While there are many ways to explore the Christian humanist tradition, one particularly inspiring way is through the friendships and communities of conscience that have congealed in different shapes and forms during times of historical tumult. What follows is a gallery, curated by Comment, that should give you a window into those communities who got fired up about a set of convictions—that to be human is something we discover most fully in the figure and life of Jesus Christ, that the dignity of the least is no less than the dignity of the great, that no one becomes themselves alone—and tested them against the pressures of their hour, refusing whatever reduction of the human their age had declared settled.
Across five continents, what they made together often took material form: books, declarations, schools, journals, hospitals, hospices, walled courtyards, integrated congregations, underground seminaries, painting workshops, samizdat networks, Sunday salons, communities of common life. What binds these communal witnesses is not so much sameness of method as a learned revelation that to be human is to become human together, in the patient company of the living and the dead, over a horizon longer than any one life.
The writings of many of the individuals you’ll meet here live on in the pages of Comment, in the convictions and preoccupations of our authors across many years. Before you go looking for them, please enjoy these windows into the background formation behind the public fruit that has stood the test of time.
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The Alexandrian Catechetical School
2nd–4th centuryAlexandria, Egypt
The Desert Mothers and Fathers
3rd–5th centuryEgypt & Syria
The Cappadocian Circle
4th centuryCappadocia (modern Turkey)
Ethiopian Scholarly Monastic Tradition
4th century–presentAksum, Debre Damo, Lake Tana
The Beguines
12th–14th centuryLow Countries (modern Belgium and Netherlands)
The School of Chartres
12th centuryFrance
The Florentine Academy
15th centuryFlorence, Italy
The Erasmian Circle
Early 16th centuryNorthern Europe
The Felipe Guamán Poma Circle
Early 17th CenturyPeru
Sor Juana’s Circle in New Spain
Late 17th centuryMexico City
The Port-Royal Circle
17th centuryFrance
The French Mystical Salons
Late 17th–early 18th centuryVersailles, Paris, Cambrai
The Sons of Africa
1780s–1790sLondon, England
The Clapham Sect
1790s–1830sSouth London, England
The Oxford Movement
1833–1845Oxford, England
The Bengal Christian Renaissance
Late 19th–early 20th centuryCalcutta and surrounding Bengal
The Russian Religious Renaissance
Late 19th–early 20th centuryMoscow, St. Petersburg, Paris in exile
Uchimura Kanzō and the Mukyōkai Circle
1900s–1930sJapan
Oldham’s Moot
1938–1947England
The Cercle Thomiste at Meudon
1920s–1940sMeudon, Paris
The Confessing Church and Finkenwalde
1933–1945Germany
The Catholic Literary Revival
1890s–1960sEngland and France
The Inklings
1930s–1960sOxford, England
The Catholic Worker
1933–presentNew York, United States, and global
Howard Thurman and the Fellowship Church Circle
1944–1981San Francisco, Washington, Boston, and others
Katallagete
1964–1990Berea, Kentucky, and the dispersed South
L’Abri
1955–presentHuémoz, Switzerland, and global
The Minjung Theologians
1970s–1980sSouth Korea
The Prague Circle and the Czech Underground Church
1970s–1980sPrague, Czechoslovakia
Liberation Theology and Solentiname
1960s–1980sPeru, Brazil, Nicaragua
The African Christian Theology Circle
1960s–presentKenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and broader Anglophone Africa
