The Commonweal Podcast

Vaccines have encountered resistance ever since they were invented in the late eighteenth century.

But vaccine skepticism has never been as vocal—or as widespread—as it has become in the United States in recent years.

Much of that has to do with the policies of the Trump administration, in particular Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose drastic changes at the CDC have reversed decades of American vaccination policy.

But what explains such broad receptivity to vaccine skepticism among wide swaths of Americans?

On this episode, Commonweal associate editor Regina Munch speaks with Kiera Ganga Kieffer, a professor of religious studies at Fairfield University. Her new book, Unvaccinated Under God, offers a provocative reading of the history of vaccine hesitancy in America.

Anti-vaccination beliefs are less a matter of scientific misinformation, Kieffer argues, than forms of religious expression, in which vaccines themselves become proxies for broader existential concerns about justice and morality.

For further reading:

Regina Munch on Kennedy’s crusade against vaccination

Michael Peppard on persuading anti-vaxxers during the pandemic

M. Anthony Mills on rebuilding America’s scientific infrastructure

Even as Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to plummet across the country, voters in the deep-red state of Wyoming, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than six to one, remain solidly in support of the president.

So it took real courage for Bishop Steven Biegler—appointed by Pope Francis in 2017 to lead the Diocese of Cheyenne, encompassing all of Wyoming—to promulgate a pastoral letter on migration just a few months ago. 

Bishop Biegler is keen to point out that Be a Merciful Neighbor is not a political document. 

Instead it asks Catholics to evaluate policies of mass deportation in light of the values of the Gospel—especially Christ’s unequivocal call to welcome the stranger.

On this episode, Bishop Biegler speaks about the letter, and its surprising reception by Wyoming Catholics, with Commonweal Senior Correspondent Heidi Schlumpf. 

Before their interview, Schlumpf also updates listeners on recent news affecting American Catholics.

For further reading: 


Heidi Schlumpf on the Church’s continued fight on behalf of migrants


Pablo Christian Soenen on moral ambiguity in the borderlands


Paul Moses on the evils of immigration enforcement under Tom Homan

Following the 1989 parish closures, the infrastructure that had supported Black Catholic leadership in Detroit was largely dismantled. Surviving parishes tried to rebuild community, while parishes that were merged struggled to forge new identities. Meanwhile, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop who oversaw the closures, left the city for Rome to take a top Vatican finance post. 

In the third and final episode of “The City and the Cross,” host and Commonweal Centennial Fellow Aaron Robertson weighs the total cost of the 1989 parish closures—not just the loss of buildings, but the erosion of the systems that once nurtured Black Catholic vocations. He tells the story of Father John McKenzie, a Black priest who tried to serve Detroit’sBlack Catholic community with little institutional support, and whose own struggle raises a pointed question for the Church today: decades after 1989, how committed is the archdiocese to investing in Black Catholic communities? 

Slowly, another question also starts to emerge: did the Black Catholic Movement ultimately succeed or did it fail? Robertson asks the very people who lived through it. 

Today, as the Detroit archdiocese undergoes another round of restructuring, Black Catholics are bracing for the worst, but they refuse to walk away from the spiritual centers they built and still call home. 

Featured Voices


Marjorie Gabriel-Burrow, a musician who helped bring Black musical styles into Catholic Mass;


Norah Duncan IV, a nationally acclaimed composer who watched the 1989 closures unfold from inside the archdiocesan chancery;


Judith McNeeley, the daughter of Deacon Allen McNeeley, who was a member of St. Bernard parish until its 1989 closure;


Dr. M. Shawn Copeland, a former nun from Detroit, now one of the world's leading Catholic theologians;


Father Tom Lumpkin, a founding member of the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance (DCPA);


Father Norm Thomas, the longtime pastor of Sacred Heart and a cofounder of the DCPA who led the public resistance to the 1989 closures (archival);


Father John McKenzie, a Black former Benedictine monk ordained a priest in Detroit in 2019, whose path eventually led him out of the Roman Catholic Church;


Bishop Walter Hurley, Cardinal Edmund Szoka's chief of staff;


Cathey DeSantis, a nun and member of Sacred Heart who became an organizer, and eventually director, of the DCPA;


Steve Wasko, a Secular Franciscan and member of a Detroit-area anti-racism coalition that formed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder;


Dr. Shannen Dee Williams, a historian of Black Catholicism whose scholarship frames Detroit as the radical center of the national Black Catholic Movement;

and Patricia Montemurri, a former Detroit Free Press reporter who chronicled the 1989 closures and broke the news of Szoka’s Vatican appointment.

In September 1988, Cardinal Edmund Szoka, the archbishop of Detroit, announced via a closed-circuit television broadcast that the archdiocese would close dozens of inner-city parishes in Detroit within a year. Churches on the city’s predominantly Black east side would be disproportionately affected. 

The announcement triggered an immediate outcry: parishioners met at Sacred Heart, Detroit's Black Catholic “mother church,” and held vigils outside locked churches; the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance became the organizing hub of resistance; protestors marched up and down Woodward Avenue; and a few local residents planted mums outside the cardinal’s residence, one for each parish the archdiocese eventually closed. 

In the second episode of "The City and the Cross," host and Commonweal Centennial Fellow Aaron Robertson chronicles the community organizers who coordinated these efforts, a journalist who covered the story, the Catholic priests caught between their vows of obedience and their commitment to Black parishioners, and the prominent Black Catholic leader—a former Black Panther—who had to deliver the news of the parish closures to the communities he faithfully tried to serve.

Featured Voices:


Walter Hurley, Cardinal Szoka's chief of staff, who oversaw the implementation of the closures;


Patricia Montemurri, a Detroit Free Press reporter who covered the Catholic Church in Detroit for decades;


Father Norm Thomas, the Lebanese American pastor of Sacred Heart Church and a co-founder of the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance (DCPA), who became the public face of the fight against the closures (archival);


Cathey DeSantis, a former nun who became one of the lead organizers of the DCPA;


Eric Blount, a Sacred Heart parishioner and minister who became an outspoken public voice against the archdiocese's plan


Frances May, a Black laywoman who co-led the Alliance for Detroit Churches and directly challenged Cardinal Szoka's authority (archival);


Wyatt Jones III, whose father Wyatt Jones Jr. delivered the news of the closures to the communities he had devoted his life to serving;


Michelle McKinney and her mother Jackie Mahome, who watched St. Agnes—the church where Jackie had built pioneering Black history programs—be merged out of existence.

What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope?

These questions, originally formulated by philosopher Immanuel Kant, are some of the most essential ones that we ask. Attempting to answer them can take a lifetime, if we can answer them at all.

On this episode, we’re featuring an interview with Christopher Beha, the novelist and former editor of Harper’s Magazine whose new book, Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, offers an account of how he has grappled with these same questions. 

Beha grew up Catholic, but became a committed atheist in college after his twin brother was nearly killed in a car accident, and he himself was diagnosed with a serious illness. 

Beha’s journey through rival forms of atheism—scientific materialism and romantic idealism—and the experience of falling in love ultimately led him back to Catholicism.

Here, shares why he believes Catholicism offers a complete and coherent picture of reality.

For further reading: 


Costica Bradatan on the emotional history of atheism


Rand Richards Cooper speaks with Beha about his novels


George Scialabba on the romantic poets