The wildfires raging on the West Coast are part of a broader, climate change–induced pattern. We must respond with real solutions, not just mitigation.
For millions, the pandemic has meant serious deprivation: not enough food, too many medical bills, the loss of a business, the prospect of losing one’s home.
Physical objects carry meaning for us, but their accumulation can be a kind of spiritual error. Reconciling this contradiction leads us to richer, deeper lives.
The most obstreperous opponents of masks tend to be men, a fact that has been chalked up to machismo and male privilege. But there’s more to it than that.
Largely white and rural, the state has moved right over the past decade. Yet its response to the pandemic may lead to more competitive races this November.
This summer, President Andrzej Duda of Poland won reelection in two successive rounds of voting. His success represents a growing threat to Polish democracy.
This time of pandemic and mass interracial demonstrations has revealed gaping wounds in our body politic. The ancient homilist Origen can help us heal them.
As cases of the novel coronavirus rise again across the United States, we’re reminded of our mortal fragility, but also of God’s promise of eternal life.
Humans are hardly the ‘rational actors’ social scientists pretend they are. With COVID-19 cases rising again, epidemiologist Joshua Epstein proposes another model.
Viruses may not be alive, but they are lively. A close look at how they replicate reveals an interconnected picture not just of human life, but of all reality.
For all the supposed fragility of the Church’s institutional system, its persistence is undiminished. It remains, and likely will remain, highly clerical.
The coronavirus will be here for the foreseeable future. Our task is to learn how to negotiate life with people who have quite different understandings of its risks.
Like his wife Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne had an abiding interest in, and a cleared-eyed view of, the struggle between the haves and the have-nots.
By all means, we should listen to scientists and take data into account in our coronavirus response. But our leaders also need to exercise the virtue of prudence.
The latest manifesto from archbishop Viganò descends into intellectual and moral farce, when what the world really needs from the church is true gravitas.
This year, global carbon emissions could drop 8 percent, the largest reduction since 2008. But with Trump in office, don’t count on permanent improvement.
A desert locust infestation now threatens the food security of East Africa, a region that was already contending with intense drought, floods, heavy rains, and war.
Those of us stuck at home and not on the front lines can become numb. How should we feel about the hordes of lives being lost every day? How should we grieve?
The Mexican government has already ordered people to stay home, with Mexico City under lockdown. But in a small pueblo in the south, life continues as before.
Even as New York shows signs of progress, the toll of the coronavirus has been high. We speak with three people who’ve been dealing with the impact of the pandemic.
Isolation can foster new growth within families or communities despite physical separation, as we confront the crisis with generosity, solidarity, and care.
We are and always will be vulnerable in some ways. But this does not excuse the short-sighted policy decisions that unnecessarily increased our fragility.
COVID-19 has profoundly affected our daily lives. Catch up with some of Commonweal’s best writing on the political and spiritual ramifications of the virus.
Some two decades ago, I took a cruise on the MS Zaandam. The Catholic rituals for the dead that I witnessed in Venezuela can help us process the death around us.
