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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

Society

A Terrible Thing to Ask

A Terrible Thing to Ask I once stopped a man from killing himself. There was nothing noble in what I did, though the story might seem admirable from a distance—the kind of thing some people share on Facebook, with lines about never giving up on the people you love. What I actually did was prevent a person from doing something he desperately wanted to do. And afterward, I left him at a hospital while I went on with my life. I’m sorry this is happening, I hope you get better, but I have to go. ...

United States
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Politics

Politics and the Limits of Language

Politics and the Limits of Language In 2008, Barack Obama’s opponents in the Democratic primaries sniffed at his rhetoric. He was talking more about hope than his policy preferences, they complained. In response, he quoted famous lines from monumental speeches in a tone of passionate disbelief. “‘I have a dream.’ Just words?” “‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words? Just speeches?” At a rally in Wisconsin, he ignited the crowd with a new refrain: “Don’t tell me words don’t matt...

United States
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Culture

Learning from Ross Douthat

Learning from Ross Douthat Ross Douthat’s departure from the op-ed page of The New York Times to join 60 Minutes at Bari Weiss’s revamped CBS News has generated different reactions in different ideological quarters: a collective wave of “good riddance” from the liberal and progressive Catholic left, and, among his fans, a wistful combination of something like grief and shared pride in the project he carried out as a columnist for the “paper of record.” The latter sentiment was expressed in an...

United States
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Culture

Seeds of Something New

Seeds of Something New The digital age has been kind to Éric Rohmer. One of the leading filmmakers of the French New Wave of the 1950s and ’60s, Rohmer remains popular today, thanks to the recent streaming availability of his major films. From La collectionneuse (1967) to A Tale of Autumn (1998), his stories of chatty, fashionable characters who muse about their complicated emotions and personal moral codes at work, on the beach, and in the bedroom, are still as aspirational as they are insig...

Global
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Culture

What’s in the Cards?

What’s in the Cards? I sat in my friend Adeena’s Harlem apartment last summer, holding a deck of tarot cards. In response to her query about the state of her love life, I pulled the final card and set it in front of her: the Devil. A card that questions a person’s ability to discern whether a risky decision is self-liberating or self-limiting seemed like a generous interpretation of her “situationship” with a man who wore “God Is Dead” T-shirts under silver chain necklaces with crucifixes. Ad...

United States
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Culture

The Wolf and the Shepherd

The Wolf and the Shepherd When I was young, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. The next thing I knew, it was morning. A friend once told me, “That’s a blessing.” Now I am older and on most nights I wake at some point. I may lie awake just briefly or for as long as an hour or two. On the whole, I don’t mind it. I figure it’s time God has given me for prayer. I’ve developed a routine. First, I count the day’s blessings. Then I pray, slowly and intentionally, a Glory Be, an Our Fat...

United States
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Culture

Mitre Night on the South Side

Mitre Night on the South Side In 2005, when the Chicago White Sox made their first successful World Series run since 1917, The New York Times ran a Sunday piece headlined “In White Sox Nation, the Borders Are Secure.” I have read few things that comprehended so well “this strange, severed city” where Robert Francis Prevost, like me, was born into White Sox fandom. The White Sox have (despite early and maliciously false reports that he cheers for the Cubs) embraced their most infallible fan wa...

United States
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Culture

Whose German Idealism?

Whose German Idealism? Toward the beginning of his career, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who passed away at ninety-six earlier this year, wrote an essay titled “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers.” Rebutting the conventional putdown that Jewish thinkers were at best second-rate, Habermas insisted that they had been full participants in German thought from the days of Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn. “The German Idealism of the Jews produces a critical utopia,” Habermas main...

United States
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Culture

Self-Evident Truths?

Self-Evident Truths? Even those of us who have forgotten most of what we learned in school about the Declaration of Independence can still likely recite its famous second sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In his recent book Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity, the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm recalls ask...

United States
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Healthcare

Back to the Lab Again

Back to the Lab Again I’ve been to the lab so many times that it has started to feel like home. In the twelve years I’ve been coming, not much has changed. This time, the buzzer was out of commission at the back entrance—the door used by the test subjects. Ushered in by a woman wearing maroon scrubs, I took in the smell of gauze, the room’s sterile palette of beige and gray, scrubs in every color. There was a certain warmth associated with this facility, even if the temperature always hovered...

United States
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Culture

A Fairy Tale Ending?

A Fairy Tale Ending? In Venice Observed, her cultural history of that enchanting city, Mary McCarthy quotes a sixteenth-century German prince’s assessment of the Venetian character. Venetians were “conspiring the ruin of everyone,” the prince complained, and he urged resistance to “the insatiable cupidity of the Venetians and their thirst for domination.” Venice was, of course, not just a city of wealthy art patrons, but first an avaricious commercial empire. Venetians were “religious about b...

Italy
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