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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

Collective Mourning, Collective Action

Collective Mourning, Collective Action When our four children were much younger, our family squeezed into our minivan for a cross-country trip from Arizona to Washington D.C., thinking this might possibly be the last time we could coax the two oldest into a two-week vacation that included their parents. We took a southern route with stops along the way at historical sites and spent the better part of one day in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. It was there that we saw poignant and distu...

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Culture

Debating Women’s Ordination

Debating Women’s Ordination Editor’s note: In recent weeks, Paul Baumann’s essay on women’s ordination and the ritual logic of the priesthood has generated passionate reactions from Commonweal readers. Below, we’re sharing some of your sharpest letters and a response from Baumann. More than a Steppingstone In his article “The Priesthood’s Ritual Logic” (February 10, 2026), Paul Baumann states, “It is the Vatican’s contention that this gendered imagery is indispensable to the Church’s identity...

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Culture

The Church Is Not a Culture

The Church Is Not a Culture My mom will be received into the Catholic Church this year. She first became a Christian among Pentecostals in high school and later met my Baptist father at a bible study. She married him and, few years later with me on the way, they found the Evangelical Covenant Church. They settled in and raised us kids there. No utopian, my mother always made the best of the church as it was. She took its opportunities to grow and serve but was also honest about its limitation...

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Politics

The Gospel According to Tom Homan

The Gospel According to Tom Homan The Gospel according to Tom Homan begins with the story of a five-year-old boy who was the first among nineteen migrants to die of extreme heat in the cargo bed of a truck that transported them across the Mexican border in 2003. Homan, the senior White House staffer dubbed the nation’s “border czar,” tells the story well, and often. Its power is in the details: the little boy dead in his yellow underpants, his other clothing removed in the suffocating heat. H...

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Culture

No Mirrors, Shared Shoes

No Mirrors, Shared Shoes My father was born in County Donegal in 1925. He would have turned one hundred on May 30 of last year. As I think about my father, who passed away at the age of eighty-eight, I marvel at the distant world of Ireland a century ago. It’s fascinating how quickly history starts to move—especially in remote areas like County Donegal—after inching along at glacial speed for hundreds of years. Here I am, a writer who has lived to see the advent of Star Trek–type smartphones,...

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Culture

Waiting for the Lightning Bolt

Waiting for the Lightning Bolt “You’d be a pretty good get for us.” In the second season finale of the hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This, this encouragement is offered by a Jewish woman named Esther to protagonist Joanne, who has been wrestling with the decision to convert to Judaism. It’s a remarkable turnaround from the previously frosty dynamic between Joanne (Kristen Bell), and Esther (Jackie Tohn). Joanne is learning a key aspect of the lived Jewish experience: the choices that would ...

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Politics

Bad for the Church, and the World

Bad for the Church, and the World Historians are wary of making comparisons between different eras and events, but also professionally disposed to doing so—Church historians included. Hence this consideration of the role and response of the Catholic Church in the Trump era in the United States, and in the Fascist era of Italy from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s. There are differences, of course. Yet given the current moment—an authoritarian president attacking democracy at home and waging war...

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Politics

Bringing Crisis Management to Congress

Bringing Crisis Management to Congress Phil Andrew is the kind of guy you want in your corner during a crisis. A former FBI hostage negotiator, he brings a calm, authoritative demeanor to difficult situations, and is grounded in values that come from, among other things, his Catholic faith. As a college student, he convinced a school shooter who had broken into his family’s home to release his parents and survived a bullet to his chest when he tried to disarm her. Since then, he has committed...

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Culture

The ‘National’ Pastime?

The ‘National’ Pastime? In this 250th anniversary year of U.S. independence, Opening Day of our national pastime is March 25. But before that, March 5–17, baseball fans are getting to enjoy the seventh World Baseball Classic. This coincidence offers a timely opportunity to explore what the “All-American Game” means in our current geopolitical climate. Begun in 2006, the World Baseball Classic (WBC) is an international tournament featuring professional ballplayers competing on national teams. ...

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Culture

Do I Take the Living Water?

Do I Take the Living Water? I have been thirsty of late. I haven’t known what for exactly, but when I read this week’s Lenten Sunday readings, about the Samaritan woman at the well, her desire for living water, I thought: Yes, that, exactly. In many ways, this isn’t surprising. My day job is at an immigration legal-service provider, and I spend a lot of the rest of my time volunteering with an immigration bond fund. As I drafted this reflection, three bond requests I submitted were rejected b...

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Geopolitics

Not Just a Mistake, a Crime

Not Just a Mistake, a Crime Imagine you are living in 1945. Twice in the last three decades the world has convulsed in unprecedented, previously inconceivable spasms of violence. One hundred million people, half of them civilians, were killed. On one side, two ancient and profoundly civilized nations treated neighboring peoples, ethnoreligious minorities, and prisoners of war with a savagery that left the rest of the world gasping. And at the very end, the freest and professedly most humane n...

Global
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Education

Bonaventure’s Blind Spot

Bonaventure’s Blind Spot As I sat fidgeting in front of my laptop on Shrove Tuesday, I could feel my anxiety rising. I had done all the usual things to calm myself before teaching online: I had stilled myself and sat in silence for a little bit. Normally, being silent reduces my anxiety. This time, however, it did not work so well. The reason was that what I was about to do was not, strictly speaking, teaching. Nor was the group of people I was about to meet the tired-looking (and occasionall...

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