Alex Mikulich

Commentary: Tempting as it may be, we need not resort to apocalyptic cynicism. Our greatest hope for the life of Mother Earth is in our own rootedness in her awesome regenerative life systems.

Five public policy areas could facilitate a shift from a destructive growth economy toward a "circular" economy that regenerates cycles of nature and the Earth by eliminating waste and pollution, and reusing, repairing and recycling products and materials.

Commentary: We tend not to see how economic growth delivers diminishing returns. Degrowth provides another way, one in harmony with diverse ecologies that serve the full flourishing of our human and nonhuman kin.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: The U.S. bishops' "Faithful Citizenship" never discusses assaults on the U.S. Constitution or how the president consistently undermines Catholic moral principles.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: Death and deadliness seem to be all around us with no way out. Consider the idea of receptive generosity, which draws us into intimate, infinite sensitivity for all creation.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: We who believe we are white need to make far more difficult collective sacrifices to create the conditions of the possibility of living racial equality as a way of life.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: Embracing a blues hope means making a decision to stand with and for every black and brown person in America. It means crying out to God with people yearning for freedom and justice.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: Disproportionate rates of infection and death among African Americans lay bare continuing health inequalities and the need for the nation to heal this gaping wound through reparations.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: The neoliberal economy and market democracy by which we live is killing us and the planet. We North Americans need to begin with (un)learning how coloniality lives inside of us.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: Dear white reader, before you retreat to the safety of self-perceived innocence, stop and dwell with the ways our African American brothers and sisters see us.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: There are numerous ways Catholics who believe they are white can take time and space to dwell in and learn from black Americans and Black History Month in February.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: As collective fanaticism condones the president's unbridled brutality, the deeper malaise is the way too many seem to put more faith in redemptive violence than in the Gospel.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: Until people of faith who believe that they are white contend with and dwell in the reality of blackness in America, we will not be prepared to become a prophetic counter-witness to the deceitful powers that seek to destroy the birth of God's love in the world today. 

Decolonizing Faith and Society: While we rightly sense the urgency for revolutionary action, the desire for change is not without pitfalls. But Sophia Wisdom draws us into a wholly different way of proceeding.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: Will we white settlers turn toward a new way of being? Will we co-sense our interconnectedness and obligations with and for diverse human kin and other-than-human kin?

Decolonizing Faith and Society: The signs are clear. The Trump administration fulfills all four marks of an authoritarian regime. It is time for us to demand dignity, equality and justice for all.

As a people, as a nation, our worship for our military might and weapons has only deepened over the seven decades since we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's time to face our own violence and renew Catholic nonviolence.

Review: As we march into global transformations of the 21st century, we have much to learn from Jason Berry's City of a Million Dreams, which vividly remembers New Orleans' brutal past and rightly commemorates both the insuppressible African struggle for freedom and irrepressible yearning for new life sung by every new stream of migrants.

Decolonizing Faith and Society: We have not moved beyond colonial ways of thinking and being. Are most Americans today working to live or living to work?

The "fruit of the earth" and "work of human hands" invites, nurtures and challenges us to be constantly transformed into God's intimate love for the whole of creation. But how sensitive are we to the whole of God's creation and the intimacy of planetary biodiversity?