There is a tension in religious and spiritual practices between focusing on self-improvement and neglecting the problems of the world. But Christian Kumpost argues that the root cause of this tension the belief that the self is what’s wrong with the world. We can resolve the tension between individualism and communitarianism, Kumpost suggests, by seeing the self and the world as not fundamentally wrong, but merely incomplete and ever evolving. Since the 1910 publication of a collection of various essays and articles written by G.K. Chesterton under the title What’s Wrong With the World?, an anecdote has continually circulated—that in response to a newspaper’s query, “What’s Wrong With the World?” Chesterton wrote in with a simple answer: “Dear Sirs, I am.” While it’s clever in its simplicity, I believe its enduring quality lay not in it capturing the personality of Chesterton himself, but in it speaking to a deeper issue that has permea…
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