Commonweal Magazine

Commonweal is a journal based in the United States that shares liberal viewpoints and is edited by lay Catholics. It is located at The Interchurch Center in New York City and holds the distinction of being the oldest independent Roman Catholic opinion journal in the country.

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Converted to the Core

1 day ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Elie

The Last Supper, in the Christian scheme of things, is both an end and a beginning: the end of Jesus’ time with his disciples, and the beginning of the religion established with the breaking of bread and the pouring out of wine. The early eighties were both an end and a beginning, at least where the place of religion in American life is concerned.
Failures of Will

1 week ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

An acquaintance employed by a Catholic university recently expressed frustration at the lack of a collective response from Catholic higher education to the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom, due process, and human dignity. Surely a joint statement—clear about convictions and obligations, cosigned by Catholic university presidents—would send a message. I was sympathetic to the idea.
‘He Deals Out to the People His Life’

1 week ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Anthony Domestico |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

Nate Klug’s chapbook Beautiful Meteor (The Economy Press, $15, 22 pp.) gets its epigraph and title from a speech Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered to Harvard Divinity School’s graduating class of 1838. In it, the ex-Unitarian Emerson criticized institutional Christianity: partly on the grounds that believers must “dare to love God without mediator or veil,” partly because ministers seemed to suggest that, while miracles once happened, they no longer did.
Trump’s Offshore Gulag

1 week ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

All it would take is a phone call from the White House, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the thirty-year-old sheet-metal apprentice and father of three whom the Trump administration “mistakenly” detained as an alleged gang member and sent to an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador, would be back home with his family in Maryland.
‘The Great Unread’

1 week ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Gus Mitchell |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

In the English-speaking world today, Goethe is still, in A. N. Wilson’s pithy phrase, “the Great Unread.” This was not always the case. “Close thy Byron,” wrote the reactionary prophet Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s; “Open thy Goethe.” The Victorians––Hapsburg-descended Queen Victoria and Saxon Prince Albert among them––were steeped in Goethe.
Out at Home?

1 week ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Carmen Nanko-Fernández |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

In its campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Trump campaign is intent on imposing cultural amnesia. The president’s March executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” made clear his intent to delete from the national memory all that is unsettling, shameful, and sinful.
A Contentious Conclave?

2 weeks ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Massimo Faggioli |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

Pope Francis’s slow, ongoing recovery after his five-week hospitalization makes for a scenario full of uncertainties about the governance of the Vatican and the Catholic Church. It is indeed a complex picture, as Austen Ivereigh writes in the April issue of Commonweal. It’s also a test for the institutional system of the Catholic Church in an age of crisis of institutions, especially institutions of government. One easily targetable Church institution is the papal conclave.
Devotion to the Displaced

2 weeks ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Antonio Graceffo

As the sound of mortar and artillery barrages echoed and jets circled overhead, volunteer doctors with the Free Burma Rangers (FBR), a faith-based frontline aid organization, worked frantically in an improvised field hospital in Karenni State, Burma (Myanmar). They were fighting against time to amputate the foot of a nineteen-year-old soldier who had stepped on a landmine. The operation was successful.
A Way in the Wilderness

2 weeks ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Alejandra Oliva

During the first Trump administration, I learned about the immigration legal system—first, as an interpreter and advocate for asylum applicants, then as a court observer, and finally as a communications staffer at an immigration legal-services provider. I learned the acronyms and the names of forms, learned what made one asylum claim stronger than another, learned enough to become outraged when a new executive rule had violated existing law and precedent in some way.
A Secondhand Burden

3 weeks ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Céire Kealty |Stephen Pope |George Scialabba |Helen Rouner

In the late hours of January 1, a fire broke out in Kantamanto Market, the world’s largest secondhand clothing market, located in Accra, Ghana. Surveyors from the Or Foundation, a Ghanaian-based nonprofit organization, found that the disaster impacted over ten thousand people who made their livelihoods there, with over 60 percent of market businesses destroyed. At least two people died and hundreds more sustained injuries or illnesses from the fire and its aftermath.