Of This World

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.