Commonweal is an indispensable lifeline for Catholics who want to be part of an informed, engaged, independent-minded laity, as well as for readers of every faith seeking an open, tolerant forum for interreligious conversation. Commonweal provides a place for civil, reasoned debate on the interaction of faith with contemporary politics and culture. Read by a passionate audience of educated, commit
ted Catholics and readers from many other religious traditions, Commonweal presents well-argued, respectful points of view from across the ideological spectrum. Our lay-run, independent status is inseparable from our role as a community of open conversation. Independence, clarity, charity, and a certain complexity are Commonweal’s watchwords. We believe challenging ideas need breathing room, explained and articulated not in slogans or sound bites but at length when necessary, always striving to be both informed and accessible to the general reader. Our institutional independence allows Commonweal sometimes to raise unsettling questions, consider novel, sometimes suspect ideas, and support the advance of Catholic thought. Rather than an ideology, Commonweal represents a sensibility. We believe that the quality of conversation shapes our shared sense of what is possible—and that this conversation has to embrace the imaginative and the visionary alongside the pragmatic and the empirical. In religious matters, Commonweal has always embodied the Second Vatican Council’s admonition that the church has important things to learn from modernity, especially from liberal democracy, at the same time that our culture is in need of the moral and social vision distilled in the best of religious tradition. Since its founding in 1924 Commonweal has staked a claim for religious principles and perspective in American life, and for laypeople’s voices within the church. The magazine has been credited with helping prepare American Catholics for Vatican II and its aftermath, and Commonweal’s current readers say it has helped them weather the sexual-abuse scandal in the church and work through questions and frustrations related to the role of women, the relationship between religion and politics, and church teachings on sexuality. The magazine has an ongoing interest in social justice, ecumenism, just-war teaching, liturgical renewal, women’s issues, the primacy of conscience, and the interchange between Catholicism and liberal democracy. Today Commonweal publishes many of the leading theologians, writers, and public figures in the United States, including Alice McDermott, Luke Timothy Johnson, Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, Paul Elie, and Sidney Callahan, among many others. Commonweal is published 11 times a year in print, with new stories added every day at www.commonwealmagazine.org. It is published by the nonprofit Commonweal Foundation, and its governance involves no institutional church affiliation.
