Liberal Catholic magazine offering independent commentary on religion, politics, and culture.
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,” ...
Toward a Rooted Universalism In the early 1920s, Jerusalem was a city charged with possibility and conflict in equal measure. The British Mandate had replaced four centuries of Ottoman rule. Jewish immigrants were arriving from Eastern Europe in increasing numbers, driven by persecution and by a dream: to rebuild a Jewish national home in the ancient land of Israel. Zionism was not merely a political program; it was an act of civilizational imagination—the attempt to create, from the fragment...
Rising Above the Slop Americans are not hopeful about their democracy. Imagining a future more free and equal than the past feels difficult; imagining twenty-first-century Americans authoring such a future feels nearly impossible. The atrophied democratic imagination is, of course, connected to broader trends in our culture. It’s obvious that some cultural practices can sustain democratic hope, while others—scrolling, posting, mindless shopping, disappearing into virtual worlds—leave it to de...
A Good Place to Lose Your Mind One of our monks, let’s call him Fr. Stan, wasn’t an eloquent preacher at the best of times. He had been married—he returned home one day to find his wife had taken the kids and left without warning or explanation—and came to the monastery later in life. As he developed Alzheimer’s disease, his homilies became even more rambling and disconnected. Once, after an especially disjointed homily that ran on and on, some of the brothers complained to the abbot, who tho...
Reading ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ As recent advances in artificial intelligence have radically altered the way we learn, teach, work, and even wage war, and as they begin to challenge our assumptions about what sets us apart from our machines, Pope Leo XIV has emerged as an eloquent critic of the way this new technology is being employed, and of the pretensions of the Silicon Valley technologists who control it. As expected, his much-anticipated first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, offers a com...
The article explores the cultural significance of football, examining how the sport reflects societal values, community identity, and the complexities of fandom in contemporary life.
Book Tour or Campaign Stump? The reviews of Vice President J. D. Vance’s new book Communion are starting to roll in, and the consensus is that this sequel to his bestselling Hillbilly Elegy is as much a political accounting as it is a spiritual memoir. Still, the subtitle—“Finding My Way Back to Faith”—promises that the book will discuss Vance’s conversion story to Catholicism, so it’s not surprising that much of the chatter on the book-tour circuit has focused on questions of religion and mo...