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