Who Has the Keys to Your Household? A Conversation with Andy Crouch

"Home is the First and Last School of Being a Person”

Andy Crouch has spent his life in three worlds—higher education, journalism and technology— without formal credentials. He studied classics at Cornell, got his Masters of Divinity at Boston University, spent a decade in campus ministry at Harvard and served as executive editor of Christianity Today. Now, he works at Praxis, a venture-building community rooted in what they call “redemptive entrepreneurship.” Along the way, he’s written some of the most influential Christian books on technology and family life of the past two decades: “Culture Making,” “The Tech-Wise Family,” and “The Life We’re Looking For.”

His wife, Catherine, is chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Swarthmore College. Their two children are grown, which makes Crouch the first subject in this series to speak from the other side of the child-rearing years. Andy paints a vision of the household broader than the nuclear family that begins before children arrive and matters long after they leave—a “formative environment to become human together.”

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Nicole: You’ve studied classics and divinity—and now you work on something called “redemptive entrepreneurship” at an organization called Praxis. That’s an unusual path. What’s the through-line?

Andy: I’m not sure one could say I’ve had a career. I’ve spent a lot of time in and around three worlds: higher education, Christian campus ministry, and journalism. But two things have been consistent.

The first is a deep love for technology. My father brought home a terminal from Syracuse University, where he was on faculty, when I was ten or eleven; it connected to the mainframe at 300 bits per second. I fell in love with programming. My dad started taking me out of school one day a week, dropping me off at the computer center where graduate students took me under their wing. Some of my first programs were submitted on punch cards. I’ve taught myself every generation of programming languages since.

The second is that in high school I was, in a sense, found by God. I started remaking sense of my life in terms of the Christian story and the Christian faith, which was not my family’s background. With that came a love of language, literature, and the arts, which led to classics in undergrad, theology studies, and a vocation to ministry. I worked in undergraduate ministry at Harvard for ten years. Then I transitioned into Christian publishing: Christianity Today, books for Christian audiences, a magazine of my own in the early 2000s. About ten years ago, I tired of the reactive side of journalism. Part of my job was to wake up in the morning, find out what foolish thing some prominent Christian had done, and write about it. And around that same time, I was getting to know Praxis, a community of faith and an entrepreneurial venture-building ecosystem that was trying to start new ventures with what we now call “redemptive intent.” Since 2018, Praxis has been my full-time work. I get to do theology and culture alongside people who are actually building culture.

I’ve been around academia, ministry, and journalism my whole life and never quite fit into any of them: no terminal degree, never ordained, no Columbia J-school. My wife is the Dr. Crouch at our house.

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Beyond Family: Building Households

Nicole: Tell me about your family. How did you meet Catherine?

Andy: It’s very related to the concept of the oikos and households: in my twenties, I was living in Cambridge in a household with four or five guys. We had a single bank account for the whole house. Everybody pooled their income, and we paid all the expenses out of one account. Anything over $10 had to be pre-approved.

Nicole: Where did this group-living philosophy come from?

Andy: There’s a very early Christian tradition from the Acts of the Apostles, where the first Christians held all things in common. We read that passage and said, ‘Why aren’t we doing this? We believe what they believed. Why wouldn’t we have all things in common?’

And at our house, we also had a big Sunday-night dinner every week. We’d invite all our friends, and friends of friends. There would often be twenty or thirty people crammed into our little house on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge.

Nicole: My husband and I also have a Sunday-night dinner tradition that we started right before our first kid. It’s on hiatus because of our newborn, but it has lent immense texture to our neighborhood relationships and household. Our hope is that some couples will come out of it. I don’t know if we can prove that’s happened yet, but that’s the goal.

Andy: The funny thing is we never commented on the fact that part of the reason all those single people showed up was the chance to meet other single young people. It wasn’t an intentional goal. But several couples did come out of it, and of course that was why a lot of people showed up.

Among the people who came to our dinners was another household of all women. One of them was Catherine. I got to know her partly because both of us are basically white, but we’d both spent very formative times in the black church. I’m trained as a musician and I apprenticed in the black church, becoming professional-level in black gospel music. Catherine and I had both been deeply embedded as a cultural minority under the leadership of black leaders. I just hadn’t met another white person who had that experience.

But the real turning point was a conversation about what our ultimate goals in life were. Just over coffee. We were not dating, at least I don’t think we were dating. I’d had a significant experience right after college: I got pneumonia and was flat on my back for over two weeks. For the first time in my life, I became aware of my mortality. In those two weeks I thought, “What matters most to me, in this short life, that will not last forever?” I concluded that if I could have children, that would be the most important thing I could imagine giving my life to. I said this to Catherine, and she said, “That’s my number one goal.”

Catherine is an experimental physicist; she was in her doctoral program at Harvard at the time. There aren’t many people you meet in Harvard Square over coffee who say that. It’s not that people are opposed; they just haven’t necessarily prioritized it.

Thirty-plus years later, we’ve raised two children, Timothy and Amy, who are now in their twenties.

by: Lisa Sorgini

Co-Living & Children

Nicole: You lived with other people for the first five years of your marriage, including the first year of your son’s life. There’s a running joke among many people my age: any time you mention wanting to live near your friends, people say, “Oh, let’s create the commune.” It’s half genuine, and I think it points to something you’ve written about and lived out: the dream of building a household beyond family. People are especially curious what this looks like with kids. How did it work for you?

Andy: We lived for four years with a shared kitchen and shared entryway with people in two different living arrangements. During that first year of our son’s life, it was all upside. I understand why people have questions about how this works over the long run of childhood, but in those early months of caring for an infant, having other adults around who provided logistical help was incredible.

This is one of the unappreciated things about any form of intentional community: the sheer relief of not having to bear the logistical burden of every single thing. Who’s making dinner? Who’s going to the grocery store? Who’s answering the door while we’re changing the baby? Having a couple of other people who had our backs was incredible.

In that first year, especially the second half when children get so relational, having other warm, loving people who he bonded with in different ways was incredible.

At his first birthday party—a funny thing, because a kid doesn’t really know what’s going on, so you invite your friends—there were, like eighteen people there. Our son, who had just started walking about two months before, walked around the room and found each person and gave them a hug. He somehow kept track; he knew who he’d hugged and who he hadn’t. This is the kind of relational matrix in which healthy development happens.

We were ambivalent about leaving that situation. We moved into a condo where our second child arrived, and we’ve lived in a single-family home since then. We would have loved to have people we deeply trusted more intimately involved in our children’s lives than ended up being the case.

That phrase, people we deeply trusted, is really central. Any type of living with people is hard, and it’s harder the less covenantal the commitments are. The more informal, the more unstructured, the harder it is to know who you can trust, and what for. Part of what made it work for us was a deep common faith. The household of men I’d lived in earlier was rooted in that Acts 2 vision of “holding all things in common.” By the time Catherine and I were raising our son in shared space, that covenantal grounding was already part of the air we breathed.

This didn’t come through the stream of co-living, commune, or co-housing movements, though I’ve come to appreciate those. The conflicts don’t go away when you live closely with people. But you need some ground to negotiate from, which is hard when you don’t have any covenantal framework for what you’re doing.

Nicole: The high-trust community you’re talking about is so real for me. I grew up in a suburban house, and there wasn’t much of a sense of a household in the broader way you’ve defined it. But since we had our first kid in Brooklyn, and now with our second, we have neighbors above us, below us, and on either side.

We’ve arrived at a lot of fun neighborly setups through seeing other people do the same. We’ve borrowed diapers from one neighbor with a newborn, and gotten children’s clothes from another. Our upstairs neighbors are a dear young Christian couple. They’ll come over for dinner, I’ve connected the upstairs woman to the baby monitor while I go out and get groceries, and our son is going to “turtle-sit” for them.

Andy: Oh my gosh, lifesaver.

Nicole: And the other day, I learned that holding our newborn was the first time our upstairs neighbor had held a baby. That was incredibly sweet.

Maintaining Community: Rupture and Repair

Nicole: You said, in a recent interview with the Institute for Family Studies, that “you can only grow the elements of community in your life at the speed of trust.” You’ve also written about a “canopy of trust” as the basis for any community, and the important repeating pattern of “rupture and repair” that underlies it. What does that look like in practice?

Andy: I’ve adopted the language of “rupture and repair” from Curt Thompson, a psychiatrist and writer on the depths of relationship and God. He’s amazing—and a good friend.

His framework is that we tend to think trust is built by affinity: the feeling that I just naturally have a sense that I can trust you. Many relationships do start there. But Curt’s premise is that the only way you can really establish true trust is paradoxically through rupture and repairing whatever has been ruptured. I may have adapted this a little, but I think of it in terms of three layers.

The first is absence and presence. There’s a key insight from developmental psychology: a baby builds confidence by experiencing their caregiver leave the room and come back.

It’s also why second and third dates are so different from first dates. Everything changes when you come back. If you had your neighbors over for dinner once but it never happens again, that becomes a signal that nothing was really established. It’s a small rupture, not a traumatic one, but if you come back and do it again, that builds a sense that you’re reliable, you’ll keep your promises, and you’re not going to disappear.

The second layer is failure and recovery. This is when something goes wrong in our environment and we work to overcome it together. Especially when it comes to relationships with neighbors, this is the great underestimated trust-building opportunity. There are these magic words: I have a problem.

Three years ago, Catherine was on sabbatical and we were living with friends in their house back in the Boston area. On their street, they had this incredible set of relationships with their neighbors. One of those neighbors had dementia and wandered off; his wife didn’t know where he had gone. Instantly, the whole neighborhood got involved searching for him, and he was eventually found.

Joining in what was a life-threatening moment meant they all really became neighbors to each other. Rupture and repair isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. It’s any situation where something’s gone wrong and we work together to fix it. In the process, we discover what each other are made of, what our real commitments are, and how much we can trust each other. Often, entire step changes in trust happen through that.

The third layer is the hardest. For this, you have to use Christian theological categories of sin and forgiveness: not just where something has gone wrong in our shared environment, but where I have been the source of what was wrong. If I can own that and confess it, and if you extend me forgiveness, that develops a level of trust that nothing else does.

It’s almost vanishingly rare now in our modern world for people who are just neighbors to get to that point. To be close enough to be hurt by someone is something we assiduously avoid.

But when you get into the shared kitchen, the shared entry, the shared bedroom, or the shared parenting, you will absolutely fault one another through your own fault and have to figure out how to repair it. Paradoxically, that’s what lasting relationships are made of.

Who Has Keys to Your Household?

Nicole: You’ve spoken about how you could measure relational health by how many people have keys to your household. How many people have keys, and how did those relationships form?

Andy: Because we use an electronic lock, I can give you the exact number: eight. They range from a couple a few doors down who are also coworkers with my wife and just had their first child; to colleagues in ministry who host students at our house (whether or not we’re here) for dinners; to friends made through friends of friends; to a neighbor down the street who has used our washing machine when theirs was out of commission.

Nicole: That’s actually how I got to know my next-door neighbor. She offered us her washing machine when ours was pouring water through her walls.

Andy: Rupture and repair! It’s also interesting when I look at the list of people who have keys to my house, and I hope I won’t offend anyone, but these people are not necessarily my best and closest friends. They are people who have access to our lives by virtue of proximity and having helped each other out. Even if they’re not all soulmates, they are meaningfully part of our lives, and they make us feel connected to the place where we are.

Nicole: I feel very similar. Moving to Brooklyn and endeavoring to create relationships that feel like true community, I assumed I needed to search those people out through topical interests we could have long discussions about. But falling into relationship with people in close community, often physically very proximate to us, has been the most load-bearing for us and for our toddler by far.

Andy: You mentioned we went down this road in the context of raising children, but honestly this is more important for Catherine now that we don’t have children in our home. Our neighborhood is walkable and very connected, but even here, at the empty-nest stage, it feels even more important to have these connections.

Balancing Career and Community

Nicole: How do you see the relationship between ambition in your nuclear family or broader household life, and the more formal career realm? How have you and Catherine balanced this—perhaps by turning down roles, relocating or restructuring work to protect your household life?

Andy: Our life has been a constant negotiation in those tensions. The reason we’re in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, is because Catherine got a job at Swarthmore College.

We had two kids while Catherine was finishing her PhD and postdoc at Harvard. We felt strongly that we wouldn’t be able to both have the kind of professional lives we felt called to and raise our children in a really healthy way unless we had family near us. So Catherine only applied to jobs in places where we had family. Academic jobs are often a small pool, so she was very fortunate to get a great job in the town where she grew up.

In many ways, we moved here for the household and for more multi-generational connections. I was maxed out at about one hundred to one hundred twenty nights of travel a year for twenty years. It’s inconceivable we could have done that without her parents down the road. An irreplaceable abundance came out of that.

At the same time, candidly, we moved from a city where you’re intrinsically proximate with people to a suburban small town. People’s lives are not structured for as many relational connections. And we moved from a city like Boston, where there was a real density and richness of faith community, to a context where we’ve had a much harder time finding that.

So we traded off some very meaningful relational density and proximity for another good thing, but not without loss.

Critic vs. Critique

Nicole: Every subject in this series has a relationship with technology that’s more nuanced than the public conversation allows. Simon Sarris, who writes software for a living, has one of the most minimalist technology postures of anyone I’ve interviewed, yet he credits the internet with enabling him to build his house and teach his children through apprenticeship. Wilson Cusack works in the cryptocurrency industry and agonizes over AI-generated children’s content. Andy, I think I would formally label you a critic of technology, but I really appreciate that a lot of your writing is prescriptive about what a good version of technology looks like, and what technology in a life rightly ordered looks like.

Andy: The problem with the noun “critic” is that it collapses two distinct functions, critique and criticism, into a single role. Criticism tends to sound inherently negative. But “critique”: there’s a great tradition of critique in the arts. In studio arts, you do crit sessions with your fellow artists. The goal is not to pretend nothing’s wrong with a painting; it’s to see what’s being attempted and why, and how effectively, and to identify ways to make that attempt more effective. And to celebrate what is working.

That is entirely my posture toward technology. I love the affordances of the technological world. I love a well-designed device or digital interface; I’m a sucker for them. But I always want to situate them in the question: what vision of being human does this presuppose? What bargains is it asking me to make as I adopt it? Generally speaking, I find that the default settings are not what I judge to be the best for myself or others.

When I concede my judgment to the default settings, I relinquish the deep question of “What does flourishing really look like?” to a system that exists not to faithfully answer it, but to make money by bringing good things into the world, but not necessarily in a thoughtful way.

That, to me, is the problem with technology: we’ve adopted all this stuff without being careful about what assumptions are being imported into the formative context of our lives (our homes, our schools, our faith communities) where the most is at stake.

I’m careful there. Even though I’ve got all this stuff in our house somewhere, it is carefully placed and sequenced. There’s a rhythm of use and non-use rather than wholesale adoption. I hope that’s a helpful rant prompted by your calling me a critic.

Nicole: That was very helpful. The formal tradition of an artist’s critique is such a useful thing to anchor on. Many people in this series have said something similar from slightly different angles. The last interviewee said: “I love technology, and I think 98% of it is badly implemented.”

Life in the Third Oikos: The Glowing Rectangles

Nicole: How do the rhythms of technology-use work in your household? You’ve written and spoken extensively about the one-hour-a-day, one-day-a-week pattern of taking a Sabbath.

Andy: Catherine and I came into our marriage both already practicing this, though it’s not that common for Christians. Jewish people who are observant have kept Sabbath as an absolutely central practice; Christians have had a looser relationship to the idea of a day a week free of work.

I’ve come to see cycles of work and rest as architectural for a healthy life. The daily cycle comes down to the waking-sleeping cycle we’re made for. One of the great tradeoffs of electricity was the ability to reproduce near-daylight at any time, such that we no longer have an inescapable reason to set down work and sleep.

Sleep-maxxing is the Silicon Valley version of optimization. But Sabbath sees sleep differently: as the laying aside of the need to perform, the daily acceptance that you can’t engineer your way out of a state in which you’re deeply dependent on God and the goodness of other people while you’re dead to the world. Until the blink of an eye ago in human history, this was just how life had to be, because we couldn’t keep working once the sun went down. Now we have to choose it.

The next layer is one day a week where, similarly, you are not producing or proving anything. You are entrusting all the things you need for your life to Another (for us, to God). In its place, you’re able to take up a kind of deep rest you don’t get when you have work to do, and a kind of leisure and joyful fun that doesn’t easily fit in a hyper-productive life.

For our family, when the kids were small, in addition to attending church in the mornings, the big household thing was actually afternoon tea. We’d make all these little things (fruits, cookies, sometimes literal British-style tea sandwiches with the crusts cut off), and often invite friends over. Our kids remember it vividly as an anchor moment in the week, a time of joy and unhurriedness and presence.

Nicole: When we first chatted, I mentioned that the John Mark Comer Rule of Life series was transformative for me and my husband. You mentioned that your daughter works on producing it, which is incredible. The part that was especially helpful to me was the joy and delight aspect: the idea that Sabbath is an intentional way to reconnect with God as a God of delight. What tips do you have for beginning to practice Sabbath in the digital age?

Andy: Preparation goes a long way. In Jewish life, the mother is the master of the house. She spends Friday, the day before Sabbath, doing advance work to make the day restful. I got to be at the Comers’ household for one of their Sabbath evenings. They serve the same thing every week, a big pot of soup made earlier in the week, with bread prepared the day before. When the time comes, you’ve done all the work, and everyone can sit down.

This, to me, is the big difference between Sabbath-style rest and what I’d call Western-style leisure. Western-style leisure is, “Let’s go out for brunch!” The thing is, someone else has to work for you to enjoy it. We tend to conceive of rest in the modern, Western, gentile world as a kind of inactivity we purchase from other people’s hard work. That’s not Sabbath. Sabbath is meant to be a time when the whole community (the stranger in your town, the maidservant, the animals) is given a day off. That requires preparation.

There are also tasks that are part of my daily work that are actually rest for my wife, and vice versa. I do the dishes most nights and Catherine cooks, so we swap on Sunday. It’s a kind of load swapping that helps it feel joyful for everyone, rather than the Western leisure where someone is toiling so you can have inactivity.

Nicole: Do you predominantly turn off screens for the Sabbath? In the digital age, almost everything you’re doing online is causing someone to work somewhere. How do we think seriously about this without being legalistic?

Andy: We turn off screens at dinner for an hour a day, for a day a week on Sundays, and in the summer for up to a week, we come close to turning off everything that has a switch.

For us, dinnertime includes turning off the electric lights. We often have candles at dinner, even during the week. Dinner by candlelight is awesome, for parents and children alike, and we should all do it way more than we do.

We’re not legalists about it; we are directional. The direction is: detach for an hour, especially from the glowing thing. I have a neurological theory, untested by neuroscience as far as I know, that we are not really evolved to handle glowing things, because nothing glows in the natural world except fire.

On Sundays, I won’t say I never read on my Kindle, but we don’t make purchases. Amazon helpfully allows you to specify that you don’t want deliveries on a given day of the week. Which is such a relief, because I’d order something on Friday and it would show up at 8 a.m. on Sunday, and I did not want that person to work.

Sundays especially are a time when we are as detached as reasonably possible. We read, we make music, we listen to music.

By: Lisa Sorgini

Returning to The Home

Nicole: This series is built on the idea of three distinct oikoi, or three eras of household and economic norms. First we had the pre-industrial household as a production hub. Then the Industrial Revolution separated work from home. Now we’re in an era of recombination, brought on by the digital: the Third Oikos. You write in The Life We’re Looking For that “our homes can become creative centers far more consequential than the refuges of consumption and leisure we’ve let them become.” Do you see the Third Oikos in the same way I’m describing it?

Andy: What I’m sure of is that there’s something primary about the formative environment that is the home. Not understood only as a place where parents are raising children, but as the place where we live out the most dimensions of our lives in proximity to other people.

That something primary gets lost in a world of work where the first thing people ask when they meet you is, “What do you do?” Where the place you live becomes the place where you collapse to watch Netflix because you’re so tired.

I would love to believe that we could start believing again, as a society, that the most important thing we do is create a formative environment to become human together. This is what I take to be the real purpose of what we call the family. It’s the first and last school of being a person.

Inevitably so in infancy. No one gets out of infancy in any healthy way without some proximate community of people, usually related by blood, who love them. If you don’t have that, you may survive, but you will not thrive.

In the modern world, many of us will reach a stage of life where we’re no longer cognitively or physically capable of contributing economically. We’ll have a long period of senescence. Years ago, I played at the funeral of a woman, probably in her nineties. I remember vividly that her daughter said: “At the end, she was reduced to love.”

I thought, I hope someone says that about me. When you think about a reduction on the stovetop, you boil it down to the essence. I hope when I’m reduced by old age, should I live that long, what they say is that I was reduced to love. Because I could be reduced to something else. Reduced to resentment, reduced to fear, reduced to anger, reduced to selfishness. And who is there to witness that? The people in your household: those who are your family by nature, or those who through some miracle come to see themselves as your family even if they’re not.

In between infancy and senescence, from day one to day omega, all the formative experiences that determine what kind of person you turned out to be happen ultimately at home. They happen only partially in achievement-oriented, preparation-oriented environments, including schooling. I would love it if even a creative minority recaptured the idea that that is what family is for, and that is what home is for.

It would get us working much harder at providing these environments for people who are not raising children and may never; for people who don’t form traditional families and may never; but who need it just as much as every other human being. It would make us more serious about other forms of household and community than just the nuclear family.

The great promise in the post-industrial moment (and I love the way you frame it) is that some of the very stark distinctions of domestic and public get helpfully dismantled. The problem is that what primarily seems to be happening is that the home becomes one more place where we have to produce and be efficient all the time.

It’s amazing how many justifications people give for introducing all kinds of devices. I’ve got lots of them in my house, but it’s amazing how often it’s about getting more productive at being a family. I don’t deny there’s a place for that. We use an online grocery list, and it’s super helpful.

But even the professional middle-class turn, where what families really exist for is to produce extremely driven children, is downstream of this. We are maxing out kids’ extracurriculars, their studies, their volunteering, and tracking it all. We’re sequencing it all so they get into a good school, get a good job, even though all the jobs are now going away because AI is going to do them, and all the upper-middle-class parents are now tearing their hair out: “What have we been doing all this time?” The home has become a pressure cooker of performance: a caricature of the messy, non-customizable, trust-building, rupture-and-repair essence of life together.

Work is good. There’s a place for productivity. But it’s not the measure of a life.

Is This a New Challenge? History Repeats Itself

Nicole: I don’t think it’s helpful to glamorize the recent past when we’re talking about the household. I keep returning to Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “every technology enhances some human capacity, obsolesces some older form, retrieves something previously lost, and when pushed to its limits, reverses into its opposite.” If that’s true, thriving in the Third Oikos means looking back. What historical examples can we use to frame our current technological moment?

Andy: The Roman world is amazingly cognate with the modern one. Built upon major innovations in money, machines, and information. Highly urbanized, technologically advanced, and unbelievably lonely. Below the surface of well-networked elites like Cicero, the mass of people in Roman cities lived precariously, in conditions of routine violence: masters violating slaves, citizens violating non-citizens, men violating women. A dehumanizing place, even as it was unprecedentedly prosperous. Which sounds analogous, with many differences, to our world.

What emerged to ameliorate this was the Greco-Roman household: a markedly diverse collection of people nucleating around a paterfamilias. A lot of people had the key to your house: friends, clients, business associates, and slaves all interacted in extensive semi-public areas. But the system was relentlessly patriarchal. Highly stratified, with violence and violation of dignity built into the stratification. So you can’t simply translate it forward. But something happened to it.

There’s a short letter in the New Testament: Paul’s letter to Philemon. Paul has encountered a runaway slave named Onesimus, who belongs to a friend of his and has also become a Christian. Paul is sending Onesimus back. Now: runaway slaves were normally branded on the forehead “I am a runaway slave” if they weren’t tortured to death, which would have been entirely legal. And Paul writes:

Receive Onesimus back as your brother. Welcome him as you would welcome me.

In context, this is unbelievably radical. The paterfamilias is being asked to treat a runaway slave as analogous to his biological brother, and to Paul himself, who is essentially the patron to Philemon’s client. What that sets in motion is a radical rethinking of the Greco-Roman household.

It doesn’t change the Roman world overnight. But what it says is: if we’re going to make it in this world of dehumanization, we are going to have to choose to treat one another way more as family than we ever could have imagined. The way out of the depersonalized, lonely world we’ve created with technology has, in a sense, nothing to do with technology. It has to do with seeing the people we’ve been given as members of our household: kin to whom we have no blood relation, but to whom we are covenantally connected.

It starts now, with these profound acts of recognition. With just a few people. You can’t do it with everybody. But you can do it with a few. And that’s the way out.

Advice: Move One Step Closer

Nicole: If you had to give one piece of advice to a young person trying to build a flourishing household, what would it be?

Andy: Move one step closer to someone you have some reason to believe you should be connected to. If you live in the same city, move to the same neighborhood. If you live in the same neighborhood, move to the same street. If you live on the same street, find a two-entry building. If you live in the same building, take the next step toward proximity.

There’s a wonderful urbanist organization called Strong Towns, and the big thing they advocate for is a zoning change called “next increment by right”: in every place in America, you’d be allowed to build the next level of density on whatever land you own without a special permit. In my own town, if I were to live in the kind of household I had in Cambridge, I would technically be violating the law.

You should be able to build the next unit of proximity on the land you own. I think it’s a beautiful metaphor for what we should pursue in our own lives. Choose the next increment of proximity and density, not just in architecture but in your relationships.

And then expect rupture. Expect it to get harder as you get closer. And then seek out what it takes to repair. If you can do those things, that’s the kind of social transformation we need. And it’ll only happen if you get close enough to risk it.

This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.

Thank you to Adam Iscoe for edits.