“A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.”1 Only a politics grounded in the experience of a polis—lives shared with a sense of common purpose, with obligations and gratitude arising from sorrows, hopes, and joys lived in generational time, and with the cultivation of capacities of trust and faith—can begin to take the place of our era’s distrust, estrangement, hostility, and hatreds.
