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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Crypto-Religiosity

3 weeks ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Griffin Oleynick

It’s often remarked that America has become less religious, especially during recent decades. But what if that religiosity hasn’t disappeared, but just taken less visible forms? That’s exactly what was happening in the arts in 1980s NYC, argues Paul Elie, author of The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. As Elie tells it, the era wasn’t just marked by the ascendance of the moral majority and the authority of tradition—figures like Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan.
Bureaucrats vs. Plutocrats

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Peter Quinn

Some books are timely. Michael Lewis’s Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Serviceis urgent. The book’s stated goal is “to subvert the stereotype of the civil servant. The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it’s deadly.” It’s especially vital to get this right as the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on federal agencies and departments shows no sign of slowing.
Ask Better Questions

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Kaya Oakes

My 2015 book The Nones Are Alright explored Americans’ shift away from organized religion. For a few years I did the circuit of conferences and church talks where people kept asking the same question: What can we do to bring people back? I never had an answer that made anyone happy, because I had no idea how to bring people back. The ship had already sailed, but people were still standing on the shoreline waiting for it to turn around.
Overlooked Treasure

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Susan Reynolds

A sign at the counter of a vintage shop that I frequent reads: My grandmother owned it, my mother sold it, I just bought it back!Traditional religious faith, argues Christian Smith, has gone the way of something your grandparents owned, like, for example, a record player: a nostalgic artifact well-suited to the needs of another age but obsolete in our own. “When people can ask Alexa to play any song,” he explains by way of analogy, “they rarely think about vinyl records.
Fatuity & Fanaticism

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | George Scialabba

THE SCENE: The Last Judgment. THE CHARACTERS: Jesus, seated at the right hand of the Father; the twenty-first-century American Christian nationalist leadership (hereafter “the godly”). THE GODLY: O Lord, we thank Thee that we were not like other men (or, needless to say, women): the woke communists, the Marxist socialists, the baby-killers, the sodomites.
What to Do with Desire?

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Anthony Domestico

How have I not read Anthony Giardina before? That’s what I have been asking myself over the last several months: first, after I read Remember This (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $29, 384 pp.), maybe the best new novel I’ve read this year, and then, after I went back and read several of Giardina’s earlier books. “Could it be called a form of grace?” a character asks about a disappointment towards the end of Remember This. Disappointments can be a form of grace, yes.
Bridge Builder

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Austen Ivereigh

After burying Pope Francis, the cardinals chose another pope from the Americas to follow in his path, proving both that the “change of era” inaugurated by Francis is here to stay and that Latin America would still be a key source for the universal Church. Leo XIV is from the south suburbs of Chicago, “the descendant of immigrants, who in turn chose to emigrate,” as he put it to the Holy See ambassadors on May 16. He was referring to the decades he spent as a missionary and bishop in Peru.
The Crisis in Gaza Continues

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Regina Munch

As the U.S. media has turned its attention to other pressing matters, war continues to devastate Gaza. A temporary ceasefire agreement fell through in March, and in the months since then Israel has blockaded Gaza—no food, water, fuel, or medical aid has entered the territory since March 2. Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of starvation. Israel also began a bombing campaign that, since mid-March, has killed three thousand people, many of them children.
The First U.S. Pontiff

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Griffin Oleynick

The swift elevation to the papacy of Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost—known simply as ‘Bob’ among his fellow Augustinian friars—defied pundits’ predictions even as it was met with joy by Catholics around the world. It’s impossible to say just how Leo XIV’s papacy will unfold, though in his early Masses and remarks the pope has already voiced strong support for the continuation of Francis’s project of synodality.
‘We Need to Talk About People’

1 month ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Dominic Preziosi

Dominic Preziosi: From his first trip as pope in 2013 to Lampedusa to pray for refugees and migrants lost at sea until his final moments, Pope Francis was speaking out on behalf of migrants around the world. How might his death affect what the Church is trying to do on immigration, not only in this country, but elsewhere? Bishop Mark Seitz: We lost a huge voice, someone who really understood what is going on on a worldwide scale, at levels never before seen. He got it. He saw it. He understood it.