Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year

As a pandemic and racial reckoning exposed society’s faults, Christian thinkers were laying the groundwork for a better future.

2020 was no ordinary year. A public health crisis provoked by Covid-19. A social crisis ignited by the death of George Floyd. A leadership crisis laid bare as the gravity of a global pandemic met a country suffocating in political polarization.

In the spring of 2020, Comment magazine created a publishing project to tap the resources of a Christian humanist tradition to respond collaboratively and imaginatively to these crises. Plough soon joined in the venture. So did seventeen other institutions. The web commons that resulted – Breaking Ground – became a one-of-a-kind space to probe society’s assumptions, interrogate motives, and imagine what a better future might require.

This volume, written in real time during a year that revealed the depths of society’s fissures, provides a wealth of reflections and proposals on what might come after. It is an anthology of writing by people of faith seeking to understand how they can best serve the broader society and renew the world.

Contributors include Anne Snyder, Susannah Black, Mark Noll, N. T. Wright, Gracy Olmstead, Doug Sikkema, Patrick Pierson, Jennifer Frey, J. L. Wall, Michael Wear, Dante Stewart, Joe Nail, Benya Kraus, Patrick Tomassi, Amy Julia Becker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Marilynne Robinson, Cherie Harder, Joel Halldorf, Irena Dragas Jansen, Katherine Boyle, L. M. Sacasas, Jake Meador, Joshua Bombino, Chelsea Langston Bombino, Aryana Petrosky Roberts, Stuart McAlpine, Heather C. Ohaneson, Oliver O’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, Gregory Thompson, Duke Kwon, Carlo Lancellotti, Tara Isabella Burton, Charles C. Camosy, Joseph M. Keegin, Luke Bretherton, Tobias Cremer, and Elayne Allen.

Anne Snyder is the editor-in-chief of Comment magazine, a publication of Cardus, and the creator and host of Breaking Ground. From 2016 to 2019 she directed The Philanthropy Roundtable’s Character Initiative, a program seeking to help foundations and business leaders re-envision the nature and shape of formative institutions needed for social and moral renewal in the United States. Her book The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver's Guide to Supporting Social and Moral Renewal was published in 2019. Anne is also a New Pluralist field builder, a Trinity Forum Senior Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. She has published widely, and currently lives in Washington, DC

Susannah Black received her BA from Amherst College and her MA from Boston University. She is an editor at Plough, Mere Orthodoxy, New Polity, and The Davenant Press and is a co-founder of Solidarity Hall and The Simone Weil Center. Her writing has appeared in First Things, The Distributist Review, Solidarity Hall, Providence, Amherst Magazine, Front Porch Republic, Ethika Politika, The Human Life Review, The American Conservative, Mere Orthodoxy, Fare Forward, Postliberal Thought, and elsewhere. A native Manhattanite, she now lives in Queens.