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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

Culture

Poem | The Encounter

Poem | The Encounter I saw Jesus today. A figure bent hobbled disheveled, clinging to a rickety walker, shuffling toward reception, needing help or a kind word. Wavering, I offered neither. I saw Jesus today. And I passed him by. James Hannan March 23, 2026

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Culture

Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse

Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse “It isn’t absurd,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1947, “to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity.” The proposition is looking less absurd by the day: AI may eventually turn on us; industrialization has turned the planet against us; social media is turning us against each other; and nuclear weapons linger just offstage, waiting for another turn. What Wittgenstein—and the many other Romantically inclined ...

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Culture

Modern Archbishop, Medieval Pilgrimage

Modern Archbishop, Medieval Pilgrimage On March 25, Dame Sarah Mullally will make history when she is installed as the first female archbishop of Canterbury. As the 106th archbishop, she will become the leader of the Church of England and spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, which comprises more than 85 million people worldwide. In preparation for this historic inauguration, Mullally also became the first modern archbishop of Canterbury to participate in the medieval Becket Camino: an ei...

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Culture

More than a Real Estate Deal

More than a Real Estate Deal In summer, wildflowers broke out along the stony ridges of the mountains, and for most of winter the valley would be hushed with snow the color of cotton paper. The Trappist monks of St. Benedict’s Monastery were lovers and stewards of the place and called it their “sacred valley.” They came from Brooklyn or Boston, had once served in the Air Force or as missionaries abroad. One brother had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and when he died, I helped carry his bo...

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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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