Commonweal (magazine)

For other uses, see Commonweal (disambiguation).

Commonweal

Editor	Dominic Preziosi
Frequency	11 issues a year
Circulation	20,000
First issue	1924
Company	Commonweal Foundation
Country	United States
Based in	New York City
Language	English
Website	<strong%20class= "error"><span%20class="scribunto-error"%20id="mw-scribunto-error-2">Lua%20error%20in%20Module:Wd%20at%20line%20405:%20invalid%20escape%20sequence%20near%20'"^'. http://<strong%20class="error"><span%20class="scribunto-error"%20id="mw-scribunto-error-2">Lua%20error%20in%20Module:Wd%20at%20line%20405:%20invalid%20escape%20sequence%20near%20'"^'.
ISSN	0010-3330

Commonweal is a liberal American Catholic journal of opinion, edited and managed by lay Catholics, headquartered in the Interchurch Center in New York City. It is the oldest independent Roman Catholic journal of opinion in the United States.

History

Founded in 1924 by Michael Williams (1877–1950) and the Calvert Associates, Commonweal is the oldest independent Roman Catholic journal of opinion in the United States. The magazine was originally modeled on The New Republic and The Nation but “expressive of the Catholic note” in covering literature, the arts, religion, society, and politics.

Commonweal has published the writing of François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Hannah Arendt, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Jacques Maritain, Dorothy Day, Robert Bellah, Graham Greene, Emmanuel Mounier, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Thomas Merton, Wilfrid Sheed, Paul Ramsey, Joseph Bernardin, Abigail McCarthy, Christopher Lasch, Walter Kerr, Marilynne Robinson, Luke Timothy Johnson, Terry Eagleton, Elizabeth Johnson, and Andrew Bacevich. It has printed the short fiction of Evelyn Waugh, J. F. Powers, Alice McDermott, and Valerie Sayers; the poetry of W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, John Updike, Les Murray, John Berryman, and Marie Ponsot; and the artwork of Jean Charlot, Rita Corbin, Fritz Eichenberg, and Emil Antonucci.

Overview

The journal, tagged as "A Review of Religion, Politics, and Culture", is run as a not-for-profit enterprise and managed by a twenty-six-member board of directors. The word "commonweal" is a reference to an important term in the political philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, who argued that legitimate leaders must prioritize "the common good" or "the commonweal" in making political decisions.

Commonweal publishes editorials, columns, essays, and poetry, along with film, book, and theater reviews. Eleven issues of Commonweal are released each year, with a circulation of approximately 20,000. In 1951, Commonweal was hit by financial troubles and almost shut down because of a loss in subscribers.

Viewpoint

Although Commonweal maintains a relatively strong focus on issues of specific interest to liberal Catholics, this focus is not exclusionary. A broad range of issues—religious, political, social, and cultural—are examined independent of any relationship to Catholicism and the church. Commonweal has attracted contributors from all points of the mainstream political spectrum in the United States.

Commonweal published several articles in support of censured theologian Roger Haight in 2001, 2007, and 2009.

See also

• America
• Catholic Worker
• Faith & Family
• National Catholic Register
• National Catholic Reporter
• Zenit News Agency

Further reading

• Rodger Van Allen, The Commonweal and American Catholicism: The Magazine, the Movement, the Meaning, Philadelphia: Fortune Press, 1974
• Rodger Van Allen, Being Catholic: Commonweal from the Seventies to the Nineties, Loyola University Press, 1993
• Patrick Jordan and Paul Baumann, Commonweal Confronts the Century: Liberal Convictions, Catholic Tradition, Touchstone, 1999
• Robert B. Clements (1972). "The Commonweal: The Williams-Shuster Years"

External links

• UNZ archive of Commonweal 3,067 Issues, 48,742 articles, 83,047pp / Nov 12, 1924 to Dec 21, 2001