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In a 1990 forum in Harper's Magazine, five specialists on urban life—two architects, an urban planner, a sociologist, and a sculptor—discussed what has been happening to our public spaces. While they differed about how best to design our shopping malls, subway systems, and city centers, they were unanimous about the underlying problem: Our lives are increasingly characterized by "fragmentation and difference," and we need a new "sense of what we have in common while knowing our difference—a sense of wholeness."

This sense of wholeness seems even more unattainable now that we are into the 21st century. Jerry Springer regularly takes us from shouting match to shouting match, with no resolutions—and certainly no "meta-narrative," no overarching story of human existence—ever in sight. Zealous religious believers denounce each other, even as they are all being condemned by equally zealous critics of religion. Influential political leaders complain about growing incivility in their own ranks that they seem incapable of reversing. And many social commentators seem resigned to a world in which no light at all can be shed on the possibilities for unifying either our individual or our collective lives. Psychologist Kenneth Gergen argues that we can only resign ourselves to an "endless wandering in the maze of meaning"; indeed, we may need to come up with a new hymn to sing along the way: "Mazing Grace."

In 1880, the Dutch statesman-theologian Abraham Kuyper issued a bold proclamation that spoke to the growing fragmentation of society and social roles in his own day—and in ours: "There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry 'Mine!'"

Kuyper did not want to return to the ways in which people and governments had attempted to unify life in the past. He feared both an all-powerful state and a social order dominated by a single church. Kuyper was a Calvinist who recognized that his own spiritual forebears had often propagated political schemes that denied people the right to live by their basic convictions. God calls people freely to offer him their obedience, Kuyper insisted. Nothing is gained by imposing patterns of "Christian" behavior on human beings whose hearts have not been turned to the Lord.

Kuyper was an important political leader in the Netherlands. After a brief period as a pastor, he waged a successful campaign for election to the Dutch Parliament. For the next several decades, he led the Anti-Revolutionary Party (which he helped found)—and even served a term as Prime Minister from 1901 to 1905. But his interests extended far beyond politics. Though he had relinquished his clergy credentials when he entered political life, he continued to function as a theologian. He founded the Free university of Amsterdam in 1880. He led a breakaway movement out of the state-sponsored Reformed church to form the second largest Reformed denomination in the country. And all the while he wrote regularly for a daily newspaper he had established earlier in his career, as well as spending much time urging Christians to acknowledge Christ's lordship over all aspects of life—including farming, the arts, business, labor-management relations, and education.

In a series of lectures that he gave at Princeton Seminary during an American tour in 1898 (still in print as Lectures on Calvinism), Kuyper set forth the contours of what he labeled "a Christian world-and-life view" that provided a faith-based perspective on a variety of cultural areas, including politics, art, and the life of the mind. Christians must have such a perspective, he argued, if we truly believe that Jesus Christ is sovereign over all of creation's "square inches."

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