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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

Politics

Hunger Is a Cry to Heaven

Hunger Is a Cry to Heaven “Hunger…is a cry that rises to heaven and requires a swift response from every nation, every international organization, every regional, local or private body. No one can remain on the sidelines in the fight against hunger.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops included these words from Pope Leo XIV in a letter to the Senate on July 9 about the priorities of the Farm Bill. The bill sets agricultural policies and funds programs that address hunger in the United Sta...

Global
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Society

The Commonweal Fund for Moral & Civic Renewal

The Commonweal Fund for Moral & Civic Renewal Thomas and Allison Franco have made a founding gift of $1,000,000. We invite you to join them. Introduction In an era of deep polarization and widespread distrust of institutions, Commonweal’s independent voice is more urgently needed than ever. The Commonweal Fund for Moral & Civic Renewal is a permanent endowment designed to ensure that voice endures—free, fearless, and faithful—for generations to come. The challenges facing American civic and r...

United States
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Culture

Why We Love to Hate Tradwives

Why We Love to Hate Tradwives The summer’s most talked-about novel, the debut Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, has a tantalizing premise: a tradwife influencer wakes up one day to find that her modern kitchen, two nannies, and the other behind-the-scenes creature comforts that prop up her “traditional” lifestyle brand have disappeared. Instead, she is now living in 1855, where she has to bake her signature sourdough over a fickle fire and bloody her hands while scrubbing clothes with a washbo...

United States
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Healthcare

The Church’s Acid Test

The Church’s Acid Test “This is your priest on drugs,” proclaimed the headline of a New Yorker article by Michael Pollan last year. Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind both chronicled and turbocharged the so-called “psychedelic renaissance.” Proliferating clinical trials had already demonstrated psychedelics’ ability to mitigate psychiatric conditions like PTSD and treatment-resistant depression, and over the following years, psilocybin treatments were legalized, under some conditions,...

United States
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Culture

Is Tech Destroying the Beautiful Game?

Is Tech Destroying the Beautiful Game? Despite the open corruption and commercialism of FIFA, this year’s World Cup has been a hit. The soccer has, by and large, outshone the many distractions and intrusions. And the atmosphere of the tournament may even have given exhausted liberals reason to hope that—despite the nativism and witless imperial ambition of the country’s present leadership—American patriotism can coexist with a welcoming internationalism. But a series of infuriating controvers...

Global
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Culture

Of Sheep, Grief, and Memory

This article explores the profound connections between grief, memory, and the natural world, using the metaphor of sheep to illustrate the complexities of loss and remembrance.

United States
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Culture

In the Church of Frilly Frocks and Incense

In the Church of Frilly Frocks and Incense Patricia Lockwood is an award-winning American poet, memoirist, and novelist, perhaps best known for her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times. She is now also a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. Priestdaddy is about her eccentric Catholic family, ruled over by her larger-than-life father, a cantankerous former Navy submariner. Lockwood writes that when her father was a y...

United States
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Politics

A Different Kind of Populist

A Different Kind of Populist Of all the upsets Democrats may score in the November midterms, none would do more to transform the national political landscape than a victory in Texas. State representative James Talarico has a genuine chance of becoming the first Democrat elected to the Senate in the Lone Star State since 1988. In just a few months, the boyish, faith-driven candidate has seized the limelight, becoming one the party’s most talked about left populists, along with New York City ma...

United States
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Culture

The Afterlife of Sacred Buildings

The Afterlife of Sacred Buildings At one time, scores of people regularly came to services at Temple Hadar Israel in New Castle, Pennsylvania, which dates back to 1926 and even earlier if you count the first organized congregation in the area. After it closed for good in 2017, people still came to that building, but for occupational-therapy treatments, administered by the wife of the building’s buyer. Members of a nondenominational Christian church (Whole Truth Ministries) also came there for...

United States
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Politics

An American Pope on American Freedom

An American Pope on American Freedom “A country’s vitality is deeply tied to the value it affords to human life in every form and condition.” Accepting the National Constitution Center’s Liberty Medal on Friday, Pope Leo XIV emphasized the United States’s promise to uphold human dignity. The award, which “honors men and women of courage and conviction who strive to secure the blessings of liberty for people around the globe,” had already been presented in person to Leo at the Vatican in April...

United States
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Politics

Fatiguing Us into Compliance

Fatiguing Us into Compliance When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to read the Declaration once again, what do we find in this most hallowed of American political texts? When I sat down, with a grudging sense of Boy Scout dutifulness to revisit those 1,337 words, I saw that it was no longer the document I remembered from high school. The bits lodged in my memory were the oft-quoted glowing abstractions: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” “all men are created equal,” ...

United States
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