Trinity Forum Conversations12 Nov 2024

Democracy & Solidarity with James Davison Hunter and David Brooks

Democracy & Solidarity with James Davison Hunter and David Brooks

One of the biggest questions in the Christian life is what it means to love one's neighbor, both in the personal and the public spheres. While these questions have always been challenging and contested, they seem to have grown increasingly divisive and demoralizing.

So how do we begin to restore and reweave solidarity and a love for neighbor into our civic fabric?

Today's episode features our recent evening conversation with sociologist and author James Davision Hunter and cultural critic and author David Brooks. Together they help us explore the cultural roots of America's crisis of solidarity, and what it may mean to move together towards a renewed commitment to the common good.

“Until we understand the depth that the enemy is in fact not the other side, but in fact the enemy is the nihilism that insinuates itself within almost all of our public institutions, and not least our political institutions, we're really not taking the full measure of the crisis in front of us.” - James Davison Hunter

We hope this conversation helps you consider how you’re engaging in relationships, and how the smallest acts of seeing another person and listening to their story can help begin to restore our social fabric and establish new cultural norms.

This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in September of 2024. Watch the full video of the conversation here, and learn more about James Davison Hunter and David Brooks.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Culture Wars by James Davison Hunter

The Death of Character by James Davison Hunter

Science and the Good by James Davison Hunter

To Change the World by James Davison Hunter

Democracy and Solidarity by James Davison Hunter

The Social Animal by David Brooks

The Road to Character by David Brooks

The Second Mountain by David Brooks

How to Know a Person by David Brooks

George Marsden

Aristotle

The Public Philosophy, by Walter Lippman

Arthur Schlesinger

John Bowlby

Parker Palmer

David Hume

Edmund Burke

Eddie Hillison

Simone Weil

Mother Theresa

American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, by Sam Huntington

Clarence Thomas

The Upswing, by Robert Putnam

Howard Usock

Nicholas Epley

The Communist Manifesto

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Wrestling with God, Simone Weil

Children of Light and Children of Darkness, by Reinhold Niebuhr

Politics, Morality, and Civility, by Vaclav Havel

The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt

The Federalist Papers

A Practical View of Real Christianity, by William Wilberforce,

Who Stands Fast? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Related Conversations:
Hope Beyond Tribalism with James Mumford

Faith, Fear & Conspiracy with David French

The Fall, the Founding and the Future of American Democracy

How to Be a Patriotic Christian

Extremism and the Path Back to Peace with Elizabeth Neumann

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society

Special thanks to Ned Bustard for our podcast artwork.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(147)

Baptizing Our Imaginations, with Mia Chung and Malcolm Guite

The term “baptized imagination” has come to the fore of Christian discussion in recent years, and this recent episode considers what a baptized imagination can actually look like.In the Christian trad...

4 Aug 33min

Practices of Hope: Antidotes to Confusion, Cynicism and Nihilism, with Curt Thompson and David French

We are subjected to the temptations of confusion, cynicism, and nihilism like never before. So many pressures, including new ones, seemingly by the day, push us in these directions. What formative thi...

21 Jul 26min

Beauty + Justice: Why We Need Both, with Makoto and Haejin Fujimura

Beauty is often dismissed as a luxury—something secondary to the urgent work of repair. But what if beauty is not peripheral, but essential to healing what is broken?Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Makoto...

7 Jul 57min

Cultivating Christian Resilience

How can we cultivate a faith that endures and flourishes?Author, Anglican priest, and Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Tish Harrison Warren shows us how lasting and beautiful things can take root and grow ...

23 Jun 47min

A Conversation With Ben Sasse

In a culture shaped by distraction, anxiety, and constant noise, how do we focus on what matters most?In this special episode, we're sharing a conversation from a recent Trinity Forum event featuring ...

9 Jun 1h 6min

From Wasteland to Grail: Stories that Shape Our Lives, with Malcolm Guite

In March, we welcomed Malcolm Guite for an in-person event to celebrate his new book, Galahad and the Grail, which is the first in his Merlin’s Isle trilogy published through Rabbit Room Press. While ...

26 Mai 54min

Forgiveness in an Outraged World, with Amy Orr-Ewing

We live in an unforgiving age. Even as we know that Jesus commanded forgiveness, extending it can seem impossible, impractical, self-harming, even unjust. In these times of outrage and fear, what can ...

12 Mai 53min

Living a Non-Anxious Life, with Alan Fadling

We are a culture well acquainted with anxiety. Recent years have shown it rising dramatically, particularly among Generation Z and Millennials, but affecting all of us. In the Sermon on the Mount, how...

28 Apr 52min