Skip to main content
Commonweal

Commonweal

Magazine | United States | Centre-Left
www.commonwealmagazine.org/

Liberal Catholic magazine offering independent commentary on religion, politics, and culture.

Engagement Insights

144
Discussions
0
Participants
0
Total Votes
181
Articles

Discussions from Commonweal

Culture

Longing for the Crusades

Longing for the Crusades It is not every day that one comes across a gleeful celebration of the prospect of one’s own death. Louise Perry, often described as a “reactionary feminist,” is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression feature. In a recent column, she looked forward to the ultimate demise of the Baby Boomers (“Boomer Christianity Is Dying Fast”). “Their confident world view was a gift from a different era,” she writes. “And it will, I fear, die with them.” But if the...

United States
Join Discussion
Politics

Can Catholic Voters Tip the Midterms?

Can Catholic Voters Tip the Midterms? After decades of campaigns to convince Catholics that the GOP is the only party for religious voters, the 2024 election seemed to confirm that to be Catholic in the United States is to be Republican. No longer was the Catholic vote evenly split, with any slight advantage helping to determine the winner—a reality that had led E. J. Dionne Jr. to quip a quarter-century ago: “There is no ‘Catholic vote.’ And yet, it matters.” Instead, by 2024, white Catholic...

United States
Join Discussion
Culture

Clerics Without Clericalism

Clerics Without Clericalism Early in his papacy, Pope Francis was asked about a possible loophole in canon law that would allow women to be appointed to the College of Cardinals as laypeople. In his reply, Francis sidestepped the legal issues. Instead, he said, “Women in the Church must be valued, not ‘clericalized.’ Whoever thinks of women as cardinals suffers a bit from clericalism.” His reasoning was surprising. In his long-running critique of clericalism, Francis typically focused on cler...

Global
Join Discussion
Politics

The Catholic Century

The Catholic Century The year 2026 marks the tenth anniversary of “crisis of democracy” literature. Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 occasioned a spate of articles and books heralding “the end of democracy,” the advent of the “post-truth society,” the coming of the next American civil war, and the return of fascism. As the legal scholar Jedediah Britton-Purdy once quipped: “Likely none of these books would exist—certainly none would be remotely the same—if Hillary Clinton had pulled...

United States
Join Discussion
Politics

‘The Construction Sites of History’

‘The Construction Sites of History’ “Nobody builds walls better than me.” I don’t have to tell you who said that, do I? When Donald Trump launched his campaign for president in front of a crowd of hired extras at Trump Tower in 2015, he was counting on his reputation as a real-estate developer to lend him credibility. His name was on the building, after all. That day, he made headlines with his racist anti-immigrant rhetoric. He also floated a promise that became a major part of his sales pit...

United States
Join Discussion
Politics

The Bishops versus the Nativists

The Bishops versus the Nativists As much attention as Trump’s mass-deportation program has received, it deserves still more. But the president has an uncanny knack for distracting us from one crisis by manufacturing another. ICE’s Operation Metro Surge, which in January left two protestors dead in Minneapolis and traumatized the entire city, already seems like a long time ago. In the months since it receded from the headlines, the president has started a war in the Middle East, banned major n...

United States
Join Discussion
Politics

Vatican Diplomacy & Vance’s End Times

Vatican Diplomacy & Vance’s End Times If this past spring was marked by rising tensions between the Trump administration and the Vatican—complete with unprecedented verbal attacks on Leo XIV from Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, followed by a direct response from the pope—summer brought something of a détente. We’ll see how long it holds. The highest-ranking American Catholic elected official continues to espouse a theology very different from the one that informs Vatican diplomacy, suggesting t...

United States
Join Discussion
Healthcare

The Sword of Damocles Life

The Sword of Damocles Life My wife has lived for nine years—about twice as many as expected—since her breast cancer returned in the bones, requiring emergency surgery to remove a lesion pressing on the spinal cord. Three years ago it spread to the brain. Nowadays, final-stage metastatic cancer can be a thing the victim lives with for a while, not a thing she’s clearly dying of. When Hope first got sick, a few people said, lightly, “Oh, cancer’s now a chronic disease,” almost as if they were s...

United States
Join Discussion
Culture

A Pilgrim Among Pilgrims

A Pilgrim Among Pilgrims As a professor of the history of Marian devotion, I teach my undergraduate students at Georgetown University how each Marian shrine—Fátima, Lourdes, Guadalupe, and thousands of others—reveals a different component of Marian devotion. At the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France, more than five million pilgrims visit the shrine every year, often in search of spiritual or physical healing. On September 26, as part of his apostolic trip to France, Pope Leo ...

Global
Join Discussion
Culture

Getting In over Your Head

Getting In over Your Head For the past quarter-century, Jonathan Meiburg has been pushing at the edges of American indie rock. With his bands Shearwater and Loma, he has written songs about forever wars, global extinction events, and the atomic legacies of the American century with a musical style mixing post-punk fuzz and symphonic grandeur. As an ornithologist and nature writer, he has traveled to all seven continents, and in 2021 he published A Most Remarkable Creature, a globe-trotting st...

Global
Join Discussion
Education

Chad Pecknold’s New Job

Chad Pecknold’s New Job If you go to the website for the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America and navigate to the page titled “Who We Are,” you will find a large photograph of a professor at the front of a classroom. That professor is Chad C. Pecknold, a postliberal theologian who has defended aggressive immigration enforcement and taken issue with the U.S. bishops’ statements against mass deportation. But if you travel right now to CUA’s theology sch...

United States
Join Discussion
Politics

Firing Squads Are Back

Firing Squads Are Back Randy Gardner hardly remembers anything about the day in 1985 when his brother Ronnie Lee Gardner was sentenced to die. Maybe he prefers not to. “I wasn’t too worried,” Randy tells me. He knew the appeals process would probably take decades—and it did. But twenty-five years of failed appeals did eventually yield to an execution date: June 18, 2010. Gardner’s family had to say goodbye in advance after he requested they not be present. Instead, they held a vigil outside t...

United States
Join Discussion