The Catholic Church is dividing along culture war lines. For many conservative Catholics associated with the “old guard leadership” of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Catholic cable channel EWTN, Pope Francis is enemy number one. David Gibson,...
William Cossen is a teacher in the Social Studies Department at The Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. This interview is based on his new book, Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Cornell University...
Did you know the Jesuits were some of the largest slaveholders in colonial America? Our guest in this episode is Rachel L. Swarns, author of The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved And Sold to Build the American Catholic Church. We...
The Catholic socialist Dorothy Day was a fan of Italian (also Catholic, to an extent) writer Iganzio Silone. She wrote about meeting Silone as part of January 1, 1968 piece in The Catholic Worker: In wrestling with the problem of...
The Pope wants peace in the Ukraine. He opposes Russian war crimes, but is not acting diplomatically on behalf of the West in the way John Paul II did during the Cold War. Over at The Atlantic, John Allen, the...
Here is a taste of David Mills’s column at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: In 1960, the leader of American conservatism treated a leading radical, and as it happened fellow Catholic, like an idiot. The first, who died in 2008, is now...
A Catholic expert on right-to-die cases testifies at the Terri Schiavo trial. Episode 54: “Respecting life, but not at all costs’ dropped today. Subscribers to Current at the Longshore level and above have access to new episodes of this narrative history podcast. To listen...
Here is Oxford church historian, journalist, and Pope Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh at Commonweal on why the pontiff focuses so much on migration: Yet neither the current scale of the problem nor Francis’s own background is sufficient to grasp why...
I recently read a blog post from Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, that used the death of Pope Benedict to score political points. Here is a taste of that post: Ratzinger was a great...
Once again I am teaching “Created and Called for Community,” Messiah University’s first-year core course. Today I taught an excerpt from John Henry Newman‘s 1852 book The Idea of a University. If you are a longtime reader of this blog,...
Francis recently spoke to the Associated Press: A taste: Pope Francis criticized laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust,” saying God loves all his children just as they are and called on Catholic bishops who support the laws to welcome LGBTQ...
Check out this very interesting piece at Jacobin by historian Travis Knoll: In short, [Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] respects religion without instrumentalizing or being instrumentalized by it. Such alliances have come with serious challenges, especially on sexual...
The pro-life election denier and MAGA priest is no longer a Roman Catholic priest. Here is the Los Angeles Times: The Vatican has defrocked an anti-abortion U.S. priest, Frank Pavone, for what it said were “blasphemous communications on social media”...
Metaxas showed-up at a Trump rally in LaTrobe this weekend. The Biden and Pelosi stuff starts at the 2:38 mark: My “favorite” part of this interview is at the 3:10 mark when the Trump-loving Metaxas says that “when somebody lies...
Check out Carrie Gates’s recent interview with Notre Dame historian John McGreevy. They discuss his new book Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis. A taste: In the book, you address many of the challenges the...
Notre Dame historian John McGreevy: Quick: Name the countries with the most baptized Catholics. You might guess Brazil (172.2 million) or the United States (72.3 million). You might miss Mexico (110.9 million) and the Philippines (83.6 million). You might be...
Over JSTOR Daily, Livia Gershon, with the help of historian Peter Cajka, explains how the automobile changed Milwaukee Catholicism. Here is a taste: With the rise of cars, and especially after 1945, these boundaries loosened. Many Catholics moved out of...
If you have been reading Current this week you may have noticed that we featured an interview with historian Christopher Shannon and a review of his new book American Pilgrimage: A Historical Journey Through Catholic Life in a New World....
Jeroen Dewulf is Queen Beatrix Professor in the Department of German & Dutch Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. This interview is based on his new book, Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022)....
Watch: Some context:...
