The Power of Institutions

This is a turbulent time for American democracy. Years, perhaps decades, of social change is manifesting in the form of distrust, violence, chaos, fear, loneliness, and despair.

But Conversing, along with Comment magazine, is about hope, healing, and hospitality.

For this special 200th episode of Conversing, Mark Labberton invites Anne Snyder (Editor-in-Chief, Comment magazine) for a close reading and discussion of the 2025 Comment Manifesto, a hopeful new document offering a vision of Christian Humanism for this era.

Together they discuss:

The meaning and intent behind a new Comment magazine Manifesto for Christian humanism

The Incarnation of Christ for what it means to be human

Hospitality in an era of exclusion

Healthy institutions and the importance of communal agency

Individualism vs communitarianism

Learning to perceive the world in fresh, surprising ways

About the Comment Manifesto

To read the Manifesto in its entirety, visit comment.org/manifesto/, or scroll below.

To watch a reading of selections from the Comment Manifesto, click here.

About Anne Snyder

Anne Snyder is the Editor-in-Chief of Comment magazine, which is a core publication of Cardus, a think tank devoted to renewing North American social architecture, rooted in two thousand years of Christian social thought. Visit https://comment.org/ for more information.

For years, Anne has been engaged in concerns for the social architecture of the world. That is, the way that our practices of social engagement, life, conversation, discussion, debate, and difference can all be held in the right kind of ways for the sake of the thriving of people, individuals, communities, and our nation at large.

Anne also oversees our Comment’s partner project, Breaking Ground, and is the host of The Whole Person Revolution podcast and co-editor of Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year (2022).

Show Notes

• Giving thanks for 200 episodes of Conversing!
• 2000 years of Christian thought to the public square
• James K.A. Smith, the former editor of Comment Magazine
• Seeking a positive moral vision
• A turbulent moment for democracy
• MANIFESTO SECTION 1 “We are Christian humanists…”
• What it means to be human in our age—our infinite dignity, relationship to the earth, and woundedness
• The significance of Jesus Christ for what it means to be human
• What the Incarnation of Christ means for our world
• “So many people we know and love and respect feel ecclesially homeless, obviously politically homeless.”
• MANIFESTO SECTION 2 “We believe it’s time to build…”
• Agency
• Called to a co-creative project
• Productive and constructive
• “Contributing the true and good and beautiful in a messy world.”
• MANIFESTO SECTION 3 “We believe in institutions…”
• Collective, common, and communal
• Institutions, as part of the social architecture of our world, can be extraordinarily positive.
• “I always get asked, ‘Why do you believe in institutions? Why? You don’t need to! They’re gone! They’re dead!’”
• “Healthy institutions are channels within which you can actually realize your sense of agency in a way that might be more moving than you ever would have imagined just by yourself.”
• Yuval Levin’s take on community (paraphrased): “All the tumult we're experiencing, we're just having a big fight about what kinds of what community means.”
• Polarization
• MAGA as a kind of community
• “I consider myself a bit of a communitarian.”
• Christian humanism throughout history always has four projects connected to it: Theology, character formation, political economy, and aesthetic.
• MANIFESTO SECTION 4 “We believe in the transformative power of encounter—encountering reality, encountering those unlike us.”
• Addressing the fractured social fabric and isolation of this age
• Encounter and trust
• Hospitality— ”taking one another's being and doing in the world seriously enough”
• Enter the room listening
• MANIFESTO SECTION 5 “We believe Christianity is perpetually on the move. There is no sacred capital.”
• “This is our most aggressive claim.”
• Distinguishing Comment from peer publications such as First Things
• “All cultures are fallen, and we’re part of another kingdom.”
• Galatians 5 and the Fruit of the Spirit
• Civilizational Christianity
• The smallness of “faith, family, flag”
• “So much of my Christian identity has been rewritten by experiences of Christian faith that are completely outside the, the social reality that is my fundamental location.”
• ”When Christianity seems to be running the dangerous risk of being captured, captured by a certain kind of ideological political social frame that feels as though it's really making itself primary simply by its Napoleonic capacity for self-crowning, that is a very, very dangerous thing.”
• MANIFESTO SECTION 6 “We believe there are different ways of knowing—that the thinker and the practitioner have equally valuable wisdoms worth airing, that relationship and context matter for the ways in which we perceive reality, that the child with Down syndrome perceives truths that a Nobel Prize winner cannot, and that there is a need for those who inhabit these myriad ways to share space and learn how to pursue understanding—perhaps even revelation—together.”
• Perceiving the world differently
• Down syndrome and the expression of a different kind of knowing or wisdom
• Full circle with the first principle of the imago Dei
• Functioning out of either confidence, uncertainty, or anxiety
• Mark Labberton’s friend Dustin (R.I.P), who had cerebral palsy
• Fatigue, trying to get our bearings
• Looking for moral and eschatological coherence

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

The 6 Primary Sections of the 2025 Comment Manifesto

To read the Manifesto in its entirety, visit comment.org/manifesto/.

1. We are Christian humanists, those who believe that Jesus Christ—God become man—is the ultimate measure of what it means to be human. We believe that every human being is created in the image of God, whole persons who are at once fallen yet gloriously endowed, finite and dependent, yet deserving of infinite dignity. We seek to stay true both to the wonder and to the woundedness of life this side of the veil, even as our eschatology floods us with hope: Jesus has walked with us, died, risen, and ascended, and he will come again to make all things new.

2. We believe it’s a time to build, that the creative imagination and the Christian imagination are mysteriously linked. We want to begin with the Yes in Christ, not our own noes. While there is an important role for criticism baptized in a study of what is true, good, and beautiful, it is a means to an end—the basis for wise repair and imagination, not the justification for destruction or erasure. We are committed to keeping orthodoxy and orthopraxy married, taking seriously our job to translate between them.

3. We believe in institutions: government, guilds, families, schools, universities, the church. We recognize that in our age of individualism, institutions are often painted as the enemy. We try to change that, seeking to shape the character of today’s most formative institutions while exploring what kind of reimagined social architecture might compel the next generation’s trust.

4. We believe in the transformative power of encounter—encountering reality, encountering those unlike us. Loving enemies is bedrock for Comment, hospitality core. We are champions of the difficult room. We believe in the deeper truths that can be discovered when different life experiences and distinct sources of wisdom are gathered around one table. We intentionally publish arguments with which we disagree, including those who don’t hail Christ as Lord, not for the sake of pluralism without conviction, but because Christians have always better understood the contours and depths of their faith when crystallized through exchanges with strangers turned friends.

5. We believe Christianity is perpetually on the move. There is no sacred capital. While the audience we serve is navigating a North American context, we serve this audience from an understanding that Christianity is an intercultural, polyglot religion. At a time of rising religious ethno-nationalism, we insist that no culture can claim to represent the true form of Christianity, and we actively seek for our authors and partners to reflect the global reality of the church.

6. We believe there are different ways of knowing—that the thinker and the practitioner have equally valuable wisdoms worth airing, that relationship and context matter for the ways in which we perceive reality, that the child with Down syndrome perceives truths that a Nobel Prize winner cannot, and that there is a need for those who inhabit these myriad ways to share space and learn how to pursue understanding—perhaps even revelation—together.

...

Our theory of change takes its cues from the garden, less the machine. We are personalists, not ideologues. We follow the logic of Jesus’s mustard seed, of yeast transforming a whole pile of dough, of the principle of contagiousness and change happening over generations. We believe in the value of slow thought. We are skeptical of the language of scale in growing spiritual goods. While we wish to be savvy in unmasking the either/or reactivity of our age and will always call out dehumanizing trendlines, we are fundamentally animated by the creative impulse, by a philosophy of natality expressed through hospitality. This feels especially important in this time between eras when no one knows what’s next, and we need one another to recalibrate, to reflect, and to shape a hopeful future.