The Whole Person Revolution

The language of trauma has become a part of our vernacular over the last decade. But how much do we really understand what it means to walk with scars? Dr. Steve West served for 40 years in the U.S. Air Force, eventually becoming a chaplain and being awarded the Bronze Star. Here he speaks with Anne to grant a compassionate picture of the experience of PTSD from the inside.

What are the pathways of formation required to cultivate the kind of wisdom and forbearance needed for a very real world of constraints and differences? With Anne to reflect on this vital if contested work today are David Katibah and Sarah Sturm, who together serve Telos, an organization that equips civic leaders to help reconcile seemingly intractable conflicts at home and abroad.

How might an institution cultivate the courage and realism required to accept an imperfect set of choices in this broken world, and to choose wisely and in a timely manner? Today's conversation with Anne's Cardus colleagues, Ray Pennings and Brian Dijkema, reflects on the challenges and choices facing institutional leaders seeking to protect the common good in a year of war abroad and strife at home.

In an editorial season focused on violence and our responses to violence, what is presently going on in Israel and Gaza has to take centre stage. As local as this conflict is, its history, narrative potency, and spiritual complexity have drawn in the world. Join Anne as she learns from two seasoned peacemakers, Jewish Israeli Eli Philip and Palestinian Christian Jack Saba, whose collaboration, friendship, and commitment to a vision of peace chart out a map we would do well to follow.

Is it possible for peace to walk in power anymore? This is the question haunting Comment's work this spring, and launching this new season of The Whole Person Revolution is someone who answers it with a courageous yes. J.S. "Joon" Park is a chaplain at Tampa General Hospital, whose public social media posts about death, grief, trauma, and loss have garnered a large following. When you read Joon's words, you encounter someone who is no stranger to the things we naturally dread as human beings: the dark night of losing a loved one, of having to accept a complete lack of control, of having to face the inescapability of our own mortality. Joon carries a wisdom earned from the trenches of what he calls "grief-catching," the act of standing present as someone is falling through the abyss of loss and pain. He joins Anne today on The Whole Person Revolution to share some of what he's learned about the strange paradoxes of dying and human wholeness, violence and healing, doubt and faith.

Dolph Westlund and Matt Ritsman were given unusual advice their senior year of college: If you want formative friendships to last, start a shared third thing. They took this to heart and, now seventeen years later, steward a fund pooled with twenty other friends from college. Meeting in person on an annual basis, with punctuated points of contact throughout the year, the Shade Partnership Fund is a philanthropic organization, a community, and a structure for accountability all at once.

We are often told to contemplate our mortality, but how often do we contemplate our natality? In this episode, Jennifer Banks, author of the new book Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, and Margarita Mooney Clayton, author of the essay "The Marian Gift of Dependence," in our fall issue, talk about the ways that gaining a sense of our natality overcomes our more destructive tendencies of autonomy and control. The Virgin Mary in particular exhibits this kind of receptivity and dependence in a way that speaks to people of all walks of life.

Judaism and Christianity are inextricably bound up in one another. Even when their histories split apart, the dynamics they negotiate in modernity often echo the other's internal dialogue and communal practice. The case of gender is no exception. In this episode, New York Times columnist David Brooks and attorney and Jewish thinker Yishai Schwartz compare and contrast the overlapping inheritances. Cited pieces include David's "The Feminine Way to Wisdom" in the fall issue of Comment, and Yishai's "Obligation and Inspiration," also in Comment's fall issue.

For all the talk about the "crisis of masculinity," few are providing a healthy vision for what masculinity in the twenty-first century could look like, and, perhaps more important, how men can get there. If becoming a man is better caught than taught, better modelled than talked about, what is going on that the formation seems increasingly rare in transmission? Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and Christine Emba, columnist at the Washington Post, weigh in. Cited pieces include Richard's "What Men Are For" in the fall issue of Comment, and Christine's July feature in the Post, "Men Are Lost. Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness."

The buzzword of the day in education is "transformation." But transformation for what, towards what? Philosopher Douglas Yacek reflects.