By Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R.
On October 28, the New York Times published a feature about the Roman Catholic magazine Commonweal on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. The article described a “complicated centennial” for the monthly magazine, in light of challenges facing the venerable publication as it enters its second century, including declining numbers of American Catholics, and an even more precipitous drop in church members who embrace the magazine’s progressive politics. Founded in 1924 as a Catholic “intellectual weekly,” Commonweal is the country’s oldest independent Catholic journal of opinion; its staunchly liberal worldview embraces both the communitarianism of the Catholic Worker Movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the 1930s, and the liberal reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. At its peak in the 1960s and ’70s, when circulation hovered around 50,000, Commonweal published towering Catholic voices including Day, Thomas Merton, and the “radical priest” Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Phillip, as well as such intellectual and literary luminaries as Hannah Arendt, Graham Greene, and W.H. Auden.
Now, the Times reported, circulation stands at 15,000, as attendance at weekly Mass continues its steady decline and, for many, the Catholic Church mainly conjures a legacy of pedophilia and coverup. Despite being led by Pope Francis, whose papacy has been defined by encyclicals against climate change and the abuses of global capitalism, the animating energy of American Catholicism tilts ever more to the right. The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump won the national Catholic vote by a 15-point margin, and incoming Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert, has espoused so-called “post-liberal” policies more simpatico with the authoritarianism of Viktor Orban than the pastoral optimism of Vatican II.
On the same day the Times article appeared, I went to the Chelsea Piers on Manhattan’s west side to meet Ellen B. Koneck ’16 M.A.R. In 2022, Koneck was named executive director at Commonweal, a rebranding of the traditional position of publisher. As the head of the not-for-profit’s business operations, Koneck oversees the magazine’s production, distribution, marketing, and fundraising. She works closely with editor Dominic Preziosi, but in accordance with conventional separation of powers, the journal’s content is led by her editorial colleagues.
On that October day, Koneck’s one concern was overseeing the preparation of the evening’s gala 100th birthday celebration. As the banquet hall was being organized and decorated, she took a few minutes to meet an old classmate and stand for a photograph. Koneck and I graduated from YDS the same year, but knew each other only in passing, brought together by our shared Catholicism and a devotion to Commonweal. I, being more of her parents’ generation than hers, am representative of the so-called “Commonweal Catholic”—like the magazine, liberal in politics and theology, and informed by a foundational morality of human dignity, social justice, wealth distribution, and cultural literacy.
Koneck was born and raised in Minnesota in what she describes as a “very Catholic” family. Her father, a retired insurance agent, had entered seminary as a teen before determining that his calling was not the priesthood but courting and marrying her mother, who worked in the public schools with special-needs students. The youngest of five children, Koneck grew up dutifully attending Mass and observing the Church’s rites of passage, rituals, she recalls, that felt more like social formalities than spiritual formation. Then, at age 14, she experienced a spiritual awakening that defined her life, and which she speaks about publicly here for the first time. Private Catholic high school, a year of missionary work, a Theology B.A. from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, and marriage to her husband Robert, all followed in quick succession. The couple entered the University of Notre Dame together, he in law school, she in the graduate theology department’s Master of Divinity program. When her husband was invited to transfer to Columbia University Law School, the couple relocated to the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City. There, Ellen began her long affiliation with Commonweal, whose offices are essentially across the street from the university. She spent a year as the magazine’s editorial assistant before transferring her graduate credits to Yale Divinity School. At YDS, Koneck earned a general M.A.R. with a heavy emphasis on philosophy and literature.
Since graduating in 2016, she has worked as a lecturer at Sacred Heart University, acquisitions editor for Anselm Academic, and head writer for Springtide, a research institute examining trends in the religious lives of young people. In 2016 and ’17, she served as Community and Events Manager at Commonweal, and was subsequently named to the magazine’s board of directors. She and her husband had returned to Minnesota to raise their two children when the board approached her about the publisher’s position. She remains based in the Twin Cities, fulfilling most of her duties remotely, and traveling to New York several times a year. The job also takes her to conferences and speaking engagements across the country.
For this article, we spoke on three separate occasions. First, a week before Election Day, on the patio of the Chelsea banquet hall overlooking the Hudson River; second, on an extended telephone interview two days after the election; and finally, earlier this month. These three conversations have been combined and edited for length and clarity to create the conversation that follows.
Timothy Cahill: What have the conversations inside Commonweal been since the election? What are people at the magazine saying?
Ellen B. Koneck: There was some grief and resignation, but for the most part the energy has been, “Okay, well, we’re here. We have a job to do.” We have never endorsed or condoned or even tolerated Trump and his antics. But the mood is, take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and figure out what needs to be done.
TC: How does Commonweal conceive of its mission?
EBK: I often think of Commonweal’s work as the work of paying attention and helping others do the same. Simone Weil said that attention is the faculty next to prayer—to take something in and be taken by it. We’re paying attention to shifts in the zeitgeist and the conversations around community, capitalism, economics, and poverty, and how religion and theology play a role in that. We think about the church and the world, not in soft or sentimental ways, but in ways that challenge the status quo. I think some of the investigation that needs to happen, both editorially and when it comes to the kind of action that Commonweal and its readers might take, is seeking to understand the disengagement that we already know is happening in the church, but also now seems to be having political ramifications in declining trust and anti-establishment rage at the status quo. To write about those things, but also to activate communities into conversation and discourse with each other. One of the resounding feelings since the election has been this sense that Commonweal has a role to play when it comes to civil discourse.
After my initial disbelief and anger, the distress that our country would choose this man over the Constitution, blah, blah, blah—I’ve been feeling that maybe this is an opening for those of us on the left, an invitation to something new.
This past August, I gave a lecture in Atlanta at the invitation of the Aquinas Center at Emory University. They asked me to do a talk on the crisis in religion and church disaffiliation, and said, “But can you make it hopeful?” And I said, I’m happy to—I have data-driven reasons for hope, I have theological reasons for hope—but it starts with looking at reality as it is, which is declining numbers and disengagement. I just don’t think that’s the whole story. And I think the same thing is happening politically. We have to face this reality, take it for what it is, but then start to inspect what’s underneath. What would cause this disillusionment, the anger, the choice to opt for someone like Trump? It implies a dissatisfaction that I’m curious about. I am not hopeless—I want to figure out what’s going on. Which is to say, this strikes me as opportunity not for despair but creative renewal. As religious media, Commonweal gets to call on hope.
To say nothing of faith and love, which are also integral.
We are very lucky we get to fall back on these virtues and this religious tradition, to call on it, draw on it for our work, and contribute to it. The tradition is live and we’re in it. That’s a very unique, wonderful spot we as a magazine find ourselves in, one that’s intellectually rigorous, but also has access to hope, love, charity, faith. It uniquely situates us in the media landscape. Faith, hope, and love are part of our tradition, but so are doubt and skepticism and moments of unbelief. We get to rely on and contribute to the tradition out of which we come, the Catholic tradition, but we’re not institutional. And I think that’s another aspect of our unique role: we have no evangelical promise to fulfill. We have no billionaire backers to answer to. We have no bishops who oversee us. We are wholly independent. That’s rare in the media now. How many backers are there whose agendas obviously influence the work that gets published or broadcast?
I think that’s part of the reason our work will matter to the next generation. They have not been raised in institutions. Many of them would prefer not to walk through the doors of a formal religious organization, but they’re still interested in religious and spiritual questions. And to find a place like us—there’s no creed needed, you don’t have to know when to sit, stand, and kneel—but you can have access to questions that have been part of the human story for thousands of years, and engage them without signing on any dotted lines.
How do you think love manifests itself at the magazine?
That’s such a cool question. It was Aquinas who said that to love is to will the good of another. Commonweal shies away from sentimentality, so we might not think of ourselves as “loving” or promoting love in the corny or saccharine perception of the word. But, there is love in the work of paying attention and telling the truth, and in making space for differing opinions to all breathe deeply on the page and not cutting anyone off before their argument’s been made. This is another of Saint Thomas’s practices. You have to take an argument on its best terms before you can disagree. You have to totally understand what you’re disagreeing with, not mischaracterize the thing and then disagree with your mischaracterization. There’s a lot of caricature in current writing and politics, and Commonweal doesn’t deal in caricature. Sometimes that makes us harder to read. Sometimes it means that you’ll approach the magazine and feel that you’ve been subjected to an opinion that you didn’t want to have to hear. But I actually think that’s love. I really do. I think it helps us get to the common good, which is what “commonweal” means.
Right. The short answer to my question is, it’s there in the name.
Yes! The common good.
What do you think most influenced your thinking when you were growing up? What kind of cultural influences, religious habits, reading, etc.?
My childhood felt marked by a kind of Catholicism that was really—what’s the word I’m looking for? — well, I didn’t understand it. When I was little, I didn’t even realize that when we went to church on Sundays, that church was about God. In school I learned about outer space—some science project— and felt dizzy over it; I remember having my first existential crisis as a 9-year-old, around The Wizard of Oz—thinking to myself, “What if we wake up tomorrow and everything was a dream?” None of that felt connected to what we did on Sunday mornings—just no feeling of a faith life in my childhood. Then, when I was in eighth grade, I went to a sleep-away summer camp that turned out to be a religious camp. And it was like heaven on this side. It was kickball and hot dogs and songs about Jesus. And I was like, “What? This is good stuff. You play and you do crafts and then you talk about God.” Who knew that God was this cool?
One night we were sitting around a bonfire, people were doing skits or something, and—I feel like this sounds silly to say, but it’s totally sincere. I don’t know that I’ve ever told this story, except to people in my life—I was praying, because that’s what everybody was doing around the bonfire, and I had the thought, “I can’t tell if I believe in God, but I like the idea of God.” I knew about God, but I didn’t know God. That’s what I felt like to my core. And I don’t know if I prayed a prayer or if it was just the observation of the fact, but in that moment an overwhelming peace set in. It was a knowledge, a sureness, a certainty that whatever else I needed to know about God would come in time, but at the core of the universe there is a God of Love who wants to know me and is willing to be known by me in return. Nothing happened. There was no event. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything. I just felt a calm, a reassurance, like, “You can rest at the center of the mystery, and no matter what you find out or learn or how much you pursue, if you pull in this direction, you will find me. If you pursue what is true and good and beautiful, that’s where I am.”
I went home and announced, “So, I love God. I know that there is a God, and now I’ll try to meet that God. That is what I want.” Not that I knew how that would work, exactly. So, I just started reading the Bible. I remember thinking, “I will start with Chapter One in Genesis and this is how I will meet the God I know exists. He, They, this God is mine to pursue for the rest of my life. There’s a relentless relationship available to me now.” I read the Bible cover to cover twice by the time I graduated high school.
I read that your college alma-mater, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, announced plans to eliminate 11 majors, including English, history, theatre, music, art, and theology. The president of the university is quoted as saying, “The majors that we are phasing out are those that were low enrolled and didn’t hold great promise in terms of what many families and students want, which is marketable skills and jobs after college.” This can’t have made you happy.
Ah, I feel so strongly about liberal arts education. What else is there? Should everyone get a marketing degree? I mean, okay, practically speaking, it’d probably be good if I had some marketing skills today, but it’s hard for me to understand asking questions and pursuing education for four years and having it all inclined exclusively toward professional development instead of broadly toward human expansion. It’s such an indictment of a Catholic University to cut liberal arts programs, because that’s what creates a backbone for society—to be culturally and philosophically and religiously literate, to have language about the spiritual and metaphysical life, to talk about our values across divides.
The liberal arts ethos is close not only to your values, but also to what Commonweal represents that draws you to the magazine. Still, typically, a magazine’s publisher or executive director is more likely to come from the Yale School of Management than Yale Divinity School.
I tried to tell the board that when they invited me to apply for the job! I said, “You guys know that I’m bad at math, right? I studied philosophy and theology. That’s what you’re signing up for.” And they said, “Yes, we do. We know that.”
And in 2022, they chose you to replace Thomas Baker, the long-time publisher who was retiring. Why was the title changed from publisher to executive director?
We just modernized it slightly. “Publisher” evokes an older model of media organization, where “executive director” is meant to subtly, implicitly make clear that we’re not just thinking about the publication and publishing per se. We’re thinking about ourselves more broadly as thought leaders across multiple platforms and initiatives.
How did you prepare for the job?
I had spent almost five years in the office before becoming executive director, including as editorial assistant, events manager, and member of the board. In all capacities, I worked closely with Tom Baker, who was an old-school mentor, a more “show, not tell” type of teacher. I just watched and witnessed Tom. This would be a very hard job for me to do remotely if I hadn’t for those five years seen how the work gets done. I felt really lucky then, and I still do. That’s how I prepared. And this position brings together a lot of qualities and interests I’ve long possessed. Whatever my role at the magazine has been, I’ve always been drawn to questions of, “What can we do to help this go farther, how can we help it sing, or find the right audience, or get funding?” I love the magazine. I want to boost it. So, when the board sent me the job description, it felt like, “Oh, I’m familiar with half this stuff and the other half I’ll learn.”
What to you is most challenging aspect of the work?
I don’t feel intimidated by the challenges ahead, but I can tell you what the obstacles are. “Nonprofit,” “religion,” “journalism,” “liberal”—these are terms going through major shifts. The way we relate to media, the way people consume journalism, attacks on being “progressive” or “liberal,” the total decline of trust around religious institutions, in particular Catholicism—these are all ticks against our work. So, we have a barrier-to-entry problem. We have to convince people of what and who we are before they meet us. One of the challenges, then, is finding language that’s fresh and accurate, that’s aligned with our history but also speaks to our future.
We’re about to enter, or reenter, a period when progressive ideas are discounted, distorted, and belittled by many in the centers of power. Against that onslaught, what is the future of a monthly liberal Catholic journal?
I think the Trump era is going to make our message more important, more urgent. I won’t be doing my job if nobody finds us who is looking for a compelling voice from the religious left—or even the religious center.
I wonder if you ever feel like a voice in the wilderness?
If you mean that in the religious sense, I suppose at Commonweal we don’t think of ourselves as a ministry, but we also don’t make a lot of sense without our Catholicism. One question we wrestle with on a regular basis is how to make religion more approachable for those who might think themselves allergic to religion. At the same time, there’s a sense that we are not necessarily here to cater to exactly what people say they want.
Maybe not what they want, but what they don’t know they need, are thirsting for?
A lot of media now is about confirming biases or telling people what they want to hear, and giving it in sentence fragments. It’s not helping the person live a fuller life. Commonweal is opposed to that. But that means we can seem more difficult to approach than the average magazine or news source. We do make a kind of demand on the reader, but it’s out of respect. It’s an invitation: “Think this through with more detail, more nuance.” That’s what we do intellectually—and also in terms of people’s religious sensibilities. Some readers may come to the magazine without any sense that religion is worthwhile. I can’t fault them for that feeling, but I’d like to have some of them leave having entertained the possibility that there may be something more to religion and Catholicism than they expected. We’re not trying to convert people, but we value religious literacy and believe it’s important that people understand the impact religious values have on society and engage with them. … Is that even close to what you were asking me?
‘The last first day’: Read Ellen Koneck’s 2016 article on the loss of her brother and the support of the YDS community
‘I don’t know, but it was such an interesting answer, I’m not sure I care. One of the messages of Commonweal is that there’s more to Catholicism than social conservatism and the monstrous priest sex scandal, which these days are the only two things that people seem to talk about.
I think that’s a fruit of our work, but it isn’t our goal. It’s a byproduct that somebody’s mind might be expanded about what Catholicism means or can be. The same way their minds might be expanded about any complex topic. Our aim is just to do very good work and let it speak for itself.
So, there isn’t an evangelical bone in the magazine’s body, so to speak?
“Evangelical” is not the right word. The Catholic sensibility we come from and contribute to believes that ritual, community, meaning-making, and belief are a part of the human experience, and they should not be dismissed by secularism. We may not make that case explicitly, but it’s implicit in our work as a liberal Catholic magazine: our belief that Christianity and American democracy not only have a lot to say to each other, but also have a lot to offer each other.
Timothy Cahill ‘16 M.A.R. writes on religion and the arts.