Rebuilding our Common Life with Yuval Levin

Trinity Forum Conversations

Rebuilding our Common life with Yuval Levin

One of the greatest problems in our civic life is that our institutions are weak. And they're weak not merely because they are distrusted by outsiders, but because their leaders fail to take their institution-building responsibilities seriously. Rather than submitting to the responsibilities and constraints that any functioning institution imposes, those leaders have come to use the institution as a personal platform to gain attention and express themselves.

On our podcast, Yuval Levin explains how institutions have historically served to connect, mediate, and structure much of our social interaction, but as they’ve been hollowed out from within, they’ve lost their sense of authority and are no longer able to serve a morally formative purpose:

“A lot of people are using institutions as platforms to express themselves in the culture war, rather than as molds that might form us into better men and women. And that contributes enormously to that loss of confidence and also to the broader social crisis that we're all living with.” - Yuval Levin

We hope this conversation inspires you to look afresh at the institutions you lead or of which you are a part, and ask, “what is my responsibility here?” Please share it with a friend and other institution builders you know.

This podcast is an edited version of an Online Conversation with Yuval recorded in November of 2020. You can access the full conversation with transcript here. Learn more about Yuval Levin.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, by Yuval Levin

Rabbi Johnathan Sacks

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Special thanks to Ned Bustard for our podcast artwork.