Q&A With Anne Snyder: How The Pandemic And Christian Humanism Inspired ‘Breaking Ground’
In the spring of 2020, the beginnings of a global pandemic and the surfacing of an American racial reckoning were uncovering fissures long present — just below the surface, in the fault lines of our society. Some Christians were wondering if this could be a cosmic moment for reimaging the structures of our shared lives and laying the groundwork for a new way forward.
At the same time, Anne Snyder, editor-in-chief of Comment Magazine, launched a publishing project — enlisting Christian institutional leaders, writers, theologians, journalists, educators, artists, activists and more — to explore a redemptive vision forward through the public health, racial and economic crises at hand. Plough joined in the venture, as did 17 other Christian institutions. The online commons that resulted — Breaking Ground — became a one-of-a-kind space to probe society’s assumptions, interrogate our own hearts and imagine what a better future might require.
“Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year.” Edited by Anne Snyder and Susannah Black.
And now, a book by the same name has been published to capture the particular moment that 2020 found us in. Written in real time during a year that revealed the depths of our society’s fissures, “Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year,” edited by Anne Snyder and Susannah Black, is an anthology of different lenses of faith seeking to understand how we can best serve the broader society and renew our civilization.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Anne. She graciously reflected on the birth of Breaking Ground in its various iterations: a web publishing project, a community of Christian institutions and leaders, and a book. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Chelsea Langston Bombino: Thank you for joining me today Anne. Before we begin, could you frame up for readers at Religion Unplugged a little bit about your own story and how you ended up in your primary role right now, which is editor and editor-in-chief of Comment, a long-term publication of Cardus?
Anne Snyder: Sure! My own quick biography is that I grew up overseas in a family itself layered by multiple cross-cultural experiences, and so as a child I had both the aesthetic and narrative exposure to Indigenous meeting cosmopolitan, Latin America meeting Asia Pacific, sacred meeting secular. As a result, while growing up I was surrounded by questions that lived at the intersection between conceptions of the good and the transcendent and about how cultural environments in particular shape norms — though I certainly couldn’t have articulated that structure of our family’s imagination at the time!
Fast forward, and as a young adult, I was encouraged toward a deep love of ideas amid a delight in music, hospitality, people. My college professors encouraged me to consider writing as a profession, probably seeing my batty prose style, but I was honestly more interested in practice, service and incarnate human realities and didn’t initially see writing as a vehicle.
Over time, after spending some years at a Washington think tank and then migrating over to journalism and cutting my long-form teeth in the teeming dynamism that is Houston, Texas, I became interested in social institutions in the U.S that were modeling what it was to accommodate diversity and were somehow also able to maintain moral coherence. I was writing in an increasingly pluralistic context where there were lots of competing visions of the good.
I was eventually tapped to write a book (“The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Moral Renewal”) about character formation and the institutions that shape us across culture, class and generation in the U.S. The book asked the question, “How do we reinvigorate moral enchantment in our time?” I wound up writing a series of stories about the healthiest institutions and communities I could find operating today and describing the patterned principles they shared in common.
This experience ultimately led me to Cardus, a North American think tank animated by 2,000 years of Christian social thought, which publishes Comment Magazine. Cardus is an institution invested in the fabric of civil society, understanding that a person’s moral agency comes into full bloom when he or she is embedded in a thick web of institutions: families, religious communities, voluntary associations, work. There was friendly soil to precisely what I’d been studying and how I’d been studying it.
At the same time, there was a sense that many of Comment’s own readers felt increasingly pressured by a binary set of moral choices in front of them. There was a desire to focus more intentionally on how to offer these leaders in local spaces a contextually sensitive source of moral renewal and beauty — to shore up a different kind of imagination.
CLB: That spirit of offering moral beauty and a faithful, yet imaginative, lens for thinking institutionally — that is something that Comment typifies, particularly under your leadership. And this same spirit undergirds a lot of how I think about Breaking Ground. Can you give the brief version of the origin story of Breaking Ground?
AS: When the pandemic initially came on the horizon, I thought this was, without overblowing it, maybe a Great Depression moment. I thought we were heading into a historical season, one of remaking and change, that we would one day look back on as a watershed juncture. That was the genesis of this year-long publishing project that became Breaking Ground. Susannah Black, a peer editor from Plough, shared my sense that this was an opportunity replete with moral opportunity, and with Cardus’ encouragement and generosity, she and I joined editorial forces.
We wanted to create something that was at once a serious intellectual work but also useful to leaders navigating volatile winds and seeking to guide their communities and institutions through a time of profound uncertainty and impending fracture. We wanted to accompany the person who was feeling very alone, to be a nudge and a conversational companion in exploring questions like, “How is this time potentially remaking me? How is it remaking the society in which I live? And what role can I play in that remaking?”
In all this, I believed that a still-larger weave of institutions might be able to put some legs on these ideas — that the potential reimagining of a wide array of civil sectors our authors were painting could inform and empower relevant institutions from these sectors to help renewal happen in real time. So Breaking Ground the learning community was born around Breaking Ground the publishing project.
CLB: The words Christian humanism have been offered by certain emerging voices in the Breaking Ground community to describe some of the ethos and scaffolding that is taking shape. I know that this community is largely a project of living and working out of what Christian humanism is — as opposed to coming in with a prescription. But I have heard you really set the table for so many wonderful conversations about the connection to Christian humanism, so I am wondering, how are you thinking about Christian humanism at this moment?
AS: I did not create Breaking Ground consciously thinking it was a project seeking to renew Christian humanism. I only had intuitions around that tradition, and this felt more like an emergency application of the moral responsibility called forth by Christian humanism at its best than anything intentionally trying to revive the field. Still, over time, as this project accrued a reputation and a following, increasing numbers of writers, readers and participants would tell us, “I think Breaking Ground is actually reviving this lost way of seeing and thinking in our world.” So, Susannah and I started revisiting our Jacques Maritain, Alan Jacobs and J.H. Oldham and latched onto the phrase “Christian humanism” as a way of describing the many different aspects of this project.
Christian humanism as an intellectual tradition goes back centuries, rooted fundamentally in the sense that Jesus Christ was the ideal human — that he was the measure of what it is to be human. Inherent in that, then, is a uniquely personalist approach to public issues and historical events. You don’t understand humanity’s progress merely through an ideology. Christian humanism insists that we understand one another in a layered and complex civic context: the institutions that form us, the cultural context that we exist within, the polity in which we find friendship and negotiate conflict, and the arts that educate our moral sentiments.
You know, there was this phrase I grew up with as a child — and it wasn’t always full of charity, but it was an honest observation — namely, ‘That person is too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good.’ In this more colloquial sense, you might think of Christian humanists as those people who are aware of their responsibility — even authority — to play a role in a larger redemptive project. This project demands that we care deeply about all the nuances and vagaries of the times and the societies in which we live. That’s intellectual work. It also requires the building of certain virtues, sensitivities and loves.
Christian humanism calls us to civic and political work that does not eschew power but deploys it with wisdom and an eye to serve.
So, I’m still groping toward a way to define Christian humanism. Why is this tradition needed right now? What weary falsities in our culture cry out for its supply? Breaking Ground is a community where thinkers and doers are articulating shared yet contextually distinct answers to the question of Christian humanism, always looking to see where it might be embodied in practice by people on the ground.
Breaking Ground is trying to create both a product — the publishing platform, the book — as well as hubs of friendships and institutional collaborations that do this warm inheritance proud. We believe it’s constructive and imaginative and that it's not afraid of the new. It seeks spiritual unity amid disagreement. It strives to thicken and expand those webs of formative institutions that allow for a just and generous common life, where joy bubbles forth in dialogue between friends and strangers.
CLB: Before this interview ends, I want to ask about a particular essay in the book. I was really struck by the essay “The Atmosphere: The Most Formative Aspect of School,” by Doug Sikkema. The essay explores how the ethos of home can be woven into the classroom. Doug quotes Charlotte Mason and elaborates on her philosophy’s relevance:
‘The child breathes the atmosphere emanating from its parents,’ Mason wrote, ‘that of the ideas which rule their own lives.’ We might add that children breathe the atmosphere of their schools which are the ideas that rule teachers, administrators, boards, and parent communities. Schools would do well, when we return, to gather their community of parents — who are ultimately co-teachers — and think about the type of atmosphere they want for their schools, understood as extensions of the home.
Can you reflect a little on this particular passage from Doug’s essay? I saw as I read the book that all the writers were grappling, in different ways, with how to humanize different elements of civil society.
AS: I loved this essay. Doug is one of my writerly exemplars. Here he invites us to ask how to humanize our public and civil society institutions, including schools. I believe he himself now leads in Charlotte Mason school.
This particular essay reminded me of my longstanding draw toward organizations that have a familial flavor. Those that see relational health as the necessary baseline of all activity. Doug here is applying this humanizing lens to education and specifically to the atmosphere in which we educate our children, which of course, at the beginning of the pandemic, was on every parent’s mind.
Doug’s observations are really indicative of how we are all shaped and formed. We are exposed to other souls through our interactions in communities, whether we are talking about kids in schools or adults in civil society. Part of Christian humanism properly pursued is to borrow lessons from some of the more covenantal spheres of our lives and to experiment with how they flower when planted in drier soil. It is not that hospitals and banks need to have the same norms as a beloved neighborhood supper club. Of course, there is space and a need for more transactional norms in all sorts of realms. But there was something about that moment early in the pandemic when all our worlds shrank that created a space to strip away the longstanding assumptions about what makes for good institutional norms.
In the early months of lockdown, we just had a greater understanding of how the rhythms and atmosphere of our households impacted us because many of us were confined to our homes even as we continued to do work, school, church, civic engagement, etc. There was something occurring in Doug’s essay that was in some ways the aim of the Breaking Ground project. Can we draw lessons from other spheres in this time of scramble and upheaval? And might not this cross-fertilization of sectors help us to reimagine a humanizing renewal of social structures? It can’t seem to hurt to try.
Chelsea Langston Bombino is a believer in sacred communities, a wife and a mother. She serves as a program officer with the Fetzer Institute and a fellow with the Center for Public Justice.