The clarity and unity of purpose of the essays in The Liberating Arts is evident and powerful, while the variety of essays makes it accessible to a range of audiences. The research-based essays provide cogent, persuasive, well-supported arguments; the personal reflections draw in readers who are engaged less by academic argument and more by a person’s story.

An excellent book for parents, alum, and donors as a resource in their support of the humanities in higher education. …As long as there are humans who seek knowledge and wisdom as the underlying flow that energizes their lives, we will continue to rely on the stories of those who lived a life well observed: the goal of a liberal arts education.

These writers offer an expanisve vision for the arts, rooted in companionship and gratitude for good gifts that are still – despite all of the evident losses – with us and continuing to impart life. The book manages to be both a no-nonsense manifesto and a convivial exchange of great ideas

This collection suggests that the liberal arts provide an education that meets the highest aspirations of the human person, an education aimed at human flourishing. It is difficult to put a price on that. What we need are administrators who are willing to offer the opportunity to aim higher.

A welcome addition to the long tradition of advocacy for the liberal arts. It brings together argument and delight, uniting the format of apologetics with the spirit of celebration. …An appropriate gift not only for those who are already “in the fold” of the liberal arts community but also for friendly skeptics and potential converts.

The Liberating Arts is a transformative work. Opening with an acknowledgment of the sundry forces arrayed against liberal arts education today, this diverse collection of voices cultivates an expansive imagination for how the liberal arts can mend what is broken and orient us individually and collectively to what is good, true, and beautiful.

The liberal arts have been about common goods, not elitist goods. ...These practical chapters are rich examples of the liberal arts in practice, stoking the imagination for how the liberal arts can play out in different contexts—whether with incarcerated adults or in elective adult education.

In this lucid and inspiring volume, a diverse group of thinkers dispel entrenched falsehoods about the irrelevance, injustice, or uselessness of the liberal arts and remind us that nothing is more fundamental to preparing citizens to live in a pluralistic society attempting to balance the values of justice, equality, and community.

At their best, the humanities are about discerning what kinds of lives we should be living. But humanities education is in crisis today, leaving many without resources to answer this most important question of our lives. The authors of this volume are able contenders for the noble cause of saving and improving the humanities. Read and be inspired!

In our era of massive social and technological upheaval, this book offers a robust examination of and an expansive vision for the liberal arts. As a scientist who believes that education should shape us for lives of reflection and action, I found the essays riveting, challenging, and inspiring. I picked it up and could not put it down.

In this series of lively, absorbing, and accessible essays, the contributors invoke and dismantle all the chief objections to the study of the liberal arts. The result is a clarion call for an education that enables human and societal flourishing. Everyone concerned about the fate of learning today must read this book.

What if the past two years of racial tension, pandemic lockdown, and political upheaval could be seen not as crises to be survived, but as seeds from which a better future could emerge? … The voices in Breaking Ground are both present and prescient. They reflect a gravitational pull toward reflection, change, and possibly even transformation. It’s as if, in writing these essays, these authors are emerging into a new day after a dark night. Squinting for sure, but inexorably moving toward the light.

Breaking Ground became a one-of-a-kind space to probe society’s assumptions, interrogate our own hearts and imagine what a better future might require.

One way to describe this new anthology from the Breaking Ground project is as a “Good Party,” to borrow a phrase from contributor Tara Isabella Burton. A Good Party, she suggests, is “a place where bonds of friendship, fostered in a spirit of both charity and joy, serve as the building blocks for communal life overall.” With 52 contributors filling almost 500 pages, we’re speaking of something close to a block party, one at which we run into some familiar faces, meet a number of wonderful new people, and even glimpse a few Almost Famous People… Since there was no overarching agenda here beyond a call to reflection, it’s truly a bit of a potluck experience.

Those who care about the common good and who long for fresh insights and daring but doable proposals, will find this book a major resource... Breaking Ground is surely one of the most important and beautiful books of 2022, a book to cherish.

I’m impressed with the wide array of people from police officers to theologians who contribute to this collection. But isn’t this what is needed in our communities across the land – a coming together of a wide array of people who care about the rents in our social fabric, people who talk and listen and pray and think and imagine what could be?

Breaking Ground is a masterful essay collection that wrings meaning out of a pandemic year. Moving from the summer of 2020 to the spring of 2021, these essays trace the changing face of the Covid-19 pandemic, from lockdowns to Black Lives Matter protests to the release of the vaccines. It is a blend of on-the-ground reportage, thoughtful conversations, theological studies, and philosophy; while rooted in a pandemic, it also covers racial justice and politics....As the book progresses, its sense of hope ebbs, leaving behind what Anne Snyder’s closing essay calls an “ache”—but also a sense that, from all of this, something new will grow.

I am going to recommend Breaking Ground to our book club. It offers an excellent opportunity to step back and, with the help of some wise observers, reflect on what we might learn from the memorable year we have just been through.

In a time of unprecedented human and planetary crisis, Plough and Comment magazines are showing how Christianity can once again seize the cultural high ground. But as their collaborative Breaking Ground anthology shows, this can only be brought about by not neglecting the low ground, since cultivation is an integral affair. If you despair of the future, the writers represented here offer real prophetic hope.