The Dance of Faith and Doubt

 

 

 

Faith With Doubt

The Dance of Faith and Doubt

Sunday, September 6, 2026

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Father Richard Rohr reflects on the place of doubt in a mature life of faith: 

Basic religious faith is a vote for some coherence, purpose, benevolence, and direction in the universe. Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good.   

 

Not Over Yet

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s ‘Regime Change’

Peter Quinn

September 8, 2026

Please email comments to letters@commonwealmagazine.org.

“Trump derangement syndrome”—coined to describe the reactions of his most virulent critics—seems an apt description of the president himself (OSV news photo/Evelyn Hockstein, Reuters).

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump lays bare the full story of year one of the second Trump administration. Their sources are myriad. Many are insiders who, for obvious reasons, prefer to remain anonymous. The end result is a meticulously researched chronicle of pervasive corruption, egomania, winsome cruelty, and score settling that is exhaustive, exhausting and, at times, frightening. 

Haberman and Swan are experienced, well-versed journalists who’ve reported on the administration since Trump’s first term. They know the terrain and the personalities. This time around, the administration came in with the knowledge and experience to avoid previous missteps. There was a clear plan, Project 2025, and a cadre of hardcore loyalists to carry it out.

 

Church of England clergy and vocations in crisis, report says

Ruth Gledhill

08 September 2026, The Tablet

Alamy

The Church of England vicar is becoming an “endangered species”, a new report launched at the House of Lords last week has warned.

The report, Parish Ministry: Addressing the Crisis in Stipendiary Clergy Numbers in the Church of England, is published after a day-long consultation at St George’s House, Windsor that brought together bishops, theologians, parish clergy and Church of England officials.

The consultation, an initiative between campaign group Save the Parish and senior Church of England leaders to halt the decline in frontline ministry, was chaired by former Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich Martin Seeley. It came as latest statistics show entries into ordination training fell from 591 in 2020 down to 370 in 2024, with 71 per cent of ministry leaders identifying “poor clergy well-being” as the primary factor of concern to potential candidates.

The global rise of unhappiness and how religion can reverse the trend

 

Guest Voices

Opinion

The global rise of unhappiness and how religion can reverse the trend

Byron R. Johnson, Thomas Kidd, Religion News Service  ncr

A TIME TO BE BRAVE

 

A TIME TO BE BRAVE

This September carries another memory: the beautiful morning twenty-five years ago when in a matter of hours so much that had seemed secure suddenly was not. Much of our world feels that way now. READ MORE...

THE PROBLEM WITH ‘WOMEN’S ORDINATION’

 

THE PROBLEM WITH ‘WOMEN’S ORDINATION’

By restricting the priesthood to men, the Catholic Church distorts humanity’s sacramental encounter with God and violates a fundamental right to spiritual discernment, creating a injustice that sacralizes global gender inequality. READ MORE...

Posted inFaith in Focus

When ‘thy will be done’ means saying goodbye to someone you love

by John Eliot Jordan September 4, 2026

Credit: Hikmet on Unsplash

As I drove my wife to the hospital, the baby wouldn’t stop kicking. Still a week from his grand entrance, he was showing his impatience by inflicting pain on his mother. But this wasn’t the day we would finally say hello to my son. It was the one where we would say goodbye to my grandmother. She was 92, a fact everyone who knew her always forgot. So vibrant and funny, she made us all assume she would be around forever. But she was dying. And yet, as Carlie and I pulled in, we were both still holding out for a miracle. 

Posted inShort Take

The three great loves of Wendell Berry

by Nathan Beacom September 4, 2026

Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., on March 10, 2011. Credit: AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File

In 1956, the great French philosopher Jacques Maritain gave a lecture at the University of Chicago in which he rebuked his fellow Europeans for a “grand slander” against America. “All this talk about American materialism is no more than a curtain of silly gossip and slander,” he said. “What I know is that the basic characteristics of the American people are generosity, good will, the sense of human fellowship.”

For Maritain, the United States was not the shallow image that even some Americans hold. Yes, there is a part of the nation that is all about commerce, advertising and consumption, but there is a parallel, and equally American, spiritual current that is about taking care of the land and our neighbors and seeing the dignity in what is humble.