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.