The Whole Person Revolution

The language of trauma has become a part of our vernacular over the last decade. But how much do we really understand what it means to walk with scars? Dr. Steve West served for 40 years in the U.S. Air Force, eventually becoming a chaplain and being awarded the Bronze Star. Here he speaks with Anne to grant a compassionate picture of the experience of PTSD from the inside. 

What are the pathways of formation required to cultivate the kind of wisdom and forbearance needed for a very real world of constraints and differences? With Anne to reflect on this vital if contested work today are David Katibah and Sarah Sturm, who together serve Telos, an organization that equips civic leaders to help reconcile seemingly intractable conflicts at home and abroad.

How might an institution cultivate the courage and realism required to accept an imperfect set of choices in this broken world, and to choose wisely and in a timely manner?  Today's conversation with Anne's Cardus colleagues, Ray Pennings and Brian Dijkema, reflects on the challenges and choices facing institutional leaders seeking to protect the common good in a year of war abroad and strife at home.

Is it possible for peace to walk in power anymore? This is the question haunting Comment's work this spring, and launching this new season of The Whole Person Revolution is someone who answers it with a courageous yes. J.S. “Joon” Park is a chaplain at Tampa General Hospital, whose public social media posts about death, grief, trauma, and loss have garnered a large following. When you read Joon's words, you encounter someone who is no stranger to the things we naturally dread as human beings: the dark night of losing a loved one, of having to accept a complete lack of control, of having to face the inescapability of our own mortality. Joon carries a wisdom earned from the trenches of what he calls “grief-catching,” the act of standing present as someone is falling through the abyss of loss and pain. He joins Anne today on The Whole Person Revolution to share some of what he's learned about the strange paradoxes of dying and human wholeness, violence and healing, doubt and faith.

Dolph Westlund and Matt Ritsman were given unusual advice their senior year of college: If you want formative friendships to last, start a shared third thing. They took this to heart and, now seventeen years later, steward a fund pooled with twenty other friends from college. Meeting in person on an annual basis, with punctuated points of contact throughout the year, the Shade Partnership Fund is a philanthropic organization, a community, and a structure for accountability all at once.

We are often told to contemplate our mortality, but how often do we contemplate our natality? In this episode, Jennifer Banks, author of the new book Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, and Margarita Mooney Clayton, author of the essay “The Marian Gift of Dependence,” in our fall issue, talk about the ways that gaining a sense of our natality overcomes our more destructive tendencies of autonomy and control. The Virgin Mary in particular exhibits this kind of receptivity and dependence in a way that speaks to people of all walks of life.

Judaism and Christianity are inextricably bound up in one another. Even when their histories split apart, the dynamics they negotiate in modernity often echo the other's internal dialogue and communal practice. The case of gender is no exception. In this episode, New York Times columnist David Brooks and attorney and Jewish thinker Yishai Schwartz compare and contrast the overlapping inheritances. Cited pieces include David's “The Feminine Way to Wisdom” in the fall issue of Comment, and Yishai's “Obligation and Inspiration,” also in Comment's fall issue.

For all the talk about the “crisis of masculinity,” few are providing a healthy vision for what masculinity in the twenty-first century could look like, and, perhaps more important, how men can get there. If becoming a man is better caught than taught, better modelled than talked about, what is going on that the formation seems increasingly rare in transmission? Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and Christine Emba, columnist at the Washington Post, weigh in. Cited pieces include Richard's “What Men Are For” in the fall issue of Comment, and Christine's July feature in the Post, “Men Are Lost. Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness.”

The buzzword of the day in education is “transformation.” But transformation for what, towards what? Philosopher Douglas Yacek reflects.

The Taylors of Tabernacle have spent a week together seeking spiritual renewal, a practice that started two hundred years ago. Susan Thornton shares about her family tradition with managing editor Beca Bruder, explaining the vision and practical tasks required to sustain a long-enduring spiritual revival.

When the word “evangelicalism” is mentioned today, few are quiet with their opinions. But just what is its mission and personality, current state and future trajectory? In this episode, Anne talks to Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and finds her frustrations mollified. Join them as they explore the precise shape of hope for a more socially transformative witness, one that doesn't just protect its cultural bedfellows but also self-purifies to serve as salt in the nation.

The American political system today thrives on division and demonization, forcing politicians to prioritize winning electoral votes over and above solving complex issues through cooperation. In the context of such entrenched dysfunction, is it possible to reshape the incentives? Katherine Gehl is an entrepreneur with a big idea: Final Five Voting. This innovative approach employs an instant runoff system and ranked ballots, promoting healthy competition and transforming bipartisan cooperation into an asset rather than a threat.

How to form a diverse coalition on a volatile topic like immigration reform? Our guest Ali Noorani was tackling this very question while leading the National Immigration Forum for fourteen years. Now, from his new seat in philanthropy at the Hewlett Foundation, Ali continues to explore the processes behind shifts in attitude, values, and public policy on immigration, keeping in mind proposals that would benefit the whole country.

How are you bringing people into your life, into your space and story? Comment managing editor Beca Bruder welcomes Bri Stensrud, the director of Women of Welcome, to shed light on the shifting attitudes of evangelicals in the United States towards immigrants and refugees. At the heart of their discussion is the transformative power of embracing curiosity about others, inviting them to come a little closer, and displacing fear with generosity.

When it comes to stirring a movement that will last, is it better to begin by diagnosing a shared problem, or rather to start with the power of possibility and the gifts already present? A seasoned sower of the common good, Peter Block has an opinion. 

At what level do vast social and ecological problems begin? Elizabeth Oldfield is host of The Sacred podcast and the former director of Theos, the leading religion and society think tank in the U.K., where she oversaw a range of ambitious attempts to influence legislation, inform journalists, and leaven the cultural atmosphere in public life. She left Theos two years ago with a hunch that some of the largest societal cancers we face germinate in the broken places of relationship and disconnection—with God, with ourselves, with one another, and with the earth. In response, she and her family have gone all-in on an intentional Christian community in east London, discerning day by day how to live out an alternative way of life in an urban, highly individualistic and consumerist context.

We have as much access to entertainment as we have ever had in history, yet nothing catches our attention. What is really happening when we are bored, and what does it say about us? Kevin Gary is the author of the book Why Boredom Matters and the essay "To the Bored All Things Are Boring." In conversation with our associate editor Jeff Reimer, Gary dives deep into the nuances between situational and existential boredom, and how it affects our perception of life.

Most of us have a movie in our memory banks that changed, forever after, the way we understand the nature of reality, of life in this world. Award-winning filmmaker Ben Rekhi has committed his talents to the conviction that movies are uniquely equipped to educate our emotions and shape our beliefs. Ben has directed and produced films as wide-ranging as Waterborne, The Ashram, Watch List, and The Reunited States, and he has more up his sleeve. In this episode, Rekhi reflects with Anne on the relationship between film and social change—what it has been, what it is today, and what it could yet be.

Real and enduring social change can feel impossible when it seems our society has split into a million fragments. How does collective action succeed when our lenses are so individuated? Christy Vines founded the Ideos Institute to solve just this problem, discovering “empathic intelligence” as a strategic way of living and engaging with the created order around us. She talks with Anne about the formation of this intelligence—how exactly it can be learned and taught.

“I try to solve inequality by day while contributing to it by night.” Many a professional do-gooder would have to acknowledge this paradox if forced to be honest. But not David and Amber Lapp, who, years ago, went to a working-class town in Ohio as researchers on love and marriage, only to stay as residents and neighbours. In this episode, they reflect on the past decade of living among people whose gifts, resentments, aches, and longings are so often mischaracterized (if not ignored) by the coastal lens. As the Lapps have sought to shine a light on the erosion of trust and covenant-making in the white working class, they've discovered their own humanity. A discovery, it turns out, that lies—necessarily—at the inception of any social change that will endure. 

Transformation happens at the speed of relationships. A familiar adage, maybe, but one we find inconvenient. Perceptive students of movements like Murdock Trust CEO Romanita Hairston live and lead with this truth as baseline. In this episode, Romanita reflects on the wisdom she's gleaned from those historic patterns of renewal as they've typically unfurled: first, with the organic creation of new communities of thought; then with the growth of those communities into public waves of aspiration and protest; then with the leverage of power to address systems—all with visionary leaders anchored in the relationships and ferment of the initial seedbed.

Western democracies are sloughing through the twilight of movement-building strategies built primarily from masculine emphases on quantification and scale, visibility and punchlines. Such impulses should not be cancelled. But it is worth opening our eyes to the role that spiritual mothers also play in nurturing the seedbeds of social change—gestations of relationship and wrestling that patiently nurture the quiet before. Joshua and Chelsea Bombino have written an essay on just this, and join Anne today to flesh out its charge.

A stressed and divided people tends to live at the surface, responding to reality's symptoms, not its nature. It's understandable: we feel forced to move quickly, to act in the face of felt urgencies, to survive. But what if regenerative social change cannot happen without first attending to the seminal, to the seedbeds of life as we know it? What is required for us to dig deep and pay attention? Mark Labberton, the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus at Fuller Seminary, joins Anne Snyder.

How does one begin to think about regenerative culture change? Is there hope for a fractured society to mend? Anne opens this season with an invitation to eavesdrop on her family dinner table. Her husband and New York Times columnist, David Brooks, has been a witness to and an agent of change on a variety of social metrics. Together they reflect on the work of sowing coherent moral ecologies, one memory - and present wrestle - at a time.

We don't often think of the theatre as a democratic cornerstone, but talk to Oskar Eustis, the acclaimed artistic director at the Public Theater in New York City, and the stage shimmers into focus as the essential art form of a free society. Oskar has produced such award-winning shows as Hamilton, Fun Home and Sweat, and he has become convinced that the theatre's capacity to teach each one of us how to be more fully alive is a gift that should not be confined to elite stages. He joins Anne here for the last episode of our Restoration of the Human season to dream about the ways in which the theatre's ancient logic might seep out into other corners of our fragmented society, granting new life for our practice of democracy, and indeed, for our souls.

We're finite beings with infinite potentialities. Every decision we make adds yet another stroke of paint to the artwork of our lives. So how do we know we're painting with purpose? Joining Anne is Steven Lawson, the creator of the Monk Manual, who has designed a planner that regularly prompts users to prepare, act, and reflect according to their core principles. What if productivity isn't about doing more things, but rather doing the most important things well?

Why is it that as human beings we so often see our limits as the enemy of the good life, and not as a helpful frame? Whether we're chafing against 24-hour days, the betrayals of our bodies, our inevitable mortality, or the caps on our relational and psychological energy, it just seems like modern life tempts us to believe that finitude is a weakness to be overcome … perhaps even a sin. But what if that's entirely wrong? Kelly Kapic is a theologian and the author of You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News. He joins Anne today to gently correct (and even heal!) the disorder of our weary self-flagellation. 

Comment is hardly alone in the effort to restore the human. Various philosophical streams have long been animated by the same telos. The question is: Do the differences in priors matter when it comes to working together towards re-humanizing every inch of our common life? Joining Anne to explore this question is the founder of Rehumanize International, Aimee Murphy, whose personal journey propelled her to discover the deeper magnitude of personhood.

We live in a time when the truth of the present has little authority while the truth of history is emerging in unprecedented fullness. This presents a quandary for the person of integrity: How does one keep growing without succumbing to the violence of one-way redemption? Michelle Browder is an artist, activist and guide based out of Montgomery, Alabama who is creating a new way to confront the past with an invitational spirit of grace and truth. Here is her story.

In a uniquely concentrated period of public injustice, from 2020-2021, a community of women found voice in the poetic lines of Psalm 37. Following David's lead, they reflected on their experiences of heartache and oppression with raw openness and hopeful expectation. Voices of Lament is a rich compilation of these stories that will move you to wail with them, and to gain a fuller picture of Christ's church. Editor Natasha Sistrunk Robinson and contributors Ka Richards and Marlena Graves join Anne to reflect on the surprise gifts of digging deep.

How does a society ensure equal and active participation of its members when there is a voice gap between workers and corporations? We start by acknowledging our interdependence and striving to provide mechanisms to amplify workers' voices. Ensuring collective power not only makes better employees but better civics. Policy expert Chris Griswold helps us rediscover the relevance of mutual cooperation while building our community.

What does it look like to prioritize friendship in an organizational context? Laity Lodge is an ecumenical retreat center in the Texas hill country that welcomes wayfarers into unique journeys of encounter and revelation — with God, with one another, with themselves, with expanding, new paradigms. In this episode, Lodge director Steven Purcell and the president of the HE Butt Foundation that oversees it, David Rogers, explore the conditions for the kind of hospitality that awakens, tends, and transforms.

How can we nurture relationships across time, political factions, and the ever-evolving opinions we as human beings invariably have? Bible teacher Beth Moore has had to become familiar with the deeper levels of discernment required to navigate turbulent waters with courage and steadfastness. From new social media friends to long-lasting deep bonds, she reflects here on the unexpected joy that comes from risking friendship.

How much does cultural and familial history shape our relationships and inflect our vocations? Best friends Otis Pickett and DeSean Dyson reflect on their respective journeys as historians and educators in the American South, sharing insights on civil religion, hospitality, and the gift of sustaining a friendship through thick and thin. 

It can feel strange to think about applying the logic of do's and don'ts to the gift of friendship. But as we are fond of saying at Comment, beauty blooms in framed spaces. Mack McCarter understands this frame's physics from the ground up, having founded one of the most holistic social fabric repairers in the country, Community Renewal International. Here are his reflections on friendship and the social technology it can inspire. 

Does a healthy marriage have to have friendship at its core? How do rings of relationships, institutions and communities around a marriage support that most intimate of covenants? Humanities greats Mark Schwehn of Valparaiso University and Leon Kass of Shalem College (formerly of the University of Chicago) reminisce about teaching college students on these questions, truths they discovered in their own marriages, and the layered bonds developed over lifetimes of different experiences.

Friendship is foundational to the good life. But in a mobile and globalized world, how can we nurture deep relationships across distance? Might our friendships offer the rootedness that our roving hearts long for? On today's episode, guest Joy Clarkson shares the practical wisdom that has guided her own enduring friendships both near and far.

Co-founders are a known relationship in the realm of start-ups and institution-building. But less studied is the dynamic of friendship between those who are building something that intends to have cultural impact and last beyond a generation. Today's episode digs into that deeper, less transactional realm, as the co-founders of Cardus, Michael Van Pelt and Ray Pennings, reflect on their 20+ years of friendship while leading.

The natural world is one thing we all share. Yet our relationship with creation is as fraught with divisions and political bickering as anything else in our divided times. How might we think through our approach to climate change and other environmental challenges? What obligations do various social spheres have to care for the environment? How might those be balanced in a way that does not do irreparable harm to either natural or social ecosystems? Our guests environmental lawyer Jennifer Hernandez, and political philosopher Dr. Jonathan Chaplin discuss these topics, their favourite spots on earth, and more.

It's been a tough season for experts. Distrusted by the public if not politicized by the craven, those trained to master a specific domain in service of common goods seem all too divested of their authority; every earned discovery is now subject to the culture war. What is going on? Are any of these dynamics legit? Dr. Francis Collins has lived these questions his whole career, though perhaps no more intensely than over the Covid-19 pandemic. Currently serving as Science Advisor to the President of the United States, he has some things to say.

Since the pandemic, there's been more clashing between the family and other spheres. Is there a way to move forward without segmenting our society still further? Educational historian Susan Wise Bauer and religious freedom lawyer Angela Wu Howard - both of them also mothers, serious Christians and generous citizens - explore the pathways. 

This spring, Comment is celebrating the civic health that blossoms when we understand distinct spheres of action and the particularities of what each sphere is for. But let's be honest: Sometimes boundaries aren't all they're cracked up to be. They can oppress a people group, numb creativity, flatline the glory of human moral reasoning and sometimes even sow more evil than could the most bombastic of sociopaths. What happens when a little rebellion is called for? And how does one discern that terrain? Kristina Arriaga and Reverend Gene Rivers are two of the holier troublemakers around — seasoned champions of human dignity and interior freedom who haven't always been able to stomach the status quo. They've joined Anne to peel back the nuances of what good trouble requires, and what it can yield.

Comment is getting re-acquainted with the traditional spheres this season, things like the family, education, church, and the workplace. But are these kinds of institutional commitments really all that shape a person? Where do scenes fall? Think of unique subcultures, a city scene, a musical or sports scene. Might scenes like these be more powerful than the traditional spheres today, at least in terms of where we are willing to deposit our trust? Comment's own Jeff Reimer and Matt Crummy weigh in. 

Most of us have accepted the skills that a fractured age requires. But what would it take to reknit our disparate selves into wholeness? Might a re-thickening of the boundaries of our civic spheres paradoxically help? Join Anne in exploring these tensions with April Lawson, Director of Debates and Public Discourse at Braver Angels, and Brandon Vaidyanathan, chair of the sociology department at the Catholic University of America.

Must we fight one another in every domain of life? Are turbocharged symbols the only way to assert one's voice in a pluralist republic? David French and Jonathan Rauch are two political observers who have thought long and hard about these questions, and they join Anne today to shed light on how we got to this flat state of affairs, and also how we can get out. Yuval Levin: How to Curb the Culture War

As we wrap up this season's explorations of the gift logic, it seemed appropriate to zoom out to the tradition that has animated this conversation from the very beginning: Christian humanism. A rich if unfinished tradition that at once informs Comment's editorial lens and animates our broader work as an ecosystem-builder, we wish to tell a story of Christian humanism that cares for the full flowering of human agency through forms of just and generous common life. It's a common life that works itself out through a thick web of formative institutions, which in turn enable purposeful dialogue and relationship between friends and strangers. Helping us see the beauty of this rotating discovery process is Luke Bretherton, the Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology at Duke University.

Rajan Mathews of Nyack College and Dave Hillis of Leadership Foundations each lead institutions that put the primacy of relationship over and above the allure of efficiency. What are the challenges in preserving this commitment in higher education and the social service sector today? What yet fortifies their call?

What might happen if our criminal justice system ventured into a different set of moral risks? Are those who have been imprisoned for their crimes worthy of a culture of trust? APAC, a revolutionary Brazilian prison system, is making a bet that natural beauty, community, work and trust might just re-awaken prisoners' innate dignity and tap into freedom's high call (less its license). In this episode, prison warden Captain Jessica Davis and filmmaker Simonetta d'Italia-Wiener, director of the award-winning Unguarded, peel back the tensions between the power of this methodology and the need for accountability. You can also check out the documentary that more vividly illuminates this gift-infused logic on PBS, where it is streaming all month here.

We tend to hear “entrepreneur” nowadays and think Silicon Valley, privilege, a preference for tech jargon over and above the humane and the commonplace. But what if its local flowering is worth a second look? Might entrepreneurship as a way of creative response be the embodiment of the gift logic par excellence? Rising Tide Capital is making just this bet, and this episode with co-founder Alex Forrester illuminates the stakes for doing so with integrity. 

Composer and singer-songwriter Alana Levandoski grew up on the Canadian prairies with an awareness of her own reliance on the gifts of the land, giving her an "ecological perspective" on her artistic vocation. "There's a huge difference between seeing something as free and seeing something as a gift," she says. For Levandoski, embracing the interdependence of a gift economy has allowed her to witness the richness of reciprocity—not just between her and her listeners but among them, too. 

The gift logic at its purest sounds like the height of virtue: self-sacrificing, open-handed, generous, gentle. But how does it square with the demands of justice? Can they co-exist in the same moral galaxy? This week's episode wrestles with these questions, and our interlocutors come from inside the Comment team: associate editor Heidi Deddens and senior editor Brian Dijkema. Two different lenses, one faith. Two distinct generational outlooks, a shared cultural context. Are justice and the gift logic actually at odds, or are they simply in need of some re-encountering? Tune in to find out.