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Welcome

to The New School, Commonweal's learning community and podcast.

Join us now for a conversation with cultural historian and astrologer Richard Tarnas and host Michael Lerner.

Rick Tarnas, welcome back to The New School at Commonweal.

Thank you, Michael.

It's always a pleasure to see you and talk with you.

And within like, two, three days of doing a little bit of that research, Stan and I, whoa, there's something here that shouldn't be there unless there's some validity to it.

So that's perhaps a little too long of a response to a couple of things that you brought up.

And I think a lot of Australian listeners will be aware of him.

He used to be quite a feature on ABC Radio National, where I work.

He wrote a very interesting piece the other day for Commonwealth, saying the US-born Pope is changing US Catholicism.

And I just wonder how you felt about it, as I knew I was talking to you.

He talks about the Pew Research Center that does all that fabulous research on attitudes and polling and so on around the world.

I'm here with my two good friends, Heidi Schlumpf and Dan Horan.

Heidi is senior correspondent at Commonweal Magazine.com. She is also an award-winning journalist and part-time faculty member at Loyola University Chicago.

Dan is professor of philosophy, religious studies, and theology at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

He is also a regular columnist at the National Catholic Reporter.

And I have a wonderful group of students, but it just makes life a little more hectic.

I was lucky to be invited to be part of a panel with friend of the podcast, Steve Millies, just this past Saturday.

And the topic was about the new converts, which I wrote about for Commonweal Magazine's October issue.

But we had a wonderful day-long event discussing this, especially talking about the rise in people entering OCIA on college campuses.

This is Dominic Preziosi, editor of Commonweal.

Amid the viciousness and sheer scale of the second Trump administration's crackdown on immigration, it can sometimes be difficult to think back to 2017 when the first Trump administration began its policy of family separation for asylum seekers arriving at the US-Mexico border.

Stories and images of children separated from their parents taken into custody shocked the nation, Democrats and Republicans alike, and the world, eventually forcing Trump to reverse the policy by executive order in 2018.

For her recent book, Now We Are Here, Gabrielle Oliveira followed 16 migrant families from Guatemala, El Salvador, and her native Brazil, many of whom were able to remain in the United States and actually reunite.

On this episode of the Commonweal podcast, Commonweal Director of Mission and Partnerships, Claudia Villa-Cosnahan, speaks with Oliveira about her work on this project and some of the compelling stories and surprising findings that she shares.

Plus, I'm joined by Commonweal senior correspondent Heidi Schlumpf to discuss the latest in Catholic news, including the midterm elections and the Catholic vote, the phenomenon of new Catholic converts, and the U.S. bishop's letter to Donald Trump on behalf of Haitians living in the United States.

That's all coming right up on the Commonweal Podcast.

Hi, Heidi.

Like, I remember seeing this newspaper as a kid.

And in fact, she had also written... for the Commonweal, which was a very popular liberal Catholic publication in America.

And the priest who was the editor had been before he was running the church in Pittsburgh, where I later grew up.

My family had moved to there.

He was editing the Commonweal.

And so he had written about Dorothy Day and she had written articles for that paper.

So she was hugely prominent in the church in America.

beautiful thing.

My friend Peggy Steinfeld, the former editor of Commonweal magazine, once wrote a hilarious piece that was a papal statement that anyone should be excommunicated if they don't root for Notre Dame and he kept.

It should be excommunicated.

Those of us like who teach at Georgetown or people who went to B.C. have other views on this.

Map that out for our listeners who are probably, for the most part, goyim.

I think with a largely Christian listenership, since we're a Commonweal-supported podcast, a lot of our listeners understand how these dynamics play out in Christianity.

They understand that there are pretty strong conservative currents in the Catholic Church and in various Protestant denominations.

But it's still quite possible to be a left-wing Catholic in the United States or to be a left-wing Baptist or whatever.

Thank you very much.

That's all the time we have for this episode.

We want to thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time.

Thanks for joining us.