Famed documentarian Ken Burns traces the long and complex history of country music, revealing old American tensions between personal and collective freedom.
Personal data has become a valuable commodity. What if we were given ownership rights over our data—not only to retain control, but also to receive compensation?
Available for the first time in English translation, the letters of a young German couple whose love of God and each other sustained them against Nazi oppression.
A new show at the Barnes in Philadelphia transports audiences into the heart of the Bill Viola’s pioneering inquiries into the phenomenon of visual perception.
In Mexico City there is an ancient agricultural system that consists of manmade islands, called chinampas. They risk ruin in the face of climate change.
Someone churchy thought a girl’s outfit was more important than her presence at church. Religion offers many excuses for emotional predation; we have to call it out
Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman is not often thought of as a religious thinker. But his Armenian travelogue shows a different, more numinous side of his work.
Easy Rider is a lasting work of art not only because it reflects the “spirit of the Sixties,” but because it depicts a bona fide tragedy that transcends its time.
A timely new novel from Oscar Cásares captures not only the vulnerability of newly arriving immigrants, but also the anxiety of simply trying to acclimate.
Because I’d read all the relevant names in college, my family made the error of looking to me to help mend my brother Vin’s blighted mind, to somehow rescue him.
In this installment, we take a back-to-the-earth approach, reading a Japanese treatise on natural farming alongside an Italian film about rural peasant life.
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.
Why did so many descendants of Ellis Island immigrants vote for a president whose speech echoes 1920s eugenicists? A new book traces the rise of ‘scientific’ racism.
Baseball is suffering a decline in popularity in the United States. But if there are fans abroad who are passionate about the game, why not bring it to them?
Making real progress toward racial justice requires the input of all Americans, including the so-called ‘privileged’ side. We need alliances, not recriminations.
My brother Robert, always in and out of treatment, was a gift. He taught me to accept my own frustrations, and to curb the envy of others I sometimes felt.
In the debates about democratic socialism, we need a new idea of utopia. The life and work of nineteenth-century socialist William Morris is a good place to start.
Abel Ferrara’s new biopic about Pier Paolo Pasolini evinces a highly personal, anti-institutional strain of Catholicism—where grace abounds in squalor and scandal.
I agree with the values of sacrifice and care, and I often find Briallen Hopper’s writing tenacious and lovely. So why did her book leave me not quite satisfied?
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.
In the second season of ‘Fleabag,’ the titular character begins a sexual relationship with a priest. What follows is a heady tale of guilt, loneliness, and pain.
African influence is resurgent in world fashion, music, visual arts, and, increasingly, literature. Two new novels demonstrate the continent’s cultural vitality.
Tibetan art can be a challenge for non-initiates to decipher. But once you pierce its iconography, you find a moving testimony of faith lived against oppression.
Jacopo Tintoretto has been considered by many, including John Ruskin and Henry James, to be the greatest artist of the Italian Renaissance. His work astounds.
In his work, the late historian John Lukacs embodied a Christian humanism, one that ideologues on both the left and right did their best to bury. He will be missed.
The first Kenyan film ever officially screened at Cannes, ‘Rafiki’ was banned in Kenya for “legitimizing homosexuality” against the country’s dominant beliefs.
A lot of people fancy themselves history buffs, obsessing over names, dates, and numbers. But facts aren’t narratives. And history can’t be learned from a phone.
To understand the contradictions of the Trump era, look no further than West Virginia. Once solidly pro-union and democratic, the state risks forgetting its past.
Despite his full, long life, the death of Jean Vanier is still sad. And as Christians, we must not skip grief nor automatically reach for a happy narrative.
The Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood are an unlikely group of Amazon shareholders, but they’re forcing a vote on the company’s facial recognition software.
Throughout the history of European thought, humor has always had an unruly, utopian impulse: one that transcended class and threatened to upend the social order.
Slow-paced and built on wildly imaginative premises, Karen Russell’s short stories teach us to approach life’s vicissitudes with curiosity, compassion, and delight.
