As Simon Peter said, it is good that we are here. 

I’m your Opinions editor, Caroline Kurt, and this is my column. 

I believe in writing about what you find most interesting, and so After Eden was born. Twice a month, this column will delve into all things related to work, gender, and family: issues that don’t just matter in the grand scheme of things, but touch our lives as students and professionals. 

I write this column as a young woman immersed in these issues — not just interested intellectually, but aware that the decisions I make will shape the world around me. The course of my life, like yours, is on the line. I was blessed to be raised by and around people who modeled devotion to the Good, but also weren’t afraid to challenge conventional lines of thinking. I have learned — continue to learn — to reject ideology and wrestle with Truth.

So this column will ask:

Does a healthy professional life look different for men and women? How should we act toward childless adults in the midst of a national fertility crisis? Is feminism really a wasteland of evil, or does it ask questions we have not yet resolved?

And even more immediately: 

Must work be intellectual to be influential? How do we elevate good models of masculinity and femininity without losing sight of a healthy pluralism in gender roles or expression?

These are debates and open questions we raise at Hillsdale.

After Eden isn’t a religious column, although it draws its name from Genesis. We Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and agnostics can find common ground in the questions and conclusions After Eden proposes. The laws of good and evil have been written on all our hearts. 

You may not agree with After Eden. In fact, go ahead and disagree — you may be right, and I’ll always love to talk.

After Eden will strive to strike a tone that is provocative yet measured, always leaving room for nuance. And since people are more often well-meaning and misguided than malicious, I hope to give those I challenge the benefit of the doubt. 

If nothing else, After Eden should give you a reason to hope. 

We live in a wild time. Just this summer, we’ve seen an assassination attempt on a former president, a last-minute candidate swap, and even more bloodshed and chaos abroad. But even if despair is our first impulse, it shouldn’t be our conclusion. We are precisely the people who, in our everyday lives as students, siblings, friends, and employees, have the power to contribute to the growing good of the world. 

This isn’t naïve. We don’t need to be overly optimistic to acknowledge this — and optimism can be a form of falsehood when it fails to take into account the real darkness that inhabits our world. 

Centuries’ worth of ordinary lives have carried us to this point, and centuries’ worth of ordinary lives will carry us beyond it. And we now have a chance, however small, to ask good questions and think honestly, treat one another with dignity and generosity, and most of all, carry hope within our hearts. 

It is good that we are here. 

Caroline Kurt is a junior studying English.