In his eminently strange and mind-bending masterpiece, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Jonathan Lear poses a question: “What could it mean for history to exhaust itself?” A distinguished philosopher at the University of Chicago whose perceptions have been refined by a parallel vocation in psychoanalysis, Lear conceived this question while reflecting on a conversation recorded between the last great chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups, and a white man named Frank B. Linderman.

“Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo,” reported Linderman in his 1962 account, “so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. ‘I have not told you half of what happened when I was young,’ [Plenty Coups] said, when urged to go on. ‘I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides,’ he added sorrowfully, ‘you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.’”

Plenty Coups’s statement—“After this nothing happened”—haunted Lear. It rattled around in his brain, gripping him for years. What could Plenty Coups have meant? Was he declaring the moment when history came to an end? Was it “an insight into the structure of temporality,” that at a certain point those things that give a people meaning can simply cease? “What if Plenty Coups were witness to the breakdown of happenings?” Lear asks. “What would he be witnessing?”

Lear devotes the rest of Radical Hope to this existential probe. “The question is what it would be for Plenty Coups to be a witness to a peculiar form of human vulnerability,” he writes. “If there is a genuine possibility of happenings breaking down, it is one with which we all live. We are familiar with the thought that as human creatures we are by nature vulnerable: to bodily injury, disease, ageing, death—and all sorts of insults from environment. But the vulnerability [I am] concerned with here is of a different order. We seem to acquire it as a result of the fact that we essentially inhabit a way of life. Humans are by nature cultural animals: we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture. But our way of life—whatever it is—is vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem.” And so Lear arrives at the ethical. “How ought we to live with this possibility of collapse?”

A Question for the Ages, a Question for Now

The Western world has become a creaking stage for this question. Our civilizational muscles, more familiar with victory than with defeat, are feeling their age and leaving us grasping for something solid. There is the nostalgic proposal, which traditionally has taken on forms of withdrawal but more recently seems pumped up by the achievability of dominion. There is the revolutionary proposal, which sees in the possibility of collapse—both civilizational and ecological—a just conclusion to extractive beginnings and, having dismissed a framework for forgiveness, seeks to hasten the end (including, in some extreme intellectual quarters, humanity’s end). There are the myriad murmuring bureaucratic proposals that are making the Establishment and well-meaning moderates sound like the adults in a Peanuts comic strip. And there is the depressive, nihilistic non-proposal that is seeping into a generation high on burnout and low on trust.

None of these reactions to the possibility of collapse cause my heart to sing. But more glaring is the absence of a constructive vision. Who is in touch with the shifting landscape of our place and time and coming up with creative ways to seed new forms of communion that will flourish in the ground of today, not yesteryear? Who is undertaking the slow, intricate work of regrowing roots, not roots that yield a false coherence or blurry tangle, but roots that interact with one another in soil capable of nourishing something beautiful, ordered, yet free?

It may be ambitious, and we certainly are not the only ones attempting it, but Comment is seeking to be an articulate gardener of this cause. As the meaning of our own faith tradition gets co-opted into the various reactive modes above (sometimes as friend and sponsor, sometimes as the positioned foe), we want to kneel and dig our hands back into the soil that was transformed by Christ’s entrance into human history and see if what we find there has nutrients to nourish the understory our world needs. The question before us is make-or-break: What kind of future did Christ actually inaugurate? If he came to be a doorway, not a stop sign, what is the path for those reborn into his life?

In the coming pages, you’ll see revealingly little consensus from confessing Christians on this question. Eschatological postures diverge. Theories of history clash. Our aim in publishing some implicit disagreement is not to perplex you but to nudge you toward the aliveness of the Christ figure, a figure whose life, death, resurrection, and ascension is, in Comment’s view, the axis mundi, the true and only basis for a realizable strategy of hope.

It also happens to be a strategy I’ve been thinking about. It seemed time, five years into my editorship, to pen a new manifesto that reflects Comment’s way of thought. After steeping in just about everything this magazine has ever published, deliberating with colleagues and readers, observing our present landscape, and praying my way to words, I am honoured to unveil this fresh articulation of what we’re about and why. I hope this new manifesto names something for you: of our shared vulnerability and shared stakes, of the reality—however faint it may seem—of common hopes. I hope it grants some resonant moral language to describe what you are already doing in your context, and how you’re already doing it. Most of all, I hope it begins to sketch out a way that might compel a pluralist palette of starved and exhausted souls to be spilled out and onto the brush of the master painter, one whose strokes are ever brilliant in the light of his wonder and love.