Of This World

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn, author of God, Human, Animal, Machine, about her new memoir, Will and Attention (Doubleday). O'Gieblyn describes secretly attending Catholic Mass years after leaving the evangelical faith of her youth, the conversation with a priest that ended her path toward conversion, and the relapse that broke eleven years of sobriety. Together they explore Simone Weil's counsel to cure our faults "by attention and not by will," Augustine's two warring wills, and what Weil's warnings about thoughtless, mechanized work suggest about life with AI.Episode production by Seven Morris. Original music by Joel Myers.

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with journalist Peter Beinart, professor of journalism and political science at CUNY, about his recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza (Knopf). Together, they discuss the deep ideological shifts within the American Jewish community since the war in Gaza began, the historic tension between secular nationalism and religious tradition, and how the elevation of Zionism has challenged what it means to be a Jew in good standing.Episode production by Seven Morris. Original music by Joel Myers.

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with historian Greg Grandin about his new book, America, América: A New History of the New World (Penguin Press), and his recent essay, “The Education of Pope Leo XIV,” which ran in the New York Review of Books. Following one thread through the book, they discuss Catholicism in the New World—how the conquest carried “the terms of its own negation”; Bartolomé de las Casas and the roots of a universalist humanism; Octavio Paz on the “place in the cosmos” that colonial Catholicism offered the conquered; liberation theology as “a reaction to a reaction,” and why the Catholic Church under Pope Leo XIV may be the only global force capable of offering a moral challenge to Trumpism.Episode production by Seven Morris. Original music by Joel Myers.

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with historian Joseph Slaughter, assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University, about why so many evangelicals support Donald Trump—and why the word "evangelical" may no longer mean what it once did. Together, they trace three competing definitions of evangelicalism—doctrinal, cultural, and political—and how the political one increasingly overrides the other two. They discuss the mainstreaming of Pentecostalism, the "seven mountains" dominionism that now unites prosperity-gospel televangelists with hardline Calvinists, the fading of old disqualifications for Catholic and Mormon candidates, and where a conservative Christian resistance to Trumpism still stands.Episode production and original music by Joel Myers.

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with journalist Jonathan Cheng, China bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, about his new book, Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea's Personality Cult (Knopf). Together, they trace Kim Il-sung's upbringing in Pyongyang - once known as the "Jerusalem of the East", and how a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher and church organist drifted from Wilsonian Christian nationalism toward Leninism, then built a cult of personality that borrowed the forms of the faith he left behind: hymnals, weekly public confession, sacralized scripture, and Ten Principles his own people came to call the Ten Commandments. They also weigh how much of this was conscious design, what sets Kim apart from Stalin and Mao, and what his "Kimilsungism" suggests about the entanglement of religion and politics in our own moment.Episode production and original music by Joel Myers.

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with journalist Elise Ann Allen, the Rome correspondent for Crux, about her new book,  (Penguin Random House). Together, they discuss how Allen came to know then-Bishop Robert Prevost while investigating an abuse scandal in Peru, the formative decades he spent as a missionary amid poverty, terrorism, and political upheaval there, the influence of Augustinian spirituality and liberation theology on his social conscience, and how his instincts for unity and peacemaking are shaping a papacy that, as his recent trip to Africa revealed, is only beginning to find its voice.Episode production and original music by Joel Myers.

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with historian of Islam Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, professor of religion at Carleton College and author of A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (Cambridge University Press), which examines Muslim political life in Trump’s America.In this episode, the three discuss the grassroots faith-based coalition behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York, the Muslim community’s response to ICE raids in Minnesota and its roots in post-9/11 organizing, and what the war in Iran reveals about a regional politics driven more by the interests of billionaires and Gulf states than by the lives of ordinary people across the Middle East.Episode production and original music by Joel Myers.

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with economist Branko Milanović, senior scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center, about his new book, The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order (University of Chicago Press). Together, they discuss the end of the neoliberal era, the rise of what Milanović calls "national market liberalism," the economic and geopolitical consequences of a multipolar world, and what the greatest reshuffling of global incomes since the Industrial Revolution means for the future of capitalism. Episode production and original music by Joel Myers.

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with Gary Dorrien, professor at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, about the life and legacy of Jesse Jackson and the Black social gospel tradition. They explore Dorrien's own intellectual journey from rural Michigan to the academy, his groundbreaking trilogy on the Black social gospel, Jackson's relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., the Rainbow Coalition presidential campaigns of the 1980s, and what Jackson's career reveals about the enduring ties between the Black church and progressive politics.  Episode production and original music by Joel Myers.

Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with Jonathan Sheehan, professor of European History at UC Berkeley, about his new book On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular (Princeton University Press). They explore the long, contested history of Christian sacrifice from the early church and the cult of the martyrs through the Reformation and into the secular modern world, and discuss what the language of sacrifice might still offer us today.Episode production and original music by Joel Myers.