Dear friends, Upset with the Chrisitan right? You’re really not going to like the post-Christian right. As secularization advances in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, and in parallel parties in Europe, our levels of division and partisanship are going to...
Newsletters
Preparing for a New Normal
Anne Snyder
Dear friends, Eleven months into this year-long project, and we at Breaking Ground are preparing to transition. It has been a tremendous honor to accompany you week by week through the wild ride of a historic year. As you know, I created this platform in June of 2020...
Two Calls to Courage
Susannah Black
Dear friends, Be not afraid. It’s the injunction that the angels typically lead with, when they visit humans. My assumption has always been that’s because they’re terrifying and the humans they are visiting have a tendency to freak out when they show up. The quality...
The Most Vulnerable, The Most Essential
Susannah Black
Dear friends, One thing this past COVID year has done has been to bring what is hidden to light. In some cases that’s been wonderful: We now have a cultural script by which we can recognize the incredible value of those “essential workers” who, before this year, we...
Where Our Hope Truly Lies
Susannah Black
Dear friends, How can Christians best participate in political life? In one of this week’s pieces, Zachary McCartney and Ben Peterson make a richly considered and theologically grounded case for the church as the archetypal polis: the political community of which all...
The Roots of Our Anti-Solidarity Culture
Susannah Black
Dear friends, We find ourselves, in the United States, at the end of a global pandemic in a society that is increasingly isolating. We've all experienced this over the last year: we have been trapped behind our screens in our pods. With that isolation has come...
True and False Evils
Anne Snyder
Vagueness and moral passion are rarely productive colleagues. The truth of things demands more care and slowly earned trust, fewer scapegoats, less totalism of absolutes. Today on Breaking Ground, Phil Christman seeks to pry apart this partnership that is making so...
What is Freedom For?
Susannah Black
Dear friends, What is freedom for? This Holy Week, Joshua Heavin brings us a reflection on the uses and nature of freedom, as refracted through the story of this past winter’s Texas ice storm. It is a timely and moving meditation on what we are to do with the freedom...
Why We Need to Make Things
Susannah Black
Dear friends, We don’t make things in the United States—but we need to start. Remember this time last year when we all started making bread and sewing masks? The bread-making was one thing: always a good idea to get back into baking. The mask-sewing was...
Growing Out of the Politics of Self
Anne Snyder
Dhananjay Jagannathan wrote a gorgeous essay this week on the sociability of courage. Volunteering as a patient-intake registrar at a large vaccination site in Manhattan, he soon found his habituated fears of other bodies displaced by the symphony of service. What I...