The Center for Public Justice offers a robust set of guiding principles for a government's response to a pandemic.
Seeing Clearly & Deeply

Reviving Intellectual Hospitality
Cherie Harder
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...

Words and Flesh: Pastoring in a Post-truth World
Kurt Armstrong
There is weight and meaning in the words we use. Words can be used to manipulate, mislead, wound, deceive, and abuse—but words can also tell the truth.

Holding Space
Anne Snyder
It’s a phrase I hear more and more these days, this notion of “holding space.” I hear it invoked by artists, therapists, retreat directors, progressive altruists. It hints at a kind of Ignatian discipline centered on the conditions required for human growth amid...

Taking It Outside
John Clair
Suddenly it seems everyone would rather simply “take it outside.” We saw these images in almost every city and town in America. Images of violence in exchange or action, splattered across the national news in waves not seen in decades. A key job of the police, and one that other citizens are less well-equipped to do, is to do what people don’t have the time or temperament or training to do when they are in a mood to take it outside. That is to find out what actually happened: to investigate.

Pressing Pause
Susannah Black
Dear Friends, Yesterday, we screened The Reunited States, a new film that engages many of the questions that we’ve been wrestling with here at Breaking Ground: Does a common life require a suppression of debate and difference, or can we find a way to join in some kind...

Snow Days and Slack
Leah Libresco Sargeant
A snow day is meant not just for sledding and snowmen, but as a rebuke of the belief that the world answers to our commands. A snow day is training for the mercy we must be prepared to extend in ordinary times.

The Complexities of Reuniting
Breaking Ground
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...

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,...