For a decade, young people have been suffering a mental health crisis. A major driver of this crisis has been a misunderstanding, by well-intentioned parents, of the best way to protect children. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues, we have over-protected children in the real world and under-protected them in the online world.

This episode of Article 13 offers guidance for parents seeking a way forward. Lenore Skenazy and Peter Gray explain why children need more real-world free play and independent activity to find resilience and joy, and how a parent’s reliable care gives children confidence to venture out on real-world explorations. As part of that care, Kim John Payne invites parents to build a protective boundary around childhood, filtering out the stressors of the online adult world and preserving space for play, self-discovery, and nurturing relationships.

FEATURED VOICES

* Peter Gray

* Jonathan Haidt

* Freya India

* Kim John Payne

* Lenore Skenazy

* Vivek Murthy

LISTEN ON APPLE OR SPOTIFY

Article 13 is a new narrative podcast from Faith Matters that brings together cutting-edge research and spiritual wisdom to offer blueprints for a better world. American society is fractured across political and cultural lines. Healing will not happen quickly or easily, but will require a sustained commitment to peaceful discussion and the development of new, creative frameworks for finding common ground.

Hosted by Zachary Davis and featuring deep-dives into vital social issues, extraordinary guests, and beautiful sound design, Article 13 aims to model the kind of hopeful, intelligent discourse our country needs—and to offer ways that each individual listener can start the healing, right where they are.

Article 13 is produced by Maria Devlin McNair, Zachary Davis, Gavin Feller, and Music by Steve LaRosa. Art by Charlotte Alba. You can learn more about Article 13 here.

We express our thanks to the Wheatley Institute for their support.

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably heard the stories and statistics around youth mental health:

60 Minutes: The US surgeon general has called it an urgent public health crisis : a devastating decline in the mental health of kids across the country

Dr. Vivek Murthy: There are few numbers I like to keep in mind to remind me of how significant this is. One is a number, 57. That’s a percent increase in the suicide rate among young people that we saw in the decade prior to the pandemic. The other number that I keep in mind is the number 44 percent. That’s the percentage of high school students who feel persistently sad or hopeless.

That was Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in conversation with Bernie Sanders in 2023. Murthy warned about the “devastating effects” of mental health challenges for young people in 2021 – the same year that the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups declared a National State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health.

For parents, these figures are frightening. With so many young people facing depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and other mental health crises, how can you help protect the children in your family and community?

There are some answers. There are other ways a child’s story could go.

[Children and adults speaking about the Let Grow Experience]

How does doing something on your own make you feel?

I feel awesome, excited, big, nervous, strong, proud.

Are you ready? Yes!

I made eggs for my family.

What kind of eggs?

Scrambled, and I learned how to use the stove and I didn’t it burn myself.

For my project, I tried to pick up a grasshopper because I’ve been scared of bugs my whole life and I just wanted to take a closer look.

Are you going to get it right the first time?

No!

No but does that mean we give up?

No!

No! Would you say you’re resilient?

Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah!

Welcome to Article 13 – a podcast that brings together cutting edge research and spiritual wisdom to provide blueprints for a better world. I’m Zachary Davis. In this episode, we explore the task of parenting today. As overprotective and underprotective parenting are called out for contributing to children’s struggles, we explore what it means to be rightly protective. We explore how protecting your children can sometimes mean letting them go and how some attachments can keep protecting them wherever they end up.

The need for freedom and play

The stories just shared came from students at Ortwein Elementary School in Las Vegas, Nevada, who participated in something called the “LetGrow Project.” The project directive is simple: go do something new, on your own. It’s a core initiative of LetGrow, an organization co-founded by Lenore Skenazy.

Skenazy: We’re trying to make it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back some old fashioned independence.

A core idea of LetGrow is a simple psychological principle. Independence builds resilience. Children need to experience freedom and risk to develop the capacity to handle greater freedom and risk.

But the reason Skenazy needed to start an enormous campaign around this simple idea is that it’s become difficult for many parents today to accept. Skenazy first came to public prominence when she wrote a column about letting her 9-year-old-son ride the New York City subway by himself; in the media firestorm that resulted, she was dubbed, “America’s Worst Mom.” For several decades, one of the dominant messages aimed at parents has been that children are under constant threat and that parents’ primary job is to protect their children’s physical safety at all times.

Skenazy: What’s new is the last 40 years or so [is] parents feeling increasingly like anytime they weren’t with their kids, their kids were in automatic danger. And so we were told that every moment that we’re not with them is bad and every moment that we’re with them, we’re giving them the gift of safety.

Of course parents need to keep their children safe. But “always safe” often turns out to mean “always supervised.” Things that were common for kids a generation ago – being allowed to play outside on their own, walking to school by themselves, organizing their own games, taking risks in their play, enjoying unstructured free time – are rarities now. The norm for many kids now is to be transported, directed, and supervised in their activities by adults. This strategy guards against threats to children’s physical safety. But if parents focus on those threats alone, they can inadvertently introduce other kinds of threats that aren’t so visible but can be very harmful.

Skenazy: The idea that if they’re constantly watched, that’s how they’re going to be safe, we’ve just seen that as they got more and more constantly watched, other bad things crept in. And sometimes it’s like it’s easier to imagine the kidnapping than it is to imagine the depression, or the anxiety. And anxiety and depression are going up. So, you know, there’s always this trade off. You’re protecting them from the very off chance of kidnapping, and you’re not protecting them from the very likely chance of heightened anxiety.

It turns out that there’s a strong causal link between depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems that are on the rise, and the childhood freedom that’s been on the decline.

Gray: All kinds of independent activities that children used to do, we’ve gradually been taking them away from children so that they’re more and more supervised all the time, less and less opportunity for them to have to figure out their own things for themselves. Over that same period of time, we’ve seen continuous increases in all sorts of indices of emotional and personal suffering among young people.

This is Dr. Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College who studies play and a co-founder of LetGrow. His research shows how taking away independence and free play from kids has caused their mental health to decline.

Gray: Play actually provides the conditions in which children develop the skills and the character traits that lead them to be able to deal with the problems of life. They learn courage in play. They learn that they can solve problems in play. They learn how to make friends in play. And these, of course, are important skills that help protect you from anxiety and depression.

There’s another crucial way that play or other independent activity can stave off anxiety and depression: by giving you the sense that you are in charge of your own life

Gray: You develop what psychologists refer to as an internal locus of control, which is really the sense that I am, at least largely, in control of my own experiences and my own fate, I can solve problems, I can run my life – versus an external locus of control, which is the sense that I’m kind of a victim of circumstances outside of my control. Now, there’s a lot of research that shows that for people of any age, if you don’t have a strong internal locus of control, that sets you up for anxiety and depression.

Of course, there are many reasons why an individual child might be suffering from depression and anxiety. There might be economic stressors on the family. They may have suffered losses or experienced some kind of trauma. But any child in these difficult circumstances will find them even harder to cope with if they are also deprived of free play – the primary way that humans and mammals evolved to learn and grow stronger.

Gray: Think how often children play at what we think of as dangerous things. They climb too high in trees. They’d jump off of cliffs. They skateboard down banisters. They do these things that frighten parents. And what are they doing? They’re learning how to experience fear and realize that they can tolerate fear, that they can get over it. So that the child climbing a tree is climbing just to the point where the fear is barely tolerable. He feels frightened, but he’s experiencing that fear. And then he’s coming down, and he realizes, ‘I could handle that. I don’t have to panic from fear.’

Free play benefits children physically, socially, and emotionally as they learn to handle fear. It protects against depression and anxiety and increases confidence in oneself. This means one of the best things you can do as a parent is introduce more free play into your kids’ lives – being clear, of course, on what “free play” really means.

Gray: What they learn is how to initiate their own activities and how to take charge of their own activities. Ultimately, they’re learning how to take charge of their own life. That’s one of the major functions of play. And of course, we destroy that when we adults step in and try to run it for them. The key thing about independent play that parents do is they get out of the way, right, intervene as little as possible.

Parents shouldn’t direct children’s play. What they should do is provide the right conditions for it to happen. Don’t fill your kids’ schedules with activities – build in lots of free time. Create play-friendly space in your home or get your kids outside. Keep out the things that ruin free play, whether that’s attention-grabbing devices or the interference of other adults. And most importantly of all, bring in other kids.

Stepping back and letting kids figure things out on their own isn’t just a recipe for good play. It’s actually been shown in clinical settings to help reduce anxiety. This is Dr. Camilo Ortiz, a clinical therapist who’s been inspired by the LetGrow project:

Ortiz: I’ve developed a new treatment for child anxiety which is based on what I call Mega doses of child Independence.

When parents over-supervise children, says Ortiz, they actually foster anxiety. Kids who don’t get independent activity, quote, “are less self-confident, have worse social skills, are less tolerant of uncertainty, have worse problem-solving skills, and are less resilient.”

The good news is that, for many kids, it doesn’t take much to reverse this harmful trend. Ortiz’s “Independence therapy” works very simply. The child comes up with a list of things he’d like to do on his own, and over several weeks completes the list. These are mildly challenging activities, like cooking a meal or biking to the park, that are done without any help from adults.

So far, says Ortiz, “we have found that these short bursts of independence have led to reduced anxiety in kids and their parents.” One child, for instance, was afraid to go up and down the stairs at home by himself. After some independence therapy, he was ready to go without his parents – to his first day of school.

Skenazy: But this kid, [after] five … I guess four weeks of therapy, told his parents, ‘Actually, no, I can handle this. It’s just the first day of school. I’m excited.’ And when he came home, it was great. He had a good time. And he said, ‘And guess what? I was like one of the only kids there without my parents.’

Of course, there will be times when stepping back as a parent doesn’t feel good. Your child will be playing high in a tree and you’ll feel a powerful instinct to rush over and support them on their way down. But try not to give in to that instinct right away. Give your child a chance to see what they can do without your help. Because they are probably undertaking this little solo adventure with more help from you than you think.

Attachment theory

Along with the instinct to play, young mammals have another vital instinct that guides them as they grow. This is the instinct to attach to a caregiver or “attachment figure.” When a child feels threatened or fearful, he will seek out his attachment figure. A responsive attachment figure provides immediate comfort and safety and stabilizes the child’s physiological responses. Over time, they build the child’s resilience and help the most sophisticated parts of the child’s brain to grow – as parenting expert Dr. Tina Bryson explains.

Bryson: Those repeated experiences over time, where you have a need or you’re in distress and someone shows up for you and helps you in those moments, it actually helps build the prefrontal cortex, and so it builds the brain in the most optimal ways.

A parent who reliably shows up for the child when he is in need is a secure attachment figure. And there’s almost nothing more powerful than such a person in a child’s life.

Bryson: One of the single best predictors for how well children turn out, despite anything that they face in the world and measuring them on every possible way we can think to measure children, one of the best predictors for how they turn out is that they have this secure attachment with at least one person. So secure attachment means you are in distress, you have a need, your caregiver sees it and responds or shows up in that moment in a way that, most of the time, in a fairly predictable way, regulates your emotions and your bodily states.

So how can you be a secure attachment figure for your child? How can you show up for them? Bryson and her colleague Daniel Seigel recommend what they call the “four S’s” – making a child feel safe, seen, soothed, and thus secure. As Bryson says, the four S’s send the child the message, “I’m here for you. I will protect you. I am the nest, the protective home you can count on, and when you’re afraid or in danger, I’ll always be here. Count on it.”

Bryson: The ‘Four S’s’ is always my north star. If I can respond to my child in a way that helps them feel safe and seen and soothed and secure, and knowing I’m going to keep showing up for them, then I am doing the best possible thing I can do for them relationally and in terms of their brain development.

Bryson and Siegel are sometimes asked whether this “soothing” approach can backfire and produce dependence on the attachment figure or anxiety when they’re away. In fact, they say, the opposite is true. The secure base provided by the attachment figure isn’t just a safe haven; it’s also a launching pad.

Gray: Attachment is extraordinarily important for infants. Children need the warmth and comfort and security of a close by parent. Now by the time a child is four, however, then the child who feels this security is ready to explore. That child wants to get away from Mom, knowing that Mom is there if I come back, Mom isn’t going to abandon me, Mom or Dad, whoever it is the attachment object is – but it’s somebody who’s there, somebody I can depend on. And so what you find with secure attachment is, those are the kids who feel most comfortable getting away from their attachment object.

Making yourself a secure base isn’t just the best way to help your child feel emotionally comfortable when they’re with you; it’s the best way to help them explore uncomfortable new terrain on their own.

Imagine that scenario again, of the child up in the tree who wants to climb down by herself. You may be standing physically far away. But you are still present to that child as she makes her climb. Through the past history of your nurturing interactions, you have given her greater emotional stability and security and a more integrated, self-regulating brain, which all results in higher inner resilience and confidence. “As the [securely attached] child develops she is able to internalize the secure base,” explains psychologist Jonathan Haidt. “She doesn’t need the parent’s physical presence to feel that she has support, so she learns to face adversity by herself.” In other words, you are helping her climb down that tree all by herself.

* The phone-free childhood

Jonathan Haidt describes this growth process in his book The Anxious Generation. He agrees that parents need to show up in their children’s lives as protective figures. The problem, he says, is that for the last couple decades, we’ve entirely mistaken what “protection” really requires.

Haidt: So my argument in brief is that humans had a play-based childhood for millions of years, because that’s what mammals do, all mammals play, they have to play to wire up their brains. But that play-based childhood began to fade out in the 1980s in the United States, and it was gone by 2010. And that’s because right around 2010 is when the phone-based childhood sweeps in, our children are now raised largely with a phone at the center of everything.

Haidt: Another way I can summarize my book is by saying we have overprotected our children in the real world and we have underprotected them online. And both of those are mistakes.

Over the last several decades, Haidt says, parents have over-restricted their children’s risky free play and independent activity, but have hardly restricted at all when it came to their kids’ lives online. And so the whole of the Internet, and with it the whole adult world, has been flooding children’s lives and minds with devastating consequences.

Child and family counselor Kim John Payne came to this realization in a particularly stark way. Payne volunteered at camps in Asia for refugees displaced by war. The children here, Payne writes, “were very clearly diagnosable with post-traumatic stress disorder. They were jumpy, nervous … and quite a few had hair-trigger tempers.” Later, when he began practicing in the UK, he was astounded to see similar symptoms there. Children from fairly affluent and stable homes showed nervousness, hyper-vigilance, anxiety, and states of mental disorder and distress similar to those in refugee children. Payne’s research revealed why:

Payne: There was just too much, too soon, too sexy, too young, and they were being overwhelmed, their nervous systems were being overwhelmed, and I started thinking that this was cumulative stress reaction. Things are moving so fast, and there’s such a deluge of information particularly through screens.

It turns out that a major stressor for children and driver of mental disorders is an unfiltered flow of content from the adult world and the Internet, through social media and smartphones.

Studies show that the average US teen spends 5 hours a day on social media. Jonathan Haidt points out that these social media feeds can be “randomly interspersed with videos more horrific than anything their parents had been exposed to as children,” including “violence and animal cruelty … car accidents, suicides and suicide posts, strangers masturbating, and hardcore pornography, some of which involves children.” CUT

These examples are extreme. But even the most commonplace social media content can be more distressing than parents might imagine. There’s the personalized ads that are designed to prey specifically on a child’s vulnerabilities and fears. There are the photos and selfies that make a child feel insecure beside their peers – as a young person on CBS morning describes.

CBS Morning:

“You’re scrolling and you see all these different people you constantly compare yourself, and I think that’s definitely a negative, and it always seems like they’re living the perfect life that you are not, even though that’s not true.”

“No, I agree with what ellie said, like [] they have a perfect [life] and they’re perfect ,they can do whatever they want, they have all that money, compared to them, I’m a nobody”

College students Aliza Kopans and Emma Lembke co-created the organization Tech(nically Politics) to help change digital regulation laws because of what they’d seen social media doing to them and to their peers. This is Kopans and Lembke on 60 minutes:

Kopans: In eighth grade after years and years of me pushing to get social media, my parents finally relented, and that year was the worst mental health year of my life.

Lembke: Big Tech didn’t care that I was a 12-year-old girl who went on YouTube and fell into these harmful rabbit holes that caused me to actually have disordered eating. They didn’t care that I would count my likes and followers and quantify my worth consistently for years and that led to increased rates of anxiety and depression. They didn’t care as long as my eyes were on the screen and as long as I was making them profit.

Life lived online, on social media, floods children’s consciousness with disturbing pieces of the adult world and with endless messages that amplify their insecurities and diminish their sense of self. Researchers disagree about the exact contribution of screens and social media to the youth mental health crisis, but Jonathan Haidt and his research team conclude that the screen-based life is a major driving factor of this crisis.

And, Haidt says, another tech-driven disaster could be coming – from artificial intelligence.

Of particular concern for children are “AI companions.” These are AI-powered chatbots designed to provide personalized emotional support that mimics human interaction. A recent report from Dr. Rupert Gill relates that about half of all teenagers in the US are regular users of AI companions, with 20% saying they spend as much or more time with AI companions as with their human friends.

Gill notes that there are benefits from AI companions. Conversation with an AI companion can improve emotional expression and reduce self-reported loneliness, particularly for neurodivergent youth. The benefits are strongest when the chatbots are used for temporary, targeted interventions.

But there are also considerable risks. Some of these have been well-publicized: AI-powered talking teddy bears that discuss sex and bondage with children; an 11-year-old girl who fell into a mental health crisis after sexualized conversations with AI-chatbots; a teenager who committed suicide after a chatbot implored him to “come home.” These dangerous and inappropriate interactions aren’t uncommon. As Jonathan Haidt writes, “An AI companion bot has no morals, no feelings, no shame. It is built to keep users of all ages “engaged” with it … my message to parents is simple: DO NOT GIVE YOUR CHILDREN ANY AI COMPANIONS OR TOYS.”

But what if, as developers promise, they really did iron out all the “bugs”? What if every AI companion becomes “safe, appropriate, and emotionally attuned … says all the right things”? What if it becomes, “the easiest relationship” a child has ever had?

Then we’ve put the child in a new kind of danger.

As researcher Mandy McLean writes, “Children develop the capacity for healthy relationships, [not from] seamless attunement [but from] rupture and repair.” A child reaches for connection from a caregiver and doesn’t get what they want. They experience frustration or distress. The caregiver notices, reaches out, and makes some amends. This rupture-repair cycle, repeated over and over again, teaches the child crucial lessons: “that relationships can survive conflict. That your needs matter and aren’t the only needs that matter.”

We aren’t born with empathy. We develop it by encountering other people with their own experience that we need to understand and accommodate. But, says McLean, “An AI companion … makes no demands; it never needs the child to notice its emotional state, to adjust, to accommodate, or to wait. The child is empathized with … but never has to practice empathy toward anything … This is the asymmetry at the heart of AI companionship, and no amount of better guardrails will fix it. In fact, better models make it worse … The more perfect the AI friend, the more it displaces the imperfect human connections that actually build the capacity for connection.”

Dr. Rupert Gill recommends that large-scale safety testing be done, similar to the kind done on new medications, on the impacts of AI companions before young people are allowed unregulated access to them. Mandy McLean insists that we ask in this process, not just “Is this AI safe for children?”, but “What kind of adults are we raising?”

As McLean writes,“Relationships that never push back don’t teach you how to tolerate discomfort, navigate conflict, or matter to someone who also has needs of their own. Over time, the absence of these demands doesn’t just make us lonelier, it leaves us less capable of relationship itself.”

Disrupting and protecting connection

Protecting your child’s relationships – and protecting their very ability to have meaningful relationships – is one reason to monitor closely the technology in your child’s life. It’s also a reason to look at the technology in your life. Your own screentime may be leaving you less available for relationship with your family.

A 2024 study found that the more parents were on screens themselves, the more likely the children were to have problematic screen behaviours that disrupted their daily functioning. Teenagers also reported that their parents feel “unavailable” when on their phones. Kids don’t feel they can just go up to their parents and talk when they need to.

Kim John Payne sees phones breaking the parent-child connection so often that he gave the phenomenon a name: micro-abandonment.

Payne: One of the leading stresses for a child is to feel abandoned, and our phones are doing that all the time. Every time we’re engaged with a child and we’re playing with them, we’re picking them up from school and they come running out from school to greet us and the phone goes and the text goes, notification goes off, and for that moment we look down, and our eyes go down onto the screen and away from a child who’s running towards us so happy to see us – that is what I mean by a ‘micro abandonment.’

And every time that happens, a child starts to feel, ‘My mom, my dad, my guardian is – not only are they not quite there for me, that even when we’re doing something and the phone gives a notification, that is more important than me.’

Because they’ve got this underlying feeling that they’re secondary, that they’re being displaced, and that’s a very insecure place for a child.

Be conscious of how screens can damage your connection to your child. And be conscious of how screens disrupt children’s connection to themselves.

Reflecting on how social media has affected Gen Z, author Freya India writes, “Algorithms … [s]haped our identities … What these continuous streams of content do is prevent you from taking a second to pause, reflect on who you really are … There are a lot of us now in our 20s who feel utterly lost. Detached from who we really are. We don’t recognise – or even like – ourselves.”

This sense of disconnection from who you really are is a core reason why Kim John Payne worries about the effects of screens on children.

Payne: It’s all about connection and the disruption to connection. Screens risk disrupting our essential connections. When I think about what truly it is that makes us human and humane, that’s right at the core, a child’s connection or a human being’s connection to their sense of self – that this is what I stand for, this, for me, is where I stand.

What we can do is give our kids the ground to stand on out of which they can make their morally guided judgments. It’s got to do with our kids having this sense of true north, as opposed to the magnetic north of popular toxic pop culture.

How do we help our kids develop that inner sense of moral true north? Most immediately, by not allowing the online world to flood kids’ lives through screens. More generally, by keeping a certain metaphor of Payne’s in mind.

Payne once came across a harbor with a stone wall wrapping nearly all the way around, leaving a narrow entrance where the boats would go in and out. Within the harbor, sailors would rest, chat, and laugh, and safely reprovision and repair their boats for the next journey out.

Payne: And I was standing looking at this and thinking, ‘That, that is just like how we want our classrooms and homes to be. That. That is what we want it to be. Because out there, the seas were rocky, the buoys were bobbing up and down, but in here, the water was pretty calm, it was surprisingly calm, it was pretty flat, compared to the turmoil out there.’ We can build an “in here,” so that our children can come back in, repair their metaphoric boats, and back out they go, and we can know that we have given them that harbor in which to repair, to build, to prepare, to go out, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. That is beautiful. That is what parents have been doing for thousands of years – because you know what, at the end of that harbor wall, was the harbor master. And as the boats came by, he was checking things out, occasionally he would come out and just pull the boat in and check out what was going on – we are the harbor masters. We’re it. That’s our job.

We can rightly protect our kids by building this harbor wall around their environment and keeping watch on what comes in. A wall sounds like it’s designed to keep things out – and it is. It should keep out the destructive parts of the adult and technological world. But this wall can also keep many more things in a child’s life that might otherwise have been crowded out. It can keep in the time and space for free play, for hobbies, for real-world exploration, for reading, for generative idleness and boredom, for creativity. The harbor wall can protect the child’s vital developing relationships with friends, with family, with nature, and with themselves

Conclusion

As we have overprotected our children in the real world, we’ve deprived them of the free play and independence that they need to develop their skills and build their self-confidence. As we’ve underprotected children online, we’ve allowed the virtual world to heighten their anxiety and smother their true sense of self. All kinds of cultural forces have pressured parents into these modes. But we can step into another mode. In fact, we’ve already begun to do so.

In January 2025, Jonathan Haidt and his research team wrote that, “As we begin the new year, we are looking back at 2024 as the year the phone-based childhood began to reverse … What we’re seeing now is a cultural awakening about the dangers of a phone-based childhood and the importance of free play and childhood independence.” In December 2025, the team wrote with a new update: “We witnessed spectacular steps forward in policy-change: Across the United States, 40 states have now enacted or advanced phone-free school legislation … Everyday now, teachers share with us anecdotes about kids laughing in the hallways, playing games at the lunch table, being more attentive in class, and reading more books. … Cultural change is moving just as quickly to restore the play-based childhood. Families around the globe are giving their children more freedom to roam in the real world.”

Culture can change course, and so can we. We can give our children more independence – to help them feel “awesome, excited, big, nervous, strong, proud,” as the Ortwein children felt after their LetGrow experience. We can build a harbor wall around childhood, removing what doesn’t belong and protecting what does. And within that harbor, we can offer the secure attachment that gives a child a restorative base at home and a powerful launching pad out into the world.

Kim John Payne describes what can result when a child is given that space to find their true self.

Payne: There was a little girl in an elementary school class, and she was doing a free drawing, and the teacher was walking around and looked at the little girl’s painting and said, ‘Ooh, what are you painting?’ and she said, ‘I’m painting God.’ And the teacher, before she could stop herself, she said, ‘Ooh, but no one knows what God looks like.’ And she, without even looking up, said, ‘Well, they will when I finish this painting.’ And I thought, There – there it is, there is this core of this little girl emerging into the world with confidence, with real confidence, that I can do this. It’s not the false idols, the images, what’s coming down through the screens, through the marketing forces, it’s something that she has within herself, not something that is being sold to her outside.

When parents create a safe harbor, they allow the child to discover what they have within themselves. As so many young people struggle with anxiety, self-doubt, and depression, a rightly protective parent can help the core of their child to emerge – and emerge with confidence.

This episode was composed without the use of generative AI.

Community in America has grown harder to find. The spaces and institutions that used to gather neighbors together are in decline, while loneliness, depression, and other social ills are on the rise. As Seth Kaplan and Pete Davis explain, a healthy country is built on healthy relationships, and healthy relationships are built on commitment.

Relearning how to commit ourselves to a place and a group of people — especially our neighbors — is one of the best things we can do for ourselves and others. This episode of Article 13 offers practical guidance for how we can make these commitments and first-hand accounts of how joyful it can be when we do.

FEATURED VOICES

Pete Davis is a writer and civic advocate from Falls Church, Virginia. His Harvard Law School graduation speech, “A Counterculture of Commitment,” has been viewed more than 30 million times — and was recently expanded into a book: Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in An Age of Infinite Browsing.

Seth Kaplan is a leading expert on fragile states. He is a Professorial Lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and OECD as well as developing country governments and NGOs.

Karen Washington is a farmer and activist. She is Co-Owner/Farmer at Rise & Root Farm in Chester New York. As an activist and food advocate, in 2010, she co-founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS) an organization supporting growers in both urban and rural settings. In 2012 Ebony magazine voted her one of their 100 most influential African Americans in the country and in 2014 she was the recipient of the James Beard Leadership Award. Karen serves on the boards of the New York Botanical Gardens, Why Hunger, Just Food, and Farm School NYC.

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TRANSCRIPT

* Introduction

Karen Washington was a physical therapist and a single mom who dreamed of having her own house in the Bronx. She was able to make this dream come true – but it turned into what she called “a nightmare” because of the abandoned lot across from her home. It began filling with garbage, got infested with rats, and became a place where “bad things happened.” But her story turned into a different kind of dream when she saw a neighbor, Jose Lugo.

Davis: She told me that my eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and she said, “What are you doing? And he says, “I’m trying to clear the trash to plant a community garden. Do you want to help?” And she said, “Yes, can I help?”

This is author Pete Davis, who related Washington’s story in his book Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing.

Davis: And what they did is they started organizing the whole neighborhood, they cleared all the trash, they started planting, and suddenly they had a garden with corn and squash and kale and collard beans and cantaloupe. Eventually, they got connected with all the other people doing community gardens all across the city.

Washington: Welcome to the Farmer’s Market, the La Familia Farmer’s Market.

This is Washington in a ParentEarth feature, describing how the garden became the launching point for a farmer’s market

Washington: We sat down, mapped it out, and then got four farmers who were willing to come to our neighborhood and got it started, so now we’re eight years in the making, love our community, community loves us, they wait for July to November to come on Tuesdays.

The garden also became Karen Washington’s launching point for new kinds of involvement in her community.

Davis: She started asking about the life of different people who are hanging out in the garden. And they said, “Oh, you know, we got this issue at school. We got this issue with hunger.” And then that got her involved in school issues and hunger issues and, How could the garden help with this?

Washington: Many families that I’ve talked to, just in passing at the Farmer’s Market, said, ‘You know, my kids were eating candy and cookies, and so when, you know, I started going to the Farmer’s Market and getting my kids involved in community gardening and eating healthy lunches, then I started to see a change and really saw how my children really started to like fresh food versus processed food.’

Karen Washington’s story is beautiful. More than that, it’s a beautiful vision of the kind of life we might wish for ourselves. A life of community. A life of meaningful connection to others, built around common projects and mutual care. Unfortunately, for many Americans, such life in community feels more and more out of reach.

Welcome to Article 13, a podcast that brings together cutting edge research and spiritual wisdom to provide blueprints for a better world. I’m your host, Zachary Davis. In this episode, we look at why community is declining in America and why this is partly caused by our own fear. We also take a deeper look at why community matters and how we can help bring our own communities back to life.

* The disappearance of community

Community was once America’s great strength. When French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville made his study of America in the 1830s, he was particularly struck by how readily Americans formed associations. These were, he said, “of a thousand different types … religious, moral …. very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.” “Nothing, in my view,” he wrote, “deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.”

This drive to associate also showed up for generations in how Americans inhabited their own local communities.

Kaplan: So if we’re thinking that America had a pretty healthy society two generations ago and we don’t have a healthy society now, what has changed?

This is Seth Kaplan, the author of Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society One Zip Code at a Time.

Kaplan: Until about two generations ago, people were very place-based, where they prayed, where they shopped, where they met people, everything was pretty close. So if you went, let’s say, in the 1950s or even into the 60s, and you went into a street, kids played on the street, parents hang out on their porch, they knew each other, and again it doesn’t mean that they were friends, but they had relationships, they had expectations that each other would be there to support them. I think this was the norm mostly everywhere until recently.

“Over the last two generations,” Kaplan wrote for After Babel, “the U.S. has moved from a ‘townshipped’ society in which neighbors regularly communicated and collaborated with each other … to a ‘networked’ and technologically-driven one in which local neighborhoods, schools, churches, and civic organizations are less important, and … have weakened over time.”

Two of those key features Kaplan describes – institutions and place-based community – have disappeared. The physical spaces that used to bring Americans together don’t exist the same way.

Davis: We’re seeing a decline in what are called third spaces. A third space is a place where you meet in community – a plaza, a park, a library, a cafe, a bar. If we see a decline in those spaces, you’re also going to see a decline in community.

Kaplan: I’m thinking, 10-minute drive from where I live, wonderfully nice houses – there’s nothing that connects those people, there’s just roads. Where are the institutions that bring those people together? You drive to church, you drive to school, you drive shopping, your civic engagement is not local, there’s nothing that brings people together.

The country has also lost many of the associations, like unions and civic groups, that used to gather people together.

Kaplan: And so, when I say fragile neighborhoods, I first and foremost mean places in which relationships are weak, institutions have thinned out or disappeared, and people just live next to each other and they have very little that brings them together.

And with nothing bringing us together, it’s no surprise that we aren’t getting together. Between 2003 and 2022, hours of face-to-face socializing declined for American men by 30 percent; for unmarried Americans by over 35 percent; and for teenagers by over 45 percent. As Derek Thompson writes, “there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.”

And in particular, we’re not spending time with the people who share our local space. The Institute for Family Studies reports of recent surveys, “only a quarter of Americans said that they know most of their neighbors … The share of Americans who spend a social evening with a neighbor at least several times per month has declined from 44% in 1974 to 28% in 2022.”

Davis: We’ve started seeing community as less of a key part of our life. We think it’s all about what we do with our immediate family, nuclear family, and what we do with our careers, and there’s been a decline in this other huge part of our life, which is our interactions with friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens in community life.

And this decline in community has taken a visible toll on American life. Writes Thompson, “solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans … have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country.”

* Why community matters

What such data reveals is that community isn’t just one good thing among others. It’s a prerequisite for many, many other vital goods, for both individuals and societies – something Seth Kaplan, as a global analyst, is uniquely positioned to see.

Kaplan: My lens for thinking about this question is always the idea that relationships is the starting point for understanding any country. When I work in Libya, I work in Nigeria, I work in the United States, we must always remember that the nature of relationships informs institutions, affects politics, society, economics. And so the question is, How much love and how much security are people feeling in their relationships?

The relationships that build and define community also define how much people will thrive in many other areas of their lives. As place-based community has declined – as we participate less in local decision-making; as we see and trust our neighbors less; as we have fewer people around us who know us and look out for us – a plethora of social ills has increased.

Kaplan: Your neighborhood determines so much about what goes on in the social life and what goes on indirectly on how you are feeling and everything about your life.

Kaplan: We’re anxious because we don’t know our neighbors. Most people, they have no one to go to who’s near them, they’re afraid to let their kids out, they’re safeguarding themselves day to day – your whole mindset changes, your feeling of joy and happiness is not there because you feel alone and at risk.

Kaplan: My argument is that everything from deaths of despair to depression to the problems we have with lots of youth to the problems of mistrust and polarization, these lie downstream from how our relationships have changed in neighborhoods.

You may be one of those many Americans who feels alone and at risk, who doesn’t have a community to support them the way most Americans once did. If so, you may also be wondering how you could possibly address this problem when there are so many vast, structural reasons behind it.

But there is, in fact, a reason behind community decline that lies much more in our individual choices. It’s what drove Pete Davis to write his book Dedicated.

Davis: I was trying to think of, What is going on, what is the first step that would be needed to start rejuvenating civic life in America or communal life in America? And what is our resistance to that first step?

And when I reflected on it, what kept coming to me was the idea that we are scared of making the commitments that are required to sustain civic life – because civic life is made up of a series of commitments. It’s a book club, the basic unit of civic life, or a neighborhood association or a block party that happens every year – it involves you getting involved in something and tying your future down a bit. You know, ‘Every first Thursday of every month I’m gonna go to the book club meeting,’ or ‘I’m going to make a commitment to be there for the block party and help set up beforehand’ – all of that requires going against what I’ve identified as the central creed of our time, which is keeping your options open. If we’re maximizing keeping our options open, we’re never going to be able to make the commitments that are required to build the building blocks of civic life, which is committed relationships and organizations.

Community stopped being a priority for many Americans in part because another priority took its place – an emphasis on maximizing one’s own individual possibilities and opportunities.

Davis: The dominant message people my age were receiving – and I sometimes call it the creed of our time – is the message of ‘Keep your options open. Don’t commit to anything because you never know when you’ll need to be in a different place or with a different person or part of a different group or working on a different cause. Keep your options open.’

According to Kaplan, “A community requires a commitment to a certain social order—and usually to a place—that, by definition, must constrain some choices … In return for security, support, and belonging, members surrender some of their freedom.” Kaplan found the same thing Davis did: “creating community in America today is so difficult [because] few want to compromise their ability to make choices.”

But the problem with always trying to “keep your options open” means there is one option you will never have at all – the option to experience life in a rich, supportive community. That option only becomes available, as Kaplan notes, with commitment.

Davis: We have a fear of regret that in our one precious life, we’re going to commit to one thing and we should have committed to another thing – in fact, we are going to regret not making a commitment. We’re going to miss out on the depths of all the deep commitments we were going to make, and we’re not going to build the types of deep identities that root us if we never make a commitment.

Here we do find something that lies within our own choice: choices about how we invest our own commitments. If we want to rebuild community, we can start by rededicating ourselves to the people and places closest to us.

* How can you rebuild community?

Kaplan: First you can look out your door, and you can imagine there’s probably eight or ten houses right there, and the first thing you could simply do is you could knock on a few doors. I will guess that if you tried eight or ten houses, you might not always succeed, but I bet you’ll find one or two houses where they will be open to something, and that is a starting point.

Once you meet a few people, the possibility of group activities opens up.

Kaplan: Can you have a block party, can you invite some people over for a meal – but of course, it’s always easier if you have one or two other people with you. Imagine there were three of you!

Kaplan: It’s best not to tackle loneliness alone. Can you find two, three, four other people in your broader area – it may not be in your immediate neighborhood – who care about these issues, and can you cooperate with them to do something, because if you can get just a few people who say, ‘We care, we want to activate that good nature or that desire to be with other people and among our neighbors,’ and a few of you do something together, it can have a cascading effect.

Kaplan: So I’d be looking for those few neighbors, I’d be looking for, What activity can you start, can you repeat that activity?

The repetition part is absolutely key, as Davis’s research showed. To build community, you need to commit to showing up for certain things again and again.

Davis: The way beautiful things are cultivated is usually through routines and routine gatherings and meetings. So you’re probably not cultivating something unless the most significant thing is, the third Thursday of every month and are sitting together and desire to do something together. So I think that’s a huge part of the story of community life, because the basic building block of community life is a relationship, and one of the key things that goes into a relationship is a little bit of commitment.

Now, that first step can feel daunting. It’s not easy to knock on a stranger’s door – even if that stranger lives next door. One thing that might help is asking yourself how they might be feeling lonely too.

In 2023, the New York Times created a video to give “voice to the lonely.” Americans shared stories like these.

“I was important, right? I mattered to people. I thought I did. And then I retired. And the isolation was deafening.”

“You look at the time and you go, ‘It’s 3:00,’ and you have so much of your day, and the phone doesn’t ring. No one’s connecting with you, and you wonder how you can make the day go by.”

“If I can get myself to pick up the phone and call somebody, somebody else will say, ‘I’m feeling exactly the same way.’ And then — poof! — you’re part of the human race again.”

Davis: I am more confident of this than almost anything, that is, the case of being communal today: almost everyone is sitting alone, wishing someone would knock on their door to come connect.

Consider how welcome a knock on the door might be, and that might make it easier to go ahead and knock. And when you do, keep this recommendation in mind.

Trailer, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: “Sometimes we have to ask for help and that’s okay. I think the best thing we can do is to let people know that each one of them is precious.”

“Hey Mr. Rogers! It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, please won’t you be my neighbor.” “That was wonderful.”

In an interview with Classic FM about playing Fred Rogers in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Tom Hanks was asked how to be a good neighbor. His answer included this advice: you should go around to the people next door, introduce yourself, and ask if they need any help. But it’s also very important that you ask them for help too.

Asking for help lets people know they’re needed. That they matter. And it binds you all together into a community that is, as Kaplan puts it, “willfully interdependent” – where everyone has a gift to offer and those gifts are in demand.

In fact, the best platform for building community is often some project that asks everyone to share their gifts and efforts – a project like cleaning up the vacant lot.

Kaplan: I tend to find [that] intentionally looking to meet people is not as good as if you are doing something with people, if you have a goal, we’re going to work together to help so-and-so.

Knocking on a neighbor’s door, joining an organization – these are things we could do this week. Other changes will take longer but are no less important. One such change involves rethinking “the American dream.”

Kaplan: The American dream, originally, when this term first came into fashion, we’re talking, I believe, the Progressive Era, it was about uplifting people, uplifting all of society. Somehow we went from a more societal world view to a worldview that’s very individual and very material.

In a 2012 study, psychologist Jean Twenge examined three generations of Americans: Boomers, born post-1945; GenX’ers, born post-1961; and Millennials, born post-1981. The study found that, compared to Boomers, GenX’ers and Millennials placed a higher priority on life-goals connected to money and status, and a lower priority on goals connected to affiliation and community. Kaplan believes we need to change these priorities. We need to aspire toward social wealth as much or more than material wealth.

Kaplan: If we all think about ourselves and we all think materially, a great many of us are going to be left behind, and a great many of us may chase that dream and end up in much worse shape. We may end up lonelier, we may end up more depressed. We may end up in that nice house but all alone, and that’s not a recipe for a successful life.

What’s needed, says Kaplan, is a substantial shift in our goals. Many people right now aspire to go far away to college and then do a nation-wide career search, seeking jobs in cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Washington D.C. Instead, we should expand our sights: consider settling in places like the American Heartland, in smaller towns where we can get to know people better, or even back in our hometowns. We can adapt our work lives around our community lives. This is Kaplan with Shelley Doyle on her podcast “The Communiverse.”

Kaplan: I have a former classmate, not a classmate, a student, she says, ‘I’m moving back to Cleveland, I can continue my career, I can do it all virtually, I can fly when I need to, and I’ll live near my parents. because we have a better community in Cleveland.’ And we can stay invested in smaller places, places where people actually know each other, care for each other.

[Doyle] There’s definitely been a theme that’s been running through my recent conversations about the return called ‘Hero’s journey,’ and so many of us go on this big worldwide exploration, only to really feel the yearning to return, but returning with fresh eyes.

In 2023, the American Immigration Council and OverZero did a study on belonging. They found that feeling you belong means you experience decreased pain, stress, and loneliness; better general health; and greater satisfaction in life overall. But the study also found that “A majority of Americans report non-belonging … 64% of Americans reported non-belonging in the workplace, 68% in the nation, and 74% in their local community.”

As you plan for your future, make this something you consider: where can you feel that you belong? Where can you know others and be known? Where can you build and share social wealth? Finding the right community may well add more happiness to your life and your family’s than following the topmost job or moving to the most cutting-edge city. As you’re making big life choices, ask yourself, in what kind of community will this choice place me?

* What joyful community looks like

The work of rebuilding community will take time. Progress will start off slow. But what Pete Davis found is that small changes build momentum. As one person shares their vision, others catch it and join in. And for those people who do dedicate themselves to cultivating the life of one neighborhood or one place, this long-term effort is often a long period of joy.

Davis: I was noticing that there were people who were full of purpose. They felt full of community, they were connected with all these people. They felt like they were living a really deep life. They were having an impact, [and they were feeling a lot of joy while having an impact, and] they completely ignored the advice of keeping your options open. They committed to particular things, they committed to causes, they committed to places, they committed to communities.

“Joy” is also how Seth Kaplan describes how he feels around his neighbors.

Kaplan: These are people, we are all together, helping each other, we feel like we live in a common boat, so to speak, we’re all going in the same direction, and we just have this norm that we’re here to be there for each other. And it just – I walk down the streets in my neighborhood and I feel joyful. I don’t know how you feel, Russell, when you walk down the streets in your neighborhood, but I feel a sense of joy because I know who’s behind the doors, I know some of the good things and bad things they’re experiencing, I know their kids, I walk around and I always see somebody I know, and it’s a reality check, it’s a sense of support.

Kaplan has seen countless examples of such support in his neighborhood. One involved his young son, who fell on the cement one day and cut open his chin.

Kaplan: My wife picked him up and took off down the street, and she came back about a half an hour later and he was all bandaged up. So what did she do, she took off to the nearest nurse. I could probably name eight or ten nurses or doctor’s houses where nurses or doctors live. I vaguely know who they are, I’ve seen them, a couple of them I know a little better than the rest – it doesn’t matter, if I knock on their door and I have a problem, they’re going to be helpful, and that’s just the norm in my neighborhood.

Another example concerned a friend of his daughter’s who had to undergo chemotherapy:

Kaplan: Neighbors come together, this community, school, comes together, people come together to support. It’s doctors in the neighborhood, it’s people checking up on them, it’s people volunteering to help them, and it’s the type of social support they get that that girl feels so much confidence and encouragement. She even went away for a special camp for a week, something involving a nonprofit in my neighborhood, so they got help on many, many levels to get them through this crisis.

Living in this kind of neighborhood has changed the very way that Kaplan experiences his life.

Kaplan: When you live in a security blanket and you have all these other people in there with you, your whole sense of the possibilities, your whole sense of who you are, everything changes.

Kaplan: The key thing is people need love. I mean, it’s such the most basic concept, we need love. I live in a neighborhood where I have a couple of good friends but I have hundreds of neighbors that I just have enough of a relationship with that we trust each other, we’re there for each other.

“Unconditional love is transformative,” said Kaplan in one talk, “and very few, too few Americans are experiencing it.” We can help transform our communities – and the lives of our neighbors – if we are willing to step forward and offer some of that love. That’s what Karen Washington did when she saw that trash piling up in her neighborhood. It’s what we can do in our own neighborhoods. And it’s how we might find our own joy.

Davis: And I think there are some people that say, ‘We should give up and just accept life as trash.’ I think there are some people that say, ‘We should move away and try to search somewhere else where there’s not trash piling up.’ And then there’s a third way, which is to transform the world. And that’s what Karen [Washington] and Jose and others have done. And what they discover is not that it’s this kind of arduous thing where it’s like, ‘Oh, you got to do the hard work of doing this.’ It is hard work. But what you find is it’s usually a great adventure that becomes part of your identity. It becomes part of your heroic story of your own life. It introduces you to all these new interesting people who become your friends. It broadens your horizons. And suddenly you wake up, you know, 20 years later and you’re like, ‘Oh, I guess I’m the queen of urban growing.’ And that’s what life is like with any commitment. You’ve got to just dive in, run across the street and say, ‘Yes, can I help?’ And who knows where that adventure will take you?

Article 13 is a new narrative podcast from Faith Matters that brings together cutting-edge research and spiritual wisdom to offer blueprints for a better world. American society is fractured across political and cultural lines. Healing will not happen quickly or easily, but will require a sustained commitment to peaceful discussion and the development of new, creative frameworks for finding common ground.

Hosted by Zachary Davis and featuring deep-dives into vital social issues, extraordinary guests, and beautiful sound design, Article 13 aims to model the kind of hopeful, intelligent discourse our country needs—and to offer ways that each individual listener can start the healing, right where they are.

Article 13 is produced by Maria Devlin McNair, Zachary Davis, Gavin Feller, and Music by Steve LaRosa. Art by Charlotte Alba. You can learn more about Article 13 here.

We express our thanks to the Wheatley Institute for their support.

Most of the news we see each day is negative. This constant stream of bad news fuels news avoidance, anxiety, and animosity — all of which harm us at a spiritual level. This episode proposes a new, spiritually healthy way of engaging with the news, looking at how we can use our media diets to help us fulfill our personal vocations and cultivate the virtue of hope. Focusing on news you can act on will improve your mental health and your ability to make positive impacts; as Emma Varvaloucas explains, focusing more on positive news also increases your ability to create positive change because it allows you to see that change is possible and what strategies best advance it.

Featured voices:

* David Bornstein

* Sharon Brous

* Jonathan Haidt

* Brett McCracken

* Kathryn Murdoch

* Hannah Ritchie

* Chris Stirewalt

* Emma Varvaloucas

Article 13 is produced by Maria Devlin McNair, Zachary Davis, and Gavin Feller. Music is by Steve LaRosa. Art is by Charlotte Alba. You can learn more about Article 13 here.

We express our thanks to the Wheatley Institute for their support.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

* Introduction

It’s 1 AM. You should be asleep. But instead, you’re doomscrolling – swiping through story after story on your social media feeds and news channels, and they all seem to be negative. Democracy is under threat. AI is coming for your job. Children are dying in wars abroad. The climate is about to collapse.

This deluge of danger makes you want to do what a lot of people have done – stop reading the news altogether. But then imagine you come across a story like this:

Documentary:  Humans are extraordinary. We're such a miracle. The land is resilient. We are resilient. We've got to believe that there's a better way where people have clean air, clean water, available food, cheap, abundant energy. The big shared human projects confronting climate change, staying a step ahead of the next pandemic, preventing nuclear conflict, will require cooperation. That's the key for success, and we are one team, the world. It's ideas that determine our trajectory as a species. The idea that progress is possible is probably one of the most powerful ideas we've ever had. People are building better futures for themselves and the communities around them.

Most news stories about our future aren’t nearly so optimistic. But that’s precisely why this story needed to be shared.

This footage is from a 2024 PBS docuseries called A Brief History of the Future. At an Aspen Ideas event, Executive Co-producer Kathryn Murdoch explained why she wanted to create it:

Murdoch: Of the main reasons I did this project was actually because my daughter came to me a few years ago and said she didn't see any hope for the future. And I was really shocked because I've been working on climate change for like 17 years, and she knows all the solutions that we work on, and and we do democracy reform, she's very familiar with all those things, but she said to me, “But look at the films, look at the television shows, look at the books, especially the YA books. Everything is dystopian.” And I sort of went around trying to prove her wrong, and I couldn't. Everything that we have visualized about our future is dystopian now. Some of it's ecological, but, you know, there's all kinds of choices, there's 27 flavors of dystopia, but there's no version where we actually get things right.

A Brief History of the Future offers visions of what it could look to get things right– and how we could get there.

Alexis Soloski discusses the docuseries in a New York Times article titled “Climate Doom Is Out. ‘Apocalyptic Optimism’ Is In.” The article discusses recent climate books that are striving, like this docuseries, to replace climate doomerism with a certain kind of informed, well-earned optimism. None of them deny that the problems are real and gravely serious. But they insist that focusing solely on the problems will make us worse at solving them. As data scientist Hannah Ritchie put it, “There’s been a really rapid shift in the narrative, from almost complete denial to, ‘Oh, it’s too late now, there’s nothing we can do, we should just stop trying.’”

If the news convinces us that the problems are insurmountable, then we won’t be motivated to do anything about them. That’s why Ritchie, Murdoch, and many others believe we need a different approach to world issues and how they’re reported. And the most practical approach here may, in fact, be one founded on a certain spiritual virtue. Soloski puts it this way: “Intimations of doom have failed to motivate us. Perhaps we will work toward a better future if we trust that one … is possible. When it comes to climate catastrophe, is our best hope hope itself?”

Welcome to the Angle – a podcast that brings together cutting edge research and spiritual wisdom to provide blueprints for a better world. I’m your host, Zachary Davis. In this episode, we develop spiritual guidelines for navigating the news – especially the division and negativity the news now fosters. We examine the spiritual stumbling blocks posed by our media environment; we outline a media diet that can help us live out our personal missions; and we explain why we need the virtue of hope – so that what we learn about the world can change the world.

* Spiritual formation and dispositions

When people tell us why we should read the news, the reasons aren’t usually spiritual ones. It’s to hold people in power accountable, to be well-informed about issues on the ballot. It’s a vital political issue – serious scholars of democracy agree that it needs an informed citizenry.

But there are also vital spiritual dimensions to our news-consumption habits. How we get our news affects the way our minds are shaped, the moral dispositions we cultivate towards other people, and our ability to carry out our mission in the world.

In their 2023 book The Great Dechurching, pastors Michael Graham and Jim Davis ask why 40 million churchgoing Americans have recently left their churches. In this book, they spent a lot of time looking at how different demographics get their news. That’s because Graham and Davis noticed a relationship between news consumption and spiritual formation – what we fill our minds with, and what our minds are like.

A report released by Pew Research Center in 2023 relayed that “half of U.S. adults get news at least sometimes from social media.” It also reported that “Facebook outpaces all other social media sites” in terms of where Americans regularly get their news. But as Graham and Davis note, “Through … leaked internal Facebook corporate memos, we learned, ‘[Facebook] algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness … If left unchecked,’ Facebook would feed users ‘more and more divisive content to gain more user attention and increase time on the platform.”

“We are in a crisis of spiritual formation,” they conclude, “because we live in an attention economy. Attention is money.” And nothing sustains attention like anger.

Every proprietary algorithm at all the large tech and social media companies has discovered what the Bible has already told us, Graham and Davis write. We are inherently prone to division, strife, and anger. We consume content that puts our brain in a cortisol state and makes it increasingly difficult to be renewed in our minds and to embody the fruits of the Spirit.

But you don’t have to be a pastor to be concerned about media consumption and personal formation. You could be a psychologist. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studies religion and moral psychology, points out that spirituality is a core concept even for those who don’t belong to a religious faith or believe in God. People innately perceive certain kinds of objects and actions to be pure or elevating or sacred in some way, and some others to be disgusting or degrading. A spiritual life, on this account, is one that strives to embrace what is elevating and avoid what is degrading. And Haidt believes that a lot of mainstream media is dangerous for our collective spiritual lives.

Haidt: We're drowning in trivia that was created yesterday.

This is Haidt speaking with Trinity Forum

Haidt: Epictetus says, If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren't you ashamed that you've made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset? I mean, that's Twitter, he said, Don't go on Twitter. And then this is Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius said, The things you think about determine the quality of your mind; your soul takes on the color of your thoughts; so avoid degrading things, avoid things that lower you, focus, expose yourself to things that elevate you.

We might agree that it can be spiritually corrupting to immerse ourselves in outrageous stories about our political enemies, or trivial celebrity gossip, or the videos of real-life violence that show up all over news channels and social media. But could even the most thoughtfully chosen stories feel “elevating,” if so much of the news is simply so bad?

* Negativity

Varvaloucas: There has actually been research that's been done that counts the number of times negative emotions appear in headlines over the last 15 or so years. And there's been a definite uptick in negative emotions in headlines, meaning anger, fear, disgust – there has been a real change in how the news is presented in recent years.

This is Emma Varvaloucas, Executive Director of the Progress Network. Working in journalism herself, she has a close look at this phenomenon of increasing negativity in the news. This negative tone isn’t accidental. Varvaloucas explains that the news is “negative by design”:

Varvaloucas: What I meant by the news is negative by design is that it's not designed to tell you what's going on, average all over the world on any given normal day, which right now is mostly peacefulness in most corners of the world, it's mostly people making more money and living better lifestyles than they did 50 years ago, 100 years ago. So what the news is reporting on are the things that defy our idea of normal, so things that go wrong.

Part of this negative focus comes down to a desire for attention: as the industry mantra goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” People feel compelled to read about crises.

Part of it also comes down to mission. Most of what we experience in daily life doesn’t qualify as news. News organizations prioritize events that are unexpected, disruptive, or have widespread consequences, ignoring everyday occurrences that don't meet the criteria of conflict, controversy, or urgency.

And journalists often feel the best way to help the world is by calling attention to problems that need solving. Reporting on what’s doing just fine can seem a less urgent task – even a less responsible one.

But this well-meaning mission can backfire by making people avoid the news. Given the uptick in negative news, it’s not surprising that there’s also been an uptick in news avoidance. In 2023, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 38% of US survey respondents actively avoid the news. The Washington Post reported: “Digital media has made news ubiquitous … And much of it, people say, drives feelings of depression, anger, anxiety or helplessness.”

Varvaloucas: I think what the news is serving people is really, really negative, and I think people are just tired.

Reading the news can feel like the opposite of spiritual elevation – an immersion in hatred and hopelessness. But there is a way to engage differently. First, we can avoid the news-consumption habits that drive the worst kinds of emotions. Second, we can focus our engagement in the same way we focus our spiritual engagement.

* How to read the news – the basics

So which habits are the worst drivers of anger, anxiety, and out-of-control doom-scrolling?

1. Getting your news from social media,

2. Getting your news from free news sites

3 Getting your news from cable television.

All these platforms have incentives, usually related to advertising revenue, to serve up the most high-drama, high-stress stories possible. These stories are designed to grab our attention and trigger our most reactionary emotions – not to engage our minds and conscious judgment. A good alternative habit to watching sensationalized video clips is to get your news by reading it. Reading “interrupts our reaction cycle and invites slow, careful processing,” write media scholars Benjamin Peters and Seth Lewis in their article “How to Make Sense of the World: The Case for Reading the News.”

And what kind of news should you read? Peters and Lewis recommend starting with Reuters and the Associated Press, for basic, accurate reporting on events around the world. Then, to dive a little deeper, invest in a subscription to a high-quality mainstream news source – one that doesn’t need to support itself through clicks. Think The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal.

And if at all possible, subscribe to a second news source, one with a different perspective from your first source – and from you. Deliberately reading news that challenges your existing beliefs will help you counteract confirmation bias and see the world from the perspective of others.

Stirewalt: If you're doing it right, if you're living up to your obligations as a citizen, you should regularly be hearing things that you disagree with, you should regularly hear ideas and points of view that make you uncomfortable, that might even point out that you're wrong from time to time.

This is Chris Stirewalt. Like many media theorists, he strongly recommends reading multiple sources with different points of view. This doesn’t mean turning to hyper-partisan outlets to see what the “crazy other side” is doing. It means seeking out legitimate, fact-checked sources that will surprise and challenge your instinctive opinions. This balanced reading won’t just give you a more accurate picture of the world; it will also help you cultivate curiosity and generosity towards people outside your own tribe – much more spiritually fruitful dispositions than contempt or hatred.

Stirewalt: My plea to Americans is, Break out. If you're conservative, you better have NPR on in the morning, you better do something to break it up a little bit. If you're a liberal, you better be reading The Dispatch, of course, which is delightful, or National Review, or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you better be listening to something else that shakes it up, that breaks it out.

* Embodiment

Now, even if you adopt these practices, keeping up with the news can still feel unproductive and overwhelming, simply from the sheer volume of stories you can access – information from literally around the world. Brett McCracken, author of The Wisdom Pyramid, cites an argument from educator Neil Postman to explain why so many people face this sense of overwhelm:

McCracken: Postman argues that our mental health is actually better when that information action ratio is pretty even, when the information that fills our brains is largely things that we can take action on. Now with the Internet, it's just like become way out of whack, so that the vast majority of information that we come across in our mental space is unactionable information, and so you can understand why anxiety and mental illness is on the rise, because we were not created to have the burden of the world's worth of unactionable information in our minds, like we were created to be in physical embodied space where the inputs that came into our mind were actionable.

Information becomes merely distressing, rather than inspiring or helpful, when it gets too far away from our own decisions and actions – what we, as embodied creatures, are able to act upon. Many religious practices involve physical motion or in-person gathering or communal feasting, and for the same reason – we are embodied creatures.

So a more spiritual approach to reading the news would be a more embodied one. Try targeting your news-reading around those areas where you can take action in the physical world. Build a general picture of world events, but focus your most intensive reading on the information that will shape the decisions you make that impact people around you.

One way to do this is by attending to news about your immediate area. When you follow local news and react to what you hear, whether that's through contacting your local government, or introducing new ideas at a town council meeting, you're helping make your neighborhood better. But local doesn't just mean the geographic space nearest to you. It also means the issues nearest to you. Maybe you're a doctor advising patients on the latest developments in a particular field. Or maybe you're a parent gathering information about teen mental health. Those subjects are local to you because they have a direct impact on you and your decisions.

Reading on these issues may still be discouraging at times But it will also be empowering, because the knowledge you gain will enable you to do more good with the actions you take.

Then there's the one other vital piece to our approach. As noted, for reasons good and bad, news, for most news outlets, means bad news. What's absolutely imperative is to read more good news.

* Positive news

Sharing good news is Emma Varvaloucas’s mission as Executive Director of the Progress Network. Founded by Zachary Karabell, the Progress Network brings together journalists and organizations dedicated to sharing stories about progress.

Varvaloucas: And the idea is really to balance out this strongly negative viewpoint that,not only the mainstream media, but also media influencers on the right and the left, have these days, to help show people there is progress actually happening.

Progress is happening. But it often happens invisibly. It’s not just because many news organizations are incentivized to publish negative news; it’s because progress often doesn’t take the form of “news” at all. It’s isolated, unique, stand-out events that tend to get reported on – not slow, gradual change where each day looks quite similar to the day before. And so gradual progress – like the way millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 30 years – never gets reported as “breaking news.” But, Varvaloucas warns, ignoring these slow, positive stories has negative consequences.

Varvaloucas: So if you don't believe that progress on any particular issue is possible, it leads you to a certain set of decisions, right? UYou look at global poverty today, there's been a spike in global poverty in the last maybe three years, but it's been on like the long term decline. And if you look at that and say, ‘Well, lots of people are still starving, nothing that we did made a difference,’ what kind of decisions are you then going to make? First of all, you're going to stop paying attention. Second of all, if you're someone like a government employee or someone's voting, you're not going to be interested in funding international aid because you're like, ‘Oh, we're just throwing money around and nothing's happening.’

If you never hear or learn about the progress that is happening, you probably won’t think it’s possible. And if you don’t believe that progress is possible, you won’t invest the time and resources needed to make it happen.

Varvaloucas: But if you are aware that that progress has happened, it leads to another completely different set of decisions. For me, that spurs further action. If I give money to XYZ place that actually does something, those efforts have actually improved people's lives, so, let's do more of it, because we know that these steps have already worked. Societies that are convinced of their destruction, I think, hasten that destruction, right? And societies that feel like, ‘We might not have the road specifically planned out on how to get from point A to point B, but we believe that something is possible,’ like, that's the first step.

The philosophy behind the Progress Network is akin to that of “solutions journalism.” The Solutions Journalism Network was founded to change the way people understand and shape the world by changing the way it’s reported on. The Network’s co-founder, David Bornstein, explained the problem this way on the PBS Newshour in 2022:

Bornstein: The main way that the news harms democracy is by providing a view of the world that is largely deficit-framed. I mean, we are amply informed about what is going wrong, about what is ugly, about what is corrupt. But because we don't have a similar amount of information about what's growing, what are the new possibilities emerging, we have a very flawed, kind of one-sided view. It's as if your parents were only ever criticizing what you did and never [] where you had possibilities to grow. Many people who would, I think, would love to participate in contributing to a better community, even a better society or world, have an impoverished sense of their power to do so.

On a political level, what Solutions Journalism offers is a blueprint for successful policy going forward. On a spiritual level, what Solutions Journalism offers is hope. Hope that there are other possibilities. Hope that a better future is within reach. Hope that your actions actually can have an impact in making that future a reality.

Because hope is not about sitting back and trusting that others will take all the action that's needed. The hope that we as spiritual news readers are called to embrace isn't presumption or complacency. It's a vision that spurs action.

Brous: And I want to say this about hope. Hope is not naive, and hope is not an opiate.

This is Rabbi Sharon Brous in a 2017 Ted Talk called “It’s Time to Reclaim Religion.”

Brous: Hope may be the single greatest act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and against a culture of despair. Because what hope does for us is it lifts us out of the container that holds us and constrains us from the outside, and says, ‘You can dream and think expansively again.’ That, they cannot control in you.

As Hannah Ritchie related to the Times: “In order to build a better world, you need to be able to envision that one is possible.” Hope is the ability and the willingness to envision that world, to dream and think expansively about it, and then to accept the responsibilities that vision entails for how we, personally, must help bring that vision about.

Hope in this sense is a “spur, a prod, an uncomfortable goad”, as Soloski puts it. But hope is much less uncomfortable and much less difficult to cultivate when we have a realistic picture of the tools we do have to build our future.

In her TED Talk, Rabbi Brous talks about four commitments she sees in revitalized forms of religion around the country. The first she names is “wakefulness.”

Brous: We live in a time today in which we have unprecedented access to information about every global tragedy that happens on every corner of this Earth. Psychologists tell us that the more we learn about what's broken in our world, the less likely we are to do anything. It's called psychic numbing. We just shut down at a certain point. Well, somewhere along the way, our religious leaders forgot that it's our job to make people uncomfortable. It's our job to wake people up, to pull them out of their apathy and into the anguish, and to insist that we do what we don't want to do and see what we do not want to see. Because we know that social change only happens when we are awake enough to see that the house is on fire.

Solutions journalists might add, “We know that social change only happens when we are awake enough to see that the house is on fire, and when we know what’s working today to put fires out.” We do have unprecedented access to news about every global tragedy. We do risk spiritual overwhelm, either in despair over problems we can’t solve or hatred for people we see as causing the problems. The answer isn’t to shut down and tune out. But neither is it to focus only on “what we do not want to see.” It’s essential that we make positive news a staple of our spiritual news diet to nourish our hope and guide our action: to let us see a better world is possible, and to give us the knowledge we need about how best to bring that world about.

* Conclusion

So what does a spiritual approach to the news entail? Being mindful of how the content we consume forms our minds and hearts. Avoiding those platforms and stories designed to generate hatred and contempt. Seeking out stories that make us better able to understand those we disagree with. Diving into those stories that help us live out our vocation. Maintaining a basic working picture of the world. And building in much more positive news so we can cultivate the virtue of hope and help the world change for the better. You can start finding those vital positive stories by going to TheProgressNetwork.org and signing up for their free weekly newsletter; subscribing to the “What Could Go Right?” podcast; visiting the Solutions Story Tracker at SolutionsJournalism.org; and subscribing to updates from OurWorldinData.org.

Reading the news is often framed as political duty, but in a talk at the American Enterprise Institute, Stirewalt framed the same duty slightly differently:

Stirewalt: You do owe your neighbor something about how you get your news and how good you are at consuming it. As citizens, we all owe each other a filial duty of love to each other in the country to be well informed.

A spiritual approach to reading the news is nothing less than an extension of your devotion to truth and to love. Your love for others is what motivates you to understand and improve their world. Let the news help you do just that.

Errata: 1) In the recorded version, Jim Davis’s last name is once spoken as “David” rather than “Davis.” 2) A podcast is referred to as “Common Grounds”; the correct name is “Let’s Find Common Ground.”

EPISODE CREDITS

A special thanks for Benjamin Peters for his feedback and suggestions on this episode.

Ari Wallach (host), A Brief History of the Future (trailer) | PBS | 2024

“A Brief History of the Future: Kathryn Murdoch & Ari Wallach with Mariana Atencio” | | The Aspen Institute | 2024

A Conversation with Andy Crouch & Jonathan Haidt, “After Babel: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World” | The Trinity Forum | 2022

Interview with Emma Varvaloucas | Article 13 | 2023

How The Media Rage Machine Divides America: Chris Stirewalt | Let’s Find Common Ground Podcast | 2024

The Wisdom Pyramid with Brett McCracken | Church at the Cross Grapevine | 2022

David Bornstein, “A journalist's Brief But Spectacular take on telling the whole story” | PBS NewsHour | 2022

Sharon Brous, “It's time to reclaim religion” | TED | 2017

Broken News: A Book Event with Chris Stirewalt | American Enterprise Institute | 2022

For the past several decades, Americans have been leaving Christian churches in record numbers. This phenomenon has been dubbed “The Great Dechurching” by pastors Jim Davis and Michael Graham. What’s surprising is that many of those Americans didn’t leave the church because they stopped believing. They left because their church stopped feeling like a place of belonging. What we need to do to reverse the “Great Dechurching,” argues Jake Meador, is embrace the task of being good friends and good neighbors — a task given to all Christians, but also necessary for all humans.

Ryan Burge: Author of The Nones and 20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America.

Michael Graham: Co-author of The Great Dechurching with Jim Davis. Works with The Keller Center and The Gospel Coalition.

Jen Wilkin: Bible teacher, speaker, and bestselling author advocating for deep Bible literacy.

Jim Davis: Co-author of The Great Dechurching, Pastor at Orlando Grace Church. Contributor to The Gospel Coalition.

Jake Meador: Writer, editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy.

Alan Cooperman: Director of Religion Research at Pew Research Center.

Article 13 is a narrative podcast from Faith Matters that brings together cutting-edge research and spiritual wisdom to offer blueprints for a better world. Article 13 is produced by Maria Devlin McNair, Zachary Davis, and Gavin Feller. Music by Steve LaRosa. Art by Charlotte Alba. You can learn more about Article 13 here.

American boys and men are facing growing challenges in school, in the labor force, and in our culture. Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men, documents those challenges and the steps it will take to solve them — which include a new cultural script for masculinity.

Many of our cultural spaces are suspicious of masculinity itself; others celebrate only that masculinity which conforms to the traditional model of strength and dominance. This episode proposes that a powerful new script would be one that celebrates the desire for strength as it is used in service to others.

Featured voices:

* Arthur Brooks

* Richard Reeves

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

* Introduction

Arthur Brooks: I have three kids, 25, 23, and 20, and my middle son is named Carlos. And Carlos was having a good old time in high school, and [] had substantial grade problems and academic issues. But the problem was he wasn't really having fun, and I think it was a meaning problem.

This is Harvard professor and social scientist Arthur Brooks, speaking with podcaster Tim Ferriss in 2023. In response to Carlos’s meaning problem, Brooks asked him to come up with a business plan for his life. The plan, in Brooks’ words, was “appropriately unorthodox.” Carlos got a job on an 8,000-acre working wheat farm in Idaho. He dug rocks out of the soil, chopped down dead trees, and ran a combine 16 hours a day.

Tim Ferriss: Why did he choose this? How would he explain that?

Arthur Brooks: Because he needed to see what he could do. He needed to find out what it meant to be Carlos Brooks, away from his family, away from everybody. Why? Because he was looking for the answers to the questions. They were inchoate. They were like, “Why am I alive? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find it in the cab of a combine. Maybe I’ll find it when I dig rocks out of the soil. Maybe I’ll find it by doing something hard with my hands.” Then he joined the military. He was 19 years old. He joined the Marine Corps. Today, he’s Corporal Carlos Brooks, Marines Three-Five Scout Sniper Platoon. And he’s got answers … I’ll tell you his answers. “Carlos, why are you alive?” “Because God made me.” “For what are you willing to die?” “For my faith and for my family and for my friends, and for the United States of America.” Boom. These are not the answers that a lot of people watching us would give, but these are super solid answers. I’m super proud of my son because he earned the answers to his meaning questions that everybody watching us has got to earn it.

Carlos Brooks isn’t the only young man to have wrestled with questions of meaning. In 2017, the Pew Research Center asked survey respondents where they found meaning in their lives: “What keeps you going, and why?” One analyst said, quote, “One of [Pew’s] most striking discoveries was that women find more meaning in their lives, and from more sources, than men … Right now, men have a narrower range of sources of meaning and identity, which makes them particularly vulnerable if one of those sources is damaged.”

That analyst was Richard Reeves, Founder and President of the American Institute for Boys and Men. As a father of three boys, he would hear about their worries and challenges around the dinner table. As a policy analyst, once he started looking into the data, he became more and more worried about the unique problems that boys and men nationwide were facing – especially since not many people were talking about those problems. So Reeves decided to jumpstart the conversation himself.

Richard Reeves: So my most recent book is called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling and What to Do about It

This story of these struggles hasn’t been widely told. But it’s a story we need to hear.

Welcome to Article 13– a podcast that brings together cutting-edge research and spiritual wisdom to offer blueprints for a better world. I’m your host, Zachary Davis. Today we’ll look at the particular challenges facing men and boys today and why telling new kinds of stories might offer some new solutions.

* What are the problems and what’s causing them?

In 2022, Richard Reeves’ published a book called Of Boys and Men. It looks chiefly at how men are performing in education, the workforce, and family life. Data in all three areas indicates that men today are struggling:

Richard Reeves: The gender gap in college degrees awarded is wider today than it was in the early 1970s, but in the opposite direction. The wages of most men are lower today than they were in 1979, while women's wages have risen across the board. One in five fathers are not living with their children.

In America today, women are 15 points more likely than men to hold a bachelor’s degree. Women’s wages have increased more than 30% since 1983, while men who entered the workforce at that time earn about 10% less in their lifetimes than men who started a generation earlier. One-third of men who hold only a high school diploma are out of the labor force. And these economic struggles impact family struggles, as Reeves described in a conversation with podcast host Coleman Hughes:

Richard Reeves: But it's also true that if men are out of work or struggling to earn a decent wage, that makes them much less attractive as marriage prospects or as mate prospects, and so they're less likely to form a family.

Men are struggling to complete degrees, to land jobs, and to form stable partnerships. And these challenges, Reeves says, are linked to some other sobering data.

Richard Reeves: Men account for almost three out of four deaths of despair from a suicide or an overdose. I mean, these are pretty shocking pieces of information, shocking data points.

The data make it clear that boys and men are facing significant problems. So what’s causing the problems? There’s been no shortage of people offering answers. But, Reeves says, these people often claim that men’s problems are problems with men.

Richard Reeves: So, from a conservative critic, for example, it might well be, “Well, they're just not masculine enough. They need to be more masculine, more of a breadwinner. They need to man up. They need to be more like their father.” But it's about them. It's about their individual responsibility.

Here’s Senator Josh Hawley, for example, speaking with Megyn Kelly.

Josh Hawley: My message to men is, “C’mon, this is the time for you to step up, to go out in the adventure of your life ,which is really an adventure of serving, giving, and providing.”

Alternatively, some conservatives identify the problem as the culture not letting men man up – as carrying out a “war on masculinity.” This is Tucker Carlson speaking with Laura Ingram on Fox News in 2018.

Tucker Carlson: And he’s absolutely right, I mean the Democratic party is anti-masculinity and anti-father, they have to be, that’s their base – and that’s just true.

In the U.S. Reeves writes, a third of men of all political persuasions believe that they are discriminated against, and among Republicans, the number is even higher. And there is some truth to that perception. Just think how common the phrase “toxic masculinity” has become.

Doug Emhoff: There’s too much toxicity, masculine toxicity, out there.

This is Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice-president Kamala Harris, speaking to MSNBC in 2023.

Doug Emhoff: We’ve got this trope out there that you’ve gotta be tough and angry and lash out to be strong. I think it’s a problem, and I’m going to use every chance I get to speak out against this toxic masculinity.

Richard Reeves: From the left, the problem was that they were too masculine, perhaps they were toxic, and if we could just somehow exercise out that nasty masculinity from them, they'd be okay.

Exit polls from the 2024 US presidential election showed that “55 percent of men voted for Trump in 2024, compared to 45 percent of women.” Among Black and Latino voters, the gender gap grew compared to 2020, with more men choosing the Republican candidate. To attribute the gender gap to pure misogyny would be a mistake, Reeves warns: “There is no strong evidence that young men are turning against gender equality. But they have turned away from the left because the left has turned away from them.” Prior to the election, Reeves strove to remind voters that the challenges facing men – especially men of color and working-class men – aren’t reactionary inventions. They are real, and they aren’t being addressed. As Reeves wrote, “The Democrats and progressive institutions have a massive blind spot when it comes to male issues, and this was exposed in the election. At worst, men are seen not as having problems but as being the problem.”

Following the election, Reeves called on Democrats to look deeply at the way they speak to men, and called on Republicans to enact policies that will actually help their male voters. Extremists on the right and left often speak as though male problems come down to the choices of individual men. But the reason policy solutions are needed is that these problems aren’t individual; they’re structural.

They're about the structure of the education system, the economy and family life. A big reason why boys are falling behind in school is that the current educational system isn’t designed to support boys’ learning styles. Men are struggling in the labor market because large-scale structural changes, like free trade and automation, have vastly reduced the number of blue-collar, traditionally male jobs. And if men are struggling to bring in income, they’re also struggling to fill the role that men have traditionally filled: the primary breadwinner and provider for a family.

Richard Reeves: So among all U. S. households, now 40 percent of them have a sole or female or primary breadwinner, female []. These are profound social changes. The central goal of the women's movement in the 1970s was to secure economic independence for women, thereby making marriage a choice. And I think that has been spectacularly achieved in recent decades. And I think it is one of the most wonderful liberations in our history. But it has come with profound consequences. And I think to just either imagine that these trends don't have profound implications for what it means to be a father, to be a man in modern society, when we've defined it so clearly previously, is naive in the extreme.

Reeves offers a lot of ideas about policies that could help address these structural challenges. For example, traditionally male jobs in manufacturing are declining, but jobs in health, education, and administration—jobs traditionally perceived as more feminine—are rising fast. Reeves recommends massive investments in recruitment, subsidies, scholarships, hiring bonuses, and other incentives to get men into those professions – to benefit the workers themselves, and the people they would work with.

Richard Reeves: We desperately need more men in our classrooms but also in our hospitals and as care workers and as social workers and as counselors.

But beyond these policy proposals, we need changes at the level of our culture. Because the problems might start with external factors, like a globalizing economy, but they don’t stay there. They come to impact individuals at the deepest inner level, in terms of how they feel about themselves and their place in the world. And our cultural narratives don’t always offer men a place.

In some stories, the very premise of Reeves’ book – that men have problems worth addressing – is mocked. In HBO’s satirical TV show White Lotus, a businesswoman lectures her daughter for not being nice enough to her brother: “He is a straight, white young man, and nobody has any sympathy for them right now. And I just feel like we should. In a way, they’re the underdogs now.” The statement is the signal for her daughter to reply, “Mom, cringe.”

The ‘dumb dad’ trope is a decades-old cliche—just think of Homer Simpson— but it was still being deployed even at the end of 2023’s blockbuster film Barbie, as Barbie is driven to an appointment by a family of new real-world friends - a mom, a daughter, and a dad.

From Barbie: “You got this! I’m really proud of you.” “Estoy muy orguoso de ti” “Ogulloso.” “Orgulloso … orgulloso de ti.” “There you go. Close enough”“Si se puede.”“That’s a political statement.” “That’s appropriation, Dad.”

Yes, the trope is meant to be funny. But it’s not all that funny for actual dads.

CNN: Those are funny, but it’s every show, and I want to get your take on this, and what concerns me is my sons, what do they watch on television? Whether it’s Disney channel, Nickelodeon, or all shows, what they’re seeing - and media’s powerful - the dad is an idiot!

This was CNN with Josh Levs in 2012. Family counselor and social philosopher Michael Gurian noted the impact that this kind of portrayal can have. When dads in the media are depicted as being stupid and unnecessary, men and women can absorb the dangerous message that men or fathers aren’t needed.

And that message –that you are not needed – is perhaps the most destructive one we could send.

Richard Reeves: A fundamental human need is to be needed. And if our men and our young boys don't feel needed, then it's no wonder that so many of them are going off the rails. A study of men who commit suicide looked at the last words they used to describe themselves before they did so, and the two words most commonly used by those men were “useless” and “worthless.” It is a fundamental human need to be needed. If we make our men feel that they're not still needed by our society, by our culture, it is small wonder that so many of them are suffering so much.

So it is crucial, says Reeves, that we start telling new stories in our culture about what it means to be a man – one that doesn’t label men by default as either “dangerous” or “useless.”

Richard Reeves: The cultural task before us is a new script for masculinity. And that new script will contain the best of the old script, which is about self-mastery and autonomy, etc., and interest in forming stable families and mating and having children, etc. But that script won't write itself.

We need to write this new script – one that respects what is new and vital in our 21st century society and recovers and renews what was valuable in centuries past.

One way to do this is by sharing exemplary stories.

* A new script

Some of these will be real-world stories. Reeves discusses the Carnegie Hero Fund, which issues medals to civilians for courageous acts, specifically risking their life to save a stranger. In 2021, he notes, 66 of the 71 medals awarded were given to men – men like 19-year-old Lucas Mendoza, who was killed while trying to help a 3-year-old out of a burning building.” Men in general have a greater appetite and tolerance for this kind of risk.

One way to write a positive script for masculinity, says writer David French, is by embracing and harnessing some of these characteristically male traits. As he wrote in National Review,

“Turning boys into grown men means taking many of their inherent characteristics — such as their aggression, their sense of adventure, and their default physical strength — and shaping them toward virtuous ends. A strong, aggressive risk-taker can be a criminal or a cop, for example.”

Caitlin Flanagan, writing in the Atlantic, also starts from those inherent, generally masculine traits, and the choice all men face about how to use them:

“Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?”

When we help boys and men direct their strength towards virtuous ends – towards the protection and service of others – we get what Flanagan calls “heroic masculinity.” French and Flanagan see heroic masculinity as a goal and desire in many young men, just waiting to be cultivated and called forth, if we as a culture will give them permission to embrace it.

[French] “It’s quite safe to say that millions of young boys desire to become a grown man — a person who is physically and mentally tough, a person who can rise to a physical challenge and show leadership under stress … We do our sons no favors when we tell them that they don’t have to answer that voice inside them that tells them to be strong, to be brave, and to lead.”

[Flanagan] “Let them be who they are, including those boys who are very interested in what it means to be heroic, in the sense of defending and protecting the weak.”

We can model and celebrate this kind of positive masculinity through the cultural myths and stories we share. Stories that depict men using their strength and skills to serve the people around them – stories like Ted Lasso, Just Mercy, or The Lord of the Rings.

Ted Lasso: “Every choice is a chance, fellas. And I didn’t give myself the chance to build further trust with y’all. To quote the great UCLA college basketball coach John Obi-Wan Gandalf,

‘It is our choices, gentlemen, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.’ Now I hope y’all can forgive me for what I’ve done.”

Just Mercy: “The charges against them have proven to be a false construction of desperate people fueled by bigotry and bias who ignored the truth in exchange for easy solutions, and that's not the law, that's not justice.”

The Lord of the Rings: “If by my life or death I can protect you, I will. You have my sword.”

The Lord of the Rings, a fantasy epic about a small group of friends banding together to save their land, is beloved by women and by men. The UK journalist Kaleigh Dray observes that

“The well-written men of the Lord Of The Rings have given us a beautiful example of healthy masculinity; one that allows men to cry without shame, to experience deep love and affection.”

Aragorn, for example, is ready to die for the quest, but also weeps and shows tenderness at the death of his friend Boromir.

The Lord of the Rings: “Be at peace, son of Gondor.”

The characters don’t show their strength by brutalizing others or dominating over women. But they do show strength – in how they help others.

The Lord of the Rings: “We will not abandon Merry and Pippin to torment and death. Not while we have strength left.”

We all depend for our sustenance and safety on people who dedicate their strength to the service of others. Strength is a virtue in men and women – but today, in many places, it’s women who are celebrated for it. We need to permit and celebrate men’s desire to be strong as well. And we need to remind them of all the forms strength can take. Not all men will be Carnegie Heroes, or the police chiefs and firefighters that Flanagan cites for heroic masculinity. For many men, the closer model will be another character from The Lord of the Rings – Samwise Gamgee, the gardener, the future husband and father, and friend.

The Lord of the Rings: “I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. A promise! ‘Don’t you leave him, Samwise Gamgee.’ And I don’t mean to. I don’t mean to.” “Oh Sam.”

Sam is an exemplar of strength called into service. He dedicates himself to the humble, ordinary work of walking alongside the person he is responsible for and caring for his everyday physical and emotional needs. As Reeves notes, we cannot do without men like these:

Richard Reeves: Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said, “Every known human society has rested on the learned nurturing behavior of men.”

Caring for another in any sustained way takes great strength – physical, mental, and emotional. But strength isn’t always what we call it, and it isn’t always what we celebrate – not when we’re talking about men. We can change that. We can let men know that their strength is needed and valued. We can encourage boys and men in their desire to be strong. And we can tell stories that show them how to harness that strength in the service of others. After all, that’s what we call heroism.

In general, men and boys have a greater appetite for risk. Researcher Ellen Sandseter explains that children love risky play – anything involving great heights, high speeds, dangerous tools, and disappearing from adult supervision – but this is especially true for boys. That’s what gives us stories like the one comedian John Mulaney tells from his childhood:

John Mulaney: “Sometimes people would say, ‘What do you think you're doing?’, but that just meant ‘Stop.’ They didn't actually want to know my thought process. They didn't want me to be like, ‘Well, I was gonna put this bottle rocket into this carton of eggs so that when I lit off the bottle rocket, the eggs would esplode everywhere.’ ‘Oh well, that's very interesting, and what brought you to this experiment?’ ‘Oh well, thank you for asking.’”

Sure, most normal adults would just immediately take away the bottle rocket. But see if you can resist that temptation just a little while to let boys have that experience of risky, rough and tumble play. According to psychologists, it’s an essential learning process – just have some Band-aids handy.

As boys get older, they will need greater challenges. Annie Holmquist, writing about The Lord of the Rings on Substack noted, “Just as the team of males in the quest to destroy the ring had a mission, so men today need responsibility. They need space … to take risks.” Or as one man wrote on Twitter, “Men rarely want to be empathised with. We want to fix a problem.” If that problem is finding his source of meaning or the direction of this life, he might need some struggle to solve it – just like Carlos Brooks did. Support his taking on that struggle.

Arthur Brooks: You need to live and to try things and to go through a process of discernment. And the way to do that is to do hard things, is to challenge yourself and to say to yourself, “I will not stop until I have answers to these questions, to my own satisfaction.”

Maybe you’re a man who’s also looking for more meaning and direction in his life. Maybe, like Carlos, you’re longing to find out just what you can do and who you can serve – but you haven’t found those answers yet. If so, remember that your work and your presence are needed right now – especially by young people. In some ways, says Reeves, boys need male role models even more than girls need female role models. And right now, we don’t have nearly all the male leaders and teachers and mentors that we need.

Richard Reeves: And male teachers are more likely to be coaches, so if we have fewer male teachers, we also have fewer coaches, but also we need more male scout leaders. We need more male, we need more men in just those other male spaces.

In this century, a smaller proportion of men are the sole breadwinners for a family. But being a provider doesn’t just mean being a provider of money. Men have many gifts to offer – especially when it comes to bringing up the younger men in their communities.

Richard Reeves: My English teacher in high school taught us metaphysical poetry from John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and some amazing Romantic poetry. He was a Korean War veteran who also was a bus driver. And he would have us in tears reading metaphysical poetry. I don't think that would have happened if it wasn't the man, for me. Just for me. I think the fact of a man teaching me to love and write and read poetry was hugely important. I think the fact that he was who he was helped me to read. He's [] a bunch of working class, unruly, 16-year-old boys. You're gonna get them to read John Donne and Andrew Marvell? By God, he did.

We are all called, men and women, to serve others with our gifts, our love, and our strength. But today, what some men hear is that their service isn’t wanted or needed. We can’t let that be the message we send. None of this is to diminish the tremendous struggles and challenges faced by women past and present. It’s simply a refusal to ignore any of the human struggles unfolding around us – like the deathly despair provoked by feeling “useless.”

Richard Reeves: And you talked about compassion earlier – that's the heart of the project here. We all want human flourishing for everybody. And if you see a group of people, whoever they are, who are struggling or suffering in some way or another, surely we're called to help that group of people. And the fact that we wouldn’t because they don't fall into these neat binary categories of our current political life is not only, in my view, shortsighted, because those problems will fester and come out in different ways, it's actually immoral. So there's a moral force to this argument here too.

Novelist Charles Dickens wrote, “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for any one else.” What else is healthy masculinity but a readiness to help bear others’ burdens? With this in mind, encourage the boys you know in their desire for virtuous strength. And celebrate the quiet but vital ways that men use their strength to help carry the burdens of others.

CREDITS

Arthur C. Brooks, “How to Be Happy, Reverse Bucket Lists, The Four False Idols, and More”

The Tim Ferriss Show | Sept 13, 2023

Interview and lecture with Richard Reeves | Wheatley Institute, Brigham Young University

Richard Reeves, “Of Boys and Men” | Coleman Hughes | Sept 23, 2022

Josh Hawley and Megyn Kelly, “The Decline of Young Men in Today’s Culture” | May 16, 2023

Tucker Carlson, “On how Kanye exposed the left's war on men” | Fox News | Oct 12, 2018

Doug Emhoff, “Toxic masculinity” | MSNBC | March 4, 2023

Barbie | Dir. Greta Gerwig | 2023

Josh Levs, “Dads to media: Stop playing us as idiots!” | CNN | Jun 14, 2012

Ted Lasso, Season 2 | Developed by Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly | 2021

Just Mercy | Dir. Destin Daniel Cretton | 2019

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring | Dir. Peter Jackson | 2001

John Mulaney, The Comeback Kid | Netflix | 2015

Americans are losing trust in most of their major institutions, including the institutions of government and democracy. This distrust is driven, argues Yuval Levin, in large part because Americans realize that many people in those institutions have started seeing them as a platform rather than a responsibility. This episode proposes that we can help rebuild the institutions to which we belong — families, churches, schools, local communities — by recommitting ourselves to the people we serve within them.

Featured voices:

Danielle Allen

Andy Crouch

Shaylyn Romney Garrett

Robert George

Benjamin Klutsey

Yuval Levin

Robert Putnam

Cornel West

Article 13 is a Faith Matters podcast. It is produced by Maria Devlin McNair, Zachary Davis, Steve LaRosa and Gavin Feller. Learn more here.

When I was seven years old, my grandma offered me twenty dollars to read the Book of Mormon ahead of my baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

The task started well, as I’d already heard the opening stories many times. But roughly 80 pages in, thick into the Isaiah chapters, I was overwhelmed. My eyes dutifully looked at each word, but I understood nothing. It was beyond my abilities. Eventually, for a stretch of at least 50 pages, I just read the tiny summaries at the start of each chapter and called it good. That’s how I finished the book before my baptism.

My grandma gave me the prized twenty-dollar bill at the Salt Lake City airport, minutes before she left on an LDS mission. I held that bill in my hands, dreaming of my purchasing prospects (a discount game for my Nintendo Entertainment System, I’m sure). 

But on my way out of the airport, I lost the bill. Did I drop it on the escalator? Did it fall out of my pocket where I’d been sitting? My parents helped me look for it, but it was gone. I didn’t have the heart to tell my grandma, and part of me decided that my loss was simply God’s retribution for skimming chapters. I deserved to lose the money.

I read the Book of Mormon (really read it) many times in the years that followed, such that by the time I left on my mission I felt like I knew it deeply and was ready to convert the world. During a particularly naive moment of zeal, I even told my high school girlfriend just before I left that everyone would convert to Mormonism if they could only hear our message explained clearly enough. That’s what I was going to do.

An Expanding World

Imagine my surprise and disappointment when reality proved far more complicated than my teenage self assumed. Despite my best attempts to explain the message, almost no one I spoke to during my mission converted.

My mission experience expanded my world, which only continued to expand when I returned home, started college, and did two stints abroad, visiting cathedrals and museums full of biblical art across Europe. 

That’s when I realized that I’d still never read the Bible cover to cover. The task had always felt daunting. How could I make sense of Leviticus, Ezekiel, or Chronicles? My reading comprehension had thankfully improved over the years, but I knew I would need guidance. So, for more than a year, I read scholarly books about the Bible alongside different translations of the text. 

I soon realized how little I knew about anything beyond the scope of the curated Sunday School lessons I was raised with. Once again, I felt overwhelmed — like I was at the limits of my abilities. Even if I could grasp what a handful of scholars thought about the book, how would I ever understand the thousands of interpretations from every Christian and Jewish sect throughout history, much less the original languages the book was written in? It would take a lifetime, I knew, to comprehend it all.

And that was just Christianity. Around the same time, as I’ve recounted elsewhere, I was also reading wisdom texts from eastern religions—the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, and so on. The more I read, the more I realized that if it would take a lifetime for me to understand all the nuances of Christianity, it would take many lifetimes to understand all the nuances of each tradition around the world. It was simply too much. If I thought about the sheer expanse of everything I didn’t know, I felt overwhelmed—like I was going crazy.

The View From Nowhere

Some people deal with this overwhelm by taking what the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls a “view from nowhere.” They believe that the only way forward is to try to become impartial spectators, scrutinizing each tradition like a medical student bent over a dissecting table. 

But living traditions can’t pass the view-from-nowhere test (consisting, as they do, of flawed human beings rather than lifeless objects), so those who embrace this view often reject traditional religion altogether, becoming either secular atheists or spiritual but not religious. 

I sympathize. There’s something freeing, after all, about sloughing off a tradition’s unpleasant cultural baggage, and there’s an allure to picking and choosing each tradition’s best aspects and leaving the worst behind. I’d even go so far as to say that periodically taking the view from nowhere is essential for seeing the flaws of one’s own tradition. (We can’t be self aware without some distance.)

And yet, taken too far, the view from nowhere is a dead end. Those who hold it too tightly develop an evasive, detached approach to life, cutting themselves off from institutional, civic, and sometimes even familial responsibilities. Compared to an unrealized ideal, every community is a disappointment, a total let down. So those who tightly grip the view from nowhere tend to favor whatever impulse speaks to them in the moment. It’s the “follow your heart” model of life, shorn of any sense of the fact that all of us are forever and unmistakably connected to each other and therefore have a responsibility for each other.

The View From Somewhere

The view from somewhere, by contrast, is grounded in responsibility for others, particularly those where we live.

It’s a lesson that surfaces in traditions around the world—a lesson I didn’t initially see when I first started digging into wisdom texts. During that first pass, I mostly just saw the passages of universal love I was hoping to see. “Within yourself let grow a boundless love for all creatures,” from the Buddha or “universal love is the way of the wise,” from the Chinese sage Mozi—that sort of thing. But the more I sat with these traditions, the more I saw just how much they also call for people to commit to and sacrifice for a (flawed) local community in time and place. 

In Buddhism, this community is known as the sangha. “We need to stick to the sangha, build the sangha, and not be separated from the sangha,” says the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. (He adds, “If we are living with a sangha that has many weaknesses and shortcomings, one which does not operate according to our wishes, then we should know what to do in order to help improve the quality of our sangha.”) 

In Confucianism, this community is the family, among other things. “When you serve your mother and father it is okay to try to correct them once in a while,” said Confucius. “But if you see that they are not going to listen to you, keep your respect for them and don't distance yourself from them.” 

And Hinduism speaks of the dharma, or your duty to your community. “It is better to strive in one’s own dharma than to succeed in the dharma of another,” reads the Bhagavad Gita. “Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind.”

In short, I found that if you sit with the wisdom traditions long enough—if you expand widely enough—you see that they encourage people to go local, to sacrifice for an embodied community. They all take a view from somewhere. 

I worry I might be misunderstood here, as though I’m saying that no one should ever reject anything from their lineage or their community. That’s not it. Taken too far, the view from somewhere can be just as pathological as the view from nowhere. It’s the story of a spouse who stays in an abusive marriage out of fear of the unknown. It’s the story of a mother whose dreams are erased in her sacrifice for her family and her church. It’s the story of a father who becomes a “yes man,” willing to silence his inner voice to climb the corporate ladder. 

Those who get too wrapped up in the view from somewhere cling to their commitments even when those commitments make them miserable. That’s not a good life. 

The good life blends the gifts of the view from nowhere with the gifts of the view from somewhere, adapting based on where we live, who we live with, and who we are. It’s context aware.

What does this look like in practice? 

I don’t know. We each live in different contexts and have a uniquely personal path and relationship with other people and the divine. Unlike my teenage self, I don’t presume to know what God has in store for anyone else. I’m still trying to discern what all of this means for me. 

I only know that whenever I feel overwhelmed in this expansive universe, it helps to remember that I grew up somewhere and live somewhere. This fact grounds me in time and place and (helpfully) limits my options. I don’t have to understand everything or solve every problem in the world. I can instead commit to and sacrifice for my communities (the view from somewhere)—all while keeping one eye open to the flaws and shortcomings of my culture (the view from nowhere).

In the end, I have empathy for my seven-year-old self who strained to understand the antiquated language of the Book of Mormon and the layers of meaning in Isaiah. He deserved that twenty dollars. In so many ways, I’m still him—straining to make sense of a complicated world and knowing, as the wisdom traditions ultimately tell us, that we don’t exist in theory.

We only exist in place.

Jon Ogden is a Wayfare Senior Editor and co-Founder at UpliftKids.org, a lesson library and curriculum for families to explore wisdom and timeless values together.

Art by Edvard Munch.

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COME TO RESTORE!

Restore is an unforgettable three-day gathering by Faith Matters that brings together speakers, poets, musicians, and artists to inspire, enlighten, and nourish faith. This year's gathering on September 5th-7th will be our best yet. A few exciting features: 

* An Evensong choral performance by Sound of Ages Choir Thursday Sep 5th.

* A special event for young adults on Friday Sep 6 evening featuring Mallory Everton and McKenna Breinholt.

* A beautifully designed contemplation room featuring a meditation by Thomas McConkie.

* An incredible art exhibit curated by Esther Candari.

* A huge books area for snagging your next read.

* Lots of chances to connect with new people.

* A parents area so those with young children can still see and hear everything.

* A preview of Wayfare Issue 4

Register today and invite your friends and family to join you!

* Student tickets: $25

* Under 30 tickets: $50

* Young Adult Evening tickets: $10

Use the code WAYFARE to save 20%

“It is of little consequence in respect to the question of originality, which of them holds the pen; the one who contributes least to the composition may contribute most to the thought; the writings which result are the joint product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other.”

So wrote John Stuart Mill in reference to the role of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, in his own published works. (I gratefully acknowledge the truth of the principle from personal experience!). History is replete with other examples than Mill of women who exercised unheralded influence on a writer who—often because of women’s more obscure place in patriarchal society—ventriloquized a wife or—in two famous cases—sisters. 

William Wordsworth revolutionized English poetry, and is celebrated as the Father of British Romanticism. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, in an age of fervent optimism and revolution, Wordsworth gave powerful expression to the innocence of children and the fundamental goodness of human nature. His constant companion—more so than wife or friends—was his sister Dorothy. She was “a flash of light, Or an unseen companionship, a breath . . . independent of the wind.” He was the most celebrated English poet of his day. However, one can track in her journals the embryos out of which William fashioned some of his most famous poems. If journals and diaries had persisted as credited forms of literary expression, she might herself have achieved celebrity status. His poem best known to school children begins with the famous lines,

I wandered lonely as a cloud

It is not clear that his words improved upon the unadorned account Dorothy recorded privately, earlier:

We saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.

More consequential for the history of early Christianity was the remarkable woman Macrina the Younger—known to few besides specialists today, and largely overshadowed by her brother Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory became the most eloquent proponent in the fourth century of the theology of ascent—that view which sees humankind as a work in continual progress, participating in gradual sanctification and union with the divine. Gregory read the Song of Solomon as a beautiful allegory of human response to the “arrows of love” with which God relentlessly pursues his creation. Gregory developed the theme most lyrically in his Life of Moses, wherein he recast the prophet’s entire life as a universal model: “The great Moses, as he was becoming ever greater, at no time stopped in his ascent, nor did he set a limit for himself in his upward course. Once having set foot on the ladder which God set up (as Jacob says), he continually climbed to the step above and never ceased to rise higher, because he always found a step higher than the one he had attained.”  

Yet Gregory left no doubt that his spiritual teacher and master was Macrina, “the common glory of our family.” Macrina had actually brought several of her brothers to Christ, and served throughout her life as their spiritual director. In 379, as Macrina lay dying, Gregory paid his last visit. Like Socrates the night before his execution, Macrina wanted to discuss the soul’s origin, God’s purpose in its creation, and what awaited us after death. Her last words were a testimony to the creation itself as an outflowing of God’s love—and reaffirmed those very teachings which her brother would make more famous. Gregory’s tribute, published as “On the Soul and Resurrection,” was his way of proclaiming to Christians the true author of  the most beautiful teachings that lighted the way for fourth-century Christians: his sister Macrina.

Rational nature was brought into generation for this purpose, that the riches of the divine goodness should not be idle.” We were fashioned as souls “with free wills . . . for this very purpose: that there would be some capacities able to receive his blessings, capacities that are enlarged by the addition of that which is poured into them.” God “has but one goal: the whole plenitude of our nature is brought to completion from the first human being to the last.” He will offer “to all a participation in the beautiful which is in him.

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Audio produced by BYUradio.

Artwork by Anna Ancher.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and perhaps the greatest of the Victorian poets. He suffered terribly from recurrent bouts of religious doubt and profound depression. In one of his “sonnets of desolation" we read a startling metaphor for spiritual struggle:

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

It took a harrowing image—carrion serving as comfort food—to shock Hopkins out of his diet of disappointment. 

In 1913, the Irishman Sir Hugh Lane proposed establishing a permanent modern art gallery in Dublin. He had secured pledges of funding to house and enlarge his own collection featuring such contemporary greats as Corot, Manet, Monet, Degas, and Renoir. The location was to be a middle-class Irish neighborhood—who could object to such an aspiration? Well, lots of people, actually. The country was on the brink of civil war; a citizen labor army of 20,000 had just armed themselves against violent police crackdowns; Dublin slums were pervasive and death rates high; the trauma of the Great Hunger was still a vivid memory among the aged; and the Great War loomed ahead, only months away. Dispensing even private funds—let alone public monies—for fine art in desperate times struck some as a tone-deaf indulgence. To others (like William Butler Yeats), affirming the enduring and the beautiful amidst hunger and squalor was an act of defiance against human fragility and contingency. (Aren’t the poor always with us?)  In spite of Yeats’ impassioned support, Lane’s proposal failed to obtain public approval, and Yeats wrote a poem of bitter consolation to his ally in the effort, Lady Gregory. Hopkins’ wrestle was spiritual and cosmic; Yeats’ was political and moral. But in both cases, grievance threatened to canker their soul, and both rebuffed the temptation.

Yeats’ magnificent poem, “To a friend whose work has come to nothing,” ends with a call that challenges the human spirit to one of the hardest tasks it can ever face:

. . . Bred to a harder thing

According to Paul Ricoeur, love means “unconditioned solidarity with and affirmation of the other.” For Dietrich von Hildebrand, love is “the affirmation of the being” of the other. For Martin Luther King, “love affirms the other unconditionally.” We could add endlessly to the list. In love we affirm the other—that is, we recognize the claims of the other person, that she is an end and not an object, she is the “Thou” in the I-Thou relationship, the “I”-view of the other into which one must enter imaginatively and feelingly. 

The quiet heroism of Yeats’ poem is in its recognition that in so many of life’s transactions, we will not be affirmed. What then? Unrequited romantic love is the great fabric upon which poets embroider their tragedies. The desiccated desert of a loveless childhood, Romanian orphanages taught us, creates real-life shrunken souls that our most effusive compensations can seldom repair. Life in a close community wreaks its own wounds of neglect and disregard and slight. Our cultural moment has sensitized us to a plurality of individuals who feel insufficiently affirmed in their diverse identities. All the marginalized were the focus of Christ’s ministry and should be of ours.

There is, however, another deficit of affirmation that Yeats is addressing in his poem. Less morally urgent perhaps, less dramatic, but a hurt that spares no one and can nonetheless corrode the soul like a spiritual rust. It is the experience of disappointment—of seeing our projects or our plans, or our vision of a larger good, frustrated.

Human nature being what it is, in the absence of affirmation we just seek another kind of affirmation. Assurance that we are right in feeling aggrieved. Solidarity in our disappointment, frustration, sense of being wronged. We cultivate our own microbubbles of discontent. 

“Be secret,” urges Yeats. “Be secret.” There is a time to make our protests long and loud. But there are also times to bear one’s grievance in private. When Job declared, “my heart shall not reproach me as long as I live” (27:6), he was making a pledge about a life in the absence of affirmation. 

“And exult,” added Yeats. Exulting is usually a counterpart of success. Yeats makes it a companion of failure, of disappointment. How so? He gives us no drawn-out ballad about the heroism of tragic failure, or the pride of having done the right thing in a world gone wrong. Yet this capacity for which no name exists—the capacity to “be secret and exult”—seems necessary in the disciple’s spiritual repertoire.

Sometimes true discipleship is the courage to say hard things, to speak truth to power, and to put one’s reputation and life on the line. Sometimes, as we are implored in scripture ancient and modern, discipleship is the discipline to “stand still,”(Ps. 46:10), to “be still” (D&C 123:17). That may be a call to cease frenetic motion of mind and body and listen. And sometimes, it is a simple call to silence. 

Hopkins silenced the interior demons of despair. As a Jesuit, he understood that nourishing despair is a failure of belief in Christ, not in ourselves. Silence in those circumstances is the allowing of space for Christ to enter into our interior dialogue, bringing hope. 

Yeats silenced the inclination to spread disappointment like a canker. The “most difficult” thing is to know when to be quietly glad that some failures cause us grief—while we wait for renewed opportunities.

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New.

Art by Gerard Dillon.

Audio produced by BYUradio.

When they were teenagers, my fourth great-grandmother and her sister sailed to the United States to walk across the plains with the Latter-day Saints migrating to Utah. Before they set off with handcarts, though, their parents changed their minds. Mary Jane and Eliza hid from them until they had boarded the ship back to England. Setting their faces toward the Salt Lake Valley, the two young women left behind their native home and family forever. They had new shoes for their journey, but they decided to save them so they would have pristine footwear to put on as they walked into Zion. They walked the entire journey barefoot. By the time they arrived, their feet were too swollen and calloused to fit into their shoes. In remembrance of the feet that have carried us here—bruised and blistered, scarred and swollen, both steadfast and faltering—we present a collection of essays to honor Pioneer Day, featuring four writers who share a connection with an ancestor that has touched them. We hope this series reflects the wisdom, solace, and strength we glean as our hearts turn to the generations before us. A kindling of recognition, a story that imparts courage, a shared grief—these are some of the gifts we receive as we commune with our family across time. May we find renewed faith as we remember the feet that carried us here and the footprints we leave for those who follow.

—Grace Carter

JULY 24TH: A PHOTO EXHIBITION

by Alexander Laurent