Ellen B. Koneck is the executive director at Commonweal. Millennial editor Robert Christian interviewed her on her faith, life, joy, young people, and more.

You’re familiar with a great deal of research on young people and religion, and you’ve spoken about this on a number of occasions. What is distinct about Gen-Z and/or younger millennials that older people should understand? 

I feel very grateful and lucky to get to keep my toes dipped in the world of research even while I work in the journalism world. Before joining Commonweal as executive director in 2022, I was the head writer at Springtide Research Institute, an organization dedicated to exploring the religious and spiritual lives of young people. That work colors how I approach my role at Commonweal, fundamentally because the research gives me hope. There is a lot changing, to be sure. The landscape beneath our feet is shifting in terms of religious identity, practice, belief, behavior, and more. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the leaders of those shifts, but no generation is exempt from them.

And I find that hope is actually the distinct factor: so many people are wringing their hands over the headline version of current trends around disaffiliation, un-affiliation, declining trust, and so on. But the majority of Gen Z and Gen Alpha self-identify as religious or spiritual (Springtide data demonstrates this easily). And Gen Z turns to religion for a sense of belonging more than any other generation (a recent study from More in Common identifies this trend). And this is good news, if you ask me. Because while young people may be doing religion differently than prior generations (that is, it may not look, sound, smell, exactly how their parents or grandparents would expect), those who are religious are flourishing. In other words, their approach to religion is working. Religious young people (however their practice may look) express greater well-being across a dozen different metrics (like friendships, finances, mental health) than their non-religious peers. None of this is evident in the headline versions of “disaffiliation and declining trust.”

Our religious expressions have shifted hundreds of times in the last 2,000 years; they will shift again. In the meantime, these shifts are an opportunity for renewal – for the church (and other religious organizations) to listen first and respond to the needs and desires of an emerging generation.

What specific challenges and opportunities does this present for the Church? 

It’s all opportunity. The challenges are opportunities, too, because the potential is nothing less than renewal and conversion. Foremost to renew and convert the church; to demand that it live its vocation in every instance. That it be a place that heals alienation rather than breeds it. That it be a place people dig their heels in and debate about rather than give up on. I truly believe the church is the lucky recipient of a generational posture that will not tolerate hypocrisy. Gen Z and Gen Alpha will require trust to be earned and will not give trust to institutions (religious and otherwise) without a vetting process first. Three cheers for that. It will bring great health and transparency to our church; the only challenge—the key opportunity—is that we accept the work of earning trust through listening rather than expect it as a matter of unearned authority.

Has Commonweal’s approach been affected by the changing demographics in the Church and larger patterns of disaffiliation? Can it reach more young people and a larger number of everyday Catholics without diluting its intellectual rigor? Is that part of its mission? 

I think Commonweal has a great advantage here, to be honest. (How and whether we manage to seize that advantage is my full-time job, of course.) The advantage is simple: we are lay-led and independent—we always have been and we always will be. So we are used to operating “outside” the institutional church while still claiming Catholicism as the tradition into which and from which our work flows. I think it is actually incredibly similar to some of the ways young people approach religion. They are on the periphery; they dabble. They explore. They ask questions and make space for doubt. There is no imprimatur in our pages; there is not requirement for belief to open our magazine and find something nourishing. I think this is a perfect starting point for many people who are interested in questions of God and religion but aren’t interested in the institutional claims, commitments, or baggage that might come with that.

But to answer your question more concretely: one of the ways shifts in affiliation status has and will continue to impact our work is simply that the Catholics of the 60s, 70s, and 80s recommended us to each other; there were networks of people whose Catholic identity mattered; they wanted to explore the ways their faith could and should impact the world. I have heard countless, beautiful stories of readers who have subscribed for 50 or 60 years, first introduced to Commonweal by a priest on a Catholic college campus, or who saw Commonweal strewn about their family’s home growing up in a Catholic household. Those inroads, those introductions, aren’t givens anymore. So where there were natural processes in place in another era, we now have to work harder and more creatively to find ‘our people.’

How does your faith affect your life outside of your work?

This is a hard question to answer, like (to borrow a cliché) asking a fish to describe water. My work is within this world of faith, and my studies were within this world; the books I reach for first grapple with the theological, and when I manage to write, it is from the space of belief. My children are educated in the same space they received their sacraments; the same place we attend Mass and funerals with our community; at home we read Tomie DePaola’s Book of Bible Stories followed by the latest Jon Klassen folk story. What I mean is, it’s hard to point to instances of faith affecting life because faith is, by nature, ubiquitous.

And actually, my difficulty articulating any kind of distinction, my inability to point out any particularities when attempting to answer this question, relates to the reasons I feel at home at Commonweal. Not every piece in the magazine or on the website or on the podcast is explicitly “Catholic” or even anchored in a faith-oriented conversation. These are conversations, instead, about politics or art or literature or culture, all on their own terms. Commonweal maintains a Catholic sensibility, a Catholic approach to the things we pay attention to, but it doesn’t insert Catholicism as a theme in every subject. That is reductive to Catholicism and faith, I think. Both are more pervasive. Both are ubiquitous. They are the shaping force of the container, not the thing contained. So I don’t know how to answer how faith affects my life outside of work; it is embedded in my life and work, it is at the base of everything else. My life and my work have taken this trajectory because of my faith; there is no way of separating them. (By the way, I think this is part of what Gen Z and Gen Alpha are getting right in their posture toward religion: for too long religious and spiritual traditions, ideas, beliefs, and communities have been mediated by institutions and experts; increasingly we see that they are too abundant to fit into our given containers and categories; they overflow!)

You seem to be a very joyful, warm person. Is that just part of your innate personality—or a product of conscious decisions or cultivated habits? Is joy something you think about? 

That’s a very generous impression! No doubt an impression encouraged by the highlight-reel nature of having a presence or a personality on the internet, but I admit it’s not entirely a fabrication of being online, either. I do think I am a joyful person. Or perhaps your word, warm, is the better one. (I’ve been accused of being peppy, but that’s only when someone doesn’t know how much and how often I talk about death. Just wait!)

I don’t do anything to cultivate this; though I am sure I’d be better off if I did. And I don’t often think about joy as a goal or a virtue or a concept or a state. But when I do, I am thinking of grief, too, as I find these conditions existentially interrelated. One of my favorite poems is “Joy” by Liesl Mueller, who describes these “two seemingly parallel lines” perfectly. That we never expect deep joy and deep pain to relate to each other, but they draw from the same well. Nouwen talks about this, too. He writes that “every bit of life is touched by a bit of death” and that it is this lack of “clear-cut joy” that points us “beyond the limits of our existence” (in Making All Things New). I don’t mean this in a reductive way, like ‘experiencing the clouds makes us grateful for the sun’ (I hate that stuff). I don’t mean grief helps create a contrast experience that helps us recognize joy (or vice versa). I mean that joy and grief are both states of utter helplessness; they are both states of wilderness, periphery places where weeping is the only reasonable language. I don’t know how else to say this; just, they are the same.

Why are you Catholic in 2024?

The saints, the sacraments, the social teachings of the church, the encounters I’ve been blessed to have with God and my neighbors, and the supernatural hope that Christianity alone can offer: to face the bleakest of realities—death itself and the death of God—and to rise again in the face of despair.