Seeking a Better Way

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked only by the anonymity of the Internet and the destructive, dumbed-down medium of television, a “vast and vacuous wasteland” that Newton Minnow, who coined the phrase in the medium’s infancy, could never in his worst nightmare have imagined.

Yet, in the midst of this bleak, lunar-like…