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.