The Vatican's recent statement that it will create a special ordinariate for Anglicans who want to become Catholics, presumably because of their dissatisfaction with the ordination of women and (...)

Miri Rubin's hefty book on the Virgin Mary is an intellectual romp through two thousand years of Christian history that seeks to explore the Virgin's role in the shaping of Western culture, (...)

November is Adoption Awareness Month in the United States-a national effort to promote the cause of the more than 125,000 children currently in foster care and awaiting adoption. Historically the (...)

I've enjoyed being scared witless in movies ever since 1967, when I was eight and jumped screaming from my seat as a murderous Alan Arkin, kitchen knife flashing, hunted the blind Audrey Hepburn (...)

Since the mid-twentieth century, "virtue ethics" has staged a comeback among both theologians and philosophers. Reacting against the formalism of moral theory since Kant, scholars (...)

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was hauled before a Congressional Committee last year to explain why he had been blindsided by the global financial cataclysm. To his credit, he (...)

A review of a new production of Tennessee Williams's 'A Streetcar Named Desire'

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?" So asked the psalmist three thousand years ago. The question is still with us and as urgent as (...)

GAY MARRIAGE & SEGREGATION I found Robert K. Vischer's review of Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty thought-provoking ("Incompatible Freedoms?" October 9). One thought it (...)

When I was barely twenty-one, I spent a brief and difficult period as a postulant in a Carmelite monastery. It didn't take me long to discover that I lacked a monastic vocation. No one who has (...)

Untold Stories from East Germany

The agenda of the November 16-19 General Assembly of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops takes up a number of hotly contested issues, including a pastoral letter on marriage and (...)

Here's a story you may have missed because it flies in the face of the dreary conventional wisdom: When advocates of public programs take on the right-wing antigovernment crowd directly, the (...)

Our economy is based largely on fantasy, a flight from reality that has led to a series of unsustainable economic choices and the crisis we are now experiencing. In contrast, the idea of the (...)

A review of John Allen's new book 'Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church'

Many a baby boomer was raised on tales of the Great Depression, tales of sharecroppers, breadlines, NRA parades, and sparing a dime for a brother in need. These often played a bigger part in our (...)

Beginning with founding editor Michael Williams (1924-38), Commonweal has enjoyed a great deal of continuity at the top of the masthead. Perhaps most remarkable in this regard was Edward S. (...)

The Informant! both gripped and frustrated me. This is Steven Soderbergh's semi-fictional adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald's factual account of the 1990s Archer Daniels Midland scandal, a conspiracy (...)

Eamon Duffy is perhaps best known to general readers as the author of Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (1997), a one-volume history of the papacy from St. Peter to John Paul II. But in (...)

It now seems clear that political pressures have transformed President Barack Obama's health-care reform plan into a health-insurance reform plan. Some commentators have protested that this (...)