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Commonweal

Commonweal

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

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

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Discussions from Commonweal

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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Politics

Sewer Socialism Takes Providence

Sewer Socialism Takes Providence To the extent that Providence has a national profile, it is as a shabbily quaint small town with an Ivy League university and an outsized mafia presence. In the six years I’ve lived there, though, it’s been ruled not by mafiosos but, like most other gentrifying post-industrial cities, by an uneasy alliance of townie landlords, mansion owners, luxury-apartment developers, and cops. Next year, it will likely be run, in no small part, by democratic socialists. On...

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Geopolitics

9/11 Changed Everything

9/11 Changed Everything At 8:45 on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was alone in my office on the thirty-first floor of the midtown Manhattan building I commuted to every day from Brooklyn. I was starting up my computer when something cast a brief fluttering shadow over the desk and carpeting. My first thought was birds, though that seemed strange; I had never seen birds up here before, this high. The building itself was set at an angle to the cross-streets, East Thirty-Third and Park Ave...

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Society

Neither Hidden nor Dead

The article explores the complexities of faith and doubt, emphasizing the ongoing relevance of spiritual struggles in contemporary life and the importance of dialogue in addressing them.

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Culture

Long Dead, Long Resurrected

Long Dead, Long Resurrected It wouldn’t be right, by Armida’s logic, to drive through Tucson without playing Canciones de Mi Padre, Linda Ronstadt’s best-selling Spanish-language album. Driving strictly five miles below the speed limit through colorfully painted, half-dilapidated, half-gentrified barrios of Ronstadt’s hometown, my grandmother is imparting some exaggerated small-town gossip. Admittedly, I’m eating it up. We make this pilgrimage every few years, driving two hours south to Tucso...

United States
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Technology

A Warning Sign for Big Tech

A Warning Sign for Big Tech Once upon a time, in the far-off ’90s and aughts, the internet was widely, if wishfully, touted for its potential to give anyone a voice. Online, we would join new communities, make a difference, go viral. The internet, it was thought, would strengthen a democratic public sphere against regimentation by corporations and suppression by governments. That historical moment ironically shadows the recent $17.1 billion settlement reached between state governments and Mar...

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Culture

Why Did Dolly Mean So Much to Us?

Why Did Dolly Mean So Much to Us? When a celebrity dies, a few days of public grieving and tributes are to be expected. But it’s been more than a week now, and my social-media feeds are still full of quotes set to “I Will Always Love You” and news reports about a proposed airport renaming and an upcoming Dollyfest. Even the subsequent deaths of actor Tim Curry and poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry haven’t slowed the public adulation for the late singer, songwriter, and philanthropist Do...

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Culture

Participants, not Prosecutors

Participants, not Prosecutors “I enter the ancient courts of ancient men. Received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me.” Niccolò Machiavelli wrote these words in 1513 while under house arrest, describing what happened each evening when he turned to the literature and history of antiquity. More than three centuries later, W....

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Culture

The U.S.-Born Pope Is Changing U.S. Catholicism

The U.S.-Born Pope Is Changing U.S. Catholicism Pope Leo XIV is changing the public voice of American Catholicism. He is building on the legacy of Pope Francis, but has turned out to be better placed than Francis was to shift the direction of the U.S. Church, and not only because of his national origin (or the fact that he’s a baseball fan). Leo has focused his papacy on a series of issues—immigration, economic justice, war and peace, and the moral challenges of artificial intelligence—on whi...

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