Over these last seven years of leading Comment, a dream has taken shape to gather the people, organizations, and communities wrestling with the types of questions we explore in our pages, across tradition and culture, context and calling. I have been uncommonly graced with a window into world after world devoted to the dignity of the human person and the common good. Street saints, community shepherds, renaissance intellectuals, and institutional stewards. Catholics and Protestants and Orthodox, rabbis and skeptics, pastors and artists, parents and builders, and many, many who refuse to despair of love’s power to bring something new into being. Many are drawing from deep wells of a philosophical and theological inheritance, often without fully knowing the breadth of the company they keep.

There is a golden thread running through them. The Understory festival is our attempt to make that thread visible, and to begin, together, from a place of yes: yes to the sacred dignity of every person, yes to the courage it takes to stay in the difficult room, yes to a unity that does not require uniformity.

The questions below have been forged through years of this editorial life and listening. They form the spine of this festival journey, and I share them with you as an invitation.

Please join us. And thank you for trusting the quiet, slow work behind this first national gathering. We cannot wait to welcome you to the Cathedral in May.

Sincerely,

Anne Snyder
Editor-in-Chief, Comment

1. What is struggling to be born?
2. Is this a time to build, or a time to re-found?
3. What is a human being, and who gets to decide?
4. What is a country?
5. What is Christian humanism, and how might it help us in this moment?
6. Must we choose between deep roots and open arms, or is that binary itself a failure of imagination?
7. Where are the present “highways” between everyday citizens and the institutions that shape public life, and how do we rebuild them?
8. Can personalism and institutional life enrich one another, or are they fated to pull apart?
9. Who is the stranger our politics has taught us to fear, and what do we owe them?
10. Can forgiveness crack open the possibility of new creation without denying justice?
11. What happens when the algorithm knows your bio but not your countenance, when the doctor treats the scan but not the person, when the pace of life outstrips the soul’s capacity to keep up? How do we recover dignity amid suffering, care, and death?
12. What does repair require after catastrophe? What does disaster reveal about our social and moral fabric?
13. What can be known through making together that cannot be known through argument alone?
14. What do we owe today’s young, and how do we fulfill our own answer?
15. What does a civilization lose when it becomes blind to beauty?
16. Can humanism thrive without reference to God?