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 h...

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'...

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...

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 auton...

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 inheritance...

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 Am...

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,...

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...

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...

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 litt...

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...

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 situati...

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 ,...

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 fo...

"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 who...

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...

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...

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?...

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,...

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 o...