Breaking Ground

As apandemic and racial reckoning exposed society’s faults, Christian thinkers werelaying the groundwork for a better future.  A public health and economic crisis provokedby Covid-19. A social crisis cracked open by the filmed murder of George Floyd.A leadership crisis laid bare as the gravity of a global pandemic met a countrysuffocating in political polarization and idolatry.In the spring of 2020, Comment magazine created apublishing project to tap the resources of a Christian humanist tradition torespond collaboratively and imaginatively to these crises. Plough soonjoined in the venture. So did seventeen other institutions. The web commonsthat resulted – Breaking Ground – became aone-of-a-kind space to probe society’s assumptions, interrogate our own hearts,and imagine what a better future might require.Thisvolume, written in real time during a year that revealed the depths of oursociety’s fissures, provides a wealth of reflections and proposals on whatshould come after. It is an anthology of different lenses of faith seeking tounderstand how best we can serve the broader society and renew ourcivilization.Contributorsinclude Anne Snyder, Susannah Black, Mark Noll, N. T. Wright, Gracy Olmstead,Doug Sikkema, Patrick Pierson, Jennifer Frey, J. L. Wall, Michael Wear, DanteStewart, Joe Nail, Benya Kraus, Patrick Tomassi, Amy Julia Becker, JeffreyBilbro, Marilynne Robinson, Cherie Harder, Joel Halldorf, Irena Dragas Jansen,Katherine Boyle, L. M. Sacasas, Jake Meador, Joshua Bombino, Chelsea LangstonBombino, Aryana Petrosky Roberts, Stuart McAlpine, Heather C. Ohaneson, OliverO’Donovan, W. Bradford Littlejohn, Anthony M. Barr, Michael Lamb, Shadi Hamid,Samuel Kimbriel, Christine Emba, Brandon McGinley, John Clair, Kurt Armstrong,Peter Wehner, Jonathan Haidt, Dhananjay Jagannathan, Phil Christman, GregoryThompson, Duke Kwon, Carlo Lancellotti, Tara Isabella Burton, Charles C.Camosy, Joseph M. Keegin, Luke Bretherton, Tobias Cremer, and Elayne Allen.