While not dispositively answering these questions, our contributors have explored them with rigor, depth, and almost unrivaled patience.

Imagining the future: What institutions need renewing now, and how might that happen? What might be born anew in this time, and how do we help in the building? Learning from the past: How have plagues historically provided opportunities for new beginnings, new building, a renewal of institutions?ģ. Seeing clearly and deeply: What exactly is being revealed in this current crisis? About society? About the state of our own hearts?Ģ. People were craving moral vision to make sense of what was happening, but few in those early days were providing it.Ĭomment, along with its key partner Plough, created Breaking Ground in an attempt to fill this vacuum, inviting a diverse array of Christian institutions to come together while requesting explorations along the following three axes:ġ. A shared sense of reality-already fragile from years of an eroding social fabric-fractured still further as physical-distancing norms shuttered us inside our homes and attendant virtual silos. This reactivity quickly coalesced into a matched set of toxically partisan mirror-image narratives about what was happening and what it meant. There was no shortage of information in the pandemic’s early days, but the immediacy of the crisis and our society’s resulting shift to survival mode yielded media interpretations characterized more by short-term need and projection than anything attending systematically to the moral opportunity at hand.

When the COVID-19 virus reached North American shores in early 2020, we all found ourselves scrambling to make sense of a chaotic and rapidly changing reality.

It is a body of work that should stand the test of time: a record of a year that revealed the depths of our society’s fissures, and a collection of proposals and reflections on what should come after: how we can truly renew our civilization in this post-COVID world. What you’ll find here is a searchable archive of every essay, event, podcast, and sermon published from 2020–2021. The publishing project was created by Comment in the spring of 2020 to use the resources of the Christian humanist tradition to respond collaboratively and imaginatively to the year’s significant crises-a public health and economic crisis provoked by COVID-19, a social crisis cracked open by the filmed murder of George Floyd, and a leadership crisis laid bare as the gravity of a global pandemic met the epistemological fracture of a country suffocating in political polarization and idolatry. Welcome to Breaking Ground, a network of institutions and people which has grown out of a year-long publishing project.

Thurman jesus and the disinherited