This episode traces how Quebec moved from a society organized by the Catholic Church to one that legislates state secularism. It opens on a problem of translation: laïcité is a French political concept with no exact English equivalent, distinct from the sociological...
Timothy Shriver has spent a lifetime learning to see the people the rest of us are socialized to look past. The chairman of Special Olympics, co-creator of the Dignity Index, and son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver, he argues that what's tearing America...
What does it mean to be visibly Muslim in British public life right now? Mehreen Khan has been living that question since she was eleven years old—when 9/11 turned her faith into something she had to defend. She's now Economics Editor at The Times, the first woman and...
Is there a word from the Lord for us today? Pastor Charlie Dates closes the Understory festival with a sermon that speaks to a weary age hungry for both truth and hope. Introduced by Anne Snyder and preceded by a live musical offering from Grammy-winning gospel...
Do our institutions need repair—or replacement? In one of the festival’s most anticipated conversations, longtime friends and conservative public intellectuals David Brooks and Ross Douthat debate whether our moment calls for rebuilding existing institutions or...
A poet who has lived two decades with incurable cancer on what faith sounds like when God feels more absent than present. Christian Wiman joins Mark Labberton to talk poetry, suffering, and friendship. "The presence of God, less so. I experience the absence more than...
What happens when people no longer feel capable of shaping the world around them? Oxford theologian Luke Bretherton argues that beneath our political and cultural turmoil lie twin crises of agency and institutional trust. Drawing on the Christian humanist tradition,...
What work has been left unfinished—and who will carry it forward? Scholar, educator, and founder Dr. Anika Prather traces a mantle passed from Elijah to Elisha, from Abraham Lincoln to later generations, and ultimately to us. Drawing on Scripture, history, song, and...
When old certainties crumble, what is God bringing forth? Opening the Understory Festival from Prague, Czech priest and theologian Tomáš Halík reflects on faith after Christendom, the wounds that become sites of encounter with God, and why Christianity’s future may...
In this opening episode, Comment editor-in-chief Anne Snyder delivers the remarks she offered on the first night of the Understory Festival—a three-day gathering hosted by Comment at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. Drawing on history's overlooked seedbeds of...
Forming virtue from inside out and outside in.
SITE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT BY POLYMATH