The Commonweal Podcast

Debates over artificial intelligence tend to vacillate between the poles of blustery optimism and spiraling despair, with AI boosters making stratospheric claims for the technology just as critics vociferously denounce its capacity for disruption.

But could there in fact be a via media on AI, a path that celebrates technological advances while also respecting...

Vaccines have encountered resistance ever since they were invented in the late eighteenth century.

But vaccine skepticism has never been as vocal—or as widespread—as it has become in the United States in recent years.

Much of that has to do with the policies of the Trump administration, in particular Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., w...

Even as Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to plummet across the country, voters in the deep-red state of Wyoming, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than six to one, remain solidly in support of the president.

So it took real courage for Bishop Steven Biegler—appointed by Pope Francis in 2017 to lead the Diocese of Cheyenne, encompassing al...

Following the 1989 parish closures, the infrastructure that had supported Black Catholic leadership in Detroit was largely dismantled. Surviving parishes tried to rebuild community, while parishes that were merged struggled to forge new identities. Meanwhile, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop who oversaw the closures, left the city for Rome to take a top Vatican finance p...

In September 1988, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop of Detroit, announced via a closed-circuit television broadcast that the archdiocese would close dozens of inner-city parishes in Detroit within a year. Churches on the city’s predominantly Black east side would be disproportionately affected. 

The announcement triggered an immediate outcry: parishioners met at S...