Zadie Smith’s recent piece on Brexit is one of the best-of-its-kind analyses I’ve read on what’s happening in the West – around us, in us, because of us, in spite of us. It is also an invitation to do some seriously-uncomfortable work around dismantling those fences which have become symbols of the end of the risk we must learn to embrace again if the days in front of us are to be less dark than are those behind us. There are echoes here of calls that have been made by others – Jonathan Sacks’s outstanding book The Dignity of Difference comes to mind – but Smith’s is grounded in a more explicitly local context and is illustrated with some powerful domestic examples that work to underscore that the challenges before us are more proximate than most of us dare imagine. (Read through Christian eyes, Smith’s piece also functions as a call to take seriously the profound political and cultural implications of venturing to believe that God is a community of difference, of otherness, and of extraordinary risk vis-à-vis the world.)

Tolle, lege.

[Image: Derrick Santini]