Nicholas Kristof:
Civility in the
Public Square

Christian faith demands a high view of human beings. If Christians are indeed called to compassionately steward our respective polities, then we are also called to a kind of civic engagement that wisely assesses our state of affairs with the type of nuance that transcends a liberal/conservative divide. Our public discourse, then, requires conversation over obstruction, vulnerability over combativeness, diversity, sacrifice and humility. In short, our civic lives require civic love. 

Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The New York Times since 2001. Kristof has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of Tiananmen Square and the genocide in Darfur, along with many humanitarian awards such as the Anne Frank Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He grew up on a farm in Oregon, graduated from Harvard, studied law at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and then studied Arabic in Cairo. He was a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times and speaks Chinese, Japanese and other languages. With his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, he has written several books, most recently “A Path Appears” (September 2014) about how to make a difference. Their last book, “Half the Sky,” was a No. 1 best seller. Mr. Kristof, who has lived on four continents and traveled to more than 150 countries, was The New York Times’s first blogger and has 1.4 million followers on Twitter, 1.3 million followers on Google+ and 600,000 followers on Facebook. Read his blog, On the Ground. Follow him on Google+, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. His column appears every Sunday and Thursday.
 

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