It begins with an assault on the familiar—a twisting of an institution’s character from the outside in. Then emergency meetings. A memo blitz. Creeping uncertainty about who has your back, and where this heightened vigilance is coming from. Funds once assumed secure—gone. Layoffs follow under the banner of prudence, chemo for a narrated malignancy within. New faces, fluent in a code that flattens and patronizes the old guild’s norms. Ultimatums descend from on high, only to stall midair—administrators left to decipher the ever-shifting rules without the authority to enforce them. As clarity dissolves, vigilance hardens into habit. The ordinary rituals of governance give way to something more exhausting: reading tone, parsing words, guarding what you share . . . and with whom. Self-censorship seeps in, redirecting energy from the shared task to reflexive self-protection. 

Across sectors, such is the convulsion that many who work at once-trusted institutions have felt with eerie uniformity this year—beginning in government agencies, leapfrogging through universities, and winding through the engines of science and medicine, the corporate sphere, the media, and yes, religious institutions as well. Flank by flank, the choreography—and, more crucially, the psychology—of dismantling has unfolded with the same grim pattern. 

But to cast this crisis of legitimacy as a singularly Trumpian drama would be a mistake. Long before the theatre of provocation began choking our politics, the very idea of an institution was running on borrowed time. Born in earlier ages of moral imagination and civic initiative, these custodians of the common good endured into the postwar era, though their authority began to fray in the 1960s, tested both by exclusion and by a widening appetite for unfettered liberty—a culture turning from “we” to “me.” For a time, the grammar of belonging they carried still held; people knew, not just in word but in habits tutored by relationships and exemplars, what duty, stewardship, and service required. But as market incentives multiplied, digital life displaced embodied life together, and abuses of power came to light, the well that fed a shared way of being began to run dry. The sources of solidarity that once made disagreement a driver of American progress thinned to a tightrope we are all now struggling to walk. Thinking institutionally became alien ground. We—perhaps especially we Americans—no longer understand what institutions are, or what they are for. 

Institutions are not just organizations but organizations imbued with special meaning. An institution, rightly understood, is a living tradition—a patterned form of human relationship that binds freedom to purpose, memory to responsibility. To think institutionally is to remember that we inherit before we innovate, that we hold something in trust. 

Institutions also do not simply organize work. At their best they cultivate the conditions for character, channelling power toward service and shaping desire toward the common good. When they falter, it is not only governance that breaks down but the joy and steadiness of those within—the sense that one’s labour, loyalty, and limits serve a story larger than oneself. 

Part of why this moment of institutional precarity feels painful—but also interesting—is that many of the institutions now being battered were already down for the count. Internally divided over their telos and mired in self-preservation, many organizational missions—perhaps especially those of the university, the media, and Congress—had already shrunk to the logic of survival, economic and cultural. We speak often of institutional trauma, the wounds they inflict on us. But this year has revealed the other side of the coin, one that many of us have not quite seen before: institutions themselves in trauma, stripped of the very tissue that gives them life—the public’s trust. 

This issue takes you into the disposition of distrust that has mushroomed in recent years—the tangled legacy of our institutions’ uneven embrace of who matters and who doesn’t—and provides a sense of what it will take to rebuild trust on truly comprehensive, people-representing ground. Our authors have lent their sight and their skill to draw an intricate map of this institutional threshold—a landscape at once contradictory and alive, marked by wilderness and rebirth. For all those institutions that have been driven mercilessly into disorientation, stripped to their foundations, there are others—churches and schools among them—showing flickers of renewal: fragile, in some cases syncretistic and troubling, but from Comment’s vantage point raw and in need of prayer. It turns out we are still creatures who long to belong, who rejoice in finding our fragile dignity called forth into something noble and glorious, who long to join the work of being part of something that stretches behind us and before us. 

Somewhat to my surprise, the most controversial line in Comment’s manifesto has turned out to be this one: “We believe in institutions.” When I wrote that, it felt like the most boilerplate of our six convictions—meat and potatoes, bland but necessary for the more delicious flavours to be enjoyed. I didn’t anticipate the visceral recoil from Gen Z, nor the naked incomprehension among working-class readers and writers, nor the chilly air coming from artists and border-stalkers, bewildered at why a publication so committed to fostering the conditions for genuine encounter and the creative imagination would also pledge allegiance to the institutional form. 

These hard, not-always-pleasant conversations have tutored me. But they have not loosened my commitment to institutions as the best vessels we late modern human beings have to undertake transgenerational journeys of shared mission and co-creation. I’ve just seen too many healthy institutions rehabilitate unhealthy people; I’ve seen too many healthy people make unhealthy institutions healthy. 

But they have persuaded me that the institutions that endure, whether they are the ones that already exist or whether they are imaginative social-architectural sketches beckoning us to take them seriously, will be the ones that make room for their own critics, that hire artists and part-timers—practitioners rooted in the real world—to bring a different dimension of truth within their walls, that cultivate sanctuaries of listening and spirited disagreement where wisdom can be discerned amid the political warfare threatening to de-soul us all. 

This issue is an invitation to listen for that music again, to trace the faint but gathering notes of institutional grace being born anew in our time. It gathers builders, skeptics, and seekers alike who are learning to see institutions not as idols to defend or abandon, but as altars to be reformed until they can bear the weight of grace more fully, more completely.