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.