Tag Archives: Kansas City

On Democracy, Part II

On Democracy, Part II – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, on the current round of redistricting sweeping through Missouri.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources%5B1%5D “On Democracy,” Wednesday Blog 5.39.[2] “We, Irish Americans,” Wednesday Blog 6.10.[3] “On Servant Leadership,” Wednesday Blog 6.15.[4] “Freedom from Fear,” Wednesday Blog 2.6; “Embodied Patriotism,” Wednesday Blog 6.26.[5] “Governor Kehoe announces special session on congressional redistricting and initiative petition reform,” Office of the Governor of the State of Missouri, 29 August 2025.[6] “A Scary Time For Chicago | Trump Gets FOMO Over China's Military Parade | Donald's Life Lessons,” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (3 September 2025), YouTube.[7] “A Defense of Humanism in a Time of War,” Wednesday Blog 6.24.

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This week, on the current round of redistricting sweeping through Missouri.

When I wrote my essay “On Democracy” last December, I anticipated that it would be the only thing I wrote concerning the most recent Presidential election.^[1] I wanted to say more, in fact I went back and forth on saying something stronger and more forceful, yet what I ended up with turned out to be just right for the moment. It remains one of the essays I’m most proud of from the Wednesday Blog. The first half of 2025 was marked by a series of essays which followed up on “On Democracy” and commented on the growing number of political crises blowing across this country and here in Missouri and Kansas especially.^[2] I even found that the usual low readership numbers on my political essays was mitigated somewhat with these essays; I attribute that in part to my choice to stay positive and focus on the extraordinary acts of ordinary people that have proven essential to the course of American democracy in the last 250 years and remain vital to the continued survival of our Republic today.^[3]

All that said, and as much as I am a political animal, I would much rather write about my research and about my English translation of André Thevet’s 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique which I’m currently editing. Those are the things which make me happy today because when I’m engaged in my historical work, I feel connected to my friends and colleagues who I’ve met in academia over the years. I want to be known a historian first and a writer second. I’m learning things everyday about Thevet and his worldview that I only barely noticed when I was deep in the effort of translating his book in the first place.

Yet current affairs in Jefferson City are pressing enough that I feel it is my duty to speak up. I know there are very real risks to publishing, saying, or writing anything political today. I’m in a precarious place now as a Ph.D. candidate approaching my dissertation defense and looking at a job market that feels smaller and more threatened than it did a year ago. I know that saying anything political could make me a harder sell for many hiring committees to accept. I take this risk because it is the right thing to do.

Today, 10 September, the Missouri Senate is set to vote on a new congressional map drawn by an uncertain cartographer, possibly in Jefferson City, possibly in Washington, with the intention of ensuring that the Republican Party secures a clear electoral victory in the 2026 congressional midterm elections in spite of learned expectations that the president’s party always loses seats in the midterms after they assume office, and the living reality of our moment in which the majority party is acting to preserve its own power and the wealth of a few at the expense in the political rights of everyone else. I’ve written time and again here that my America in its purest form is embodied in the New Deal and Great Society, and in FDR’s Four Freedoms speech.^[4] Sure, we haven’t gotten there yet, all that means is we should keep working for it. America is a shining beacon of democracy for all the world to see, even if that beacon’s shadow often also shows our flaws played out before it like hand-puppets on a screen. Democracy requires participation; it’s the greatest form of government we’ve yet invented because it requires the most of the governed to understand how government works and to participate in their own government for the common good.

This new congressional map is not democratic. In fact, it is the anthesis of democracy. In his statement announcing the Republican supermajority’s push to force this map through the Missouri General Assembly, Governor Mike Kehoe openly stated that this map is intended to protect “Missouri’s conservative, common-sense values should be truly represented at all levels of government, and the Missouri First Map delivers just that.”^[5] This was expected, yet still bold by a sitting governor to be so openly one-sided. On Thursday, 4 September, the window to submit written testimony on the redistricting bill opened on the Missouri House of Representatives’ website. I sent in the following statement:

In his statement announcing this new mid-decadal redistricting effort, Governor Kehoe explicitly said this was to preserve “conservative values.” With that out in the open, I want it to be known that if this map is intended to support conservative party politics in Missouri, then it impedes on the rights of all of us moderate, liberal, and progressive Missourians. It is a blatant abuse of power that targets us Kansas Citians in particular. I want to see Missouri create a nonpartisan independent board which draws the electoral maps, so they are fair for all Missourians. I ask the committee to reject this redistricting map for its blatant partisanship and the fact that this redistricting process is costing the taxpayers’ money that could and should be spent elsewhere.

This is the sum of it. I do not think it is hyperbole to say that my own political rights are under threat by this bill. Rather, what was once extreme is today expected because any rules we had for electoral fairness have been thrown out the window. It’s true that both parties gerrymander their congressional maps, but the Republicans do it far more. It’s also true that the Democrats are gerrymandering congressional maps in the states that my party controls. I want independent redistricting maps in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and every territory. That should be our goal. Yet in this moment we need to fight for democracy to save it. This is a struggle here in the United States, yet it is being felt around the globe. Who else is as influential in world geopolitics today who could take up the mantle of democracy if we discard it? What keeps striking me about what the Republicans are doing is that it is all for short-term goals that masquerade as solutions to the country’s problems. What I and many like me want are long term solutions that will actually resolve many of those problems.

With this new congressional map, I and every other moderate, liberal, and progressive on the Missouri side of Greater Kansas City will lose all federal representation. We currently are represented in Congress solely by Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver II, who has served this city for many decades. I regularly send emails to our senators, Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt about a variety of issues that I care about from restoring funding to the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA, NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), to my fears of presidential overreach with so many executive orders which seek policy changes that by law can only be made through acts of Congress. In every instance, the response I receive has nothing to do with what I wrote. In the case of an email I sent to Senator Hawley concerning my fears over my profession’s long-term viability in this country as federal funding to universities and research institutions is threatened for political reasons, I received an email back lauding the Big Beautiful Bill and all the good it will do for America. A screenshot of that email is included below.

Meanwhile, Senator Schmitt’s office only responds with campaign emails pretending to be official senatorial correspondence. This ought to be illegal in my opinion, and a version of the Hatch Act of 1939 should be passed for the Legislative Branch to keep Members of Congress from using their official correspondence to actively campaign for their offices. I have a folder filled with all of the emails I’ve received from his office since April 2024 and normally they will go directly into that folder. Yet there was one email his office sent me in response to my concerns over cutting funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which was such a blatant example of his dismissive approach to his constituents who disagree with his views that I became pretty angry.

So, I called his Washington office, realizing as the phone was ringing that it was after business hours in the East, and left a voicemail. In summation, I challenged him to actually address his constituents’ concerns. I borrowed what I imagine is the lingo of the manosphere, a foreign corner of the Internet to me and challenged him “man to man to stop being a coward and do his job for all Missourians, not just those in his own party.” I haven’t gotten a response to that one, whether by email, phone, or letter. This is not how I like to talk to people, let alone write to them. I would rather find ways to speak to people in their own language to lift them up. I’m my worst when I lose that sense that I can say or do something that will make the lives of the people around me better.

It’s in this spirit that I decided to write again this week about democracy. Any form of representative government requires that we trust in each other for it to function. This is one of the central tactics of the current majority party. The President recently called the city of my birth a “hellhole,” something that I take personal offence to. I appreciated Stephen Colbert’s response, especially the heartfelt final two words of it.^[6] In my essay “A Defense of Humanism in a Time of War” I wrote that I don’t want to be known as a pacifist because there will always be schoolyard bullies to contend with.^[7] The people in power today here in Missouri and the slim governing majority in Washington are the biggest bullies this country has seen in a long time. They evoke the worst aspects of America, the greed that embodied both the First Gilded Age and the garishness of this Second Gilded Age in which we live. Not content with letting the democratic process that brought them into office work as it has for over two centuries, they insist on doing what they’ve accused their opponents of doing: rigging the electoral process in their favor. They clearly do not trust us, so why should we trust them?

Democracy is nourished by a love of neighbor. American democracy in particular is built upon a bedrock of idealism that we are still trying to achieve. That is what we need to work on. Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, argues that we are on the verge of a second Progressive Era, a time of tremendous political reform. We who oppose the Missouri supermajority and the thin ruling majority in Washington need to remember that end goal. We need to sustain the democratic spirit through this time of trouble so that we can have a better tomorrow. I’m writing this knowing the risks because I feel it’s my duty as an American. I will always stand up for my neighbor regardless of if we agree or disagree on a given topic just as I will stand up for my colleagues, students, friends, and family because it’s the right thing to do.

^[1] “On Democracy,” Wednesday Blog 5.39.

^[2] “We, Irish Americans,” Wednesday Blog 6.10.

^[3] “On Servant Leadership,” Wednesday Blog 6.15.

^[4] “Freedom from Fear,” Wednesday Blog 2.6; “Embodied Patriotism,” Wednesday Blog 6.26.

^[5] “Governor Kehoe announces special session on congressional redistricting and initiative petition reform,” Office of the Governor of the State of Missouri, 29 August 2025.

^[6] “A Scary Time For Chicago | Trump Gets FOMO Over China’s Military Parade | Donald’s Life Lessons,” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (3 September 2025), YouTube.

^[7] “A Defense of Humanism in a Time of War,” Wednesday Blog 6.24.

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On Universals

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This week, I discuss some of the things which are common to all of us, problems we all share, and why I think we ought to look at solving those problems.

I don’t rest much these days, there’s so much I have on my mind from my work to my hopes for my life to the state of our world boiling in tumult around us. I sleep, yet I rarely feel rested when I awaken. I suspect it’s worse on those mornings when I’m pulled awake from the middle of a dream, that is from REM sleep into my waking reality. Perhaps this is the same for you if you’ve noticed it. This morning was one such occurrence and I’ve been tired throughout the day, even drifting off to sleep midday while watching the Cubs game and later riding in the backseat of my family’s car to an event. These days, I have a lot on my plate, and as one of my best friends pointed out to me recently, I’m probably due for a vacation of at least a week in length. When I have the time and the money to do so I’ll probably slip away somewhere as suggested.

I’ve always thought that the more technologically advanced our society becomes the better life will be for we humans who crafted these machines and machine intelligences which are the hallmarks of our civilization today. I suspect many, if not all, of you would both agree and disagree on some level with this statement. Life is easier on some counts, yet we still haven’t found a way to relieve the burden of human labor through invention. This is one of many universals we all have in common, one of many things we can look to and nod at as signs of our humanity. We all struggle in our own way, and we all have things we love and fear. I think at the core of our problems today is the desire to divide us into camps armed to the teeth to defend their own circle from the other circles out there in the fog of doubt. How often I’ve worried about nothing when someone doesn’t respond to a message, email, or letter when the person on the other end was simply busy! We all dream, don’t we? In our waking moments as well as in our sleep we dream about the life we want to have in our future. There does lie a difference between those who see those dreams as blueprints for what they can create and those who merely see these dreams as figments of an overactive imagination. Yet that difference can be overcome with enough courage and determination to see a better tomorrow.

I do believe that we all want to be happy, the question lies in what we each believe on our own terms will make us happy. In America, a country with capitalism so deeply baked into our collective consciousness, happiness is often quantifiable in dollars and cents. I went to college with a lot of people who chose their majors out of a conviction that their happiness would come if they became rich. I also know other people who are happy with quiet, unassuming lives. In my case I know I am capable of doing great things, of making an impact on our society, and I want to do all that. Yet as I’ve grown, I’ve found that what makes me happiest is being comfortable in my living, having choice in what I do and who I live my days with, and always seeking new knowledge and even wisdom from time to time. I know I need to earn my keep to do these things, something I’m presently not doing, yet as I often say when I’m feeling especially dour about the current state of my life at 32: I have many long years ahead of me, let’s take one step after another to get to that point of comfort that I seek.

Another universal emotion for humanity is fear; in fact, it’s one of the most powerful emotions we can feel. I know fear well, as Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Starship Voyager said to an embodiment of Fear in one of the finest episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, “I’ve known fear, it’s a very healthy thing most of the time. You warn us of danger, remind us of our limits, protect us from carelessness. I’ve learned to trust fear.” Fear is a seed of knowledge, yet hope is the fertilizer needed for wisdom to flower. We’ve been fed so much fear by one camp of all others that it is nearly all we hear today. Yet that fear lacks the depth which is needed for true societal growth to occur. The power of the fearmongers will remain brittle and fragile until at long last it crumbles again as it always does.

So, let me ask you this: what would it be like if we let our guard down even for a few moments and talked with one another about the things we have in common? What if we lowered our banners proudly proclaiming our camps and sought out the universal ground upon which we all stand? At the end of this time of change, whenever whatever is coming next is settled, we’re going to have to do just this. We will need to talk with one another and recognize our common humanity. What’s more, we will have to learn not only to talk with one another but listen to one another again. I’ve been in meetings in the last few months where I certainly could’ve contributed my own thoughts about the state of things, yet I’ve found it far better to be attentive to the people there with me and hear what they have to say. Often, we have similar concerns and similar hopes in kind. To do any of this takes a tremendous amount of courage but not anymore than we’ve mustered in the past. I’ve seen it after big storms when people help dig each other out of the damage. You may ask, “Why would we care about our neighbors if we don’t even know them well?” That question is simple: you do it because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a series of television commercials several years ago which purported to show a potentiality where it was normal to prefer pain or trouble over pleasure and comfort. I wonder if we aren’t in fact living in that world where we accept the pain and trouble because we can’t work up the courage to face that pain and trouble and find solutions to remedy it? Take for instance the trouble we go to in the United States to travel between our cities: we put up with uncomfortable day or multiday long road trips or quick yet rickety short-haul regional flights because we’ve dismissed the potential of trains to connect our smaller and larger cities together. Last month, I drove up to Chicago in the backseat of my Dad’s small pickup truck and returned home in a sleeper class roomette on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief. I appreciate the ride back to the city of my birth, yet the benefits of having more legroom, being able to walk about the train, lounge access in Chicago, and complimentary service in the dining car can only be outweighed by the convenience of being able to choose when I want to leave my origin and arrive at my destination by car, especially when as of now there’s only one direct train per day in each direction between Chicago and Kansas City.

We can use particular answers to solve universal problems, if only we have the courage to consider those particularities. I worry today that we may be short on the courage to solve our most universal of problems, the rot at the heart of our civilization that we’ve too long ignored until it’s oozing there right before our eyes. A house with rot in its foundation will eventually fall and crumble into ruin. Can we face our own rotting foundations before we lose what is most universal, what we most love and appreciate about our lives? Or can we do what we know to be right, what we know we must, and begin the process of rebuilding to craft a better version of the old edifice of our civilization, a more equitable edifice indeed, for our posterity to enjoy?I’ll leave you with those questions, because often the best conclusion to any essay ought to be the provocation of more queries rather than definitive answers.

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Embodied Patriotism

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This week, on the patriotism we live in our ordinary lives.

This Monday, after a long day working on my dissertation I went with my parents to Kauffman Stadium to see the Kansas City Royals play the first game in this week’s series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Of the many things that I think of when I see the Pirates, memories of the weekend I spent in Pittsburgh in January 2020, or memories of watching them with my grandmother play the Cubs on WGN in my youth, I have a slight soft spot for the Pirates as a fellow legacy nineteenth-century team (1887) in the National League Central alongside my Cubs (1876), the Reds (1890), and the Cardinals (1892). The great Irish American artist Gene Kelly often said that he took up dancing to meet girls and to be agile and athletic so he could play outfield for the Pirates, his hometown team.

On this particular Monday, once we finished our walk into the stadium, bought our dinners and bottles of water, we made our way up to the top level of the stadium, the View Level to watch the game. I broke off from the rest of my family for a few minutes when we made it up to the 400s level to buy myself a brat. I didn’t realize though that the pregame ceremonies were reaching their conclusion with the march of the color guard and the performance of the national anthem. I consider myself patriotic in my own way; I hope you’ve seen in the last six months on this blog that I strive to elevate my fellow countrymen, my fellow humans in fact, through evocations of all the tremendous things we are capable of doing, of the extraordinary acts of ordinary people.^[1] So, as the singer began her tune, I looked around at the people around me to see what I should do. At that moment I was at the register paying for my brat (everything is self-checkout now), yet as I saw no one else at the registers beside me were stopping to make our salute it occurred to me that nothing could be more American, dare I say more patriotic, than engaging in commerce with overpriced foods and drink that’s probably not good for any of us. I quickly finished my purchase and stepped back from the register and took a place beside a group of fellow millennials who held their right hands over their hearts, as we’re taught to do.

Throughout the game, a strong showing by the Royals who hit in 9 runs over the Pirates 3, I thought about this brat purchase during the national anthem and felt resolute in my decision. There are people who I know who take the anthem very seriously to the point of zealotry. In my many years of attending baseball games and soccer matches I’ve often wondered what would happen if someone chose to keep their hands at their sides or even remain seated during the anthem? We saw the harsh reaction of the clamorous cacophony when Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem a decade ago. At the time I was ambivalent yet now having heard more stories of oppression and promises unkept I appreciate what he did. I believe this question of how free we are to patriotically express discontent in civic rituals is essential to the vitality of a democracy. I’ve often found the crafted rituals which the Royals put between innings to be at times bordering the ludicrous. This is especially true in 2025 after the Royals ruined their relationship with so many of us Kansas Citians with how they misled us and took advantage of us in this year’s stadium sales tax vote. My distrust of the team is why I effectively retired the Royals cap that I bought only two years ago at another visit to Kauffman Stadium.

We embody our rituals by wearing American flags on our clothes and demanding unquestioning patriotism in this American life. Here I’m adopting Céline Carayon’s notion of embodied language in her 2019 book Eloquence Embodied about early colonial French communications and relations with Indigenous Americans through gestures and visual language.^[2] Today in the United States our patriotism is just as often meant to be blood-red flowing within our bodies as it is worn on our chests and loudly proclaimed with often poorly sung renditions of the national anthem, a hymn requiring professional training to perform. It is meant to be shouted in unquestioning proclamations of American freedom even as that liberty seems ever more fleeting under the combined weight of a cruel-minded governing majority and an even crueler corporate elite that has created so much of the embodied rituals which define American culture in the 21^st century. These rituals, always sponsored by some robber baron and crafted by their public relations department, sing proudly of American freedom all while ensuring their own profits at the expense of the American people’s own freedom from want and fear. We embody our patriotism in what we purchase and where. Earlier that day, looking for a late afternoon pastry, I ended up at my local Whole Foods. Their bakery is good; the chocolate croissants are about what you’d expect for a gargantuan corporation’s attempt at mimicry of a Parisian classic. Yet as I bought a slice of pizza that caught my eye thinking how I might stop here for pizza by the slice more often I felt a pang of guilt after all there’s a good local pizzeria, Pizza 51, just across the street and several more within walking distance. Even as bakeries go as fair as Whole Foods is during the morning rush I would much rather go to McLain’s, the Roasterie, or Heirloom, all local bakeries within walking distance of my family home and along the route I was driving yesterday afternoon. Yet where Whole Foods won was that they forego the usual bakery hours and keep baking pastries in the afternoons whereas the others are usually low on their morning batches or already closed for the day. I’ve known for most of my life that these big corporate chains put tremendous stress on small local businesses; in fact I’ve flatly refused to shop at Walmart for this very reason, only buying a couple of bottles of water at one in the Kansas City suburbs once in 2020 when my Dad’s old truck broke down outside of it during the evening rush hour under a hot summer sun.

The America that I love seems more and more fraught the further from walkable neighborhoods and into the suburbs and exurbs you go. This is where most Americans have built their lives in common isolation living in mansions of rest surrounded by moats of artificially green grass regardless of how dry the local climate may be. It’s a life spent driving individually in vehicles increasingly resembling The Princess Bride’s rodents of unusual size in their environmental dangers. Several months ago, I had a bad argument with an attendant at a car wash in a nearby suburb because I ended up in the members’ lane on accident. I told the teenager working there that I made the mistake because there wasn’t a sign that I could see in my Mazda where the two lanes split (the big overhead sign is blocked by a dumpster from my lower line of sight) while the guy kept telling me that I can’t pay in the lane I was in. I was angry because the way that place was built favored the minivans, SUVs, and trucks that most people drive at the expense of those of us who still drive sedans. Yet I lost my temper because when the management got involved in our deteriorating conversation they shrugged off my suggestion that the row of ground-level signs standing outside their toll booth ought to be placed where the lanes split saying “that’s something for corporate to decide.” This is where that America of neighbors seems to be at least dormant to me; rather than making decisions that will benefit all of us together we instead more often choose inaction rather than risk our own individually precarious position. I grew up admiring the likes of Daniel Burnham and was proud as a young kid to say I was from Carl Sandburg’s City of Big Shoulders with big ideas and big ambitions. I’m just as proud to have witnessed firsthand the renaissance that Kansas City has experienced since the millennium. Those sorts of dreams and ambitions are what make me proud to embody our shared patriotism when I feel we’ve warranted it. I prefer the embodied patriotism my parents and grandparents taught me which as I’ve gotten older, I’ve found grew out of the progressive and city beautiful movements of a century ago and felt their greatest expression during FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. That is my America, the America of neighbors standing up for each other. I see that America every day in my neighborhood where people say hello to each other when walking down the sidewalks or on the Trolley Trail. It’s for that America that I feel pride is warranted, that America which we should be working to rebuild by reconnecting our car-dependent suburbs and neighborhoods, by forcing us to spend time with each other again, to be social again.

^[1] That’s one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written.

^[2] Céline Carayon, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, (University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

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The Poetics of Finality

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This week, some words about endings.

On the morning of Flag Day, I went to the Linda Hall Library with my parents to see the classic 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. I knew about this film, but this was my first time seeing it. Beside the story, what struck me most about this film was its tone, pacing, and overall character. After I finished my other two events of the day, the Plaza No Kings Rally where I watched the crowd of 11,000 people rally for democracy, and Mass that afternoon, I returned home tired yet eager to find that same tone. I went looking for it in Rod Serling’s classic series The Twilight Zone. Released between 1959 and 1964 in its first incarnation, this series had scared me a bit the previous times I’d sat down to watch an episode or two. It has an air of fear to it that is reminiscent of the reasons why I generally stay away from horror films. And yet on closer inspection, Serling’s stories tell something that is far less frightening than I first imagined because it’s a theme with which I’m all too familiar.

I came to indirectly know more about Mr. Serling when I moved to his hometown, Binghamton, New York, to undertake my doctoral studies in August 2019. His image isn’t all over town, but it’s a visible reminder of Binghamton’s history and place in the fabric of American culture. In fact, much of the stories that I’ve now watched in The Twilight Zone fit the character of that interior part of the Northeast where I lived from August 2019 to December 2022 quite well. In some ways, not too much of the built environment has changed from Serling’s day 60 years ago. Still, I noticed time and again how the optimism of that postwar era had faded. The same town was there, but some of the energy it once knew was long gone. Having lived my life to date in Chicago, Kansas City, and London, all cities with layers of history and memory, I’ve seen how the current generations have chosen to craft their own layer.

London is a city that holds mementos to its ancient and medieval past while largely built in the form of its eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century growth at the height of the British Empire. Yet today there are enough futuristic buildings and settings in the capital that it was used as a setting standing in for the space-age galactic capital of Coruscant in the latest Star Wars series Andor. I delighted in seeing familiar places from the Barbican Estate and Canary Wharf in the show.

Chicago has some of the same American character of Binghamton and the Northern states as a whole, a common history. Yet Chicago is the powerhouse of this country, the beating heart of our transportation network, the real crossroads of this nation. Where other industrial cities in the Great Lakes faltered in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s Chicago instead continued to power on for its sheer size and the diversity of its industry. Today, it has a very particular character which I believe makes it the most American city this country has to offer for its marriage of American settler culture and all the different indigenous, migrant, and immigrant communities that make America the patchwork of peoples in one great republic that it is.

Kansas City meanwhile saw more of the downturn for its smaller size and some of its traditional industries haven’t translated as well into the current information revolution. Kansas City once thrived as another great railway hub: the Gateway to the Southwest as the last major Midwestern metropolis along the Santa Fe Railroad as it drove across the prairies toward New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California. Today, our interstate highways direct traffic through Kansas City more from Texas, Colorado, the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, and points east than in the old northeast-to-southwest alignment of the rails. Recently while I was in downtown Kansas City, I remarked on how underwhelmed I felt visiting there for the first time after the business and thrill of going with my parents down to the Loop on weekends when we still lived in Chicago. Kansas City however has seen a renaissance of its own in the last twenty-five years that has filled in many of the gaps left by urban renewal and restored this city’s vitality. That more than anything else made my move to Binghamton a tremendous culture shock: going from a growing city to one that was a shadow of its former self struggling to invest in its future.

For every Twilight Zone episode there seems to be a fearsome unknown menace looming over the story; something that the character can perceive the effects of yet can’t quite see. Yet if there is any common thread to this menace it’s that it is a fear of the unknown. In the original pilot that launched the Twilight Zone, titled “The Time Element,” Serling’s rational psychoanalyst foil to the main character trapped in his dreams concludes through his logic that his dreams that he goes back in time from 1958 to Pearl Harbor on December 6^th, 1941 could not be real because any incident that happened in this dreamed 1941, if real, would impact the patient as he lived in 1958. Yet reason is proven unequipped to address the irrational, how can it explain what it intrinsically is not? I’ve argued time and again here in the Wednesday Blog that this is where there exists room for belief in a life lived rationally. Still, having watched a fair number of Mr. Serling’s stories now, I think I can say something to this menace’s true character.

There is an intrinsic fear that comes with knowledge of seeing that we do have an ending. On a biological level, our bodies can only continue working for so long. We drift apart from our lives as they were in one moment or another, apart from friends who we admired and loved in a given moment, apart from jobs that consumed our waking and sleeping thoughts, apart from situations which challenged us to become better versions of ourselves. Yet, all those lived moments will continue on in our memory, at least for a time. I was stunned to find how well I could remember very particular moments of minute detail earlier this year when prompted by a sudden and wonderful realization about how I want to live in my life to come. Even the smallest of details that my senses perceived were there, locked away. The antidote to any fear is joy, and for me it was the most radiant joy I’ve felt in years which unlocked those memories for me of moments which led to that jubilation. Still, fear in moderation is a good counsel, a wise friend. It’s what makes me watch for traffic when I’m crossing the street here in Kansas City, or that advises me to make certain decisions over other ones at a very fundamental level to keep me alive. This is one interpretation of what the infamous tree in Genesisportended: that once humanity ate its fruit we would never again be able to be innocent from seeing flaws in the beauty of nature and in the beauty of ourselves.

Over the weekend then, I went to see the new Stephen King film The Life of Chuck starring Tom Hiddleston as Charles Krantz. I particularly grew to like young Chuck’s grandfather played by Mark Hamill. If I were to compare Stephen King’s writing to any other American storyteller of the last century it would be Rod Serling. Both tell stories of this same menacing fear. Yet in King’s Life of Chuck, the monster who’s revealed in the last scene is far more familiar, ordinary, and known to us all that I saw it less as a menace and more as a companion. There is intense poetry in both Serling’s Twlight Zone and King’s Life of Chuck around endings. They tell us that the finality of moments in our lives and of our lives all together give our lives greater meaning and purpose. I’ve found in the various projects and events I’ve helped organize that we get more done when we have goals we’re trying to achieve and a timeline by when we want to achieve those goals. I often work better when I have deadlines because if I begin to feel impatient at how long something might take, I know there’s an end date to look forward to. I feel that about little things but not the big ones, not the experiences that’ll one day make for good stories or about my life itself.

I for one don’t want to live forever, I worry that’d take some of the meaning out of my life. I would like to be remembered for my writing, for being a good person, for the history I research and leave for generations of graduate students to muddle through in their coursework. On a recent digital security Zoom call that I attended we were asked to search our names on several search engines and see what came up. Should there be anything we didn’t want searchable we could then get that removed. I was delighted to see that after my website, social media profiles, and various conference programs came page after page filled with essays published here on The Wednesday Blog. I suppose that’s one benefit of writing this weekly for the last four years: my thoughts written here will be remembered at least by the search engines. Yet I think the Wednesday Blog will have more meaning when I decide to set it aside and turn my staff to other facets of “my so potent art” to borrow from Prospero. Because then anyone who is curious enough to glance through these pages will be able to see them in their totality and know these essays are artifacts of the time when they were written in the early 2020s at a time of my life of doctoral study that feels so very close to ending.

This is not the last time you’ll hear from me on the Wednesday Blog, rather I’ve decided to end my weekly publication of this blog at the end of the current season. This is Season 5 of the podcast, or Book 6 of the blog itself. I feel that it’s had a wonderful run, and it’s been a great outlet for me while I’m biding my time as my career slowly begins. Yet now, I’ve got a lot more writing to do from new research papers to submit for peer-review to book reviews that it’ll be nice to take this off my docket. This is the 25^th issue of this season, and I have a further 15 issues planned before the end. Thank you to all my readers over the last four years and all my listeners over the last three. I hope this will be an ending worthy of your curiosity.

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A Defense of Humanism in a Time of War

A Defense of Humanism in a Time of War – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, why we should not lose sight of our common humanity in a time of war.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—This week's sources:[1] “Masks,” Wednesday Blog 4.15.[2] Luke 10:27 (New American Bible).[3] St. Augustine, Confessions 8.7.[4] Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Renaissance of Encounters and the Renaissance of Antiquities,” Renaissance Quarterly 78, no. 1 (2025): 1–41, at 12.[5] Philippe Desan, Montaigne: A Life, trans. Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal, (Princeton University Press, 2017), xxxiii.[6] “On the Cannibals,” Wednesday Blog 4.20.

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This week, why we should not lose sight of our common humanity in a time of war.

The news of the last weekend felt like another shot at the optimism that I knew in my early childhood. I was born at a time of triumph for this country in the aftermath of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe when the hopes and dreams of the postwar world seemed like they might finally be realized. I remember the 1990s through a child’s eyes, and so much of the trouble that befell this country and all others in that decade largely fell out of my vision. I remember when the Good Friday Agreement was signed and the Troubles ended in the North of Ireland; it was of particular interest to us Irish Americans whose history was born in the same struggle over generations of immigration. Yet my experiences in those first years planted deep within my soul a desire for people to get along and for the peace we knew in those years.

That peace of course faded on that sunny Tuesday morning of September 11^th, 2001, when an attack on New York and Washington propelled us into war in faraway Afghanistan. I wrote several years ago in the Wednesday Blog that to me 9/11 marked the true beginning of the twenty-first century, not the millennium celebrations a year before.^[1] It was the moment when the hopeful optimism we’d built up suddenly came crashing down and left us scarred and stirring for a fight. Yet Saturday’s news didn’t remind me as much of 9/11. It didn’t remind me of the national unity we saw after the attacks, or the outpouring of sympathy that led to emotional scenes of the Star Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn of the Republic being played at a royally attended memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Instead, the aerial attack that the President ordered on Iran’s nuclear facilities reminded me more of a rainy Wednesday in mid-March 2003. That week my Mom and I were in St. Louis visiting my aunt, uncle, and cousins who lived there at the time, and on the morning of March 19^th we read in the papers that the rumored war with Iraq would likely start in the next 24 hours. Sure enough, after a day spent at the Gateway Arch, we watched around 9 pm that evening as the younger President Bush made a speech from the Oval Office announcing the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. All I’d ever heard of Hussein was that he was a bad man, a dictator of the worst sort, and in all fairness he was. Still, none of us watching together in that West County living room expected the war would last for as long as it did.

Combined, the Wars on Terror became a common feature in the childhood of my generation. We knew a time before war, but all we’d seen for so long were these wars fought in distant places that we’d easily forgotten what a time of peace could be like. In general, as a child I thought more favorably of the war in Afghanistan than the one in Iraq, after all our military invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime and capture the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. I got used to regularly seeing the convoys of Chinook helicopters flying over our house en route to Fort Leavenworth, 16 miles (26 km) to the north. At certain points during the wars, they flew overhead several times per day. War consumed the American psyche in a way that after a while I became quite uncomfortable with. I began to see the human toll of the wars in the returning veterans who, once the homecoming celebrations were over, were left to deal with their experiences often on their own. I saw a mean-streak that was always there in our society become more prominent directed toward anyone who could be an easy target. I’m sad to say I’ve joined in this from time to time, something I regret.

For as long as any of us can remember we’ve used our religions to justify that mean streak and the violence it produces. Famously, the Mahatma Gandhi is supposed to have remarked that he liked Christianity but had never seen it practiced because Christ preached that we ought to “love our neighbor as ourselves.”^[2] How’s that going?

We often think of high-minded ideals like this in a very Augustinian context, that it’s something we’ll get to when we need to, “Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!”^[3] We either haven’t faced our mortality or don’t recognize the humanity inherent to being mortal. Knowing that our lives have an ending gives us reason to act while we can, and in that action, we have the potential to lead our lives and those around us away from the trials of the last quarter-century toward a better life.

When I’m asked to define myself in short keywords, I usually say something along the lines of “I’m a historian of Chicago Irish American Catholic roots.” There are so many different stems that could be followed from the roots of that one statement whence grow the orchard of my life. After all, I’ve lived in Kansas City now since the millennium, in spite of my stubborn devotion to my native metropolis. Yet more and more as I progress further in my career and my studies, reading so often the works of Renaissance cosmographers and naturalists who rooted their lives and work in the revival of the classical Greek & Roman past I’ve come to know more about Renaissance humanism. This philosophical tradition sought to center humanity in our understanding of the Cosmos in contrast to the older scholastic preference for understanding all things in a theocentric manner. Still, some humanists again drew their work as a meditation on Nature as drawn from the Divine Spark of creation. Most prominent among these was Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536) and his friend St. Thomas More (1478–1535) who are two of the most prominent Christian humanists of the Renaissance. I studied Erasmus and More in great detail in my History master’s and wrote about their influence on the education of More’s daughter Margaret Roper (1505–1544) and granddaughter Mary Basset (c. 1523–1572) in my master’s thesis. And as my work continues to progress, I see this same tradition of Christian humanism present in the cosmography of André Thevet (1516–1590) who revolved his accounts of what Joan-Pau Rubiés has called the “Renaissance of global encounters” around drawing a greater understanding of God and Creation.^[4]

For years then, living with these humanists in my reading and my work, I found many parallels and descendants of their thought present in the things I was reading for fun. Carl Sagan’s secular humanism for instance owes much of its ancestry to the Renaissance and Enlightenment humanists who came before him. Sagan’s perspective of the minuteness of humanity decentered us from even the Renaissance humanists’ mission yet drew some of these same themes of putting humanity in our rightful, little place from Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–1592) own early skepticism. Like our own time, Montaigne lived and worked in a time of war, Philippe Desan writes that “there were eight civil wars in France during Montaigne’s lifetime.”^[5] He laid a skeptical path upon which Sagan would eventually devise his own Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot, a path paved in the decades after Montaigne’s death by Descartes (1596–1650) and in the Enlightenment by Rousseau (1712–1778) and Voltaire (1694–1778). I find so much to be admired in this contemporary secular humanism, I myself agree with the view that religion and politics should be kept separate having seen enough instances of detrimental influence from religious authorities in the political theatre. Perhaps then a better way to define my thinking is as a twenty-first century Christian humanist, following in the path laid by Erasmus and More five centuries ago and building out my worldview with bricks and mortar created from the Catholic notion of social justice and the commonweal which tries to live up to that ideal that we should “love our neighbor as ourselves.”

I know many brave people who have put their lives on the line for others whether in war, in our local emergency services, or in any other capacity. The Catholic Church teaches a theory of just war, which I’ve long had trouble with. At the start of the current war in Gaza I wrote about this, deferring the question to say

“I’d rather negotiate for as long as possible, try to find common ground with a potential enemy in the same way that I try to speak to those I interact with on a daily basis in their own language. Yet sometimes it does come down to this question of whether after all the negotiating and the impasses that have resulted if fighting is justified?”^[6]

In that blog post I tried to connect the war that never needed to start in Gaza to Montaigne’s own criticism of his fellow Frenchmen during their Wars of Religion. As this war has progressed, I’ve concluded that the only justifiable side to take is to reinforce my own claim to humanism and hope and pray and in my own way quietly advocate for peace to my elected officials. Just as I’ve known many brave people who were willing to die for their beliefs in the uniformed line of duty, I’ve known many also who are willing to face arrest, condemnation, and even death to stand up to the horrors we unleashed upon ourselves 80 years ago when we entered the age of nuclear war. I’ve known priests and nuns through the years who have stood up to the evil ways in which our scientific advances have been used for the sake of all of us. The President who ordered the atomic bombs be dropped, Harry Truman, is a local to Kansas City, and knew several of my relatives. My great-grandfather Gene Donnelly always said that the bombs saved his life and the lives of millions of others as preparations were well underway for the Allied invasion of Japan 80 years ago this summer. Again, with the question of just war, when this moral question of whether Truman should’ve used the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki comes up, I don’t have an easy answer because I can see both sides of the question.

So, this Saturday when the news broke that the current President ordered an aerial attack on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities, I wasn’t surprised, but I was certainly scared. For my entire life, and for much of my parents’ lives we’ve lived in the shadow of war with Iran, a country whose revolution was as much a reaction to American involvement in its own domestic affairs as it was in reaction to the Shah and his government. Over the weekend, as I’ve read more of the reactions to the American entry into the war between Iran and Israel, one shared by a friend in the Kansas House of Representatives struck me the most. The Facebook post was written by a man whose father had taught foreign policy classes about Iran for decades, and several of that professor’s students were involved in the Iran nuclear negotiations initiated and concluded by the Obama Administration a decade ago. The professor’s son made two stark points: this was the first time we had approached the Ayatollah’s government as respectable partners, and in part because of this we reached a peaceful settlement with Iran on the question of their nuclear program, but that peace was eliminated by the current President after he was first elected in 2017. Why? Another friend of mine made the point that until peace is more profitable than war, we will know only war. I remember what peace was like, though living in this armed camp of a country I doubt I’ll see it anytime soon. The reactions here at home to our attack on Iran fell along the same partisan lines as every other issue these days. The President’s supporters cheered him on, while those of us opposing his agenda questioned the constitutionality of the attack considering Congress was given no prior notice.

What strikes me most is that this President says he seeks peace. On Monday afternoon he announced on his social media platform that he’d negotiated a ceasefire between Iran and Israel that would go into effect at 6 pm Eastern Time. Yet the following morning I woke to read about more missile strikes in the New York Times. Did he actually negotiate a ceasefire, or was this another social media musing? Does he really want peace enough that he is willing to put his political future and the unity of his coalition on the line? Are any of our political leaders, for that matter, willing to try? I want to make my own effort if not for myself than that the generation now being born might experience that same peace I remember from my youth.

I don’t want to be known as a pacifist; our long history has taught us that there will always be schoolyard bullies to stand up to. Rather, let me be known as a humanist who seeks to raise the human spirit above the petty squabbles of war and violence that have so marked our memory. For if history, philosophy, and theology have taught us anything it is that alongside every call to arms is a cry to try living a better life. While history and philosophy study the rational and discernible aspects of this, it is in theology that we must find stock for our future wellbeing, for we must believe in ourselves and the fundamental goodness of our nature if we are ever to achieve the dream of humanity. For in our beliefs structured in religion’s purest form we reflect the best vision of ourselves.

^[1] “Masks,” Wednesday Blog 4.15.

^[2] Luke 10:27.

^[3] St. Augustine, Confessions 8.7.

^[4] Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Renaissance of Encounters and the Renaissance of Antiquities,” Renaissance Quarterly 78, no. 1 (2025): 1–41, at 12.

^[5] Philippe Desan, Montaigne: A Life, trans. Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal, (Princeton University Press, 2017), xxxiii.

^[6] “On the Cannibals,” Wednesday Blog 4.20.

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Correction: 25 June 2025, 13:12 CDT. Amended a typographical error that latched the final paragraph to the penultimate one.

On Vanity

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This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.

Today, in Rome the College of Cardinals will convene for the new conclave to elect our next Pope. By the time you read this we may have already seen white smoke rise from the chimney and met our new pontiff by his papal name on the balcony of St. Peter’s. Or more likely when you read this the cardinals will be amid one volley or another of voting rounds and deliberating their right course of action. Since the death of Pope Francis, I’ve felt rebuffed by the electoral speculation over who will be the next pope; by and large I’ve avoided reading any of these articles or watching any of these analyses. On the one hand, in my lifetime these lists of papabili have often been wrong. Francis was an unexpected choice. Yet on the other hand I see a sense of vanity in all this speculation which seeks the political power of the Papacy while ignoring its pastoral nature. I’ve long heard that the eventual choice of Pope is supposed to be directed by the Holy Spirit, whispering perhaps into the ears of the men in red like God did to Elijah in the cave. In my own experience, I’ve seen this most in the realization that the best path for me to take often is the strangest or most winding in character.

It takes a great deal of humility to take that particularly uncertain way in life, to not know where you’re going to end up. You have to learn to trust in yourself and in the people around you to make that path work. I’ve learned to expect things to break, and nothing that I try to work, and to figure out how to move forward in spite of what I’d dreamed and hoped for. I try to learn from my experience even when it is painful or heart wrenching to see dreams vanish and new realities, perhaps less glowing than what I hoped for, take their place. Still, the best way in my experience is to be patient and let things grow naturally around you and within you. The initial instinct isn’t always accurate, yet it should not be discounted either. There are days when the useless is best just to let your mind rest and decide where to go next. The late Renaissance French humanist essayist Michel de Montaigne (he actually wrote “I am no philosopher”) wrote in his essay “Of Vanity” of the men of his own time when France was wracked by forty years of civil war, “a time when it is so common to do evil, it is practically praiseworthy to do what is merely useless.”^[1] I am often focused on resolving questions by finding immediate solutions, even if they are smaller steps leading to a greater whole. Yet in recent weeks I’ve found those solutions aren’t always needed or warranted, for they can sift the complexities of a problem so far down that the problem itself slips through the strainer and remains unresolved.

I recognize a degree of vanity here; I figure I have a strong mind and being reasonably well educated that I can attend to any problem and find a logical solution. Yet logic cannot account for humanity in all our chaos and charm. The character and nature of humanity is to spy ourselves in the glass and be marveled by it. We can be so caught in imagining our own glories and our own defeats that we miss the lived moments in between when we are surviving the daily fare and writing even the smallest of verses which will contribute to the song of our lives. I’ve learned to accept that my wishes for things are not always going to happen, and that as much as I warm my soul with dreams of wonders to come those dreams will only be realized by living with the people around me, learning about them, trying to understand them, supporting them, and appreciating them for who they are. Why enforce my own persuasions on you when I could appreciate you, dear Reader, for your own self and your cosmovision? This is a word I only recently learned, I saw it first in Surekha Davies’s new book Humans: A Monstrous History. It seems to originate in Spanish as a way of expressing the way in which reality is subjectively understood through our sensory perceptions. Descartes’s famous maxim for knowledge, “I think, therefore I am” means in this sense that we know what we know because we can perceive it. The cosmos in all its wonder is familiar to us through our sight, hearing, smell, and touch. I would much rather wait to hear your song and listen to it harmonize with mine than pull your voice into my own melody against its own nature.

Montaigne admired those in his generation who kept up the good nature of humanity, its customs, laws, and mores in spite of the world around them losing so much of that common purpose. In quoting Cicero, “not by the calculation of your income, but by your manner of living and your culture, is your wealth really to be reckoned,” the essayist speaks the greater value of a good life enriched by a passion for community and a charitable outlook on our pursuits.^[2] While I’m a practicing Catholic, ever striving to be more faithful in my life, I firmly believe with my whole being that the state should be secular, the better to reflect the totality of the people from whom government derives its power. I would be vain to demand that the state reflect my Catholicism at the detriment of all my neighbors, even my fellow Catholics, whose faith is personal and distinct from my own. A good person recognizes this and seeks communion through mutual respect and appreciation. The most central tenant of my faith is that God is love, άγάπη, φιλία, and ἕρως alike in the original Greek, and the greatest expression of this love is in our liberty to make our own lives, our free will. If we are meant to live in this image then surely we ought to lower our pride and our vanity and hail the liberty of those around us to live their own lives and make their own choices?

For much of my life I’ve had a hard time taking criticism. I’m better at it today, yet it still is a something I know I will always need to work on. I’m no longer in a state of mind where I feel that I need to justify my actions or choices to everyone. On the inverse side, several years ago I finally caught myself trying to deflect praise with a witty quip that deflated some of the experience. This is something that I’d been doing for a long time perhaps to not inflate my ego too far. I went through my phase of wanting to be important, wanting to be a leader, and to be at the front of things and today when I am in that position in so many organizations, I’ve found that it’s much more fun to be a part of a team working together to achieve our common ends. Together these twin forces pull me toward a humility that I hope keeps me grounded, in which I’ve allowed myself to experience my successes while embracing the troubles that occurred in the course of those victories.

In my academic career I’ve published to date one public-facing article about my historical zoology research into the three-toed sloth and an encyclopedia entry titled “Amerindians in Brazil” for the volume South America: From European Contact to Independence which was published earlier this year. In both instances, I’ve since found things that I got wrong. It was a bit of a shock at first to realize this. In the case of the encyclopedia entry, I made a rather large error in misgendering a god, the Tupi deity Maire-Monan who I interpreted as feminine following the lead of the sixteenth-century Portuguese authorities, only to realize while I was writing a book chapter last summer about magic in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest the error I’d made. As such, the correction to the encyclopedia entry appears in the footnotes of that forthcoming chapter. Likewise, in the editing stage of a forthcoming article of mine, my first peer-reviewed article to be published, I was presented with conclusive evidence that my prior conclusions that the three-toed sloth found in my sources cannot be definitively identified as a southern maned sloth (Bradypus crinitus) as I’d written in that article “The ‘Sufficiently Strange’ Sloth” for EPOCH Magazine’s June 2024 issue but is in fact more likely either a northern maned sloth (B. torquatus) or a brown-throated sloth (B. variegatus). That prior assertion in favor of the southern maned sloth stands corrected now not only in my forthcoming article “A Sloth in the First French Colony in the Americas” but also in the latest draft of Chapter 3 of my dissertation.

A few years ago, I would have still had significant trouble accepting these critiques out of a strong sense of embarrassment at making such a mistake. In the case of the sloth’s historical zoology, I thought I read all there was to read about the different three-toed sloth species which live in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, yet I was proven wrong by a generous reviewer who even offered a bibliography of where I could look to find more reliable information. Were, I always fixated on the looking glass of my successes I would surely miss the flaws that pronounce my humanity and not see the ample room for growth. I know that I’m not perfect, in fact I revel in the fact. And while my faith exists, I challenge anyone who claims to know definitive things about matters of belief whether they can really know the mind of God, a concept which as I wrote previously in my blog post from 12 March titled “The Divine Essence,” that divinity extends in scale far beyond human comprehension.

These last few years I’ve long felt a sense of disconnect between the two poles of my life. On the one hand in Binghamton, I felt a sense of professional accomplishment, I was at a good university conducting research and teaching, and a part of an academic community, however disparate that community was in practice. Yet I missed my family, I missed the Midwest, my home cities of Chicago and Kansas City became longed for isles of the blessed far to the west on the flatlands beyond the Appalachians. I longed to be active in my parish and to offer my talents to my brother Hibernians in elected office. I missed the regularity of the live music in Kansas City, the greater presence of the Kansas City Symphony in this city than anything I could find in Binghamton. Yet when I left Binghamton at a moment when I know I needed to leave, I found that I gave up more than I necessarily wanted. I lost that sense of professional accomplishment and surrounded myself by friends from beyond the academy who appreciate what I do but don’t necessarily understand the nuances of it. In the last few months, I’ve found something of that professional community through the learned societies that I’m a part of and at academic conferences where once again those two poles seem linked by a common axis. That axis is essential to a good life because it provides the balance which allows the individual to truly live to their fullest potential as a part of a wider community. I’ve known true solitude, a mantra of mine in recent weeks has been the simple Irish phrase, “Is mé i m’aonar,” or “I am alone.” It’s a plaintive call of sorts, yet it’s also a moment to learn from, that as much as I’m used to this existence that I want to grow out of it. Montaigne wrote in “Of Vanity” that “it is pitiful to be in a place where everything you see involves and concerns you.”^[3] This is the solitary life, a life where about you all things revolve, and what’s worst about it is that it can be lived in community. Alone together was a phrase I read time and again during the recent pandemic. Yet even then with our need to stay apart we found ways to be together. I spent much of the pandemic years here in Kansas City rather than in Binghamton and still felt far more closely attuned to my professional community and the friends who populate it.

In these past few weeks, I’ve been happiest when I’ve had that connection with my family and friends, when I’m with other people and experiencing their lives, their passions, their perceptions of our shared world. I put faith in the currency of human connection and community because that is the most valuable coinage I’ve yet seen. All the gold and silver that humanity has ever mined cannot compare with the value of community and the humility it brings out in all of us. I have many highly accomplished, brilliant friends, and I’m delighted to count myself among them. There is some vanity in these friendships, after all we approach each other with our own experiences and stories to share, highlighting the things we’ve done, yet in a good relationship we do so to elevate our friends and encourage them to seek greater things for themselves. I feel fortunate to have met these friends, and to be able to put my talents to use serving our common cause.This week then as the cardinals vote in Rome, I hope they will look not just to their own personal interests, theological bent, or political persuasion. I pray they will listen for that suggestion that seems just strange enough that it could be right, and that they chose a Pope to lead our Church who will continue to build bridges that may close the divides erected for millennia between ourselves and so many of our fellows. I hope for a pope who will be a friend to all, a good diplomat who can unite disparate peoples together into one common cause. May his humility guide him to be the pope we need now in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, and when he is elected may we rise to the occasion to better ourselves.

^[1] Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, (Stanford University Press, 1965), 3.9., p. 722.

^[2] Montaigne, Essays 3.9., p. 724.

^[3] Montaigne, Essays 3.9., pp. 725–26.

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On Servant Leadership

On Servant Leadership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkanePhoto: By Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Photographer name), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34828249

Photo Credit: By Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Photographer name), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34828249

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This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.

Over the past weekend as we marked the 250^th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Siege of Boston, and the beginning of the American Revolution, I started to think about writing this week about that anniversary. I partook in the Veterans’ Rally on the Plaza here in Kansas City, which was part of the National Day of Action against Kings. During the hour walk to and from the event in Mill Creek Park I thought long and hard about what I would say, of my fascination with Paul Revere as a child, or about my first visit to Boston in 2002 when my parents & I walked the Freedom Trail with a family friend who I reconnected with on this most recent trip. Normally, at this point in April I’m more focused on the more recent revolutionary anniversary of the Easter Rising which began with the reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in front of the General Post Office in Dublin. Perhaps I could blend the two revolutionary touchstones into something profound for our own moment; of the unrealized dreams and aspirations of both sets of revolutionaries.

Yet events of the following days have changed all that. I’m writing this now close to two hours after I heard the sad news of the death of Pope Francis. After a half an hour replying to messages from my parents and various friends who texted me the news over the night, I wrote my own brief message which appeared on my social media accounts:

This one feels different to me. Papa Frank was our pope: from the Americas, a Jesuit, and more open minded to the world. His Universal Synod will remain a testament to the man and his twelve years of service to our Church.

Francis’s pontificate marked my early adult years. He was elected at the height of my time as a student at Rockhurst University, when I was surrounded by Jesuit philosophy and spirituality, at a moment when his election seemed to match the optimism I felt in our world. Pope Francis remained a rock amid the tempestuousness of the years that have followed. His humility and humanity shone beyond either of the other two popes of my lifetime. Last summer, my European tour originally included nearly a month in Italy on the way to a dear friend’s wedding party. I’d planned to be in Rome for one Wednesday in the hopes of going into the Paul VI Audience Hall to see Pope Francis in person, even if I was way in the back of the room and wouldn’t be able to meet him. The Swiss & Italian portions of that trip didn’t end up happening, and I regret not getting to see the man in person.

Despite this, I felt that I knew Pope Francis on a personal level. He always struck me as another guy trying to make the best out of life. I’ve heard many people refer to him as the grandfather of the Church away in the Vatican keeping us in mind and in good humor. I like this image; it matches what I saw when he was interviewed by the American television networks. Like Voltaire, my mental image of Pope Francis is him with a smile on his face, an earnest and caring smile and perhaps with a joke in mind. Pope Francis was a leader I was willing to follow because he did so with intense humility. I was standing in the lobby of the Campus Ministry, Counseling, and Career Counseling offices at Rockhurst that afternoon of 13 March 2013 when Cardinal Tauran delivered the Habemus papam announcement from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and announced that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was our new Pope, Francis, a name chosen to commemorate the humblest of saints. That he asked us to pray for him, to help him in his pontificate was for me the first sign that this man was different.

The Catholic Church exists in a very different world today than it did a century ago. Then when only 150 years had passed since the eruption of the American Revolution and even less since the anticlerical outbursts of the French Revolution the relationship of the Church to democracy was more fraught. A century ago, fascists in Italy claimed they were acting in defense of tradition and of the Church to attacks from communism. We saw where that road led in the Second World War. A century ago, the Church emerged from the ashes of the Irish Civil War in a dominant position in the new Free State, a position it would hold through the founding of the Republic in 1949 and into my own lifetime. Here in America, Catholic voices led the chorus of the most extreme and anti-democratic factions in this country railing against anyone who opposed them, even their fellow Catholics.

I worried twelve years ago as we neared the end of the first decade of Pope Benedict XVI’s reign that the disconnect between the Church and our world would only continue, and that locally the voices of we liberals and progressives in the Church would remain a hushed minority. We received two new bishops in Greater Kansas City that were appointed by St. John Paul II in 2004; in January Archbishop Fred Naumann was appointed to lead the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas where I grew up, and in May Bishop Robert Finn was appointed to lead the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, which covers the Missouri half of this metropolis. Both were far more conservative than their predecessors, and far more dogmatic. Bishop Finn closed a great many of the social justice ministries of the Diocese and alienated at least a quarter of the local Catholics. My own parish, St. Francis Xavier, often stood in sharp opposition to his leadership as the Jesuit parish remained welcoming and open to all. By the time Pope Francis was elected Finn’s leadership was crumbling under the weight of his inaction and obstruction with the abuse scandals, though Archbishop Naumann was only replaced in the last two weeks with the far more synodal and open Bishop W. Shawn McKnight, who previously led the Diocese of Jefferson City in central Missouri. I for one am hopeful that Archbishop elect McKnight will prove to be a better listener to the Catholics of his new archdiocese.

I remember the sun shining on the day when Pope Francis was elected. It was actually very similar to today, Monday, 21 April 2025, and my sense of a new dawn for our Church. The Sun was shining overhead, and the Spring birdsong was resounding around campus. I experienced many of the same things today. It’s profound to me how similar those two days are.

It did feel revolutionary in many ways when he was elected. He was the first Pope from the Americas, an Argentinian by birth. He was the first Jesuit pontiff, the first pope in a long time to be the child of immigrants. Pope Francis felt like he was one of us. Over the weekend I thought a great deal about what it takes to enact change and restore optimism and hope to a society such as ours which is so bereft of it. Pope Francis brought hope because he was one of us. The minutemen who stood up for their communities and their rights as citizens of a democracy 250 years ago at Concord were like us. The Irish Volunteers like so many of my great-grandparents’ siblings who stood up to British colonial rule a century ago and for better or worse kept fighting even after some liberty had been attained were like us. The people I saw on Saturday were mere ordinary people standing up not just for themselves but for all of us.

The true merits of a servant leader lie in their willingness to help everyone, not only their friends or fellows. Pope Francis was the Papa for all Catholics, especially those who disagreed with him and so loudly denounced his efforts at reform. He was the Pope who listened to us even when the bishops receiving his messages didn’t always heed them. I participated in the Synod on Synodality in the initial parochial stage when I was still in Binghamton; I spent an evening writing my own lengthy and heartfelt answers to the questionnaire, and when my parish’s report was published, I was excited to see some of my comments appear amid the harmonious chorus of like-minded people at my parish. Yet when the diocesan report was published, I was saddened to see how little of that chorus was heard, and at the one listening session I was able to attend several years into the Synod process I felt that as much as we in the laity heard each other that our local clerical leadership kept their ears closed.A servant leader listens to the people. They are approachable, open, and honest about their decisions. I’ve known many leaders who fit this bill: from the late Pope to many of my pastors down the years, to our Mayor Quinton Lucas, a man who I consider to be a friend. Servant leaders do great things as ordinary people. During my walk home from the rally, I remembered a scene from the second episode of the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams, one of the touchstones of all millennial history buffs in this country. That scene showed a team of men and oxen pulling the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga past the Adams farm to the Dorchester Heights to the south of Boston. I rewatched this episode that afternoon and felt a upswelling of emotion at seeing something akin to what I saw on the Plaza that afternoon: ordinary people working together for a common cause to make life better for all of us. These are the extraordinary acts of ordinary people. That, dear reader, is servant leadership.

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Montaigne and the Ages of Life

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This week, reflections on Michel de Montaigne’s perception of his changing character throughout his life.

I’m currently reading Philippe Desan’s biography of Michel de Montaigne, the French philosopher and statesman and the father of the essay. Montaigne is an influence for me in how the Wednesday Blog has developed over the last four years that I’ve been writing this weekly. He is also one of the figures on the orbit of my dissertation, and one of the most important sources for critical analysis of the events which I describe in that doctoral work. Philippe Desan in turn is one of, if not the most prolific Montaigne scholar of our time. So, it’s been a delight to read his biography of this man who I’ve gotten to know however faintly through the frame of his Essays in my research.

Most of my work deals with his famous essay “On the Cannibals” found in Volume 1 of that three volume collection. “Des cannibales,” as it’s known in its original French, was published in the first collection of Montaigne’s essays in 1580, and it’s this collection with which I’ve been the most invested in my work. The cannibals of Montaigne’s focus speak to questions of humanity and human dignity which I pose in my dissertation, which is titled “Understanding the Sauvage in André Thevet’s Brazil: 1555-1590.”

Yet it is in the third volume of Essays where Desan established a crucial connection between Montaigne the man and Montaigne the humanist of the late Renaissance preserved in the amber of his words. In the essay titled “On Vanity” Montaigne poses a fascinating self-reflection looking back at his life as he remembered it and who he was at the time he wrote that particular essay near the end of his days. Quoting here from Donald Frame’s 1965 translation, Montaigne wrote that in the years since he published his first edition of essays in 1580 “I have grown older by a long stretch of time; but certainly I have not grown an inch wiser.” Here whether out of humility or in refutation of Aristotle’s maxim that age and experience begats wisdom, Montaigne sees himself as the same light as before. Despite this, Montaigne continued to observe that “myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two; but when better, I simply cannot say.”^[1] This struck me that the essayist could see such a simple yet profound difference between himself as he was when first he wrote and published his magnum opus and the man he later was publishing his third and final volume of essays nearly a decade later.

From my earliest days of extensive writing in my high school years I found myself looking ahead to a time late in my life when I would return to the places of my teenage youth and reflect on what once was and who I’d become. I suppose there’s some vanity of my own in having this profound sense of legacy even from what was then quite an early point in my life. Still, in recent weeks I’ve been reintroduced to younger versions of myself as my family carries out a Spring cleaning and we’ve found decades old boxes of photographs and postcards that I still remember taking and sending yet which haven’t seen the light of day since their capture. I was humbled and heartened to see in particular how loved was the boy I once was, and how inventive and imaginative he could be. Looking at these photos, especially from around my family’s great move from Chicago to Kansas City in 1999, I remember each and every one of them being taken. I remember the sights and sounds, the smells, the prairie winds and the things I was thinking in those first days of my life in Kansas City. These memories have always been there in my mind, yet the subsequent quarter-century has piled many more atop them so that they are now rendered foundations for the memories that comprise me today.

I suspect these days spent pouring over decades-old photos removed some sort of mental block I’d put up out of stress that’s kept my imagination in check in recent months. I longed to have the same expansive dreams and wandering thoughts that’ve populated so much of my consciousness, and now again I find it easy to tap into that deep reservoir which too is built into my memories yet also grows out from them into things which are wonderous and extend beyond the limits of reality toward the possible. Am I then wiser than I was when first I began writing essays in my adolescent and early teenage years? I’d like to think so, at least in some respects. I have a sense of calm today which was lacking in earlier years, and while the stresses of my life are great, as they are for all of us, I know how to accept them and tamper down some of their effects.

Yet in so many ways I do feel that I too am a different person from the kid who moved west all those years ago. Likewise, I see a clear distinction between the student starting high school in the years after the turn of the millennium and imagining his future in the last decades of this century. I’ve learned to live more in the moment in which I find myself, to influence that moment to fit what I aspire it to be. A complex turn of this answer is to consider all the potential lives I might have led, a thought experiment which I’ve considered developing into a short story with some sort of science fiction shenanigans. In one version of this, a broken-down elevator occurring simultaneously across parallel realities as a sort of mirror image resulted in contemporary alternative versions of myself ending up stuck in the same elevator all at once. I could see it either being a bit of a laugh-fest as one version of myself attempted to out-wit the others, or a simmering cauldron of irritation.

What all this speaks to is the complexity of our personalities. We are all multifaceted with so many different competing thoughts and desires and inclinations and perceptions. I’ve thought more recently that perhaps my academic career would be further along if I limited myself to only focusing on my research, yet then again, I’ve always had multiple hats in the ring so why would I stop doing all these different things now? The Wednesday Blog for one remains a sort of release-valve for me to write about things which I’m curious about yet don’t directly relate to my research. I look to my colleagues, and I see people with similar interests and in some cases similar paths they’ve taken to get to where they are today. Several days ago, when I was dwelling in a particular bout of melancholy thinking about the long winter that has grayed the skies over my own doctoral candidacy when compared to my peers, I felt a sense of pride at noticing just how I’ve persisted in my efforts and my work in spite of all the challenges which the last six years have brought. Perhaps it is this combination of trial and hope which forms a person; it’s what formed me into the historian I am today.

When I started writing the Wednesday Blog in March 2021 I did so because I felt such a profound sense of nostalgic hope at one particular memory that surfaced after a sleepless night amid my comprehensive exam studying that I felt compelled to share it with the world. I know for a fact that I am a different person today than I was four years ago when I wrote that blog post about an Air France commercial I remembered seeing on ITV and Channel 4 five years before when I lived in London. The difference lies in the added layers of experience laid by all the trials which I’ve endured and the hopes which’ve kept me going. When I had such tremendous trouble unlocking my imagination and letting myself daydream in the latter months of 2024, I recognized that I am happier when I allow my mind to wander and craft stories that no one else will ever know. These are often stories of the future I hope I might live and the wonders I might come to know and explore. That imagination, that connection with my own consciousness, is the thread that runs all throughout my life and connects these different versions of myself that I’ve grown into and out of with the passing of time.

When Montaigne picked up a copy of the 1588 edition of his Essais, containing all three volumes of musings, he took a pen to it and steadily began correcting things he found beneath the standards he’d developed at that late moment in his life. I don’t often read my own writing after I’ve finished editing a document. I’ll occasionally return to an old blog post when I’m referencing it in a newer one, and even more occasionally if I’ve cited a source before in a previous paper, I’ll open that paper to aid me in citing the same source again in the research project of the moment. Yet, I rarely sit down just to read my own writing. The last time I did I ended up switching from a PDF file back to the Word document version so I could edit as I read. In fact, when I was moving into my apartment in Binghamton in August 2019, I found an essay I wrote in my sophomore year of high school when I was 15 years old. It was a near 20 page essay that attempted to summarize the history of religion in Britain and Ireland from the Stone Age to St. Patrick. Reading it then at the start of my doctorate and thinking about it as an essay that I might grade, I would’ve given it a low B- or maybe a C+.

I need to remember that my old writing fits into a particular time and place in my life and ought to remain in that setting for as long as I can muster the strength to not try to refine it further. These ages in my life mirror those in everyone else’s, and I hope that as I dream about the ages to come, I will be able to share them and live them to their fullest potential. Montaigne died in September 1592, almost 400 years before my own birth. At that point, he’d made his name in politics and in philosophy. The Wednesday Blog is essentially my collection of essays of varying length and quality. I hope that when I wander off in my own time that my life in all its ages will have been as fulfilled and prolific as the great essayist.

^[1] Montaigne, Essais (EB) 3.9.433r, Frame, 736.

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Dominion or Cultivation of Nature?

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This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.

A line in the Book of Genesis that comes into play in my dissertation is in the very first chapter of that first book of the Bible in the first Creation story in which God made humanity “after our likeness” and gave us “dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth.” In the context of my research this divine proclamation of human dominion over the rest of Nature in Verse 26 was used to justify the conquest and colonization of the Americas by Europeans beginning in the last decade of the fifteenth century. Here these newcomers from across the sea found worlds that to them seemed less touched by human hands. Brazil in particular stood out for André Thevet, the man at the heart of my dissertation, because its great forests seemed unaltered by its human inhabitants. The Tupinambá had in fact been living and using the great Atlantic Forest for generations, yet to Thevet coming from a France covered by cities, towns, villages, and a countryside that’d been farmed and ploughed for thousands of years he beheld something that to him seemed primeval in this world on the far side of the Atlantic.

I grew up hearing the adage that before settlement of the Midwestern states in the Early Republic and Antebellum decades that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River leaping from tree to tree without ever setting foot on the ground, and that these great forests were ancient and unspoiled by human hands. I now know that while there once were great forests in the old Northwest Territory, the Great Lakes states where I was born, those forests seemed far deeper and darker to the European explorers and colonists of the 17^th and 18^th centuries because the diseases which their predecessors introduced on North America’s coasts in the 16^th century. Those pandemics killed vast potions of this continent’s indigenous populations such that by the Revolution the old indigenous forestry efforts of controlled burns were fewer and farther between.

I was born in the western suburbs of Chicago, a city which is famous for its engineering triumphs that shaped the natural world on which it was built. Chicago stands on the borderland between the Eastern Woodlands and the Prairies. Generations of engineers and innovators created an environment suitable for the building of one of the greatest metropolises in all of human history. I remember as a child listening with a sense of awe and pride to my Dad’s retelling of the story of how engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River at the turn of the last century to keep Lake Michigan, the city’s drinking water source, clean from all the pollution in the river. The western suburbs where I grew up were largely built as bedroom communities for downtown commuters. Our home was 26 miles west of the Loop, which in a preindustrial context would’ve take a pedestrian nearly 9 hours to travel. Wheaton, my hometown, became accessible from the city thanks to the railroad, in this case the Union Pacific which as of time of writing continues to operate trains for Metra through Wheaton’s two commuter stations into the Ogilvie Transportation Center, or Northwestern Station as I knew it. On the Metra you can today get from Wheaton to the Loop in 45 to 50 minutes, making it a viable commute for many. This sprawl is possible because of industry and the ways in which we’ve grown in our civilization with this mentality that we have dominion over nature and ought to use it and change it to our needs.

An even more radical transformation of nature can be found in my adopted home city of Kansas City, a metropolis of 2.2 million built around the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers about 400 miles southwest of Chicago as the crow flies. The land here is a mix of old glacial hills and prairie, yet unlike in Chicago where the city and suburbs were built from the old forests which survive as preserves in various pockets, in this drier region trees normally only grow in those few places where rivers, creeks, and streams flow. Kansas City is on the easternmost edge of the arid western half of North America, and so this region’s original state could not support the same kind of verdant canopy nor the large population which it does today. Brookside is a beautiful place; I love my neighborhood in particular for all the old trees which line our streets. The oldest of those trees were planted by developers working for J.C. Nichols between 1906 and 1950 when he built the Country Club District, of which Brookside is one part. The Kansas City Public Library’s history collections contain photographs of my neighborhood when it was just being built in the 1920s and while I recognize the contours of the hills, I find the lack of tree canopy to be somewhat alien to my recollection.

In developing neighborhoods like Brookside, our ancestors sought to create lived realities which fit what they knew in the Northeast, where too as William Cronon so expertly wrote in Changes in the Land, the landscape there was transformed by the first generations of colonists to resemble something of England, the Netherlands, and France depending on whether the colonists were in New England, the Hudson Valley, or along the St. Lawrence River. I find something reassuring and communal in seeing similar neighborhoods to my own in cities across this continent, from Atlantic to Pacific; this tells me that there are others whose lives might be something like mine, and that I’m not as alone as I often feel. It’s the same reason in fact why I like watching Jeopardy! or the national evening news broadcasts, because I know millions of others are also watching these programs, and maybe even a few people I know & love are among them.

What I hope I’m getting at here is a sense that I have that we’ve built up our world and transformed the nature of the worlds ours replaced in order to better fit some sense of normalcy which has been brought further and further toward the fringe of our world from some idealized source. I for one am drawn to the sense that this source is English, owing to the prevalence of English names in so many of these neighborhoods whether drawn in the Midwestern case from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, or the Old South, or in each of those cases from England itself. Yet with that embrace of a nostalgia for an idyll that may never have fully existed, of the idealized American town whose cultural roots fall in the idealized English market town, do we also carry on the sense of ownership over nature? This dominion after all caused English forests to be so depleted in the early modern period that wood began to be imported from New England and Canada for the building of ships for commerce and war alike.

I’ve grown used to expecting a less than favorable reception from other people. I’m ready to flinch and to put up my defenses whenever necessary. I suppose this is a learned hesitation; I’ve met a lot of people throughout the years who were interested in me only for their own benefit. Recently I loaned out a pen to a friend and immediately reawakened a 20 year old memory of doing the same thing in middle school only for the classmate to declare that pen was theirs now and not mine, leaving me to write the rest of the day with an old stubby pencil that was barely longer than my thumb and forefinger are wide. Last week, I wrote about how traffic even in Kansas City seems to have gotten worse, and the behavior of drivers across the board more aggressive since the recent pandemic. Unlike my Dad who learned to drive in Chicago, I never use my car’s horn out of a general knowledge that in this country other drivers are likely to have guns, and I’d rather my frustration at their conduct remain unannounced to them in the name of self-preservation.

The great trial of the present moment seems to me to be one of ordinary people like you or me just trying to survive amid a deluge of unnecessary troubles brought on by the greed of a few. I believe that before profits or efficiency that empathy must always come first in all our deliberations. I hope for the best intentions in all people whom I meet, and in many cases I see the good in their eyes and posture and in the way they interact with our world. Do we allow for the flood to persist because we are so jaded to the naïve hope that love could actually be the most powerful emotion? I know that love is more potent than greed, and that in the end it’s flame will always burn brighter than one fueled by fear. Yet love requires patience, as St. Paul wrote, and patience is not something which industry can well afford to have.Should we then look for other ways of living? If we are to begin anywhere, it’s to remember that we are natural beings ourselves, yes made in God’s image, yet evolved out of the same natural materials that begat all other life on Earth. I don’t know where the Divine comes into play in any of this, you can read my recent blog post on that topic for more. In fact, I see myself as much a hopeful skeptic as a believer. What I do know is what I’ve experienced, and that is that there is no more powerful emotion than love which burns so bright as to blind the mind and senses to any other voice. I for one love the aspiration and mission of studying how the innate and fundamental in nature was understood in our historic past, and I hope to continue learning more about this. Yet I feel the weight of our world on my shoulders, and like many others who feel isolated from the higher pursuit of wisdom in all its philosophical pulcherity, today I’m just trying to keep that love which I feel burning bright while I also do what I can to survive in this world we’ve built. It is our dominion, which is a triumph to our humanity, yet its roots are still in nature and nature will outlive anything we build.

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Tóg go bog é | Take it easy

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This week, a few words on taking life slower.

Where I grew up first in the Chicago suburbs and later on the western edge of Kansas City, Kansas the average speed limits were around 35 mph (56 km/h). I think there’s something to be said about a life that’s taken at those sorts of speeds, that the speed we drive from place to place reflects in how we approach other aspects of our lives all the same. By comparison, in the year that I lived in London I fell out of practice with my driving, instead I knew how to navigate by walking speed, closer to 3 mph (5 km/h). Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I found Binghamton to be such an incongruent place to live because the average speed limit is 30 mph on the local streets and roads in that valley.

When I learned to drive then, the average speed that I found myself at hovered around 35 mph. Furthermore, I learned to drive on the highways before I learned city driving, as most of my early daily drives were on the highway K-7 between our home in Piper and my high school in western Lenexa, Kansas. It was a 30 minute commute each way to school every day, and one that I don’t remember getting that old too fast. In more recent memory, I found that driving a good 20-25 minutes every day down to the school I taught at in Leawood, Kansas did grow taxing to the point that now I’m less willing to drive quite as far in town as I did even a few short years ago.

I’ve noticed several types of driving and several variations on speed that my car will embody depending on how I’m feeling on a given day. There are times when I am so attuned to my surroundings and to my car, which I lovingly named the Mazda Rua 6 years ago, that it will feel as though we are one in the same, that my car will adjust its direction and speed with the slightest turn of my hands, or the flick of my eyes from one direction to another. This feeling was especially pronounced on my 14 long drives between Kansas City and Binghamton that I undertook between August 2019 and December 2022. On those drives, I would usually keep a steady pace of around 75-80 mph (120-129 km/h) on the Interstates between the Catskills on the eastern edge of my route and the Great Plains to the west. When I’m out on the open road I’ll still sometimes set my car into cruise control at this sort of speed, which tends to be the pace of highway traffic anyway and let the day’s drive go by.

Yet I’ve noticed more and more in my drives around town, I’m not going quite as fast as I used to. I tend to drive a few times per week between my home in Brookside and my place of work in the Crossroads, always on the city streets and always in a decent amount of traffic for Kansas City. Yet the pace of traffic has slowed somewhat; where before I’d keep to that 35 mph threshold, now I’m fine if I’m hovering between 30 and 35 mph (48 and 56 km/h). Just before writing this, I drove home from a haircut with my cousin Richard Morrissey at his salon in Mission, Kansas and I found that I didn’t particularly care that the traffic was going 30 mph, especially when I crossed the border and merged onto the northern reaches of Ward Parkway. Nor did I mind the slower speeds when I decided to turn off that major boulevard and onto a side street that goes up Sunset Hill toward Loose Park where traffic really ought to be moving no faster than 15 mph (24 km/h). I didn’t mind the slower pace because I didn’t feel the need for speed.

My generation grew up with the role models of our parents and grandparents whose generations worked day in and day out for decades and who built our sprawling metropolises in which we need cars to get around. I’ve accepted this world that I was born into and its hurried tempo and made myself far busier than I probably need to be. On a recent day when I had 3 meetings in a row in the span of 3 hours I was struck by the fact that when I was still in Binghamton I was busy but not this busy; that the reason why I’ve not been keeping up with podcasts or TV shows the way I used to is because I simply don’t have as much time in the day for them.

The key here is a learned moderation which goes a long way to what I find is a happier life. There are things which I hope for and want with an eagerness that inspires me to plow on forward yet I’ve learned that the best things I can hope for are those which occur in the quiet moments of calm between those rushing evocations of the modern life. I for one would much prefer to just be an academic spending my days reading and writing about historical zoology and having deep and enriching discussions with friends and colleagues. I would much rather listen to my colleagues about what they’re researching, and about the things they’re learning in their own particular topics. And yet, when I was with my colleagues at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference the week before last in Boston, I felt that I stood out in some ways from them by all the different fires I have going at once. I’ve always been one with many different projects in the works. Even now, alongside this weekly blog and my dissertation I have two articles in the review and editing stage, a third that I’m hoping to submit to a journal soon, two books on the way that I will be reviewing, and a short story I’m plodding through writing.

On top of this I hold several different committee assignments in the Fr. Bernard Donnelly AOH alongside my primary recording secretary duties. I also work part-time as an usher team captain for the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts and now have somewhat of a hands off approach to my Mom’s efforts in leading and organizing a local progressive protest organization called Blue Brookside. Simply put, I have to persist at this higher speed to keep track of everything.

One of the first phrases I learned when I started studying Irish in 2007 was one which I initially misheard: Tóg go bog é, which translates as “Take it easy!” This is a nice sentiment, and one which I’m trying to live, to be less worried, to inflict less stress upon myself. Perhaps even though I didn’t identify it as such this may well be what I’m trying to give up for Lent this year. You might say it’s working in some stripes yet not in others. What remains is a key question about how I can grow from finding this balance between busyness and nonchalance? Maybe this is something we all need, time away from the constant stream of information and news and worry. I’ve recently begun responding when people talk about social media that I admire those who’ve dropped away from it; were it not such a good way of staying in touch with friends and family near and far I probably would do that too.Let this be a motto for us to aspire to: tóg go bog é, take it easy.

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Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

New Posts on Wednesdays

Tag Archives: Kansas City

On Democracy, Part II

On Democracy, Part II – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, on the current round of redistricting sweeping through Missouri.

On Universals

On Universals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I discuss some of the things which are common to all of us, problems we all share, and why I think we ought to look at solving those problems.

Embodied Patriotism

Embodied Patriotism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, on the patriotism we live in our ordinary lives.

The Poetics of Finality

The Poetics of Finality – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words about endings.

On Vanity

On Vanity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.

On Servant Leadership

On Servant Leadership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.

Montaigne and the Ages of Life

Montaigne and the Ages of Life – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, reflections on Michel de Montaigne’s perception of his changing character throughout his life.

Dominion or Cultivation of Nature?

Dominion or Cultivation of Nature? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.

Tóg go bog é | Take it easy

Tóg go bog é | Take it easy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a few words on taking life slower.

On Democracy, Part II – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, on the current round of redistricting sweeping through Missouri.

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On Universals – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I discuss some of the things which are common to all of us, problems we all share, and why I think we ought to look at solving those problems.

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Embodied Patriotism – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, on the patriotism we live in our ordinary lives.

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The Poetics of Finality – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words about endings.

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A Defense of Humanism in a Time of War – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, why we should not lose sight of our common humanity in a time of war.

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On Vanity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.

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On Servant Leadership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.

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Montaigne and the Ages of Life – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, reflections on Michel de Montaigne’s perception of his changing character throughout his life.

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Dominion or Cultivation of Nature? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.

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Tóg go bog é | Take it easy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a few words on taking life slower.

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