By Andy Crouch
What if COVID-19 was only remembered as a footnote of what followed it? This is probable. Pandemics and other natural disasters alone are rarely history-shaping events. Instead, they accelerate and intensify cultural trends and realities. But we have a say in what those will be in our lifetimes.
Speculation about how our economy would look after a long pandemic year has given way to the realities: Some asset classes – like large public equities – have done incredibly well. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of small businesses that were viable before the pandemic have closed entirely. We did not see the K-shaped recovery coming, but we could have, and maybe should have – because K-shaped is the shape of our world.
There are other trends shaping our future now too. Social trust has eroded. We’ve spent a year engaging in work and relationships over compressed bandwidth, costing us context, emotion, and empathy. Recovery from the last year will require more than money.
But there is hope, great hope, in an ancient biblical model designed to heal a K-shaped world. Let’s consider this beautiful biblical idea with our friends from Praxis, because ideas like this one can change the world.
Read the rest of the story in The Praxis Journal.
Photo: Kari Shea on Unsplash
