Our new issue is live. Among the highlights:Cathleen Kaveny, in "The Single-Issue Trap," on what the bishops' current voting guide overlooks:

Affirming the status of the unborn has not only acquired pride of place in the years since the bishops first electoral missive; it has also acquired a certain organizational force and power. But given the sustained emphasis on the importance of abortion, what does it mean for the bishops to affirm that "as Catholics we are not single-issue voters"?

Bernard P. Prusak, in "Turning Point," reflects on his work as part of the final session of the Second Vatican Council:

For me, the council brought a new sense of openness and hope, grounded in a genuine dialogue among Catholic scholars, bishops, and eventually the laity. As Joseph Ratzinger wrote at the time, the bishops at Vatican II had taken a giant step beyond being a mere sounding board for propaganda, to become, as an independent body of bishops, a force that the papal Curia had to reckon with. And perhaps nowhere was this giant step more evident than in the vexed issue of liturgical reform. Within the church as it was experienced from below by Catholics of the so-called Latin Rite, the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council would be particularly unexpected.

TheCommonweal editors, in "The Wrong Kind," note what appears to be a troubling strategic shift on the part of the GOP as the election approaches:

[Since 2008], the GOP seems to have given up on attracting many more minority voters in time for the 2012 election, and has switched to another strategy: If you cant get them to join you, beat them backwith laws that make it harder to vote. Since the 2010 midterm elections, more than a dozen Republican-controlled states have passed laws that require photo IDs at polling stations, impede voter-registration drives, reduce early-voting periods, or redraw electoral-district maps. Despite their superficial neutrality, these laws have a disproportionate effect on minorities and the poor, as well as students, the elderly, and those with disabilitiesall groups that tend to vote Democratic.

Plus a look at political journalism in the digital age, a farewell to longtime contributor Joseph Cunneen, who died in July at the age of 89, and the latest from E.J. Dionne.