At this year’s Catholic Media Awards in June 2024, the Jesuit Communications Conference’s AMDG podcast walked home with a number of awards — including an honorable mention in the “Best Podcast — Expression of Faith” category for an interview it hosted with Ellen Koneck, executive director of Commonweal Magazine, the “venerable Catholic journal of opinion” (their words, not ours).

The June 2023 episode, entitled “How Young Adults’ Faith is Defying Classical Categories,” focused on several themes from Koneck’s then-recent talk on young people in the Church at the Catholic Common Ground Initiative of the Chicago Theological Union and from her work prior at the Springtide Research Institute. Koneck’s discussion with host Mike Jordan Laskey was wide-ranging: Koneck discussed the usefulness and limitations of disaffiliation data, the problem of alienation felt by many young Catholics, the flexible relationship young people have with traditional institutions, and Commonweal’s role in engaging the spiritual needs of young people. 

In particular, Koneck discussed Commonweal’s unique relationship to the institutional Church, and the freedom that the magazine’s independence affords it in reaching out to young Catholics. “Young people today want to explore religious and spiritual questions without the baggage of institutional affiliation being the only reason they get to come in the door and ask questions,” Koneck began. “[We’re] trying to take the questions which might be too taboo to ask in a specifically institutional setting, to parse the details that you will not hear parsed in a Sunday homily, and to help Catholics ask these existential, spiritual, and religious questions they are wrestling with in their daily life.”

The podcast can be found here and the full list of award winners from the Catholic Media Awards can be found here.