Category Archives: Wednesday Blog

School’s Back!

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It’s that time of year when families are running for school supplies, uniform shops are in full swing, and parents count down the days until their kids aren’t around all day long anymore. Yep, school’s back! I remember the eagerness I always felt at the start of a new academic year, yes, I’m that much of a nerd. I was always excited to see whose class I’d be assigned to, which friends would be in class with me, and as I got older, I began to look forward to specific classes like Latin or Drama.

I’ve had 24 first days of school so far since I started Kindergarten. I remember that first one quite clearly, my parents were going into the school with me and sitting in a room where we were playing with something, maybe some building blocks? Now looking back on that day as I near the end of my time as a professional student I can’t help but smile, seeing as that first first day of school was one of my favorites. In the years since I’ve had all sorts of first days. I remember being surprised at first seeing my classmates in my elementary school in Kansas City, thinking they all looked younger than me. As it turned out that was the moment when I met some people who remained friends throughout high school and beyond.

Looking back on my years of first days of the new school year I feel like I can get a good grasp on my own history, on how I grew up over those years, just by looking at those specific days spaced about a year apart. How things have changed from being the smart kid with a big curious gaze at all around him to the now nearly 30-year-old who has moved to the other side of the classroom as a teacher. I’ve kept the curiosity, God willing that’ll stick around all throughout my life, but I’ve let a layer of worldliness grow around it. I think one of the reasons why I often nostalgize my early youth is because I wasn’t aware of the problems of the world then, only of dreams and ideas of how to make an impact upon it.

I’ve also always preferred the beginnings of stories over their eventual conclusions. I’m more of a fan of Bronze Age Greek archeology than many of the later periods in Greek history because of the mystery involved in an era with less written records and more potential for wonderous discoveries. In the same way, I’ve always preferred the first day of school to the last. There’s the potential involved in that first day, the start of something, that isn’t there at the last day. That may also be why I prefer conceptions over cremations.

On that note, a word from this week’s sponsor: Funeral Advocates of Prairie Village, Kansas.

Only joking, but if you’re looking for funerary help do talk to my friend Brian O’Laughlin at Funeral Advocates, he’s the best in the business.

Lately the first day of school has been marked by rapid withdrawals and new enrollments in the college classes that I TA. It’s a phenomenon that is still new to me, as whenever I enrolled in a class when I was in college I stuck with that class for the entire semester. Those sorts of roster changes can be complicated for me as the instructor, but you kind of just have to go with the flow and deal with it. There are students who I’ll meet on the first day who I’ll look forward to working with for a good fourteen to fifteen weeks only for them to withdraw for any number of reasons. I’m fine with it if they think it’s best that they can do for their own needs. It does mean I tend to not learn my students’ names as quickly as I’d like because they’re in so much flux so early on.

Tied up with the first day of school is also the first day back seeing your friends again. This is one of the big things I always look forward to. Seeing people who I enjoyed working with in the previous academic year, people who I respect and trust, once again after a few months off. It’s one of the great benefits of education that we get both that time together and that much needed time apart to rest. The first day of school waddles into view every year like a penguin looking for a good watering hole, and once it’s gone, you’re on board that train heading towards the inevitable last day of classes at the end of the line.

Perhaps the first day of school is a good metaphor for life. Like the school year’s beginning everyone has a start to their lives, and like its ending everyone will run their course in their own time. Sometimes school years seem to drag on eternally, while other times they will pass in the blip of a second. Regardless, the school year always finds a way.

Now, I have a syllabus to write. Happy First Day of School, and to all the students and teachers and parents out there: good luck! 

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Summer School in Irish

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Summer School in Irish – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I finally returned to Irish school this summer after a decade away. You can find out more about Gaelchultúr's online North American Irish classes here: https://www.gaelchultur.com/en/courses/irish-language-online-cursai-usa-2022

Bhí mé ag staidéar Gaeilge an Samhradh seo le Gaelchultúr ar Zoom. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a formal Irish class, but when I saw the opportunity from Gaelchultúr to take classes scheduled for the North American evening hours on Zoom I jumped at the chance. Irish has a special place in my heart, it’s the language that many of my ancestors spoke only a century ago. I’ve always wanted to be able to speak Irish as well as read and write in it, but never to much avail. So, now as an adult I wanted to give it a second try.

I first started studying Irish when the Irish Center in Kansas City began offering classes back in 2007. I was one in their first class of students, and at 14 found myself studying two languages at once: Latin in school and Irish in the evenings. They’re different enough that I didn’t often mix things up, but I still don’t think I was quite ready to really understand either language. I’ve now taken Latin three times and Irish twice formally, and only now am actually properly beginning to understand the nuances and structures of both.

So, what have I learned this time around? Well, I learned how to form past tense verbs, something I’d bumbled my way into half-learning on my own in the past, and I learned about this nifty habitual aspect that can be useful to describe actions that are regular and frequent in happening. I’ve become more confident in my speaking abilities and my recall of words, phrases, and grammar. So far then, I’d say this time around of studying Irish has been a success.

My biggest piece of advice if you want to study any language, whether you already speak it or not, is figure out how you personally learn languages best. What’s your best method? If you figure that out, then you can really begin to make progress. I like doing all the week’s exercises before class so when class starts, I already have notes and am more prepared. I find I need the confidence boost of knowing the answers ahead of time to really let myself make progress in a task. In the same way that I always had a harder time ice skating when I started to think about it in my usual depth and excess than if I just did it and didn’t worry too much. 

The same, as it turns out, goes with Irish. When I’m not overthinking about what it is I’m trying to say I do pretty well; when I do overthink things, I’ll mess up either the pronunciation or chose a different word altogether that just doesn’t work as well. I’ve really learned how to learn languages through learning Latin and French. Using the methods, I’ve found helpful for those languages, particularly writing out sentences and reading text aloud, I’ve been able to really pick up on my Irish far better than I ever did as a teenager.

Irish for me has a particular potency, it’s the language that my name comes from, it’s the language that is best used to express the origins of my identity. It’s a foundational language for me that I was aware of for most of my life but hardly ever fully understood. I wrote last year about my struggles learning and retaining my Irish, that rather fittingly for a language spoken by past generations of my family I knew how to conjugate in the past and present tense only but not the future tense. Now having studied the past tense and muddled a bit with the present tense I know that looking at the future tense I could probably write future tense verbs if I had to though I don’t know any of the intricacies of the Irish future tense yet. So, from last year to now I’ve made some progress yes, albeit at a slow pace.

Where does that leave me today? Well, I’ve enrolled in the next class up. Even though I’ve taken Irish before I decided to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start) seeing as it’s been a decade since I last studied it. Thus, as I now finish up the A1 class, I’m looking forward to starting A2 in September. Maybe then by this time next year I’ll be strong enough near the end of the B2 to write some of these blog posts and podcasts in Irish. (Don’t worry!) To quote Florida’s own former Governor Jeb Bush, “Please clap.”

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Artemis

NASA’s SLS and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 at Launch Complex 39A & 39B. NASA Images Library.

Artemis – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some exciting news about the upcoming launch of Artemis 1. The audio clips used today come from the NASA Audio and Ringtones Library. You can learn more at http://www.nasa.gov/connect/sounds.
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As long as I can remember I’ve known Neil Armstrong’s now immortal words “It’s one small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind.” They were spoken a couple decades before I was born at a time when my parents were themselves children. I think I may have recognized Armstrong’s voice earlier than many other public figures. Then again, Space exploration has always been a big deal in my life, from the endless sci-fi novels that lined the shelves of our basement library in our suburban Chicago home to the Hubble pictures that adorned the walls of many of my classrooms through the years.

Looking back at a lot of those novels and hopeful calls for future Space exploration and settlement, like Gerard K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier or Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey it’s striking how far we are now today in 2022 from where we hoped we’d be over the last 60 years. Our last lunar mission ended 20 years to the day before my own birth in December 1972, and besides the odd Chinese robotic mission we humans haven’t been back to our largest satellite since.

So, in December 2017 when NASA announced the beginning of the Artemis program I was thrilled. Artemis, like its twin Apollo, will take humans back to the Moon at some point later this decade or in the early 2030s. Not only that, but Artemis is supposed to be the beginning of the first permanent human outpost on the lunar surface, the beginning of a new stage of human settlement. Since that announcement I’ve enjoyed the thought that in future when I look up at the Moon, I’ll be able to see from a very great distance places where other humans will be living.

The troubles of the last few years, the great crises we’ve been living in with the pandemic and all its associated problems, have certainly contributed to delays in the launch of Artemis 1, an uncrewed mission that will orbit the Moon and lay the groundwork for future crewed missions in the Artemis program. There were even moments when I admit I worried that Artemis 1 would never leave the ground, like the Constellation program that Artemis replaced.

Many of those worries were relieved a few weeks ago when Artemis 1 was moved onto its launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket, the first launch of the Space Launch System (SLS), a 365 ft (111.25 m) tall super-heavy lift expendable launch vehicle, now waits for its date on the same Pad 39B where the Apollo missions left Earth five decades ago. Only in the last few weeks has NASA given a deadline for this momentous launch: at some point between 29 August and 6 September 2022.

We stand at a point on the verge of entering a new generation in our exploration of Space, a generation when our horizons are far greater than ever before. The dreams of the 1960s haven’t been forgotten entirely, in many ways the Artemis missions to the Moon and the future Martian landings evoke those dreams best expressed in our stories. What’s more, we have a real opportunity here to make a difference through these missions, to let them inspire us to make our lives better here on Earth. I’ve often heard it said from astronauts that seeing Earth from orbit is a humbling experience, because it demonstrates just how interconnected we all are. 

It really brings home what Carl Sagan wrote in his book Pale Blue Dot that we are capable of doing so much more if we recognize our common stewardship of this our home, the only home we’ve ever known. We certainly can use Space exploration in the long term to try to find another home, if we continue to mistreat this one so badly that we need to look for a new one, but it would be far better of us if we use these experiences of visiting strange new worlds to use those experiences to appreciate what we have here even more deeply.

My hope is that Artemis will be a beacon of light in an ever-turbulent period in our history, and that it will be remembered as a moment when humanity came together to achieve a common goal for the benefit of all of us.

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S’Wonderful

Georges Guétary (L) and Gene Kelly (R) singing “S’Wonderful” in 1951’s An American in Paris with Oscar Levant (C) between them.
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S'Wonderful – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I wonder about the word wonder.

Have you ever thought about the words you use to show appreciation for something? Or better yet, have you ever considered what the words you use to show excitement mean? You might say a very modern “cool,” or a more traditional “good,” or a Midwestern “neat,” or a more midcentury “groovy.” There could be a “dude” thrown in there if that’s your style, or you could go even further and offer an “awesome” or a “fantastic,” or Mr. Spock’s own measured “fascinating” into the mix. There’s one such exclamation that bears some consideration, one that is “wonderful” to behold.

What does it mean when something is wonderful? What does it mean to be full of wonder? Growing up I knew the word wonder from the Age of Empires series of computer games where a player could win the game by building a wonder and keeping it standing for 2,000 years in the game’s time (10 minutes in our own reckoning). I always wanted to build wonders in those games but was never quite good enough a player as a child to get to that point. 

There are other uses of the word wonder that come to mind like the German Wunderkind, or Wonder-Child, whose abilities outmatch all others. Or there’s the 2016 Sir Elton John album Wonderful Crazy Night that I got to see him promote and perform on the night when I was in the audience at the Graham Norton Show in London. Wonder is a flexible word because of how lofty an idea it evokes. There are wonderous things out there that are worldly, like the blueberry danishes at McLain’s Bakery in Kansas City, and there are wonders unimaginable to behold like the visions of previously unimaginable beauty seen by the James Webb Space Telescope in recent months.

Yes, I was there.

In the last couple years, I’ve come across the word wonder more and more in my work. It is one of the best English translations of the French word singularité which appears frequently in my primary sources, a word which can be translated as both “individuality [and] uniqueness” as well as a “peculiarity [or an] oddity.” Une singularité is a wonderous thing because it defies expectations. The wonders beheld by the European explorers who arrived on the Atlantic shores of these continents five centuries ago opened their eyes to visions they could not previously have imagined. They became “marvelous possessions” as the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt described in a landmark study of the First Age of Exploration. 

In my own specialization the 3-toed sloth was a wonder to behold for all these very reasons. It was a mammal that did not seem to provide any usefulness to the humans who lived around it. Nor did it seem to contribute to its own ecosystem by hunting or foraging beyond whatever it could slowly grasp in its own favorite tree. What’s more an especially wonderous claim was made by one of the leading sloth writers of the day, a Frenchman named André Thevet (1506–1590) that claimed because there was no eyewitness evidence of the sloth eating or drinking that had been proven by a European then the animal must be one of only a very small number, if not a true singularité in that it could “live only on air.”

Another place where the word wonder appears is in religion. In Exodus 3 where Moses encounters God at the Burning Bush, God says that when the Pharoah of Egypt does not heed God’s command to let the Hebrews go that God “will stretch out [God’s] hand and strike Egypt” “with wonderous deeds.” (Exodus 3:20 NAB) These same wonders were then performed by Moses and his brother Aaron to assert God’s will that their people should be freed (Exodus 11:10), leading to a transformation in the relationship between the Egyptians and the Hebrews from master and slave to former oppressor and the defiant.

To be wonderous is to be unfathomable, to be terrifying in power and incomprehensibility. The other great nearly religious experience where I’ve heard the word wonder used is in those moments of joy when words fail, and song takes over. I’m of course talking about falling in love, and of that great Gershwin song “S’Wonderful,” which I first heard in the 1951 Gene Kelly film An American in Paris sung by the Pittsburgh native song and dance man himself alongside the French cabaret singer and actor Georges Guétary. It’s one of those songs that I know by heart, having played the film’s album enough times and seen it quite a few at that. One of these days I’ll sing it for myself.

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To Gaze into the Past

“Cosmic Cliffs” on the Carina Nebula, NASA JWST, Public Domain.
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To Gaze into the Past – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some inspiration from the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. You can view all of these images at: https://webbtelescope.org/news/first-images/gallery

Historians like me spend our working days trying to understand past generations, to see their worlds through their eyes and to interpret that world in a way that’s understandable to our modern audiences. I for one would love to see the sloths that my dissertation focuses on as they lived in their own time and place 467 years ago. Better yet, I would love the opportunity to sit down and chat with such greats as Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Hypatia of Alexandria just to hear these great minds of their own times speak as regular people without all the pretenses, titles, and theories that we frame their lives within our histories.

Unfortunately, as far as I know the time machine hasn’t been successfully built yet, and time travel even by slingshoting an object around a sun hasn’t been attempted yet. Give it a few centuries, maybe. My conversation with Mr. Lincoln will have to wait. Yet there are ways we can gaze back into the past that are possible today. If you’re reading or listening to this at night go outside and look up at the stars and see what you can find up there. Maybe even use a star chart app on your phone to figure out which stars you’re looking at. Once you’ve done that see how many light years distant they are from us on Earth. That light took quite some time to reach us, meaning that that light left those distant stars years, decades, or even centuries or millennia ago.

Last summer I wrote about my profound sense of awe at gazing up towards the light radiating out from the star Vega while sitting on the rim of the Split Mountain Canyon in the Utah side of Dinosaur National Monument. What struck me most was that Vega is 25 light-years away from Earth, meaning that that light left that star when I was still a small child in a moment of my life I look back on quite fondly. What’s more, I knew I could return to the same spot 25 years later in 2046 with my children, if I’m so lucky in the future, and show them the light that left that star on the night when I went up there with my Dad back in 2021.

The same idea is central to how we ought to understand the immensity of space. Einstein is responsible for the development of the idea of spacetime, that time itself is a dimension alongside the others we might already recognize. I often think about this when I’m daydreaming, imagining observing the passage of time in a very small scale by watching the light move across the walls of a room however slowly as the day goes by. This past Halloween evening I sat with a fellow sixteenth-century historian in San Diego’s Waterfront Park and looking out towards San Diego Harbor to the west stared at the sunset as it seemed to almost faintly radiate up and down as it slowly set below the horizon. In that moment I knew I could begin to understand the passage of time just as I learned at a young age to comprehend the passage of space in the form of physical objects moving across the landscape, like cars driving along an open highway.

So, this week’s breaking news from NASA Goddard of the reveal of the first five images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope out in orbit of the Earth was a profoundly beautiful moment for me. Webb captured our first images of galaxies as they existed a mere 4.6 billion years ago. Those same galaxies could look very different today, yet their light has only just reached us across the vastness of Space. That image, Webb’s First Deep Field, was released on Monday evening by the White House after NASA offered a preview of the five images to the President and Vice President. Lucky them!

Webb’s First Deep Field, NASA JWST, Public Domain.

As profound as that deep field is, I was struck more by the potential offered by another one of Webb’s images, the second image released to the public which shows the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet called WASP-96 b, which is about 1,120 light-years from Earth. WASP-96b’s atmosphere confirms the presence of water on that planet’s surface, a sign of potential life on that planet’s surface. This is the part of Webb’s mission I’m the most excited about, its potential to help us in our endeavors to find out whether we’re alone in this vast Universe of ours, or if we’re one planet among many populated and teeming with intelligent, thinking, and innovative people.

I can’t help but mention the picture, which is probably my favorite on an aesthetic level, that being the image of the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula, a stellar nursery located roughly 7,600 light-years distant from Earth. The vibrant colors of the Carina Nebula even unseated Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s 1904 painting The Lute from the coveted role of my computer’s background, at least for now.  A closer nebula to Earth, the Southern Ring Nebula, was also photographed. This time though instead of a stellar nursery this nebula surrounds a dying star in its cloudy sphere. Even more profound are the quintet of galaxies captured by Webb from some 290 million light-years away, old enough that its light was contemporaneous with the end of the Carboniferous Period and beginning of the Permian Period here on Earth, well before even the evolution of the first dinosaurs.

On a side note: the Carboniferous room in the Evolving Planet exhibit at the Field Museum remains my favorite room in that collection; I’ve always loved those trees.

The images released by the Webb team and broadcast Tuesday from NASA Goddard represent 25 years of combined efforts from a whole host of scientists and engineers at space agencies around the globe working together to achieve a common goal. By expanding our knowledge of the universe around us we are also demonstrating to ourselves and our descendants that it is possible to work across national divides, to achieve common goals. When we do pull ourselves out of our current string of interrelated crises and societal problems it will be because we’ve finally decided to work together as one humanity for the betterment of all of us.

We have an opportunity now to gaze into the past, to see light coming from stars that may well have died long ago. Yet with their light memories of their existence remains. With that light we’re reminded not only of what once was both out there and here on our home planet, but also of what could be in our future, of a time when maybe we will explore further afield, spread out from our home not as conquerors but as explorers. Stay curious.

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Politics and the Citizen

Mr. Lincoln

Politics and the Citizen – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to speak to you about the meaning of the word "political."
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Words are at the center of all our political debates. They are at the center of our lives, the core of our existence. We would not exist as we do without words. Words have tremendous power to do good, to inspire people to achieve wonderous things, to rise above what they thought possible and make a better future. Yet words are also dangerous when poorly used. They can have the effect of destroying trust between people; they are capable of breaking up families and communities. Without common words we cannot have a common society.

I was struck last week reading in the New York Times how the protests following the recent Supreme Court ruling of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were rephrased by the far right as an “Insurrection.” That is a word that has been far more justly levied at their own faction, whose actions on January 6th last year proved their lack of faith in a democratic society. Other words and ideas have been poisoned by the same fearmongers from Critical Race Theory to the Green New Deal. These are ideas and proposals that if considered in their true meaning have merit, yet any mention of them in the political square anymore will be met with the screaming banshees in the wings whose greatest weapon and sole power is the volume of their voices.

One such word which they have demonized by their own behavior, perhaps the most critical word to our democracy, is politics. It is taboo now to be political in a crowd when you don’t know everyone else’s own political views. A professional soccer team wearing practice shirts recognizing racial inequality is dangerously “politicizing” an otherwise family event. It’s curious to me because their own use of the word “political” has no bearing on the actual meaning of the word, nor on its origins.

The word political simply refers to the idea of the city, the polis in Greek. To be political is to be a citizen, an active member of society. To be political is to participate in government through voting, running for public office, and serving the people in the public sector. To be called political is one of the greatest honors anyone can bestow, for it means you care about something greater than yourself, you care about your community and want to contribute to its future.

In the ancient and medieval context, a citizen was far more particular of a person than today. The idea of universal suffrage is a modern thing, something that has been fought for down the generations and even still is being fought over today. Today though I believe the best way to describe a citizen is simply a person who wants to contribute to their own community. They need not have the papers conferring official legal citizenship in their country of residence, for even without those individual people can make a difference to their communities.

This is intolerable to those who demonize the word political. Why else would they make such an effort to poison an entire population against such an idea that at its core is meant to better their lives? It is intolerable to them because they know their views, as extreme as they are, are in the minority among their fellow citizens. There are generations of Americans who have come to recognize the benefits of democracy, and who have pushed us to improve upon those benefits already existing, that they might be extended to more and more people until eventually some day we may have true political equity. 

Yet now, as has happened in every generation since the founding of the first English colonies on the East Coast 415 years ago the powerful voice of a small few who see democracy as a threat to their own interests has influenced the course of affairs in this country to the great detriment not only of we the American people but of humanity at large. I’m speaking of course of the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency ruling made on the last day of the recent session of the Supreme Court. In that ruling the conservative majority declared that regulation should only be conducted through legislation. This means the President and any federal agency acting under the authority of the Presidency, even if acting in the best interests of the people they are sworn under oath to serve, have less ability to create broad regulations that are not expressly allowed under Acts of Congress.

The voices of a few who feel greater concern for their profits than they do for the future health of humanity and our home planet spoke up and were heard over the cries of the rest of us. I could say let’s trust in Congress to do their part now and legislate new regulations that will replace what was stripped from those executive orders revoked by the Court but those in Congress with the power to save us are also listening to that swansong of the soloists rather than the Dies Irae being belted by we, the chorus.

Our politics are in many ways broken by our extreme partisanship. It is this word, partisan that ought to be used when the far right uses the word political as a curse. We retreat into our slogans but don’t actually talk to one another. One side hears “Defund the Police” and the other “Law and Order” and neither leaves the table any better off. Rather, both parties find themselves far less willing to talk to the other, to find things in common with the other, to learn from each other. Once again, those fissures that threatened to make two countries out of one in that messy divorce of 160 years ago that left 6% of the population dead are beginning to show. 

Do we really want to go down that path again? Do we really want to fall into such political disfunction that we cease to see each other as fellow citizens and instead as enemies? We have let the battle cry change from “E Pluribus Unum, Out of Many One” to “No Compromise”, leading us to rally ’round our own partisan flags to the detriment of our common threads. I want to cry out in pain every time I see the American flag used as a symbol by those who want to be exclusionary, by those who would see all it has stood for over these past centuries be replaced by the worst of our nature: by our greed.

2016 Super Tuesday Democrats Abroad Primary

As citizens of a democracy, we have a right to know, to understand, and to discuss these questions of who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. And, as citizens of a democracy, we do have the right to dissolve our democracy, to end the experiment that’s been running for so long. I recognize that our current federal system isn’t going to last forever, nothing does, yet I remain hopeful that when it does eventually take its leave that that system will be succeeded by something better, crafted by the wisdom and love of another set of founders inspired by the precedents set by the first, who will craft a new system with all the best traits of our own yet reimagined in such a way as to overcome the faults in our own today. Until then, we citizens are caretakers of this democracy. It’s a fragile gift passed down to us from our ancestors, which we get to treasure and improve as best we can so that when we pass it on to our descendants it will be in better shape than how we found it. Let’s do our duty.

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Church and State

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

Church and State – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a message for the present moment for the future prosperity of the country.
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The foundation of good government is good ethics, which I fully acknowledge can and are taught by many faiths and learned through religious teaching. The Golden Rule after all is in various forms the foundation of most major religions after the various commandments to love and honor God above all else. Those ethics –– treat others the way you would want to be treated, contribute to society in a positive way, build a better future for your children and their children to come, among others –– aren’t inherently tied to religion; they feature in many religious teachings but they themselves are not inherently religious. 

A good society unbound by religion can also teach these morals. Some of the great humanists of the last century have proven that; great minds like Carl Sagan whose call to reflect on how we’re all residents of this one Pale Blue Dot in the vastness of Space. Like it or not, we all have to live together, and so our laws which govern our societies in a way that makes life better for all themselves ought to be built upon those same codes of ethics. It is possible for a society to legislate based on religion, to derive their laws from a common bond of faith. This has happened time and again in societies around the globe. Even in my own references to God exist in an otherwise secular republic. 

Yet if laws are going to be written to dictate in a manner grounded in religious doctrine or the interpretation of everyday questions through one interpretation of religious doctrine then those laws must reflect the will of the whole society, not only one part of it. Show me a council of any type of scholars whether theologians, philosophers, economists, or historians where everyone has willingly and freely agreed on every issue of their own accord. I doubt there has ever been one in the long memory of humanity.

With that in mind any state which governs over a society made of a plurality of faiths should never legislate based on the teachings of one faith, lest they elevate that faith above all others. I left a religious social club in 2014 because they violated the core principle that in our country the church and the state should remain separate through their continued political fundraising and campaigning. A state cannot govern without the support and trust of the public in the blind justice of its institutions to craft, execute, and interpret the law in such a manner that is beneficial to the society as a whole.

A transgression of that trust would damage the reputation, the honor of the very institutions that form the foundations of this society. The wanton abandon of obligations and duties that come with high office is a great symptom for the corruption in our society today. Elected officials who have coopted their offices to support a narrow set of highly partisan campaigns at the detriment of their constituents who expect those they elected to be responsive to them and be their voice in the halls of power. A branch of government designed to be above the partisan fray that has dominated our legislatures since the Early Republic has too fallen into the mire, making decisions its members promised they would not make to overturn “the law of the land” as one such member said before the legislature in his confirmation hearings. Still, a profound conviction grounded in religion rather than civics has influenced two key rulings by that august body in the last week. Two rulings that prove how poorly the separation of Church and State is faring today in this country.

The support of these causes which drove the twin arguments forward to on the one hand expand the rights of the individual at the fatal expense of the society at large and on the other to deny the rights of the individual at the will of a few who after generations of single-minded clamoring like Cato the Elder before the Roman Senate that “Carthage must be destroyed” those particular rights are now revoked. Better options exist in other societies with other governments and other relationships between the Church and their states, yet here in a country so engorged by its own reflection that any action less than overt and aggressive nationalism is unpatriotic the power of the pulpit cannot be denied.

Cato the Elder

Carthāgō dēlenda est! | Carthage must be destroyed!

Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE)

Those other options, opportunities to improve our own quality of life in such a manner that the great debate at the heart of this affair would be resolved without any sweeping action to legislate prohibition as was done with alcohol a century ago. Still in our current state our bloated yet fragile national ego won’t allow for ideas to enter the narrative from beyond our borders lest we lower our guard and allow those distantly related bogeymen of Communism and Socialism to invade just as prior generations of proud Americans feared the influence of Papism and foreign interlopers.

Of all the songs from Handel’s Messiah the one that has always stuck with me the most is the aria sung by a female voice “If God be for us, who can be against us?” The chief issue at the heart of this stalemate in public discourse is that one side of the argument claims the blessings of Heaven behind their words, their actions, and their beliefs. To them anyone who opposes them opposes God, and the opponents of God are inherently wrong. Thus, there is no need for debate at all. I do believe that we humans have been fortunate from time to time to be able to interpret the Will of God, look no further than the Beatitudes or the Greatest Commandment uttered by the scholar of the law in answering his own question to Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, 

“He said in reply, ‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

(Luke 10:27, NAB)

Are those public servants honored by the duty and responsibility to fulfill the obligations of their offices who legislate based on a very particular interpretation of the law of the land directed by their own personal religious beliefs truly doing service to the country in their actions? Are they truly acting out of love for their neighbor? This is a time when the durability of the institutions that form the bedrock of this society are being challenged in every direction both by those who see less need for democracy in their own self-interest and by those who seek to reform and revitalize those institutions to flourish for generations to come. 

We must always act with an eye to the past that we build our generation on the precedents that have come before us, but with our mind turned toward the future that we today now build, that it will be a just and kind world for our descendants.

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Kitty

Kitty, Easter 2022
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Kitty – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to tell you about my cat Kitty.

I’ll freely admit I’m more of a dog person. I am fascinated by cats, their social behaviors, their mannerisms, their temperamentality. Yet at the end of the day, I like the unconditional love a dog will always offer if you treat it well. This summer is my first one in over 20 years without a dog in my life, as my best friend Noel died a year ago at the start of June at the ripe old age of 16. Throughout all that time that I’ve had dogs, first Pretty the Beagle, then Spot the Aussie Shepherd, then Caesar the Black Lab mixed with a pony, and finally Noel the Shih Poo. 

I’ve also lived with a succession of cats. First among these was a black cat named Mrs. Norris, who we more commonly called Nora, then a grey cat we rescued who we named Crookshanks. After these two Harry Potter-themed names my Dad and I adopted a Siamese farm cat named Leo who could be very lovable but also was a bully to first Nora. Finally in the Summer of 2009 my Dad rescued a fourth cat, an orange and white cat who we named Kitty Kiernan, or Kitty for short.

When I first met Kitty on that Saturday afternoon, she was standing on an ottoman in our living room at our old house on the farm looking out the window onto the porch and into the western fields beyond. She quickly turned at my entrance and began talking to me, meowing with so much excitement. We became fast friends and over the next year she loved to sit in my lap when I was at the computer or watching TV. She also became best friends with Noel, after all Leo and Crookshanks were friends, and while Crookshanks was kind to Kitty, Leo was a jerk to her from the first moment they met. So, Kitty became Noel’s best friend. They slept together a lot when they were young and continued playing with each other even into their senior years until Kitty got tired of Noel jumping on her and tackling her and retreated to her own parts of our current house where Noel couldn’t reach her.

Over the years I’ve collected a large photo album of what I call “Noel Pictures.” I still look at them from time to time, I’ll freely admit I’m still in mourning for my pup. One of my favorites taken a few days before Noel died is of her sleeping on the old red Victorian sofa in the sunroom in my parents’ house with Kitty sitting on the floor below her looking up at Noel with concern clearly written all over her face. In those last few weeks Kitty came downstairs to check on Noel from time to time, and in the last day she came to say goodbye, sniffing Noel and rubbing her head against the ailing pup’s. The amount of affection those two showed for each other both in their youth and as they’ve grown up together really does touch my heart.

This week I’m reading about the premodern concept of the Great Chain of Being, a hierarchy of nature which places God at the top followed by Angels, then Humans, then Animals, followed by Plants, and finally Minerals at the bottom. This is inspired by both Plato and Aristotle, but especially Aristotle’s biology found in his book the History of Animals (Books 1 & 8). Aristotle classified life forms based on what sort of soul they have between a Rational, Sensitive, or Vegetative Soul. We humans, Aristotle wrote, had all three types of soul in ours. All other animals lacked reason but had the sensitive and vegetative types in their souls. Plants, as the name suggests, are just vegetative in their essence. When I was a freshman in high school my theology teacher said that animals don’t go to Heaven, that Salvation is reserved for humans alone, and even then, only those humans who willingly surrender themselves to God. As I’ve lived with Noel and Kitty, as well as Caesar, Spot, Leo, Crookshanks, Nora, and Pretty over the years I’ve come to see more in their eyes than just a partially completed soul. When I saw Noel die last June, I saw something leave her, the will to keep going, the consciousness that dwelt within her little body for sixteen years left her, and her body fell into a far more restful slumber once her last snores stopped.

On Monday evening, as with every other time when I sit down with my parents to enjoy that evening’s televisual feast (to borrow a phrase from Fawlty Towers) Kitty was quick to jump up onto my lap for some quality pet time. I’ve learned where she likes to be petted and try to do my best at it. Considering how blissful the look on her face often is after just a few minutes I suspect I meet my objective time and time again. This Monday though it went a step beyond just mere bliss. Kitty curled up in a ball on my lap and slowly, softly, gently began to snore as I petted her in one smooth stroke from forehead to the tip of her tail and back again in a circle. In that moment I too started to relax, to breath deeper, and to feel something of the serenity I often feel when I imagine myself floating in air or dream of the delicate beauty of the evolutionary order of the Cosmos.

Kitty conked out, June 2022

I don’t entirely agree with Aristotle’s idea that animals are inherently lesser than us, sure they aren’t human, but we are animals in our own right. We’ve just evolved differently than animals. Whereas Kitty’s daily routine involves napping, watching birds and squirrels out the windows, eating and drinking, and getting petted whenever there’s a free lap for her to lay down on, mine is far more focused not only on the abstract, both the past and the future, but also on affairs far from our home. Sure, I think about meals just as she does, and I long for those moments of physical interaction with the people I love, holding my Mom’s hand or giving my parents hugs from time to time. When it comes to Kitty though, I do enjoy letting her jump up onto my lap so I can pet her. I appreciate being appreciated. I like the fact that even when we do have disagreements (she has bit me from time to time) she always returns to me when she wants to.

I don’t know how much longer Kitty will be around, we never really figured out how old she is seeing as she was found by a friend in the parking lot of an apartment building here in Kansas City. But regardless of how much longer I get to be her friend, she’s taught me a lot about empathy and what it means to care for someone else.

Kitty snoozing on the clock, September 2015.
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Anniversaries

The Chicago skyline as seen from the Museum Campus in January 2013

Anniversaries – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I feel a bit sentimental about the biggest anniversary in my life to date.

23 years ago this week, my parents and I packed up our house in the Chicago suburbs and moved about 500 miles southwest to a farm on the western edge of Kansas City, Kansas. There were so many different aspects to that move from an opportunity for a different sort of life to the chance that I could grow up with my maternal cousins. In the years since we’ve had all that and more. Still, for the first 20 years I approached this anniversary with a bit of a sour attitude. 

I was excited at first at the prospect of moving to a farm, to a place where we’d have horses and all sorts of pets (back then I was really into cowboys as well as dinosaurs like your typical 6-year-old). But as time passed and I began to realize what it meant to be living on a farm on the outskirts of a metropolitan city away from so many of the things I’d come to know and love back in Chicago, I developed a sense of gloom about the whole story.

It took until my mid-twenties for me to fully appreciate how wonderful a city Kansas City is, and how much it had really become my home. As the twentieth anniversary of the big move approached in 2019, I was back in Chicago for a week for probably the first time as an adult returning to my original hometown for business rather than on a family trip. At that point I seemed to be on the verge of securing a position back in that city and felt like all my hopes of the previous two decades were finally coming true. That job didn’t end up panning out, and besides a quick overnight stop in the suburbs on a long drive west to Kansas City from Upstate New York in October 2020, I haven’t been back to the city of my birth yet this decade.

When I was there in January 2019 attending the American Historical Association’s annual conference, I paused here and there between things to reflect on the life I might have had if we’d stayed. Now as an adult having gone through academia I wonder if I might be in a more advantageous position today professionally if I’d gone to high school and college up there rather than down here. Don’t misunderstand me, my education at St. James and Rockhurst was wonderful and something I’ll always treasure. Still, the opportunities of things to study, especially in the sciences, are far greater there than here. In fact, I wonder if I would be in a different field today if we had stayed there than here: planetary science, paleontology, geology, who knows, maybe even anthropology.

It’s curious to me that my interest in history didn’t really begin until after the move to Kansas City. In Chicago we were members of the Field Museum, a cultural icon that we visited easily once or twice every month. My fascination with the past was born in those hallowed halls, first for dinosaurs and in more recent years for the ancient megafauna of the Pleistocene and for anthropology. Without that steady anchor in the natural sciences to keep my interest I began to turn to other things like Roman and later medieval history as well as linguistics.

The Field Museum in its Winter splendor

In many ways, that move impacted me far greater than any other event in my life so far. I became the guy I am today because of it. The guy in the classroom with more complicated loyalties and interests, the one with two favorite baseball teams (the Cubs and the Royals). Yet I’ve realized in recent years that I accentuated the fact that I’m not a native Kansas Citian for a good long while because it was something I could use to stand out from the crowd. Though rather than it being just a bunch of grandstanding, that fact of my life is one of the deepest and most personal parts of my story. Loyalty is something I treasure above all, and my own loyalty to my original hometown, even after 23 years, remains strong. To me, for example, abandoning the Cubs would be like turning my back on a core part of my identity.

That passion is helped by the fact that those first six years contain many of my best memories, like the April Fool’s Day when my Mom woke me up to a clear sky and said, “I took the day off work, and I’m keeping you out of school today. Let’s go to the Brookfield Zoo.” Or the time when some relatives were visiting, and I rode with my Aunt Kay in the back of my parents’ Ford Explorer down the Eisenhower Expressway so all of us could go see the then brand-new Michael Jordan statue outside the United Center. There are the times when I got to go visit my grandparents with my Dad up in Mt. Prospect, or the times when he took me on the Metra downtown to go to the Field Museum (again, that old museum). There are all the summer days we spent on our sailboat, the Arctic Tern, out on Lake Michigan up and down the Chicago lakefront and out to where the skyline fell below the western horizon.

You can understand why then for 20 years I felt like I was missing something from my life. After we moved to Kansas City we went from the big towers and expansive museums and endless suburban streets to big open skies, beautiful sunsets, and days spent remembering what we had before we left the place that to me still felt most like home. I think the farm wasn’t ever really going to feel like home to me, it was too quiet, and as an only child out there I was pretty lonely. Only after we moved into Brookside, the neighborhood where my Mom grew up, did Kansas City really feel like a place where I belonged.

Still, as much as I may grumble about the move it has also brought so many wonderful and dear people into my life. I got to know most of my family after moving to Kansas City, all my aunts, uncles, and cousins on my Mom’s side. I also made many dear friends in school and in daily life, including some who have been a part of this podcast so far and my brothers in the Donnelly Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Kansas. I would not have gotten to know my dogs and cats and other pets if it weren’t for the move. I learned to love my best friend Noel, departed a year ago this month, and became a far better, kinder, and gentler person because of her presence in my life. Kansas City has given me so much, and made me who I am today.

Now as an adult I can see many different paths ahead of me, some of which lead back to that great lakefront metropolis, the beating heart of the Midwest. Others lead me back here to the Fountain City that I’ve adopted as home after a long and sometimes begrudging trial period. Some see me keep working out in the East in one of those great cities, and still more see me move out West to California or stay closer to home in Colorado. Nevertheless, today I could conceivably decide to fly up to Chicago for the day and go walk around those museums and streets that I remember so fondly from my youth. For me the Field Museum today is as much a place of scientific wonder as it is a place of wonderful memories. I’m still a member there, even though I haven’t actually visited in three years. (Thanks, COVID!)The Ancient Greeks had an understanding of time that we are always facing backwards to the past with the future still over our shoulders. I like that idea both as a historian and as a passionate person with a still young life filled with memories. What can I say, I’m always in a sentimental mood.

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23 Years Later and I finally bought my first Royals hat.

Creatures of Habit

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Pexels.com

Creatures of Habit – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how we tend to stick to the same things over our lives.

I’m writing this week’s blog post substantially later than I usually do. This past week has been very uncomfortable for me, first with a bout of food poisoning last Tuesday and Wednesday, and now with the continuing aftereffects of it still in my system. So, at a time like this when I feel physically terrible, I often find myself returning to the same old routines and manners that I’ve practiced my entire life. There’s something comforting in watching an old episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy all these years later because it’s nostalgic as well as staying educational.

Last night I found myself craving some good music, the soaring melodies and rich harmonies found in opera. I ended up listening to a couple of things including the Queen of the Night’s second aria “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” from Mozart’s Magic Flute. For all the hellfire innate in the words––the title translates to “Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart”––there’s one line near the end that caught my eye, “Alle Bande der Natur.” At the moment I thought of “Bande” as in “bonds” or more metaphorically “customs” when in fact it really means “bonds” as in “connections.” So, in my elementary level German I translated “Alle Bande der Natur” as “all bonded by Nature” or that it was a matter of instinct and habit.

My misinterpretation of the German text there brought me to think a bit more about habit and instinct. What sets us off to do what we do? Why for example do some people eat each thing on their plate in turn rather than mix the flavors together? Or why does my cat like to extend her claws when she’s happily being petted?

Instinct is a survival mechanism. If you recognize you’re in a bad situation, you’ll probably do your best to get out of it. That goes back to the days when our distant ancestors were hunted as prey by other larger animals. Perhaps the urge to laugh at other people’s misery, embodied in my youth by America’s Funniest Home Videos and today by a good portion of the content on Instagram and the “Hold My Beer” subreddit, comes from a similar primal satisfaction that it’s not me who’s getting his leg gnawed off by a lion today.

As long as we’re tuned into our own natures, we’re bound to avoid some of the pitfalls that inspired that particular metaphor and survive. I learned the hard way to avoid bad food this past week and am still suffering the consequences now eight days later. On the other hand, my pup Noel learned in which house her best friend the black lab Henry lived and liked to stop and sit at the bottom of his stairs to see if he’d come out to play. We create habits out of experience and grow as a consequence.So, the moral of the story, the greatest lesson to learn here: to quote the Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man himself, “never run for a public bus, there’ll always be another.”

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