Past Themes

19 RESULTS
A Church for the World 35.3 | Fall 2017

Sep 1, 2017

A Church for the World 35.3 | Fall 2017

Purchase a single copy of our fall 2017 issue. This issue is all about the church: what it is, what it isn’t, and why it matters. Our concern isn’t just an apologetic for the public importance of the church. It raises important questions internal to the church—questions about reform and renewal. The health of society and the strength of social architecture depend on having churches that are centered on the supremacy of Christ, because to serve the Lord is to serve the world. It’s not if church is for the world, but how.

Beyond Ideologies 39.4 | Fall 2021

Oct 16, 2021

Beyond Ideologies 39.4 | Fall 2021

Purchase a single copy of our fall 2021 issue. We live in an era when seemingly every human issue is viewed through an ideological lens. Utopic in flavour and aim, airtight in answers, and more attune to systems of thought and social order than respectful of the irreducible complexity of human beings, ideologies are often unhelpful and perniciously detached from reality. Yet are we inevitably situated in a stream of assumptions we’ve inherited about human flourishing and the good society, or can we forge a healthier, more humane path? This issue seeks to encourage you, our readers, to reimagine with us a new stream that cuts a little closer to the canon of Christian social thought—a canon that has always been ideologically heterodox, personalist, and alive.

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Charting Social Change 41.1 | Spring 2023

Feb 17, 2023

Charting Social Change 41.1 | Spring 2023

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.

Church, Where Are You? 41.4 | Winter 2023

Dec 7, 2023

Church, Where Are You? 41.4 | Winter 2023

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...

Embodiment 39.3 | Summer 2021

Jul 15, 2021

Embodiment 39.3 | Summer 2021

Purchase a single copy of our summer 2021 issue. While there are many ways to interpret the markers of “progress” over the last millennium, one line stretching east along the x axis is the gradual displacement of bodies. Without quite realizing it, many of us pre-pandemic were starting to believe that bodily limitations could be cast aside in the quest for more—ignoring the boringly basic needs of our human bodies and their rhythms.

And so this year of death and disease has offered, in a tragically revealing way, a severe mercy of course correction. We’ve realized that embodiment is not actually a hurdle to overcome, but the very yeast for flourishing itself. How will we allow this to reshape our understanding of the good life? Will our app designers and urban planners, theories of change and individual habits reflect this recovery of our creatureliness, of givenness and finitude?

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Gender and Our Humanity 41.3 | Fall 2023

Aug 31, 2023

Gender and Our Humanity 41.3 | Fall 2023

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...

Love and Fear 37.3 | Fall 2019

Oct 10, 2019

Love and Fear 37.3 | Fall 2019

Purchase a single copy of our fall 2019 issue. Noli timere. Be not afraid. This command pervades the Scriptures, and yet many in Western societies are engulfed in a sense that doom is near and what was will no longer be. There is fracture and pain exploding out into the open—for some it’s long-rumbling, for others it’s a shock. Almost everyone feels besieged and misunderstood, reduced to a caricature and cut off without grace. But emerging from this morass is a call to a new kind of engagement with one another, one that Comment would like to answer with a long and unpredictable table that seats elite next to commoner, scholar next to practitioner, black next to white, able-bodied next to handicapped, young next to old, rich next to poor, privileged next to overlooked, immigrant next to indigenous. What does it require to be repairers of the breach? How can a magazine informed by 2,000 years of Christian social thought help us tend to the task? This print issue opens up these questions, inviting an exploration of the fears and loves that compete for eminence in a nation, a neighborhood, a society, a soul.

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Minimalism 36.4 | Winter 2018

Nov 22, 2018

Minimalism 36.4 | Winter 2018

Purchase a single copy of our winter 2018 issue. Minimalism is making its mark on society, one tiny succulent at a time. What does that mean for Christians? The North American church surely does overconsume. Perhaps embracing simplicity could be countercultural and lead us toward certain kinds of holiness and obedience that we’re lacking. Yet things are still at the centre of this new movement that is purportedly anti-consumerist, and might hospitality suffer when we decide that having “extra” is uniformly bad? Among the faith-motivated and others, some adopt minimalism to be on trend, but still others are embracing some really beautiful practices for beautiful reasons, even godly ones.

Navigating Uncertainty 38.4 | Fall 2020

Sep 24, 2020

Navigating Uncertainty 38.4 | Fall 2020

If 2020 is defined by one thing, it’s the ushering in of mass uncertainty. Uncertainty about how to behave in the face of a capricious virus, about the future, about whom to trust in the face of conflicting directives. What happens when a society that thought it was successful is shocked into realizing that it can no longer assume an infinitely upward path of progress? What happens to human character when we lose confidence in the same? This fall issue of Comment is an attempt to explore these questions with both honesty and tenderness. We are seeking wisdom from untapped sources—children, jazz, mathematics, cultures adept at thinking in the present tense, refugees, the materially poor. What can we learn from these ignored sages, and from the biblical narrative of exile itself?

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Rebuilding Trust 39.1 | Winter 2021

Jan 7, 2021

Rebuilding Trust 39.1 | Winter 2021

We are living through times that often feel like one long commentary on Joni Mitchell’s line “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” From regular encounters on the street to public sacraments, hospitality in the flesh to basic truth-telling from our leaders, it is not the sophisticated accoutrements of an advanced civilization that have screamed in their absence, but rather the rudimentary things we ordinarily take for granted. And among these invisible “essentials” is something increasingly at risk: trust. Symptoms of the rot abound, and just in the nick of time, many cultural observers are starting to take notice. We commend the diagnostic literature to you, but what this winter issue of Comment does is brave the “what now?” question: What might it take to build some trust back in to our withered commons, and for those who have never tasted trust’s rewards, sow it reliably for the first time?

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