Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year

Presentation of Breaking Ground, a book of a unique moral record of 2020-2021, and the network of diverse faith-based institutions which generated it, with Susannah Black, senior editor of Plough, and Luke Bretherton, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, Christine Emba, columnist, The Washington Post, introduced and moderated by Anne Snyder, editor-in-chief of Comment and creator of Breaking Ground

Breaking Ground is a network of institutions and people which has grown out of a year-long publishing project. The publishing project was created by Comment in the spring of 2020 to use the resources of the Christian humanist tradition to respond collaboratively and imaginatively to the year’s significant crises—a public health and economic crisis provoked by COVID-19, a social crisis cracked open by the filmed murder of George Floyd, and a leadership crisis laid bare as the gravity of a global pandemic met the epistemological fracture of a country suffocating in political polarization and idolatry. In the book, there is a body of work that should stand the test of time: a record of a year that revealed the depths of our society’s fissures, and a collection of proposals and reflections on what should come after: how we can truly renew our civilization in this post-COVID world.