Thomas Baker

About a year ago, we launched an extremely handsome Commonweal app for iPads, iPhones and Android tablets, and our goal all along was to make it an integral part of a Commonweal subscription. As of this week, it has finally happened: If you are a Commonweal print subscriber, you can now also read Commonweal using the app, free.

Most news stories this summer about interns haven’t been positive, from the NTSB summer intern fired for “overstepping the bounds of his authority” to the obscene rant from New York’s most troubled mayoral campaign about their intern who spilled dirt to the tabloids.

At Commonweal, things were very different. I want to introduce you to Joanna Gardner and Sara Bovat, who were here for all too brief a time this summer as our interns — not only because they did such good work, but in the hope that dotCommonweal readers will let other talented young people know that being here can be a good experience. (Information here about our internship program.)

Joanna, a recent Catholic University graduate, is spending the next year with Amigos de Jesus in Honduras, while Sara is heading back for her senior year at Holy Cross. We wish them the best. Here’s what they had to say about their summer.

Joanna Gardner

As a new intern, you never really know what you’re walking into. You could become immersed in a challenging project, or find yourself doing the proverbial coffee-fetching for three months. Going into an internship with Commonweal, I wasn’t too worried about facing a summer of “sugar or sweetener?” but I was still nervous, intimidated by my admiration of the magazine, as I walked into the office on my first day. Now, at the end of a great summer, the familiarity of the office and the people in it is all the more amazing because of those initial nerves and uncertainty.

Never one to seek the limelight, Commonweal's editor Paul Baumann nevertheless found himself there on Saturday, gaudily attired at the graduate commencement exercises at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT, where he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.

In his short but intensely active life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer held only brief appointments that involved regular parish preaching. As with most churches and their preachers, reactions were decidedly mixed. In Barcelona, where Bonhoeffer (only twenty-two at the time) enjoyed some brief popularity in his German-speaking parish, the resident pastor quickly responded by suppressing the advance preaching schedule.