Flying in over the Twitter transom over the last few days came various bits of sad, bad, or maddening news: A third of Republicans assent to parts of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Sizable groups of both Democrat and Republican partisans believe the country would be...
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Irreplaceable
J. Daniel Sims
“Don’t forget. Everyone is replaceable.” I was seventeen the first time I heard those words. My teenage ego had swollen predictably as the weekend shift (scrubbing grease off floor-mats at the local deli) transitioned into something a bit more dignified. Promotions...
Making and Keeping Peace
The VII Foundation
To make progress towards peace, you have to build trust by going onto the other side’s turf rather than demanding that they come to meet you in grand government buildings. Shared risks can foster a bond. Experience suggests that two factors need to be in place...
One Nation, Sinful Under God
Shadi Hamid
So many of us have felt dread, that inchoate sense that something isn’t quite right: not with our politics nor our country nor even, perhaps, our own souls. We don’t often have the language for that thing, whatever it is, but the inability to give that something a...
Building Trust Across the Political Divide
April Lawson
We are arguably living in the most polarized time since the Civil War. And what’s more, the particular variety of polarization that presently plagues our society is an especially nasty one. Two kinds of polarization are spiking: negative polarization—“It’s not that I...
Forerunners: Sojourner Truth
Susannah Black, Jason Landsel
In 1844, in a field outside the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, a gang of young men showed up at a revival meeting, making trouble. The meeting’s organizers grew angry; the men – more than a hundred – redoubled their uproar. One of the meeting attendees, a...
The Complexities of Forbearance
Gregory Lee
In the middle of the twentieth century, American Christianity experienced a subtle but seismic shift. As sociologist Robert Wuthnow observed, where Christians had once distinguished themselves according to denominational identity, following the Second World War,...
Openings in Our Fractured Republic
James K.A. Smith, Yuval Levin
James K.A. Smith: At the heart of your diagnosis is that we've got this contemporary penchant for nostalgia, which is a desire to return to some part of the twentieth century. Whether it's '63 or '83 or something like that, people have some golden age in mind. But...
Citizens Aren’t Just Born. They’re Formed
Kevin den Dulk
My university (yes: by press time Calvin College will be a university) recently crafted an “educational framework.” Its purpose, as I understand it, is to “operationalize” our primary mission. Three of its four categories of goals—“faith,” “learning,” and...
Sowing for Trust
Anne Snyder
We are living through times that often feel like one long commentary on Joni Mitchell’s line “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” From quotidian encounters on the street to public sacraments, hospitality in the flesh to basic truth-telling from our leaders,...