Some events change everything. As we go about our lives—tending to our families, doing our jobs, finding moments of precious leisure—we settle into a routine, and it can be hard to shake us out of established patterns. But sometimes an unexpected event does just that. These events might be happy ones like the birth of a child or painful ones like the loss of a job or of a loved one. Moments of surprise or shock often disrupt the contours of our daily lives, and they may lead us to reevaluate our goals and our very sense of who we are.

Some events do more than change individual lives; they change entire communities. An event that at first affects only a few often becomes more widely disruptive. When Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri, those closest to him felt the pain most acutely, but the impact of this shooting—and of other events such as the death of Trayvon Martin in Samford, Florida and of Freddie Gray in Baltimore—has created ripples that spread outward from his family and friends, throughout communities whose residents question whether their children can walk their cities’ streets in safety, across a nation whose people are led to wonder if we will ever overcome our sad legacy of slavery and racism. As Harold K. Bush writes in “Surviving Ferguson,” everyday horrors, like the one that occurred on the streets of Ferguson, are a sudden, invasive presence in our otherwise mundane lives, but these horrors, by unsettling our minds, create moments of openness to transcendence.

Some people are, of course, affected more by these events than others. It is true that in recent years remarkable progress has been made in racial integration, but we remain a nation divided. As sociologist Elijah Anderson has written, our society is still largely separated in to “white space” and “black space” (see: “The White Space,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Vol. 1: No. 1: 10–21). White space is perceived as a space of privilege, a place where jobs, education, and opportunity are present; black space is the iconic ghetto, perceived as riven with crime and poverty. African Americans must navigate both black and white spaces as a condition of everyday life, but white Americans can avoid space they perceive as “black.” From inside the bubble of white space, shootings in places like Ferguson seem remote, irrelevant to our lives, which leaves many of us insulated from the transformative forces rippling through our communities.

But the ripples keep coming, faster and stronger, becoming more like waves crashing into our lives until can we no longer ignore them. Sometimes, they make us see the world differently. In “Risk and Volatility for the Rich and the Poor,” David Lott describes how a wealth management seminar was transformed by his awareness of recent protests. In “The Challenge of Music We Can’t Stand,” Josh Langhoff relates how a concert on the Chicago lakefront was changed for performers and listeners alike by the shooting in Ferguson, which had happened only five days earlier. Contributors to this issue relate other experiences that disrupted their lives and made them reconsider the world around them. In “Pigs Is Equal,” Gayle Boss describes how a surprising encounter with a pig has led her to reconsider her thinking about animals and agriculture. In “Transcendence in America,” Geoffrey C. Bowden describes how watching the film American Sniper left him concerned about civil religion in America. Other contributors describe how they were led to reconsider their attitudes toward issues like sexual violence or environmental sustainability.

Is God really calling to us through the surprises and shocks of our lives? Most often, we just don’t want to hear this call. We are not ready, like Peter and Andrew, to drop our nets and follow. But when God calls us out of our bubbles, we must embrace all of God’s work in the world around us, not with fear and anxiety of all that we do not understand, but with prayerful thanks for the gifts of a God who is the author of a peace that surpasses all understanding. A

                                                —JPO