Poet and novelist Fanny Howe is an experimental writer’s experimental writer, the author of dozens of books, one who remains publicly, committedly Catholic.
Is liberal democracy really so exhausted that there is no choice but to abandon it? The hopeful answer, articulated earlier by Italian priest Luigi Sturzo, is no.
Big business has a growing public relations problem. But the whims of wealthy philanthropists alone cannot bring about the economic justice envisioned by the gospel.
A new show at the Barnes in Philadelphia transports audiences into the heart of the Bill Viola’s pioneering inquiries into the phenomenon of visual perception.
Thomas Merton taught me to value self-denial, but a bout of depression forced me to question whether asceticism was the healthiest response to my life.
Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman is not often thought of as a religious thinker. But his Armenian travelogue shows a different, more numinous side of his work.
The idea of religious liberty was not simply the product of the Enlightenment. It has ancient origins, going back to early Christians suffering persecution in Rome.
Vatican II marked a turning point, showing that appropriate change did not mean losing one’s identity but, rather, enhancing it or salvaging it from ossification.
Daniel Callahan was one of the most influential editors in Commonweal’s history, and the preeminent creator of the field of bioethics. He passed away on July 16.
Should Christians renounce both the eating of sentient creatures and the performance of experiments on them? Yes, we should, to the extent that we can.
Pope Francis’s gift of St. Peter’s relics to the Orthodox patriarch is remarkable. Rather than righting a previous wrong, it constitutes a genuine self-emptying.
It can be appealing to think of the Bible as a stable, fixed text. But paleography is not an exact science, even in the hands of the best practitioners.
Most of the films in competition at Cannes were quieter, more richly textured meditations on love, loss, and identity. But the specter of Trump loomed large.
Drawing on the mystery of Christ in the liturgy to nourish one’s own life of faith is not always a self-evident or easy thing to do. We need to become mystagogues.
The recent UN report on the rapid loss of biodiversity failed to arouse our concern. But endangered ecosystems reflect our gravely sinful habits of consumption.
The medieval Franciscan philosopher and theologian Duns Scotus is barely studied today. But the church would be enriched by a renewed engagement with his works.
Is all flesh really beloved by God? Or is Christianity just another sect, with a new elite kind of flesh that belongs, unambiguously, to no one except its members?
In our divided era, aggressive secularism and Catholic neo-integralism are not the only two options available. A new Vatican document revisits religious freedom.
French thinker Étienne Balibar argues that the modern nation-state has become a religion that is now collapsing under the weight of its contradictions.
A new book describes everything one could wish to know about Hell: fire, brimstone, and boiling oil, but also the history of the idea across religions.
Poet Ilya Kaminsky’s second collection attends to the barbarism of war, but also speaks of the love—romantic, familial, and communal—that resists such violence.
Poet, editor, translator, and human-rights activist Carolyn Forché speaks about Óscar Romero, Liberation Theology, and the Catholic Church in El Salvador.
Seminaries still have a role to play, and should not be abolished. But they should no longer be factories for clericalism, elitism, and misogyny, as they often are.
The only adequate response to the clergy sex-abuse crisis is a paschal response: death to one way of being and resurrection to a truly new way of life.
Some Catholics have critiqued the Document on Human Fraternity for its theology of religion, but little attention has been paid to its reception in the Arab world.
Augusto Del Noce argued that the true fault line of contemporary history ran between those who affirmed man’s religious dimension and those who denied it
