Amber Lapp has spent years living among the people and places she writes about, not merely taking on economically struggling communities as a neutral observer but becoming a neighbour. A research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project, she reads questions of civic renewal through the moral vocabulary of dignity, solidarity, hospitality, and hope—held open on behalf of people who have stopped holding it for themselves.
On the opening night of the Understory festival, she reflected on what those years of listening have taught her—stories of a friend who felt everything she touched turned to ash, a neighbour haunted by anxiety attacks that arrive without warning, and the peculiar loneliness of a life conducted across “a vast digital prairie,” where alienation creates the feeling of “living among ghosts.” Beneath all of it runs a single question: How many of our social troubles are downstream from people doubting their dignity?
This reflection originally appeared in our episode, “What Is Struggling to Be Born?” framed by an address from Fr. Tomáš Halík and recorded at the National Cathedral on the Understory’s opening night.
