In his inaugural address, President Biden called for unity, quoting St. Augustine as he did so. What, in the face of an astonishingly divided country, can we hope for? Is it possible—is it even desirable—to seek unity? “Harmony makes me nervous,” said Brookings...
Seeing Clearly & Deeply
Relativism Is Out. Truth Is In.
Brandon McGinley
Truth is in, and that’s good. It’s much better for Christians, and for everyone, for the terms of discourse to be made clear, rather than obscured behind the false neutrality of skepticism and relativism and tolerance. But if we try to contain truth within American political categories, just as when we try to tame Christ and his teachings, we will continue to do violence to it, and to him.
Is Unity Possible?
What makes political authority legitimate? How is it perceived as legitimate? These two questions are at the center of what we’ve been considering at Breaking Ground for the past few weeks, because they’re at the center of what it means to have a transition of power,...
Building Our Commons
Father Jack Wall, Joe Boland
How might we imagine and actually each play a role in building a more woven, widely shared commons? A commons committed to solidarity and humbly receptive to repair. One that keeps human dignity front and center and sees all of life as gift. How could each of us and each of the societal sectors that touch our lives and that we touch in turn—education, medicine, business, social service, law, media, politics, the institutional church, and more—how could we and all these shift, perhaps softly in some ways, perhaps dramatically in others, to sow a better normal?
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...
Robert Peel’s Policing Principles
Sir Robert Peel
These principles, attributed to the founder of London’s first modern police, were sent out in the “General Instructions” issued to every new member of the Metropolitan Police Force from its formation in 1829 onward.
Order and Justice
Susannah Black
These days it feels like we’re seeing political theology, good and bad, play out in front of our eyes: if we thought history was over and ideas didn’t have consequences, if we thought that all of this was abstract, we’re sure disabused of that notion now. Last Friday...
What Is Policing For, and How Do We Reform It?
Anthony Barr
To rebuild the public realm, we must reform the police; to do that, we should turn to the policing principles first set out in 1829 by Robert Peel: the “police” are just members of the public “who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”
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,...