Fr. Bryan Massingale tells us what Americans shocked at Floyd’s death, particularly white bystanders, need now: the virtue of courage, motivated by righteous anger.
Pentecost readings can lead to easy, watered-down homiletics about unity amid diverse peoples. In response to the killing of George Floyd, the church must do more.
As Colson Whitehead argues in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the legacy of injustice is not something we can simply move past. Old crimes continue to shape us.
Prisoners have been disproportionately harmed by the spread of coronavirus. Progressive district attorneys like Larry Krasner have taken the lead in responding.
While flawed, the 1619 Project is a first step toward disenthralling ourselves from an imagined past of America as history’s designated instrument of liberation.
George Orwell was an ornery person, irritable and impatient, and he took an unholy pleasure in upbraiding his left-wing brethren. What would he say to the left now?
The administration claims its ban of immigrants from African nations like Nigeria is related to national security. A more plausible explanation is racism.
A parasite is a homemaker, living in its host. In Bong Joon-ho’s new film it could be property, capital, commercialized art and artifice, or all of them together.
The synod on the Amazon will be remembered as the moment that bishops gathered in Rome asked the pope to ordain married men in order better to serve the poor.
Words like ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ make people uncomfortable. But as El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz points out in a new letter, we must reckon with them.
We talk to Benjamin Francis-Fallon about his new book, The Rise of the Latino Vote. And the Commonweal staff speaks about what they witnessed at the border in El Paso, Texas.
Guadalupe began as a paradoxical figure, both symbol of indigenous faith and tool of colonialist oppression. Now, she demands we listen to the poor and marginalized.
Educated by Irish Catholic missionaries, Robert Mugabe helped Zimbabwe create a new middle class. But in his refusal to relinquish power, he committed atrocities.
Famed documentarian Ken Burns traces the long and complex history of country music, revealing old American tensions between personal and collective freedom.
I’m nineteen years old, the year is 1958, and I’ve already made it through the first nine months of probation. More than anything in the world I want to be a saint.
Supporters of the electoral college are implicitly arguing that states with a higher percentage of white, non-Hispanic voters should choose who becomes president
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.
Making real progress toward racial justice requires the input of all Americans, including the so-called ‘privileged’ side. We need alliances, not recriminations.
The case of the Central Park Five shows that the legal profession needs reform. It must do more to hold itself accountable when it reaches provably unjust verdicts.
African influence is resurgent in world fashion, music, visual arts, and, increasingly, literature. Two new novels demonstrate the continent’s cultural vitality.
The Jesuit theologian has recently come under fire for his supposed racism and support of eugenics; but great religious thinkers must be read with care and precision
Claims of Catholic victimhood depart from false premises. Any analysis of racism also needs to account for historic injustices and present power dynamics
The work of the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian provides a theological critique of ethno-nationalism, and serves as a model for resisting racism today
Sister Diana Muñoz Alba challenged the UN, religious leaders, U.S. and Mexican governments, and all of us to do more to prevent the suffering of migrants.
