ |Nick Tabor
Dead Man Walking, based on the acclaimed memoir by Sr. Helen Prejean, may be the world’s most popular contemporary opera. But it had never before been performed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City—until now. On this special episode, in anticipation of the Met Opera’s Live-in-HD broadcast in cinemas on October 21, host Dominic Preziosi is joined by bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, who plays the condemned murderer Joseph DeRocher, and Sr. Helen Prejean herself.
