Past Themes

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.

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.

Purchase a single copy of our spring 2022 issue. The world is not just flat, it’s flattened. Globalization, social media, ever-proliferating confessional pluralism and an erosion in the authority of coherence-lending institutions are just a few of the trends that have together conspired to bulldoze a historical understanding of civil spheres and their attendant norms. College faculty increasingly understand their roles to be those of advocates and activists more than they do as seekers of understanding. Debates around critical theory have spilled into the public domain via hot takes when the tools for using it fruitfully are known only by a trained few. There is widespread cultural confusion over the distinction between public and private, vulnerability and restraint. Churches are defined more by their politics than by their creedal confession. And so on.

In all of this, we no longer seem to be asking that most vital question that gets at directive notions of telos, namely, What is an education for? What is the family for? What is the church for?

This issue seeks to remind us of a toolkit we actually have at our disposal if we but widen our apertures to recognize the multi-dimensional lives most of us actually lead. We are inviting you, our reader, into a rediscovery of the many spheres beckoning for your participation as a way of disrupting the dysfunction we see all around.