Purchase a single copy of our spring 2026 issue. A strange hesitation has entered our public life: not whether humanity will survive, but whether it should. Across technology, bioethics, environmental discourse, and political imagination, the human is increasingly...
Purchase a single copy of our spring 2025 issue. From monastic cells to browser windows, urban planning to biotech labs, our notions of and norms around private and public are in flux. This issue of Comment takes many of our inherited assumptions about privacy—both...
Purchase a single copy of our winter 2024 issue. Over the last few years, Comment has heard a certain question recur with curious frequency. This question pops up, usually, in conversation with those who are worried about democracy’s future, who foresee the chances...
Purchase a single copy of our fall 2024 issue. Where is history headed? How any one of us answers this question says a lot about our sensibilities, our teleology, and our hope. And while narratives of decline abound this 2024, they diverge significantly in terms...
Purchase a single copy of our summer 2024 issue. Home. The source of so much longing, yet also often the site of pain accumulated over lifetimes of loss and alienation. What’s going on in the late modern era that “home” feels so elusive? What is home, actually?...
Purchase a single copy of our spring 2024 issue. Is it possible for peace to walk in power anymore? This is the question of this issue. An exploding Middle East, a West on tenterhooks, many of us are holding our breath. Humans properly fear violence, all forms of it....
Purchase a single copy of our winter 2023 issue. It’s no secret that the church, like every other traditional institution in late modernity, is struggling. Its impoverished public witness in recent years, the lack of vision and compromised credibility, reveals soil...
Purchase a single copy of our fall 2023 issue. There is no question that gender has moved toward the centre of the culture war in North America. But do we understand what is at stake when gender becomes one more choice among many? This issue of Comment desires to...
Purchase a single copy of our summer 2023 issue. 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...
Purchase a single copy of our spring 2023 issue. What causes change in the norms and orthodoxies of a society? We’re familiar with change induced by outside forces: a technological advance, a natural disaster. But when we want to change something, whether animated by an ideal or in reaction to the status quo, what’s at play, especially when it works?
The question may be a peculiarly modern one. We live in times when agency is at once vaunted yet elusive, our unprecedented powers of reach, data, and technological mastery somehow yielding not glory but a mass sink into numbness. Low-grade nihilism simmers just beneath the surface of everyday conversation, the desire for impact birthed in secular zeal soon stymied by chokeholds of institutional breakdown and pixelated trust. With several generations having passed since a spokesperson for justice was able to inspire and unite the masses in moral movement, many experience today’s wicked problems as insurmountable. Cynical indifference tempts both humble and ambitious alike, and, still more concerning, an entire generation of young adults.
Comment’s next two issues are going to explore this in two parts. Our spring issue will perform an x-ray on today’s paradox of agency while asking afresh how culture actually changes. And our summer issue will dive into some narratives of those historic seedbeds of social and moral movements that incubated quietly, intentionally, and with great patience and trust. We hope that our writers’ explorations of both the analytical and the exemplary will be of interest to philanthropists and historians, non-profits and artists, theorists of cultural change and all those keen to recover a sense of coherent momentum in human affairs.
