We live in a frenetic, fragmented age. For all our capacity to connect to others, there is disconnection and isolation, a nameless hunger for anchors and integrated living. How to orient life toward wholeness and the good when the tectonics beneath are ever on the move? How do we make sense of our commitments and identities across chasms in culture, class and ideological stripe?
Enter Of Souls & Silos. The writings here are born out of these questions, premised on a hunch that the truest truths are found deep, influenced by temporal contexts but not bound to them. I’m drawn to stories of hope and gritty courage, to places and people that are subverting the status quo. Having spent some of my childhood overseas, with subsequent experiences in worlds both privileged and unprivileged, I’ve developed a conviction that those on the margins of our mainstream often have some wisdom worth revisiting – wisdom rooted in humility, in hospitality, in putting webs of love before pinnacles of success. This isn’t a demographic truth so much as a repeated sensation, one that’s motivated my writing and directed my feet. I hope the narratives here lend you a little respite from the whirl of tweets and caricatures, that you may find a reflectiveness that spurs your own—in your own silo and also beyond it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Snyder is the Editor-in-Chief of Comment Magazine and the host of Breaking Ground, a collaborative web commons created in 2020 to try to inspire a dynamic cross-section of thinkers and practitioners to respond to these pandemic times with ingenuity, wisdom and courage. The anthology that emerged from that year-long project, Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year, was published in January 2022. She is the host of The Whole Person Revolution podcast and the author of The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Renewing our Social and Moral Landscape, published in 2019.
From 2016 to 2019 she directed The Philanthropy Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a program seeking to help American foundations and business leaders strengthen “the middle ring” of morally formative institutions. From 2014 to 2017 Anne worked with Laity Lodge and the H.E. Butt Family Foundation in Texas, and before that she worked at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, World Affairs Journal and The New York Times. She has published widely, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, City Journal, The Orange County Register, Houston Business Journal, Bittersweet Monthly and of course Comment. She serves as a trustee for Nyack College and is a Senior Fellow with The Trinity Forum.