This Land of Strangers

A must-read for comprehending our great relational unraveling at home, work, in politics and faith.

This relationship crisis is widely felt. The family disintegrates. Friendships diminish. Communities collapse. Businesses lose trust and customers. Employees lose commitment as they feel ever more disposable. Stridency and hostility curdle political and religious discourse.

Yet until now, no one has woven together the disparate research from these broad domains into a narrative that reveals the sheer breadth and depth of our decline, nor calculated its unsustainable costs. Readers will be shocked at the magnitude of the problem and the cumulative destruction it wreaks.

Once the answers to society’s most pressing problems were sought in economics, politics, law, social programs, and tax policy. Today those sources have proven increasingly powerless to address the singular most devastating root of the problem: a comprehensive unraveling of our life-giving relationships.

With deep passion and insight borne of three decades of study, Hall explores in illuminating detail four key societal advances that have delivered unintended consequences – damage to our relationships. He makes the case that relationship is so integral to our wellbeing that its decline gives rise to an emerging caste system. Those with superior relational networks prosper. Those with inferior and shrinking relational networks – children growing-up without fathers, adults without confidants, companies distrusted by key stakeholders, polarizing political and religious groups who sow divide and dysfunction – are destined to lose out.

Hall concludes by challenging readers to embrace three emerging changes that show signs of revitalizing life-giving relationships, reversing the forces that birthed “this land of strangers” and ushering in a new era – The Age of Relationship.