Thousands of migrants are now camping along the border in Ciudad Juárez, enduring squalid conditions as they await responses from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
My visit to the besieged city included protests, tear gas, and arrests. It drove home the degree to which Hong Kong has become a militarized police state.
For decades we’ve been assured that trade with China would lead to more liberty there, not less liberty here. The NBA example reveals the limits of this thesis.
Decades of neoliberalism have rendered the American left understandably wary of welfare benefits for all, not just the poor. But Scandinavia shows that it works.
Words like ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ make people uncomfortable. But as El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz points out in a new letter, we must reckon with them.
We talk to Benjamin Francis-Fallon about his new book, The Rise of the Latino Vote. And the Commonweal staff speaks about what they witnessed at the border in El Paso, Texas.
The sisters I met along the border know well the intractability of poverty, disease, and violence. That does not keep them from working to relieve them.
Museums have recently tried to expand our picture of Native American life, coupling indigenous art with contemporary American works. This approach has limits.
Massimo Faggioli comments on the legacy of Don Lugi Sturzo, the Italian priest who resisted fascism and insisted on the right of lay Catholics to engage actively in politics.
Kathryn Tanner offers a pointed theological critique of finance capitalism, which inverts the Christian understanding of human dignity and the dignity of work.
We need a truly international reckoning with the fact of mass migration, one in which wealthy countries actually confront climate change and food insecurity.
Global warming, the rise of the Latino vote, and, of course, millennial socialism. New books to keep an eye out for next time you browse the bookstore.
Educated by Irish Catholic missionaries, Robert Mugabe helped Zimbabwe create a new middle class. But in his refusal to relinquish power, he committed atrocities.
Democrats and Republicans both have proposals for paid family leave. So why can’t they agree on a set of policies, one that balances solidarity and subsidiarity?
Famed documentarian Ken Burns traces the long and complex history of country music, revealing old American tensions between personal and collective freedom.
Available for the first time in English translation, the letters of a young German couple whose love of God and each other sustained them against Nazi oppression.
In Mexico City there is an ancient agricultural system that consists of manmade islands, called chinampas. They risk ruin in the face of climate change.
The United States needs a vibrant, thoughtful democratic-socialist presence. One that knows what it stands for, and one with a tragic sense of its own history.
A new federal rule redefines who is likely to become a “public charge,” and is therefore ineligible for citizenship. Few remember the rule’s anti-Catholic roots.
Hong Kongers are fighting China for their political survival. But the rest of the world, particularly the West, seems apathetic toward their precarity.
A timely new novel from Oscar Cásares captures not only the vulnerability of newly arriving immigrants, but also the anxiety of simply trying to acclimate.
A protest outside a Texas detention center featured speeches and songs, but also revealed something more: God’s commitment to accompany those making their way north.
A new book proposes the abolition of life sentences. But meaningful criminal justice reform requires greater clarity about the nature and purpose of prison time.
In this installment, we take a back-to-the-earth approach, reading a Japanese treatise on natural farming alongside an Italian film about rural peasant life.
Progressive religious activists, including Catholic sisters, staged a sit-in at the Capitol, forming a human cross to protest Trump’s cruel treatment of migrants.
Why won’t the pope require bishops around the world to adopt the standards of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child? It signed the treaty, but won’t comply.
Why did so many descendants of Ellis Island immigrants vote for a president whose speech echoes 1920s eugenicists? A new book traces the rise of ‘scientific’ racism.
The retrial of humanitarian border activist Scott Warren raises frightening concerns for all who would help migrants. A conviction would set a dangerous precedent.
Commonweal writers have long engaged with the church’s stance on labor rights, worker justice, and income inequality. Here are the best pieces from our archives.
Making real progress toward racial justice requires the input of all Americans, including the so-called ‘privileged’ side. We need alliances, not recriminations.
The case of the Central Park Five shows that the legal profession needs reform. It must do more to hold itself accountable when it reaches provably unjust verdicts.
In the debates about democratic socialism, we need a new idea of utopia. The life and work of nineteenth-century socialist William Morris is a good place to start.
