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
Pope Francis is a highly original and supple thinker, with a breadth of knowledge accumulated over five decades. A new book fleshes out his intellectual journey.
Some Catholic moral theologians have recently expressed doubts about the fidelity of scholars in the field to the magisterium. But such doubts are unfounded.
We need to move beyond our inherited clericalism. The idea that the laity have no agency in the church is not magisterial teaching; it is not, in fact, true
Essays by a master medievalist, ranging from painting to purgatory, monasticism to monarchy highlight the fact that Christianity has long been materialistic
Jack Miles plays the role of voluntary expatriate in his enlightening and hugely sympathetic reading of the Qur’an, and we are all in his debt for doing so
In the fraught history of Jewish-Christian relations, Protestants and Catholics developed different responses to supercessionism, a legacy that must be confronted
The Jesuit theologian has recently come under fire for his supposed racism and support of eugenics; but great religious thinkers must be read with care and precision
Adequately “interpreting miracles” requires more than biblical exegesis. It demands a coherent and consistent construal of reality, which modernity cannot provide
A new translation of The Enneads, the third-century cosmological poem by Plotinus, is likely to remain the definitive critical edition in English for years to come
