“Morality In The Real World” with Anne Snyder

Shownotes:

Today’s conversation with Anne Snyder might give you a little hope. She joins Eddie and Chris in a rich discussion of the Christian imagination, bringing back our shared stories to build community and move forward with more grace and joy--concepts that have seemed a little hard to grasp over the last few years.

Anne is the editor-in-chief of Comment, a quarterly magazine that prints articles and essays focused on “public theology for the common good.” She oversees Breaking Ground, a network of institutions and people created by Comment in 2020 to use Christian humanist traditions to respond to the significant crises of 2020.  Anne is also the host of The Whole Person Revolution podcast.

Resources:

Follow Comment on Instagram

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Learn more about Comment Magazine and Breaking Ground

Listen to The Whole Person Revolution podcast

Transcript:

Anne Snyder 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:02

I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight. Today we are talking to Anne Snyder who is the Editor-in-Chief of Comment magazine. She's been involved in a whole range of other projects, one during the pandemic called Breaking Ground. She's the host of The Whole Person Revolution podcast. And she's delightful. We had a wonderful conversation today.

Eddie Rester 00:25

One of the things that I loved about the conversation was just her passion to connect, not just in an intellectual sense of what's happening in the world around us. She really digs into and invites others through the magazine to dig into some of the big issues around friendship and relationships, fragmentation, isolation, social change, but has this deep sense of it has to be rooted in the world. That you can't just think. That thinking has to play out in the real world. And that for me, is right down the lane of how I want to understand and be in the world.

Chris McAlilly 01:05
Yeah, in some ways, I see Anne and her work as, or I see the work that we're trying to do is kind of... I don't know, just like, way down the food chain.

Eddie Rester 01:15
Way down the food chaing. A smaller subset of the same thing.

Chris McAlilly 01:18

Of the same thing, which is to create space for rich and deep conversations around really important topics within our civil society, and really kind of trying to engage the Christian intellectual tradition, the Christian imagination, the Christian story, as resources for thinking about some of the most important human questions and conversations of the day. And so, Comment does this all day, every day. Today Anne brings her passion for that work, and her really just kind of range of conversation partners and her ability to analyze both the global conversation and the very particular conversations in local communities, into the conversation today with us. And it was... I mean, it was awesome. I really enjoyed it. And...

Eddie Rester 02:17
We could have talked to her for a couple hours.

Chris McAlilly 02:18

Yeah, we could have talked to her for a good long time. And, you know, I guess, what are one or two of your takeaways in terms of thinking about how you build institutions, how you engage the work that you're doing, Eddie? What are you going to take away?

Eddie Rester 02:33

I think the thing that she really talked about, and I'm going to have to go back and listen to it, where she talked about shared story, shared telos, shared ending, shared vision of the world, how all of that has gotten lost in our own desire to isolate ourselves or isolate our families, particularly post COVID, as we're trying to recover. And that really resonated with me personally, in the way that I live, but also what I'm seeing in life of the church, life or the world, how we've pulled away from each other or any sense of shared life together. And I think that's an important thing for us to hear. What about you?

Chris McAlilly 03:15

I think for me, she lives in DC. And it's very aware of kind of the elitist DC bubble in terms of diagnosis of what's wrong in American culture and American society. And she used the phrase, the way in which DC sometimes condemned the landscape. And she is she said, she gets bored and dissatisfied with a lot of that analysis and is always trying to go deeper and to try to get closer to the real questions of particular communities and kind of the real complexity and texture of life on the ground, wherever that is, in all kinds of different contexts. And then, you know, the other thing she said about herself, that I love is that she's hopelessly bent towards hope.

Chris McAlilly 03:59

And you're going to hear that in her... We prompt her, but she just is full of a delightful spirit and a deep, passionate desire to see the Christian imagination continue to fund a wonderful and meaningful, flourishing society. And so I think you're going to enjoy the conversation. If you do, please do like it, share it. Share it with your friends. Leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts so that others can find the conversation and The Weight podcast just blows up. Right, Eddie? It just blows up.

Eddie Rester 04:38
There you go. You're gonna enjoy this conversation. so we're gonna let you get to it.

Chris McAlilly 04:42
[INTRO] Life can be heavy. So heavy, in fact that the weight we carry can sometimes cause us to lose hope.

Eddie Rester 04:51
But we've all come across those people in life who seem to be experiencing the same world we live in, except they maintain a great depth of joy and hope.

Chris McAlilly 04:59
A former generation called this gravitas. It was their description of a soul that had gained enough weightiness to be attractive, like all things with a gravitational pull.

Eddie Rester 05:11
Those are the people we want to talk to. On this podcast, we talk to pastors, entrepreneurs, artists, mental health experts, and many others.

Chris McAlilly 05:20

We will create space for heavy topics. But we'll be listening for a quality of soul that could be called gravitas. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO] Well we're here today with Anne Snyder. Anne, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.

I loved that.

Anne Snyder 05:35

Anne Snyder 05:35
No, it's my honor. Thanks for having me.

Chris McAlilly 05:37

You're currently... We were talking before we pushed the record button, you're currently working with a lot of different hats, but kind of the central vocational umbrella that you're working under is as an editor at Comment magazine. Tell, for folks that don't know Comment and maybe kind of what you're doing there, maybe just give us a brief snapshot.

Anne Snyder 05:59

Sure. So Comment magazine has been around a little over 20 years, but I came into leadership in 2019, just before COVID. Our tagline is "Public theology for the common good," which is, in its own way, always being interrogated, and it's a dynamic definition what we mean by "public theology" today. But I've tried to... Sort of our mandate is to distill and/or translate what we call 2000 years of Christian social thought to kind of the challenges and opportunities of our society, which happens in our case, we're sort of serving North America, broadly. So it's obviously just a slice of the world--not as global as, you know... Maybe my ideal would be one day if we if we could, like, wrap our hands around the whole earth. So we're primarily, our bread and butter is the print quarterly magazine. We have a lot of extra online content now. We built into podcasts and events, and we're trying to facilitate more local conversations. But the typical rhythm is we have sort of a theme that drives three months of conversation, some of it quite formal in essay form, some of it more improvisational, that is usually discerned. I try to discern the theme, as I'm just criss crossing between so many different contexts and try to keep ears open for I think trying to get to the root of pain points in people's lives and communities' lives, in a country's life, as well as in the church. I wouldn't say we... I try to... We're very civil society focus. And we're bringing what I think of as like the Christian imagination and Christian light to illuminate some of the pain points, and then from there, try to create sort of a constructive response. And some of that's through dialogue, some of that is through featuring entrepreneurs and sort of institutional reformers and innovators. And some of it is through real intellectual, you know, scholastic work. So it's... I, I've probably... My predecessor was an amazing mind, Jamie Smith. And he left me very big shoes to fill. He's a philosopher. I come from journalism without a PhD. But I've tried to, I think, in an age of a lot of distrust in elites and in ideas that are untethered from reality, I have tried to create a space, both in the publication and in the sort of gatherings that we facilitate, to be a translation hub a little bit between praxis and people in real organizations, institutions, communities, that are operating as agents of hope, seeking to sort of hold common ground in a very polarized time. And I try to sort of hold them up as exemplars because I often think the wisdom is more in the praxis these days than necessarily in just like naked thought. So, but we want to somehow give the practitioners language and frameworks and imagination to further empower what they're doing and help them feel like they're part of a broader story that is, like, theological in nature. And we want to encourage the, quote, pure thinkers, the brilliant ones in there, to sort of see how the questions they're asking and seeking to answer are being modeled in hospitals and police departments and schools and churches and synagogues and politics and so on. So it's, I think, at our best we are, if we're not doing the translation actively, we're at least a gathering place where those doers and thinkers somehow find themselves in dialogue, and our role is to kind of help them understand each other.

Eddie Rester 09:37

I think that's a great way to put it, translation. And I see that in the articles that you've written on your own, but also the articles in the magazine, that it's really how do you distill things down into the real world? And I think that's a gift that you actually bring as a journalist, rather than someone maybe back from theological, philosophical backgrounds. Talk a little bit about your background as a journalist. I mean, you've got friends around the world. You've done some amazing work as a journalist before you came to this work.

Anne Snyder 10:10 Thank you.

Eddie Rester 10:10
So share a little bit, just kind of your role, background. What led you to this?

Anne Snyder 10:17

Yeah, thanks. Well, the quick version is fresh out of college, and much to my surprise, basically, the only job I could get was at a think tank in DC. And I was very surprised to be in, like, a truly intellectual space that is slightly different from university, because you're sort of... Public think tanks have more kind of immediate public impact and their sort of theory of change is not so much to form students over the long haul. But to, in our case, you know, you have crystallized ideas around policy, or even more deeply. I worked for a fairly philosophical place. We would we would invite, we would bring together scholars and journalists. So I found myself in this kind of pure intellectual air and respected it, but just didn't feel like it was quite where I was gifted to be or where I wanted to be. And I was getting to know all these journalists through programs we were doing and I was so enchanted and noticed that they, even if they were like, in their 70s, still working journalists, they just seemed contagious. Like they were not bored. They were alive and had this spirit of learning. So that kind of attracted me, that they were lifelong students. And they always also just had the best stories to tell. Like they were just the most fun to talk to in any kind of gathering of people. So little by little, I find I kind of migrated my way to the world of journalism and wound up at a small magazine initially, working on actually foreign affairs, which had been my background in college, and then wound up at the New York Times for a while, working with several columnists, which was kind of a nice blend between the high conceptual philosophical, normative worldview type brains and cognition, and like real world events. So I kind of lucked out in where I, myself, though I got paid, continued to sort of be a grad student. And then somewhere in there, basically what happened was, even though I was having this wonderful, professional experience, and I'd grown up overseas as a kid, and just a variety of things in my own life and family background, I felt like journalism itself, at least in its national form, was becoming very insular, and like an elite insular bubble. And there was an element of, "We who have gone to Harvard are now talking about everyone else out there. We know all the trend lines." It was very top down. And I felt like it was filled with a lot of hubris, and many, many blind spots, absent sort of the texture of the complexity of human beings that really can't be caricatured. And so I kind of around that time discovered this woman, Dorothy Day, who, you know, kind of the Catholic Worker Movement, and so much about her life, her faith, her vocation, ultimately, like building these houses of hospitality after she became Catholic, and starting the Catholic Worker newspaper, which was like a huge, I would say, act of community that actually talked about writing being an act of community. And it had quite a role in sort of informing and tying people together in the labor union of the labor movement of the early 20th century. And everything about her choices of trying to be enmeshed in real community, real people's lives, in her case with the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression, and then writing about those very human experiences and how this affects relationships. And something about her approach to journalism just was like, "This is what I'd love to be doing." So fast forward. And I just, I think, frankly, sort of providential grace in my life, was given a series of opportunities by some foundations, and other sort of professional opportunities to do a little bit more of that enmeshed with people, enmeshed inside institutions, kinds of journalism, and I started realizing that though I came from this philosophical background and I had like an overly conceptual brain, I could ground it in the stories of lives, and more specifically the stories of communities. And I sort of channelled that specifically through... I did a lot of writing around dynamics around immigration in the US, not immigration policy, but sort of second, third generation immigration and assimilation dynamics as people are negotiating their national identity and religious institutions at that time. Many different religions. I was living in Houston at this point--Nigerian Pentecostals, Vietnamese Jesuits, Korean Presbyterians, variety of Buddhist, Hindu. I found myself--it was through the local religious institutions that I felt welcomed me as someone who had a transcendent frame of reference as a Christian. They just welcomed me in to both be a friend, but also be attuned to the subtle dynamics of sort of their American experience, their challenges, their desire for social mobility, their negotiation with trust and who to trust. Which institution do you trust for information versus your fellow? I was somehow... Like, I just felt like the gates were wide open for me to be a student and friend to these worlds. So I would kind of try to write about these less visible dynamics that bind communities together, and it led me to just deep interest in what is sort of the trellis of our relational life, what is the civil society that we can take for granted? Which is really a question about what makes for a healthy institution. And so all of that just kind of happened organically as I was flitting between very gritty stories of rehab communities and police reform and immigrant assimilation patterns and questions of agency and social class. All of those sociological questions, telling stories at the concrete human level, about specific people, specific communities, and somewhere in there, I was like, "Wait a second. There's this, like, question about institutions at the base of it all." So that was longer than I meant to share. But that's sort of the path. And then Comment picked me up as a magazine that, yes, is Christian social thought, but is like, very, for theological reasons, very interested in the shape and contours of our institutional life. So it all just kind of felt like a perfect fit.

Chris McAlilly 16:52

That's so helpful, just to get that context on your journey. Because through it, there have been a number of constructive projects that you've worked on. And with a number of different partners. And I think one of the things that's unique about your formation is that you've had this kind of global, cosmopolitan kind of life, that really you were born into, with your family of origin, living in Australia and China, as I remember from perhaps some previous conversations I've heard you in. And then also kind of coming back to, like this sense of needing high conceptualization to kind of make sure that we have a language and a way of conceptualizing a moral imagination for civil society, but also that has to be really grounded in the particularity and the specificity of lives, and the complexities of life on the ground. And that, in the American context, particularly in cosmopolitan settings, requires a ton of translation and negotiation, and you have to think about, quite deeply, intentional trust building. So I wonder, you know, I feel like that's...

Anne Snyder 18:11
That was beautifully put. You should take my job. That was like, you just really ennobled my sense of calling by how you just expressed all that. Thank you.

Eddie Rester 18:19 He's a great writer.

Anne Snyder 18:20
I know! I know. Well, be careful what you wish for. I might come knocking

Chris McAlilly 18:25

Well, here's the thing. I think that at the heart of it is I think some clarity about what's wrong, you know? And I think one of the things I hear you talk about a lot is, what's wrong is a breakdown in trust or fragmentation of institutional life that leads to a breakdown in trust. I just wonder, you know, you're doing a lot of constructive things. How would you articulate what's wrong? Or what are the... I mean, there are many things that are wrong, but kind of what are a few of the things that you see that do need to be changed?

Anne Snyder 18:31

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of the question, I think. And it's a hard question. Because I do partly, I think I even get criticized for this. But I am sort of hopelessly bent towards hope, maybe as a matter of sanity and mental health of my own. And I always desire... I think critique is really important, but I'm always trying to... I don't know. I'm just bent towards construction and that maybe as a bent towards the resurrection. There's some like theological, spiritual impulse that is like trying to create out of ashes always, that I can't quite explain. And I think sometimes people are like, "No, we need to do more takedown pieces." But your question is lovely. I mean, I view a lot of my work, actually, when I really think about it, as creating space for people much smarter than I am, especially I would think sort of scholars who are literally paid to do the reading that someone in my role doesn't have all the time to do. But I try to create spaces for, like, I'll have an intuition. We're seeing all these symptoms of what's wrong, and we all get depending on--well, at least living in a city like DC, and around a lot of people who are doing the diagnosis socially and culturally. You know, over the last six, seven years, I would say the common things people say are isolation and polarization and fragmentation and all these - tions--and occasionally an -ism--and they're not... They're right. But always, somehow I think the more you hear the same words used to sort of condemn the landscape--and frankly, very little constructive imagination being fostered--I get almost bored and also dissatisfied. I'm always trying to go deeper. And so a lot of the work that I actually feel I'm doing is trying to create a space to invite a variety of perspectives to be bewildered together and to discern the deeper roots. So I'll just say that as almost like a baseline caveat that like, though, on the surface and at a deep level, I'm very bent towards construction, and reimagination. The actual work is also a public space to try to get, and sometimes a private space to get clear on what the fundamental problems are. So that being said, I will just name a few things. And this is what I'm saying today. I bet a year from now, I might say something different, hopefully deeper, and even more accurate, but I think where I am right now is... And they're all a little bit related. I think we're living in a time, at least in the US or the Western world, where we have forgotten how, if we ever knew, how to listen, both kind of listen and attend to God, to one another. Listen to one another to the end of the sentence. You know, my husband says something like, so many of us, someone will be talking to us. And we only allow... Like, if the conversation is the length of our arm, we only allow that person to get to barely our elbow before we are already thinking of a response. And I think that's just very true, and I'm really honest about my own pace of mind. There's like a loss of patience, and some of that's rooted in fear and self preservation. Some of it's just an atrophy of skills. I think it's somehow related--I do actually think it's related to the decline of the liberal arts and an increasingly technocratic, utilitarian culture that's always asking, "what's the point?" without sort of a moral telos. So that's one thing, just kind of a genuine loss of the skill, and therefore the virtue of what it is to be a listening person, which doesn't mean you lack agency or that you don't stand for things, but that's very problematic. A democracy, to be healthy, like needs many listeners. Two, I think there's just a general exhaustion. I feel this. I mean, I felt this for a long time. But I think, you know, we all know, one of the many sort of problems with this sort of late modern period in which we find ourselves as a species is, we're all... You know, technology forces ever increasing speed and change. And I think in the American context, where communities have broken down- -and I feel this, especially post COVID, because I think COVID, on the one hand, for many of us who survived it, there was this beautiful return to basics, and also a desire to really recapture in our own lives and persons what really matters. So relationships and trying to be more focused and being really clear about what your big yeses, so that you can say a lot of nos. And I love all of those principles, but we're all sort of doing it as individual islands or even just nuclear family islands. And we're not, we don't--this is really the big point I want to make that I've been thinking a lot about lately. We don't have... I mean, very few people. And I'm sure this is different by geography and social class, but we don't have a sense of shared time, shared possessions and shared time. And I think this is maybe fresh on my mind. I just am talking to you a few days after having done a like a silent retreat in a Benedictine community. And it was funny, I entered the retreat. When I hear the word "retreat," I think fluidity of time, like I'll lose track of time and it'll be wonderful and I'll enter into Kairos time and what was sort of, like, that was a very naive assumption because I walked in and I was like, oh my goodness. I forgot that, for this community of sisters to function, time is holy. And like in this case, lunch is served only from 12:00 to 12:30. If you are straggling in late, the kitchen is closed. You know, they have morning prayer, evening prayer. You know, time itself in a sense is very rigid and strictly kept as the way to order the community. And I was sort of reminded as I was settling into this rhythm just over three days, which helped deeply and kind of what is it really to listen and how seldom am I creating time to truly listen to the movement of God in our world, and how it all weaves, all the competing relational obligations and exchanges. There's like the praying class, or sorry, not the praying class, the sort of praying people historically, was the timekeeping class. And you know, I think the church remains a timekeeping community. But very few of us are conforming our lives to it the way, say, that might have happened in the medieval era or... And I think, who we're looking to, to keep time today... I know a lot of Christians who are kind of lamenting the decline of Christendom. I feel like they think the state is keeping time, but I think Silicon Valley is really keeping time, which is a time oriented towards innovation. And so I've been thinking a lot about the morality of time lately, which may be a surprise answer to this question. But I think there's something in the fact that we're all sort of... You know, so many people I know are saying things like my own nuclear family, like parents, like, it's too much to bear. Like the nuclear family has too much weight on it. Something about whether... That's
both logistics. That's just sheer logistics of doing life. But also, I think just the broader cultural stresses of a world filled with shootings and a lot of confusing messages and feeling like kids are not protected. So there's all these strains, and yet, we're all like on our little islands trying to survive, instead of being woven together, where you can sort of be lighter of heart. And so this, there's just something I think about how individualized our sort of age of authenticity has made, the way we treat convenience, our schedule, our life. And it takes a lot to really coordinate it well with others, unless you have a covenantal sense of a life community together, on mission together, and you are strict and non-negotiable about the things that you are really sharing. And so that's just something I'm struggling with. And I think it's an American pathology. It's a 21st century pathology. And I think somehow, the way in which the technology is involved, there's something in that that feels like it's a source of, then, a lot of the fragmentation and kind of... You know, I use this phrase that's too fancy, but like epistemological rupture, where we're all seeing reality from our own little lens without a lot of breaths. We're overwhelmed by complexity. But we actually, because we're overwhelmed by complexity, we put on these very narrow little glasses, and we're in these lanes that just lead to increasingly, I think, a vague sense of chaos. Like us against chaos, us as individuals, and that's just too much to bear. So that's a bit of a philosophical answer. But that's what I would say today, that there's something about time that relates to the feeling of the lack of coherence that I even feel in my own life, you know. I happen to be in a season where I'm feeling like I'm in the center of you know, because we're all the heroes of our own lives, unfortunately. But I'm like, my life is the center of a bicycle wheel. And I've got like a million spokes going out. And there's a lot of very, you know, gratifying and fulfilling and exhausting responsibilities, relationships, contexts. And my vocational life is often surrendered to try to weave all that together for a public product for others to make more coherent sense of the world and reality. But we're lacking, like, the wheel that binds all the spokes together, that can sort of... And that's a continuous community. That's just shared life, common life. Sure. No doubt. Thank you for sharing.

Eddie Rester 29:11
So, so much there that, I mean, we could spend about three hours on teasing out some of those things. But the thing that really sparked something in my mind was the "loss of shared."

Anne Snyder 29:24 Yeah.

Eddie Rester 29:24
Whether it's shared time, shared story.

Eddie Rester 29:30
That we've kind of reduced life now. Fifteen years ago, a writer I read a lot of said that we are the most disconnected connected people in the history of the world.

Anne Snyder 29:44 Yeah. Yeah.

Eddie Rester 29:45

And that was early. That was early in social media. And now I think we're seeing how that has spun out and allowed us to really live on these islands. And in the church, I see exactly what you said, that we've kind of isolated our families. We want to recover individually and as families... ... of what this lost time was.

Anne Snyder 30:05 Right.

Eddie Rester 30:06
And so there's not this sense of shared time, shared moments, shared experience.

Anne Snyder 30:14
Or shared telos, like a shared good we can all point to. And I think that afflicts the church, too, which is so sad.

Eddie Rester 30:23 Absolutely.

Chris McAlilly 30:24

Yeah, and then what ends up happening is we... The church becomes a zero sum power game, just like every other game, you know. So people are just like, you know, let me carve out my little evangelical section of the church or my progressive section of the church or whatever. And let me try to... And yeah, and I feel like what I see you doing, you and those who are committed to the work of Comment, kind of as an editorial trajectory for the conversation is to try to not only kind of articulate maybe some of the problems and try to go deeper in the analysis of what is wrong, but to kind of articulate different threads that need to be worked on, if you're going to try to weave some things back together. And the idea that a moral, kind of having a morality of time, and kind of a shared vision of what we would order our space and our time towards, I think is a, it's a big problem. But I do think, you know, every local community is trying to figure that out as well. It's both a global and kind of big picture societal issue.

Anne Snyder 31:41 Yes.

Chris McAlilly 31:42

But I think where I see... There's a... What I think is interesting is just either you kind of come into yourself, or your two or three friends that you're trying to navigate all this with, or your family, and it's just you're kind of operating as an island over against chaos. What I see is, and I'm actually very hopeful about this, you know, on the other side of COVID, I see these neighborhood gathering, I mean, the neighborhood that I live in, is getting together every Friday for like a pickup soccer game.

Anne Snyder 32:12
Oh, that's great. Lucky you! That's awesome.

Chris McAlilly 32:15
Well, it was, I mean, it's a COVID innovation that just kind of stuck. And so it's just a group of parents and and kids that get together. It's like Happy Hour slash pickup soccer.

Anne Snyder 32:27
Perfect. I'm sure the pickup soccer gets more and more interesting as it goes.

Chris McAlilly 32:32
It's magic, because it's a group of people that really, you know, we have space in common. You know, there's been kind of...

Anne Snyder 32:41
Exactly. And a ritual, like a regular. It sounds like it's been sort of ritualized.

Chris McAlilly 32:45

Yeah, for sure. And now, like, we're coming up on like, the second or third annual big kind of spring cookout, you know. So it becomes, it's becoming part of the rhythm of the way this group of people travels together through time as a neighborhood.

Anne Snyder 32:57 Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 32:57
And what I love about that is, you know, I mean, I see small, I guess, seeds of those kinds of things happening, not just in our community, but kind of around. I do think that that is hopeful.

Anne Snyder 33:12

That is cause for hope. Yeah, very much so. Very much so. Yeah, I mean, of course, hope. I sort of think of hope like a lily pad. There's so many lily pads, or a lily pad pond, I should say. And I think if you choose to be attentive to it, you actually can find it sort of everywhere. And I tend to, living in DC, it can be a little harder to see in this sort of national political scene here. So I sort of just try to like, have a little deaf ear to that. So I do tend to find it, to your point, at much more local levels where the community size is manageable. There's like a sense of shared space and place. I mean, there's so many examples. I think there's a sort of variety of random ones coming to mind.

Chris McAlilly 33:15

Where else do you... I mean, I guess, as you think of the texture of real communities, as complex as they are, when you think of other examples that you've seen, maybe recently of people that are not only articulating, maybe, a view of what's wrong and charting a course for some social change, but actually, like, have you seen other examples that are cause for hope for you?

Anne Snyder 34:25

There are... I happen to have become a big fan of the school, a college, in Michigan called Hope College, which has a new president as of a few years ago, who came in with this kind of just a vision he sort of received, that is practical in its implication. It's trying... His name is Matt Scogan. And he's started something called Hope Forward at the school called Hope College, which is a very great word you get to use for all sorts of branding. But he's trying to take away college tuition, and the idea is to--and they're piloting it, I think they started with 24 now they're at 58, or sorry, 48 students. So they're kind of like doubling every year as they're hoping to make this true for all the students that go there. But the idea is to invite more of a covenantal mentality with this place of formation. And you are not contractually obligated but you do sort of sign a pledge of promise to give back to the institution after you leave the rest of your life, whether through time, talent, or resources. And, you know, it's a big bet. But it's an interesting. It's captured the attention of Malcolm Gladwell, and like certain secular figures who are like very disturbed by... They realized the business model of higher ed is broken. And that all is, like, great and fun to write about. And I'm very excited about how this little actually Christian College could maybe catch the attention of like a Johns Hopkins or a Harvard or University of Michigan, or whatever, and just sort of at least prompt the question of like, this is a radical idea. Could others try it? But what I find interesting is how that kind of like spirit of generosity and generosity towards future generations and a commitment between the generations even relationally to stay in touch, and also the accountability, it leads to professors to really provide a transformative college experience. All of those dynamics have lent... It's like the gift logic incarnate. And there's something... I get excited by that because that feels like something core to Catholic social teaching that is just being embodied in a very current American context way, trying to solve a practical problem of student debt, etc. But you watch these deeper spiritual and relational graces emerge as a result of people leaning in to gift. So that's one example. There's so many ideas. I mean, there's some really interesting news I'm involved with. Comment publishes of one of my favorite series called The Welcome Table, which is right now spearheaded by Greg Thompson. We hope to diversify the writers over time. But it's sort of like an intersection of Civil Rights history in the US, sort of Christian social thought and food interestingly, and like the culinary, various culinary traditions, and how do we understand hospitality and the convivial imagination. And Greg is deeply involved in some Underground Railroad memorialization work. And so when I see like... Basically, I think the nexus typically is proximity to those who suffer, who have suffered, and increasingly--and I don't mean this in a victimization mentality way, but I do think suffering, especially those who emerged, and they're like, people of poise and depth and compassion, like those who have suffered, whether collectively as a people or through some trauma in their lives, and come out on the other side, broken open and very selfless, it's just a proxy for trust to me. It has become that a bit. And something about sort of people who are agitating from the margins, and doing so in a very communitarian spirit. That's just, I'm always drawn to that, partly because I often see the Sermon on the Mount so vividly embodied in these communities. So I mean, there's so many I could say. We are... Actually our next issue of Comment, you referred to this, I think, but our this issue we had this spring, we've been exploring all things social change. And we did something rare, where we actually decided to devote two issues, so essentially six months, to the subject, and the first three months is more like analytical looking at sort of different paradigms of social change and cultural change. Why people of faith in particular, why do we have sort of a dialogue around this question? What is that about? So sort of interrogating it more analytically, but then our next three months is really looking at historical case studies. And I'm particularly interested in what I call those hidden seedbeds of communities that form sometimes in response to a crisis, sometimes out of a move of great vision and world changing hope. And obviously, like the early church in its way and Christianity itself is kind of like the model par excellence, against which I sort of test every other kind of movement of social change, whether it's around a more narrow, discrete issue or something broader, like just the arc of justice over history. So we've done a series of case studies, and it's totally random in a scatterplot, because we only have 100 pages to work with, but learning about a community of women called the Beguines, who I didn't know much about, who in the Middle Ages just sort of like cropped up and they were neither monastic nor married. And yet they found ways, starting in the 12th century, to sort of create these mini cities. And they were, you know, in the broader society, not allowed to be literate or anything, and they created these learning communities. And they were serving the poor and they were very dynamic and they were places of hospitality. And it was sort of this like... It sounds kind of like a Holy Spirit inspired flowering of community life that was very porous and in service to the city, even though these women were otherwise largely kind of, you know, ignored by the reigning religious figures of the time. And what has spawned from those... You know, they got shut down sometime in the 14th century, but that sort of movement of little, almost cities, literally what did that spawn in Europe later? So that's just... These are such random. I could give you so many different examples. But.

Eddie Rester 40:30

I think what I'm hearing in all of them is there's this vision that leads to imagination that leads to a larger story that people can buy into together. They can buy, give them that shared, that telos that you were talking about earlier. Yeah. Why is that kind of moral imagination so critical to social change? Why can it not just be "let's do this thing?" Why does it require this larger imagination, do you think?

Anne Snyder 41:02

You know, it's a beautiful question. I think, whether we know it or not, we all inherit, especially as societies and as somewhat coherent cultures, wherever we're born, we all are inheriting a cultural imagination, of course, first, typically from parents then from the broader society and how you get formed and all the institutions in that society. And I'll speak specifically kind of in the democratic context, because democracy is like an improvisational polity, even though it's rooted in certain fundamental, foundational convictions around self governance and rule of law and individual freedom or liberty. There is sort of like a moral enterprise that has to sort of fuel those convictions, and that enterprise has an inescapably dynamic character. So I think, especially in a democracy, there's something about you have to constantly be re-envisioning the meaning of our shared life. And I think, you know, I've been finally getting up to speed-- barely up to speed--on all things AI, just because it really feels like it's coming down the pike quicker, more quickly than anyone even thought, even the inventors of ChatGPT or whatever, thought. And as I do so, and I've spoken to some people in Silicon Valley, who are very much in that world, either as coders or investors. And I've been, asking questions around what about limits? Like, are any of you thinking about human finitude and how human beings are created? What is the nature? Why do you feel so competitive and driven to sort of go faster and faster and faster? Is that just capitalism and its incentives driving you? And I've been struck by sort of just like the complete absence of any sort of moral, any conversation about the good. And I feel like it's just going to hit, sort of like our tech has in the last decade hit all the creators in the form of a midlife, quarter life spiritual crisis. And they don't quite have the vocabulary categories. So there's something about like being obsessed with change technocratically without any sort of philosophical arc that I find actually very dangerous. And...

Eddie Rester 43:31

I was just going to say, Jen Doudna, who did CRISPR technology, said the same thing, almost eight, nine years ago. It was like, we've released this, but there have been no moral, philosophical conversations about where it goes.

Eddie Rester 43:48
The technological world pushes much faster than the conversation can keep up sometimes.

Chris McAlilly 43:54

Yeah. And I think that brings us back to just kind of this latest episode of Comment, which is charting social change, which I love, because there's this sense that society is... Our social worlds are changing. They're in continual flux. And, you know, both bio technological change and kind of artificial intelligence and kind of media and kind of the way we intersect with the internet, like those are questions that are going to press upon our view of what it means to be a human being and kind of what it means to live in community together. And I think this is where, you know, I've found the folks who are trying to articulate what it might look like to have social change without a Christian vision within the west. Just kind of imagining what that world might look like, or also going back and doing almost like a social history of how the west was changed by the Christian vision, I've found I'm really helpful. So Tom Holland's book "Dominion."

Anne Snyder 45:04 Yeah, "Dominion."

Chris McAlilly 45:06
Which if you haven't read the book, or seen the book, it's... Tom Holland, also, interestingly, I guess his training is as a journalist, and he spent time...

Anne Snyder 45:15 Oh, I didn't know that.

Chris McAlilly 45:16 Yeah.

Anne Snyder 45:16

That's encouraging. A journalist can write a book that fat? Oh, that's life goals for me. That's great.

Eddie Rester 45:22 [LAUGHTER]

Chris McAlilly 45:22

Anyway, basically, he had spent time in contexts that were not, that had no connection to the North Atlantic, western world that is funded largely by kind of Christendom set of social values. And so I think he was struck by both kind of his historical work with both ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Sparta, ancient Athens, just the kind of barbarism. I mean, they're civilized worlds, but there's a deep kind of barbarism to them that he recognizes historically, and then has also seen in other contexts around the world that's just kind of lacking charity, that we think of is just basic to a universal, western vision, but that he is, as an atheist, or at least someone who's culturally Christian, but doesn't have deep Christian...

Anne Snyder 46:24 Beliefs.

Chris McAlilly 46:24

Yeah, he's not a confessional Christian. He's kind of recognizing the ways in which the western world is indebted to this Christian vision, that revolutionize the way that we think about the human person. And it's worth kind of recovering. And there may be something that the church or the Christian vision has to offer to the moral imagination of the western world, if we are to chart a social change trajectory that would be one that anybody wants to be a part of, you know.

Anne Snyder 46:57

That's right. That's right. And I do think specifically Christianity's--and this is where I'm spending a lot of time as a student myself these days, even as I'm trying to forge Comment around this notion of, quote, Christian humanism. But like, it's why does Christianity care so much about the fate of the human being? And I think I've been just digging into that a lot the last two years. It was always intuitive to me. And now I'm just trying to like bone up on the intellectual background here, and theological background. But as I see sort of anti-human and trans-human forces gain steam and audience and following, for some understandable reasons, Gen Z, I mean, this thing... There's a lot of pain points that people feel but I'm like, okay, are the only... Is the only... Are the only people or is the only tradition that can actually provide a robust vision and care for the human, why does it feel like that actually has to come from Christianity? Why is that? What's in the faith or in the history of the faith that is... And I think it's just the incarnation. But so anyways, there's something there that feels like this is the moment for the church, if only we could get our own joy and cohesion together internally to respond and lead out of a place of service. But yeah, I'm a little discouraged on the joy and cohesion internally part.

Chris McAlilly 48:24

I know that Eddie wants to jump in, but I want to ask for folks who, you know, that's a term that maybe some folks might be unfamiliar with, the idea of Christian humanism. Where does that come from? Kind of what... You know, I know that you want to, you're interested in this now, but kind of what are some of the sources or where does that dimension of Christian theology or social vision come from?

Anne Snyder 48:50
Yeah, well, I've actually have sort of my main tutor in this has been a Duke Divinity professor,

Luke Bretherton, who both of you may know.

Eddie Rester 48:59
Great guy. Yeah, he was on the podcast a while back.

Anne Snyder 49:00

Wonderful guy. Oh, was he? Gosh, well, I don't deserve to be on the same podcast as Luke. But he has been a real muse and helped me the last couple of years, and a friend, so I'm going to borrow from him liberally here. But he's been helpful because I didn't have tons of suspicion around the word "humanism," but I know many people like sort of steeped in, say, the last 60 years of Christian formation, hear the word "humanism," and they immediately hear, like, "atheism" or something. So he's just sort of helpful in cutting through all that. So just definition wise, I sort of broadly define Christian humanism as this, like both historic and living tradition, that Luke and many, many theologians throughout the ages would say, actually goes all the way back to sort of the hours before Christ was crucified. When Pilate says, "Ecce homo," like, "Here is the man." Many theologians have sort of used that and interpreted that as like Pilate actually almost preaching against himself and saying, this, the Christ is like the full human, is the measure of what it means to be human. So, you know, there are debates about that. I'm not sure. Like, I think once I was in a conversation with, I don't mean this to sound like name dropping, but Tim Keller and he's like, he's like, "Ecce homo... I'm not sure Pilate is the source of Christian humanism." But anyways. So I have found that helpful and it has sort of found its way through the centuries, through theology and virtue formation and civic engagement and art. I would say, like those four overarching projects, that is holding Christ himself up as the measure of what it is. So it's not saying he wasn't divine; that is just as powerful and crucial, but that he was also very fully human, with all the range of human emotions and bodily urges and limits and needs and temptations and sufferings, and joys. And so it's a tradition that says if you really want to know what it is to be huma and to live a truly human life, look to Christ Himself, and the patterns of that life. So that's kind of definitionally. I have, I think, in many ways, it's... Part of why I'm playing with it as a label, though I don't love isms. I mean, we did a whole issue on ideology, which is the the shorthand version I would have, if I could say... I think we titled it "Beyond Ideologies." And if I could put a subtitle to it, I would have said, "We are the anti-isms," because there's something that lacks the personalism and like the incarnate. An - ism is like immediately abstract. But Christian humanism has been a helpful frame. A, it kind of lacks a lot of cultural baggage compared to many other things within, I would say, Christianity in the west. And so there's like a blank slateness to it, I think for at least a lot of the current contemporary imagination. But it helps name, I think, a lot of people's intuitions about how heaven and earth me and why this life matters. So the actual story in my own more recent work that kind of led me to the to seeing this as like a very helpful label or canopy was I did this project over COVID called Breaking Ground, which Comment was still publishing our regular magazine, but somehow it felt like the quarterly magazine would be too slow to like, keep up with how news heavy the year 2020 was, from the pandemic to George Floyd, all that occurred in the US in particular that year. And I was just yearning. I just was like, church, where are you? So I was really yearning for the Christian imagination to show up. So created this online space called Breaking Ground that was in collaboration with about now 30 other institutions of different sectors. Comment was really the editorial heavyweight. We partnered with Plough Quarterly, which is an Anabaptist magazine. And while working on that I discovered someone who I kind of felt like was like a bit of a dead horse whisperer or like a predecessor to this work. And it was a man that very few Americans know of called J.H. Oldham. And he started something during World War Two, well, starting in the 1930s through 1947, called Oldham's Moot, and it's featured in a beautiful book Alan Jacobs wrote called "The Year of Our Lord 1943." But it was basically a collection of people like Reinhold Niebuhr and T.S. Eliot, and they had this very well known Jewish German refugee sociologist Karl Mannheim, physicist John Bailey, or sorry physicist Michael Polanyi, John Bailey, the poet, and several dozen others. And they were all men. It was the 30s and 40s. But they would come together, often through great logistical hardship, multiple times throughout the 30s and 40s. Like feeling like crisis... You know, Hitler was totally... You know, just like trying to understand this relation of strong men and totalitarianism and how do you relate faith to society in an increasingly secular century? How do you understand nationalism? And what is the role of education specifically in forming human beings who can sort of stand to thwart these forces that seem to be attacking the human and human dignity? And like redefining what the human being is, what the soul is? So they, he was a gatherer and it would sort of facilitate conversations structured. He would commission papers. And when I was sort of steeped, learned about Oldham's Moot, in a time of civilizational crisis and reckoning in Europe, I was like, in a way, I just, something about that... I was reading all the transcripts. I was like, that's what Breaking Ground is trying to do in our day, and we're not... We may not have World War Two, so... And he would have said, in fact, he did say, like, unless the deepest questions about the human in our particular time and place are constantly raised, society will lose any sense of the transcendent and will become criterion list and prey to managerial control on the one hand, or worse, like the blandishment of ideologies that claim to have the answer to human purposes, in terms that liberal societies are in danger of not addressing. And so he was grounded in a deeply sort of Christian humanist fragrance that allowed mostly Christian thinkers, and in that case sort of government leaders, to be in dialogue with other intellectual traditions, all of whom were sort of very concerned about and trying to get clear on the human questions. There's something about all of that I was like, that's Christian humanism. And it seems to like awaken in response to felt crisis, or at least liminal, that time between times, which I think we may be in now, some sort of like hinge point between eras.

Eddie Rester 55:41

Recently, I got to teach a group of honors students, bringing in a pastor to talk to them, and at the end, they could ask me anything, absolutely anything. And one of them, a young woman asked me, "Why is Christianity dying? Why is it dying?" And that, her question, that question always taunts me, but coming from a 19 year old, the tone of her voice... And I think it goes back to some of what you're saying, this ought to be our moment. This ought to be our moment, you know. Someone once said, years ago, Christ came not to make more Christians, but to make us fully human. And we ought to be, in this moment where so many things seek to make us less than human, we should be the clarion call for what does it look like? What does it feel like? How can we be together fully human? Anne, we've taken up a lot of your time this morning.

Anne Snyder 56:46
Well, vice versa. I'm sorry, I'm a little long winded.

Chris McAlilly 56:49

No, it's okay. But I would I would just say, let me tag on to what you said, Eddie, as we as we close here, because I do think that's not just the voice of like a 19 year old. I think it's also... I hear that in folks who are kind of at the end of their life that are trying to hold on to what I see is kind of really a fragmentation of a whole set of institutions that kind of were born after World War Two. And you have this--and particularly kind of, I mean, we're United Methodist, and so you see kind of the fragmentation of a particular form of institutional life, that was really kind of the... I don't know, the institutional instantiation or embodiment of this Wesleyan Methodist tradition. And so that's breaking down. And there's a lot of lament there. At the same time... You know, I think one of the things that I appreciate about you, Anne, and I am grateful that you're bent towards construction and resurrection and hope, because...

Eddie Rester 57:53 And hope, yeah.

Chris McAlilly 57:53

Because I think you're pulling together, you know, in Comment and the work that you guys are doing. I think--and many others, you know, the 30 other partners that you did Breaking Ground with--I think it's not just one thing. There are all these small experiments, projects, partnerships, and collaborations across the country, if you are attending to them, that are, I think, signs of resurrection in the midst of death. And so, you know, I just appreciate the ways in which you're doing that the way in which you're pulling together others and drawing folks' attention to signs of life and hope in the midst of perhaps kind of a hinge point between eras. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

Anne Snyder 58:36 Thank you.

Chris McAlilly 58:36

Really appreciate your time. This was great.

Anne Snyder 58:39
Thank you. Thank you. Well, thanks for that encouragement, and I'm humbled and given strength to keep going. Thank you. It's nice to feel not alone.

Eddie Rester 58:48
[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.

Chris McAlilly 58:55

If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]