The Commonweal Podcast

Readers of Commonweal and beyond will likely recognize Lawrence Joseph, the author of many books of poetry and prose, and whose work has often appeared in the pages of our magazine.

We’re delighted to report that Larry has just published a new collection of poems, entitled Precisely Now. It’s a collection of thirty-two poems, some of which appeared for the first time in Commonweal, that he began shortly after the first election of Donald Trump in 2017 and continued writing right up to the present.

They are poems of linguistic compression and colloquial precision that, as our literary critic Anthony Domestico puts it, “match anything published in the past half-century in their formal control and moral witness.”

On this episode, senior editor Matthew Boudway talks with Larry Joseph about the

new collection, the poet’s process of composition, and the theology of grace. 

For further reading

By now, many of us are familiar with the realities of the Trump administration’s violent campaign of mass deportations. But how often do we listen to the stories of some of the most vulnerable victims—young children and teenagers separated from their families?

Gabrielle Oliveira, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, did just that. For her ethnographic study Now We Are Here, she followed sixteen migrant families from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and her native Brazil from 2018 to 2021. 

All of Oliveira’s subjects experienced some form of family separation as a result of U.S. immigration policy under Donald Trump. Yet all also managed to remain in the United States, where their educational journeys remain the single most important factor in their lives. 

On this episode, Oliveira speaks with Commonweal Director of Mission and Partnership Claudia Avila Cosnahan about how these families have metabolized the trauma of separation.

Plus, Commonweal Senior Correspondent Heidi Schlumpf speaks with Dominic Preziosi about the latest in Catholic news, including the midterms, new Catholic converts, and the U.S. Bishops’ pointed letter to Donald Trump on behalf of Haitians living in the United States.

For further reading: 

What happens when we read the Bible? Why do we read it? What does it do to us?

There are at least as many answers as there are people. Our interpretations of the Bible depend not only on what we read—which texts, which translations, etc.—but how and especially with whom we read it. 

On this episode, professor of spirituality—and editor of the Commonweal Podcast—David Dault joins associate editor Griffin Oleynick to discuss the ethics of reading the Bible, detailed in his new book The Accessorized Bible.

Core to Dault’s argument are the Jewish concepts of tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and tzniut, indicating modesty. Reading—and even willfully misreading—the Bible with these in mind can help commit us to liberation instead of coercion, to peacemaking rather than violence. 

For further reading:

Debates over artificial intelligence tend to vacillate between the poles of blustery optimism and spiraling despair, with AI boosters making stratospheric claims for the technology just as critics vociferously denounce its capacity for disruption. 

But could there in fact be a via media on AI, a path that celebrates technological advances while also respecting limits and safeguards?

The key to such a shift, argues ethicist Meghan Sullivan, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, where she also directs the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, is a commitment to prioritizing human life over technocratic paradigms. 

That means, above all, foregrounding human dignity—a concept the Catholic Church is well-positioned to articulate. 

Plus, Commonweal senior correspondent Heidi Schlumpf reports on Catholic news from the past few weeks, including schism, ICE roundups, and new polling about young people and religion.

For further reading:

Vaccines have encountered resistance ever since they were invented in the late eighteenth century. 

But vaccine skepticism has never been as vocal—or as widespread—as it has become in the United States in recent years.

Much of that has to do with the policies of the Trump administration, in particular Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose drastic changes at the CDC have reversed decades of American vaccination policy.

But what explains such broad receptivity to vaccine skepticism among wide swaths of Americans?

On this episode, Commonweal associate editor Regina Munch speaks with Kiera Ganga Kieffer, a professor of religious studies at Fairfield University. Her new book, Unvaccinated Under God, offers a provocative reading of the history of vaccine hesitancy in America. 

Anti-vaccination beliefs are less a matter of scientific misinformation, Kieffer argues, than forms of religious expression, in which vaccines themselves become proxies for broader existential concerns about justice and morality.

For further reading:

Even as Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to plummet across the country, voters in the deep-red state of Wyoming, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than six to one, remain solidly in support of the president.

So it took real courage for Bishop Steven Biegler—appointed by Pope Francis in 2017 to lead the Diocese of Cheyenne, encompassing all of Wyoming—to promulgate a pastoral letter on migration just a few months ago. 

Bishop Biegler is keen to point out that Be a Merciful Neighbor is not a political document. 

Instead it asks Catholics to evaluate policies of mass deportation in light of the values of the Gospel—especially Christ’s unequivocal call to welcome the stranger.

On this episode, Bishop Biegler speaks about the letter, and its surprising reception by Wyoming Catholics, with Commonweal Senior Correspondent Heidi Schlumpf. 

Before their interview, Schlumpf also updates listeners on recent news affecting American Catholics.

For further reading: 

Heidi Schlumpf on the Church’s continued fight on behalf of migrants

Pablo Christian Soenen on moral ambiguity in the borderlands

Paul Moses on the evils of immigration enforcement under Tom Homan

Following the 1989 parish closures, the infrastructure that had supported Black Catholic leadership in Detroit was largely dismantled. Surviving parishes tried to rebuild community, while parishes that were merged struggled to forge new identities. Meanwhile, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop who oversaw the closures, left the city for Rome to take a top Vatican finance post. 

In the third and final episode of “The City and the Cross,” host and Commonweal Centennial Fellow Aaron Robertson weighs the total cost of the 1989 parish closures—not just the loss of buildings, but the erosion of the systems that once nurtured Black Catholic vocations. He tells the story of Father John McKenzie, a Black priest who tried to serve Detroit’sBlack Catholic community with little institutional support, and whose own struggle raises a pointed question for the Church today: decades after 1989, how committed is the archdiocese to investing in Black Catholic communities? 

Slowly, another question also starts to emerge: did the Black Catholic Movement ultimately succeed or did it fail? Robertson asks the very people who lived through it. 

Today, as the Detroit archdiocese undergoes another round of restructuring, Black Catholics are bracing for the worst, but they refuse to walk away from the spiritual centers they built and still call home. 

Featured Voices

In September 1988, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop of Detroit, announced via a closed-circuit television broadcast that the archdiocese would close dozens of inner-city parishes in Detroit within a year. Churches on the city’s predominantly Black east side would be disproportionately affected. 

The announcement triggered an immediate outcry: parishioners met at Sacred Heart, Detroit's Black Catholic “mother church,” and held vigils outside locked churches; the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance became the organizing hub of resistance; protestors marched up and down Woodward Avenue; and a few local residents planted mums outside the cardinal’s residence, one for each parish the archdiocese eventually closed. 

In the second episode of "The City and the Cross," host and Commonweal Centennial Fellow Aaron Robertson chronicles the community organizers who coordinated these efforts, a journalist who covered the story, the Catholic priests caught between their vows of obedience and their commitment to Black parishioners, and the prominent Black Catholic leader—a former Black Panther—who had to deliver the news of the parish closures to the communities he faithfully tried to serve.

Featured Voices:

What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?

These questions, originally formulated by philosopher Immanuel Kant, are some of the most essential ones that we ask. Attempting to answer them can take a lifetime, if we can answer them at all.

On this episode, we’re featuring an interview with Christopher Beha, the novelist and former editor of Harper’s Magazine whose new book, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, offers an account of how he has grappled with these same questions. 

Beha grew up Catholic, but became a committed atheist in college after his twin brother was nearly killed in a car accident, and he himself was diagnosed with a serious illness. 

Beha’s journey through rival forms of atheism—scientific materialism and romantic idealism—and the experience of falling in love ultimately led him back to Catholicism.

Here, shares why he believes Catholicism offers a complete and coherent picture of reality.

For further reading: 

Costica Bradatan on the emotional history of atheism

Rand Richards Cooper speaks with Beha about his novels

George Scialabba on the romantic poets

In the first episode of Commonweal's new podcast series, The City and the Cross, host and inaugural Centennial Fellow Aaron Robertson traces the origins and flowering of Black Catholic Detroit throughout the twentieth century—from the era of Jim Crow, when Black Catholics were regularly excluded from white parishes, through the 1960s and 1970s, when the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council coincided with the civil-rights and Black Power movements. 

Robertson speaks with the musicians who transformed Catholic liturgy by bringing gospel into the sanctuary, the parishioners who built Black Catholic communities from scratch, and the activists who compelled the local Church to recognize Black leadership. 

For more information about the episode, click here. To learn more about Commonweal's Centennial Fellowship, click here.