Seedbeds of Social Change

What creates a new era? What are the nutrients in those seedbeds that become nourishers of redemptive history?

Comment and our accompanying podcast The Whole Person Revolution have undertaken a six-month exploration of social change—what it is, how it happens, what we tend to miss in our impatience for quantifiable results. Where our spring issue took a philosophical approach to these questions, this summer issue is more like a scatterplot almanac—select histories of social movements as they begin in what Gal Beckerman calls “the quiet before,” the fragile ferment of instinct and hope.

Comment is interested in this fertile underground because we live in a culture that defaults to celebrity even though it yearns for community, and in an age that attends largely to that which is preened in public. We discount the processes of discernment and trust necessarily nurtured in private. There is an attractive mischief about turning instead toward more hidden beginnings: What is going on when that first trimester is successful, able to mature and birth new life? Is it possible for green shoots to grow on their own terms, not in response to a perceived threat, but rather as an outgrowth of love and a confident vision of the good?