Tag Archives: Politics

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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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.

We, Irish Americans

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This week, what does it mean for my community to call ourselves Irish Americans?

When I was applying for universities for my undergraduate studies, I was thrilled that one university allowed me to write in my own answer for “race or ethnicity.” I took out my pen and wrote down “Irish.” That university, Rockhurst, is the one which I chose and attended throughout my undergraduate years, and it remains the one that I list today before the others. Rockhurst holds a special place in my heart because it is so intrinsically linked with the Irish American community here in Kansas City, and it is one of those anchors that’s tethered me to this community where I’ve been able to make my own impact and presence.

That adjective I chose to write however is perhaps more complicated. I am not Irish by birth but by descent, though one generation too far removed to qualify for Irish citizenship in that manner. Still, Irish is a better descriptor of me than the generic American white, a category which my people were only accepted into for the sake of preserving the flimsy-footed tableau that is racism in America. When I moved to London, I was surprised to be confronted with three categories of white to choose from rather than the monolith I was used to. I technically qualified for all three: I have both Irish and British ancestry, yet I am from a country other than those two. I marked the box for White Irish as long as I was living and studying there because it felt the truest to my nature. Yet again, I am not Irish per se; rather I am Irish American, a member of one of the larger camps within the diaspora created out of the centuries of trouble caused by English and later British colonialism in Ireland. In this perspective, my people are victims of colonization, yet here in America we are the colonizers. So, amid all these tangled webs of identity and nature what are we, Irish Americans?

It is notable to me that in France there is no particular legal sense of identifying oneself as anything other than French. Trevor Noah put this well when he spoke about an immigrant who was granted French citizenship by President Macron after a tremendous act of heroic bravery in saving the life of a child. Yet when I’m in France, I find that if people are confused about my name I go toward my heritage to explain why it’s not your typical Anglo-American name, that my family comes from Ireland instead. I hear a similar tone from the varied generations of nativists in this country, even in the writings of President Theodore Roosevelt, a man who I overall admire a great deal, who wrote in opposition to us persisting as “hyphenated Americans.” This country ought to be a melting pot where all of the immigrants and their descendants shed away their own national and ethnic trappings in favor of becoming one people with one common identity. Yet again, I find this perspective runs contrary to my own lived experience.

To be an Irish American means to remember the place where our ancestors came from, and to remember their struggles as they sought to live their lives first at home and later in this place their newly adopted home. To be an Irish American is to remember that we too were the immigrants not that long ago and to offer a warmer welcome to the newcomers than our ancestors often received. For me, to be an Irish American is to have roots in two countries, better reflecting the interconnected and global nature of our world. Yet at the end of the day, we are Americans. In Ireland, I refer to myself as “an American cousin,” with a slight nod to that infamous play of 1865. The Ireland that many of us know is the Ireland of our grandparents and great-grandparents, the Ireland of the revolutionary generation and the twentieth century when our families left to come to this country. The Ireland of 2025 is still the same country, yet it has grown with the last generations into something that many of us find incongruent with our expectations. It is less an island than ever before with more outposts of the global world on its shores.

Our experiences greeting this global world are different because we encountered it here in America rather than in Ireland. We relate to all the peoples of the Earth through our friendships, rivalries, and mutual circumstances with the other diasporic immigrant groups in this country. I’ve wondered for a long while, including in this outlet if we are slowly with each new generation becoming less Irish Americans and more deeply rooted in other tribes in this country. We tend to be more religious than our cousins in Ireland, and as there are less Catholic schools and parishes that are explicitly Irish are we then becoming Catholic Americans more than Irish Americans? Or are we contributing to a general secularization of that larger white American demographic resulting in both our ethnicity and our religion fading into the background of our identities as ordinary Americans trying to survive in an ever more chaotic world? The key here is that our community is diversifying between political persuasions and regional identities and an overall willingness to remain connected to the lives and histories and passions of our ancestors.

I for one have kept in touch with all of that because I believe it is intrinsic to understanding who I am. My Dad grew up under the same roof as his grandmother who came to this country from Mayo in 1920, and the fact that my parents chose to name me Sean demonstrated to me that this history was an important part of who I am even before I really began to understand what it all meant. For the record, I decided to add the fada to my name (Seán) when a little before my 10^th birthday I learned that’s how it is spelled in Irish. I’ve devoted a great deal of time to learn the Irish language even though it’s not all that useful here in America because I know that it’s what my family once spoke, and in order to better understand them and by extension myself as well, I decided I ought to use one of my talents and learn it.This week we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with our usual parades here in Kansas City. I marched in two this year, the warm-up parade on the Saturday before here in my neighborhood of Brookside and the big parade down Broadway in Midtown Kansas City on the holy day itself. Normally, I end the big parade and the holy day itself rather annoyed at how the old caricatures of Irishness and Irish Americanness persist along the route both in the parade and among the spectators. And while I did see some of that, I was more focused on marching with my brothers in the Fr. Bernard Donnelly Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). Many of us continued the celebration of our brotherhood and our common heritage later that day and it proved to be one of the better, and sunnier, St. Patrick’s Days that I’ve experienced in a long time. We, Irish Americans persist in our stubborn identity because we’ve built our communities in this country around our roots. It defines us distinctly from our fellow Americans, and with all good intentions demonstrates to our cousins across the water that we haven’t forgotten about them.

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On Democracy

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This week, for my birthday I want to write to you about my belief in all of us and how democracy remains our best hope.

One of those great efforts with which human history is concerned is the question of what our original nature was at our beginning and if and how we have changed that nature. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the primitive as “closer to humanity’s origins” and living in a state without the societal and technological innovations “that obscure their nature” evokes this original nature, what in Christianity is called our original sin, or biologically our evolved state as a particular form of bipedal mammals among other lifeforms.^[1] The seeming natural state of human societies until very recently has been toward forms of monarchy and aristocracy, the Tory Party in Britain today still refers to itself as the natural party of government because they descend through many generations from the old Cavaliers who supported Charles I and the aristocrats in the Parliaments of the Stuart and Georgian centuries who opposed the liberal reforms of the Whigs. Here in the United States, our own whiggish political tradition sees its modern manifestation in the old establishment wing of the Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party or G.O.P., whose founders in the 1850s included former Northern members of the Whig Party once led by our own aristocrats, men like Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams in the early republic.

Yet those same men stood for something beyond just preserving their own aristocratic power within their own society. These American Whigs and their Republican and Democratic successors aspired to a high ideal of human nature that entrusted power in the hands of the many rather than in those of a few or the one. Dr. Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote in her Letters from an American about how the Secessionists who dragged this country into our Civil War in 1860 and 1861 were trying to assert their own aristocratic vision of the republic that would benefit the few at the disregard of most and the expense of the many. As James J. Sheehan reminded us in his essay in the December 2024 issue of Commonweal, Tocqueville wrote that the chief difference between the source of power in an aristocracy or a monarchy, or their corrupted forms oligarchy and a tyranny, and the source of power in a democracy is that “despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”^[2] The despots rely less on our trust in their rule, and in many of the cases we see today they sew discontent in government, the economy, and for all of us with each other in order to assert their authority and keep hold of power.

Democracy is a far harder thing to keep, as Dr. Franklin knew well. The inclusion of more and more people complicates any organization, yet it also allows that organization to better reflect all involved. Democracy requires the efforts of all of us to survive; if left unwatered and unnourished by each generation it will wither and die like any other flower or fruit on the vine. Throughout my life, I’ve looked to heroes in our history from Lincoln, Mandela, Óscar Romero, Popes Francis and St. John XXIII, to people closer to my own life. What all of them have in common is a desire to improve the lot of humanity, and in the case of Lincoln and Mandela to promote democracy in their homelands. When I look ahead and worry about what might be coming in these next four years, I often wonder if I would be safer, happier, healthier, and living a more fulfilled life elsewhere in another country where I can leave the troubles of my own behind. Yet I remember these heroes, MacDonagh and MacBride, and Connolly and Pearse, my great-grandfathers who fought in the two World Wars, the dreamers and optimists who organized and marched non-violently for civil rights here in America and in Ireland too, and looking again at our own day I pause. This is our time to make life better for our successors while we live to overcome the long winter of fear before us. If I left now, could I look those heroes of mine in the eye when my time ends?

I believe in democracy because it is the best form of government we’ve yet imagined. I believe in representative government because I would rather have a say in my neighborhood, my city, my county, my state, and my country than not. I believe in democracy because I believe in humanity and that all of us can make something better if only we believed in ourselves and in each other. I believe that before that original sin there was original grace, original goodness; that before the first frown there was the first smile; that before the first thoughts of lust there were thoughts of love. I believe in democracy because I need to believe that I will have a future, that all the things which I’ve done in these last 31 years are building up to something which will, in Bill Nye’s words, “change the world,” no matter how small that change may be. To do any of this, to see any of this goodness in our hearts, to believe in ourselves again we need to be willing first to acknowledge our faults and second to forgive ourselves and put in the effort to make our lives better. For all our technology and our ever increasingly complicated ways of life, we are still the same humans as our ancestors living in Lévi-Strauss’s primitive manner. We retain the same bodies and souls. Because of this, we can build a future for our posterity in a spirit of grace, compassion, and optimism that would make the heroes of old proud.

^[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Montaigne to Montaigne, trans. Robert Bononno, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 25.

^[2] James J. Sheehan, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” Commonweal, December 2024, 13.

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The Power of Hope

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This past weekend, history was made when President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The next 48 hours inspired tremendous hope again.

During my senior year at Rockhurst, now a decade ago, the BBC released the first of two seasons of a new series of Shakespearean adaptations called The Hollow Crown. These films were realist adaptations of the Henriad plays Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, and Henry V. This first season seized my attention and enthusiasm with a tremendous rush of emotion and energy. I wrote my undergraduate capstone in History on Richard II partially because of how these films brought these medieval kings to life for me. Shakespeare’s plays have tremendous power because they speak to common human emotions and experiences, it’s why they’ve been adapted by Akira Kurosawa from their original settings to feudal Japan, and why contemporary adaptations of these plays can work even if they can also leave something to be desired.

Yet the greatest power that Shakespeare’s plays have is in their quotability. William Shakespeare was one of the greatest writers to use the English language to tell his stories, and to breathe life into his characters and settings that the most fantastical magic of The Tempest can seem just as believable as Richard II’s grief at losing his crown. For me, one of the most readily quotable lines in Richard II comes not from the deposed king but from his uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who in a speech which Jeremy Irons described as one coming from a medieval Brexiteer, offered the truism “small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.” (2.1). I think of this often in many different situations. Our politics of these last 8 years have been somewhere in the middle, an 8 year on-going rain that may seem tempestuous throughout but that has merely brought together several of these sudden storms in quick succession.

For most of my life I’ve heard the argument that ordinary people like us cannot do much to change our politics, and that we are better off leaving politics to the politicians who are going to do whatever they want anyway. I’ve grown up surrounded by this apathy, yet my parents instilled in me from my earliest memories a duty to vote, to speak up, and to play my part as a citizen. I’ve been frustrated in the last year in particular hearing so many people express a distaste in our electoral system because the two candidates running for President this year were men who seemed so out of touch and disconnected from the rest of us that we felt little need to participate. For myself, by the time the Missouri Primary came around for my party, our candidate had already secured enough delegates to claim victory in the primaries, and so this was one rare election when I didn’t vote.

All of that changed on Sunday at 12:46 Central Time when our sitting President, my party’s candidate, Mr. Biden announced he would no longer seek reelection to the Presidency this November. I was out at lunch with my parents when I got the news, and my first reaction was akin to many: fear at what would come next. I was on the fence whether President Biden should drop out of the race, unsure of what the result might be; and today writing this 48 hours later I’m still afraid of what could happen.

Yet my fears have been assuaged somewhat at the sight of how much the tone of this election has changed in my party. Where so many were going to vote for the President in order to keep his opponent out of power, in the last 48 hours our new candidate, Vice President Harris, has received more than 28,000 offers from ordinary people to volunteer for the Harris campaign. In the last 48 hours the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party have raised about $250 million in donations and pledges; of those donations more than 888,000 were from ordinary people wanting to pitch in. The tone has changed, where before last month’s debate we hoped that President Biden could lead the campaign to eke out enough moderate and undecided voters to support the Democratic side and defeat his opponent, now we have a campaign that is built less on fear of the opposition and more on the hope of what our new candidate has promised to do and could do if elected President.

Hope is far stronger than fear because it offers us a chance to aspire to something greater than ourselves. The most successful President of the twentieth-century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ran on a platform of hope and reform that would pull the country out of the Great Depression, and in his later campaigns defend liberal democracy from the growing tides of authoritarianism around the globe. All Democratic Presidents since Roosevelt have been judged on what FDR accomplished, and few have risen close to his level. The two that initially come to mind are Lyndon Banes Johnson, who served as President from President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 until January 1969, and our now outgoing President Biden. In spite of a staunch and illiberal opposition built around the premise that any and all legislation proposed by the Democrats must be blocked at all costs, even at the expense of the country, the Biden-Harris Administration has passed several landmark pieces of legislation which have been notable in the good they’ve done while being overshadowed by claims to the opposite from the clamoring gallery in the opposition.

Most of the Biden-Harris Administration’s major legislation occurred when the Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress through the end of 2022. These included in 2021:

The American Rescue Plan Act, which injected $1.9 trillion into the economy to help ordinary people during the hard times of the recent pandemic.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is funding infrastructure improvements and new projects across the country.

In 2022, Biden signed:

The Inflation Reduction Act, which included elements of his failed Build Back Better Act offering significant investment in climate and energy production and a three-year extension to the Affordable Care Act.
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act which is the first major federal gun control law passed in the last three decades.
The CHIPS and Science Act which bolstered American semiconductor manufacturing.
The Honoring our PACT Act, which expanded health care for US veterans.
The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act which adds procedures to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to avoid a repeat of the stalling measures to keep President Biden’s election from being certified during the January 6^th attack on the Capitol.
The Respect for Marriage Act which codified same-sex and interracial marriage.

And finally, in 2023, Biden signed:

The Fiscal Responsibility Act which restrained federal spending during fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and suspended the debt ceiling until the beginning of 2025.
In September 2023, he established the American Climate Corps, in a Rooseveltian manner to help facilitate the national response to the climate crisis.

What is striking about Biden’s presidency is both how much he accomplished in four years, and how little most people seem to know about it. He could not fully live up to FDR’s legacy because he lacked the majorities in Congress throughout his term that would have allowed him to continue to pass legislation. In the last month, it’s become clear that what new policies his Administration announces will be intended less as viable things to be accomplished in what remains of his term, but rather as signs of hope of what his party would do if they retain the Presidency and win back a majority in the House of Representatives.

That hope now has a face and a name in the Democratic presumptive nominee for President, Kamala Harris. The Democrats would do well to recognize that the power of hope for the things she and her Administration and the congressional party can accomplish together are far more powerful than all the fears we have of what would happen should the opposition regain the Presidency and retain its majority in the House. Hope is stronger than fear because it builds on the idea that there’s something better to be had than what we now have. I believe that hope is what will unite us together in the Democratic big tent this year to win this election. The circumstances aren’t great, President Biden’s withdrawal was far later in the race than I would have liked, and in the coming weeks I want to write here about the flaws in our electoral systems that his withdrawal lays bare.

This week though, let me leave you with what I believe to be true: the Harris campaign is in a strong place with its grassroots enthusiasm, fundraising, and organizing, and has the legislative accomplishments of the Biden-Harris Administration as a strong foundation for a successful, if unexpected, campaign. It’s up to all of us to hope that she can provide better promises than her opponents, and to act on that hope and vote in November.

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On Political Violence

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This week, I feel compelled by this past weekend’s events to write about the follies of political violence.

On Saturday evening, I was making dinner for a friend and I to share when I received the first notification from the Washington Post that something had happened at a rally held by former President Trump in Pennsylvania. We first heard that that something was a shooting as we were starting dessert. The evening turned from genial conversation in my family’s dining room to tuning into NBC’s coverage to learn as much as we could at that early moment. What transpired, as far as I’m aware at time of writing, is that a single shooter firing from a nearby rooftop shot at the former President, striking him in the top of his right ear in what was clearly an assassination attempt. This is the first time an American President has been shot since Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt in 1981, and so the first in my lifetime. We quickly saw the film of the former President being removed from the stage by the Secret Service, and only a little later did we see the actual shooting itself, albeit on RTÉ’s Instagram feed rather than on NBC.

Considering the level of senseless gun violence in this country, and the bellicose rhetoric of the former President and his allies, I’m not surprised that something like this happened. I remember well how the conservative press were using bull’s eye targets in their graphics on TV over the faces of Democratic elected officials whose seats they wanted to target in the 2010 Midterms, and how that contributed to the assassination attempt against Gabby Giffords, the former Representative of Arizona’s 8^th congressional district. Things were toned down after that shooting thirteen years ago, but the rhetoric has increased in the years since, especially since 2015 when the 2016 Presidential primary races began.

I feel that political violence ought to be considered in the same vein as the concept of just war and the practice of capital punishment. Can we reasonably assert a right to use violence to influence the politics of a society? It has certainly been done time and time again. Just this Spring, I was engrossed in Apple TV’s recreation of the aftermath of the assassination of President Lincoln on 14 April 1865 in the series Manhunt. The Civil War is a good place to ponder these questions, when David Brooks of the New York Times interviewed Steve Bannon just before he reported to prison on charges of Contempt of Congress over his refusal to appear before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, he brought up Lincoln’s call for restoring national unity in his second inaugural address, Bannon would not accept any such arguments, fixating instead on Lincoln’s decision to engage in the civil war with the rebellious southern states, referring to our 16^th President as “a military dictator” for his actions and the actions of the military during that war.

I was deeply disturbed reading Bannon’s responses to these questions, because though we may both be Irish Americans who were raised in Catholic schools, I come from Illinois and have always seen Mr. Lincoln as a hero, as longtime readers and listeners to this publication are well aware. What disturbed me most was that this moment when these words of reconciliation, which matched what I’ve read of Lincoln’s plans postwar to engage fully in reconstruction rather than retribution, that Bannon’s reaction was belligerent and unwavering.

For decades now the cries of “no compromise!” have rang out in our politics. I remember a friend in high school telling me that there are no moderates, only conservatives and liberals, and you are a friend to one side and an enemy to the other. I was shocked then too to hear such rhetoric from a friend because at that time we were on opposite sides. Political violence occurs because we allow ourselves to be riled up into a frenzy to the point that we believe it is justifiable to act violently against our neighbors, our countrymen and women, our fellow humans. I have a very hard time with the concept of a just war that is taught by my Church, though again in the context of the Union aims during the Civil War, I can readily see how preserving the Union and ending slavery were justified. I believe a just war needs a strong moral bedrock for it to be justifiable. We cannot run out crying “Deus vult! God wills it!” and proclaim any old brawl a just war.

The first time I was challenged to consider these questions was also in high school, about a year before that conversation mentioned in the last paragraph. In my sophomore year, I took a combined honors world history and world literature course, taught by two teachers in their first year. Our literature teacher assigned us to read Eli Wiesel’s novel Dawn, in which the main character, Elisha, is a Holocaust survivor who’s moved to the British Mandate of Palestine and joined the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary group fighting to drive the British from the region to establish a Jewish state. The book covers the early morning hours when Elisha is preparing to execute a captured British officer, who is to be shot at dawn. My assignment was to write an essay of my own saying how I would have acted, would I have carried out the execution or would I have let the captive man live?

The essay I submitted was one of the rare essays I ever earned an F on. I wrote that to take a life is not in our rights but should be left to God alone, so I would not know how to make that decision. At sixteen, I tried to find a middle way, to fall back on my faith as a means of avoiding making such a tough decision. Today though I would choose to reprieve the captive, to let him live. When I visited the remains of the Dachau camp in the Munich suburbs in January 2020, I was struck by the thought that everyone involved, the captors and the captives, the murderers and the victims, were all at their core humans, and at one point in their lives they were all innocent, helpless, and defenseless as infants. Since then I’ve noticed more of this in people I pass on the street, where just as I still in some ways imagine myself as I was when I first recognized my own consciousness as a very young child, so too I can readily imagine others in those perhaps purer moments of life before we are weighed down by our anger and fears and pain, by our suffering and sorrow and grief.

So often, political violence is unnecessary and unwarranted; a choice made by someone on their own, an inflection point in history when the decisions of the individual can change the whole world for the worse. In more pop-culture questions about history, one will often hear people ask, “If you could go back in time and could stop Hitler or Stalin, would you kill them?” I for one prefer the way Hitler was handled on Doctor Who, when in the episode titled “Let’s Kill Hitler,” the man merely ended up being shoved into a closet.We will likely not know much more of the motives of the man who shot the former President on Saturday evening for some time, and the best thing we can do is let the investigation continue in its own pace. I do not wish death on anyone, that is a horrible thing to do. Even if the acts of some are so heinous that they may seem to be due such an extreme and ultimate punishment, I challenge you to consider what condemning or killing them would do? What benefit does it hold? And how would it change you?

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An Election Year Independence Day

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This week, I’m writing to you with this week’s holiday in mind, with some of my aspirations and hopes for America.

While I have colonial ancestors who settled New Haven, Connecticut and Newark, New Jersey, and who at the time of the American Revolution were living in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina, I more closely associate with my recent immigrant ancestors. I’m one of those hyphenated-Americans who holds onto elements of a culture and identity that transcends the Atlantic and provides connections not only to this country but to the places where my ancestors came from. One aspect of the political philosophy of American nationalism that I don’t agree with says that you have to conform to a particular American identity when you come here. My ancestors did that, to varying degrees, and I’m more American than anything else, yet it’s all those other elements that give our Americanness its richness of character.

So, when I think of the music that embodies the soul of America, it’s music written by a fellow hyphenated-American, Aaron Copland, the dean of American classical music. When I tried my hand at musical composition in college, I wrote a four-movement trio sonata that told the story of a voyage from Ireland to America by St. Brendan and his monks in the sixth century. My addition to the fable was to have the tone of the music switch from being very Irish in the first and second movements to taking after Copland’s sound in the third and especially the fourth movement as they reached this side of the water. I’ve long wanted to write a blog post all about my admiration for Copland’s music, but thanks to the copyrights on his recordings I’m waiting for a few more decades. For now, go listen to Appalachian Spring and Rodeo after you’re done listening to, or reading, this.

Copland’s music speaks to me now in 2024 especially as we approach an election year. This is the most sacred task that we American citizens fulfill in our obligations to our republic: we do our duty by voting for whom we want to represent us on all levels of government, and on the host of ballot measures found further down-ballot. This election feels far more pivotal than any we’ve seen in my lifetime. For context, I was born exactly one month before the elder President Bush stood aside for President Clinton. While I may have disagreed with the policies of both Presidents Bush, they still seemed to be decent men. It’s hard to say that this year about one of the two candidates who flooded Thursday night’s debate on CNN with so many half-truths and outright lies that the network did nothing to check live on air. I was baffled watching it to think that the network’s executives and news directors didn’t choose to lay out better safeguards considering this is the same man whose rhetoric and refusal to admit his loss in 2020 led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6^th, 2021.

When I think of a President who I want leading our country, I think of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.I want someone who best represents the best ideals of America, someone who can speak with all of us and for all of us. I hope for someone who can work with Congress and the states to execute legislation that will lead to an overall improvement in our national well-being. I was disappointed to see the President perform so poorly during the debate on Thursday, yet of our choices this year he is the closest to embodying that ideal of the common man.

This year’s election is not politics as usual, there are deep intrinsic questions at stake over the future of our country and what sort of government we want to have. I was deeply unsettled to read the transcript of David Brooks’s recent interview with Steve Bannon, who Brooks called a Trotsky-figure for the MAGA movement. From the interview, and from the way Bannon positioned himself as a leader of that movement, he made it clear that there is no room for communication with their political opponents, who Bannon termed in a far more affrontive manner as their enemies. That is the most essential element of good government, something that all the great political philosophers recognized: we need to be able to communicate with each other and grow together as one body politick made up of a great many parts. I’ve seen the same problem on the left as on the right, a disinterest in listening and in compromising to achieve a higher ideal or a common good that will benefit everyone. Yet the greater threat is coming from the faction who’ve gained enough sway that they now control their party and their leader is again a candidate for the Presidency.

This Independence Day, Americans around the globe will celebrate the invention of our republic from an ideal written on paper during a hot and humid Philadelphia summer 248 years ago. I’ve heard it said that that was the first time that anyone thought to write down the idea that “all men are created equal.” Think about that for a moment: that was the first time that the notion of universal equality, or better universal equity, had ever been considered. The President is the President, and I respect him for serving in that office as I feel respect for the office itself. It is a monument to self-sacrifice when done well, and a trap of self-aggrandizement when the oath is taken for the wrong reasons. Yet when a sitting President leaves the office on Inauguration Day, they may still be Former President, but they are now again just another citizen who’s offered to carry that mantle in the relay until the next candidate will take it up.

The burdens of preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution of the United States are greater than one person can carry on their own. The office holder ought to have us, we the people who come first in the Constitution, supporting them as long as they keep their oath, and do their duty for as long as their term lasts. It is a humbling thing to serve in such an august role. It is something that truly should not be taken lightly, or brought on by a candidate for any other reason than for service.

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Leadership

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I’ve long wondered about what kind of leader I want to be. This week a coalescing of those ponderings.

Leadership is one of the great qualities which we yearn for today, particularly in this country agreement among our leaders on the same basic principles of democracy and integrity. We seek the same fundamental truths even while truth is far more diffuse a concept than ever before. To take the first step towards this restoration we need to begin talking to each other again and really work towards rebuilding our mutual understanding of who we are and what we want out of our Union.

Throughout my life I’ve looked up to certain types of leaders: a citizen like Abraham Lincoln, a unifier like Eleanor Roosevelt, and a servant like Pope Francis. Each of these figures took their own stands in their own circumstances of time and place and worked to their own ends, and in some respects they were successful.

I’ve been humbled to serve as a leader at varying moments and in several capacities and my own efforts are often rewarded by how I can connect with the people around me. I make a point of working with people, of listening to their ideas and trying to incorporate them into something all of us working together can be proud of.

Today then, I want to present to you a paper that I wrote at the end of my time as a Master’s Student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in November and December of 2018. I presented this paper “Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis Christiani and the Humanist Knight in early-sixteenth-century England” at the American Catholic Historical Association’s 2019 annual meeting, co-current with the American Historical Association conference at the old Stevens Hotel, now the Hilton, on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago on Friday, 4 January 2019. I hope this offers two visions of leadership from the Renaissance, one rooted in Erasmus’s Christian Humanism which hearkens towards the social justice-rooted morality of my own Catholicism, and from the realpolitik of Niccolò Machiavelli in his timeless book The Prince.

Erasmus’s Enchirdion militis Christiani (The Handbook of the Christian Knight) was one of the most popular books of its day in Western and Central Europe; translated into eight languages between 1519 and 1542. Its most popular and widely disseminated edition was that published by Johann Froben in Basel in 1518. The Enchiridion‘s enduring popularity throughout the first half of the sixteenth century is a testament to its relevance at a time when Europe was witnessing tremendous social and religious upheaval through the Reformations of Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. The Enchiridion was intended to be a guide for Europe’s many princes, kings, and lesser lords on how to be good moral rulers, how to be “soldiers of Christ” as the title states. Through this role as a guide for good governance, the Enchiridion can be seen as a Christian Humanist equivalent to Machiavelli’s The Prince as a guide in Renaissance political philosophy. In considering the Enchiridion‘s role as a book of political philosophy, this study will consider both the 1518 Froben edition^[1], and the 1523 Alnwick manuscript^[2], the earliest known English translation of the Enchiridion, from which all quotes derive.

Originally written in 1502, the Enchiridion was said to be inspired by an unpleasant evening that Erasmus experienced in the castle of a knight recorded as “John the German.”^[3] The knight’s wife begged Erasmus to write a treatise offering her husband guidance on better manners, thus resulting in the Enchiridion.^[4] While the Enchiridion was first published in 1503 by Maartens in Antwerp^[5] it did not achieve widespread fame until its first publication by Froben in 1515.^[6] The Enchiridion‘s philosophical inspirations come from a number of different sources, both Biblical and Classical, from Moses, Solomon, and David to Julius Caesar and his nephew Augustus to the heroes of the Iliad and the Aeneid. While this work takes great influence from Platonic philosophy, it nevertheless bathes Platonism in a deep bath of Christian theology before allowing it to enter into the main work.

As a work of Christian Humanism, the Enchiridion contains a thorough retelling of the many morality stories found in the Bible. It appears, through the wording of the Biblical quotes in Froben’s Latin edition, that Erasmus used his own revised translation of the New Testament throughout the Enchiridion, which had been published by Froben in its most widely read form in 1516.^[7] Nevertheless, Erasmus draws just as heavily from the Old Testament, looking at Moses, David, and Solomon as good and worthy models for the Christian knight of his day. For Erasmus, a Christian ruler should follow closely the teachings of the Church and its Old Testament forbearers. Countering Machiavelli’s view that the two safest manners for a prince to control a population is to either “destroy them or reside there,”^[8] Erasmus argued that it is a “grete obomynation … if a man forsake his fynge or theiss lorde [Christ].”^[9] For Erasmus, temporal power was secondary to spiritual wellbeing, arguing later in the same chapter of the Enchiridion that the death of the soul is far more consequential than the death of the body, as the death of the soul “is extreme misery,”^[10] even greater than bodily death. The key difference here is that Machiavelli wrote as a politician, while Erasmus set his words to paper as a theologian.

The disparity between the political realities of early sixteenth century Italy and the theological expectations on morality at the same time are stark. Erasmus’s chief concern is the wellbeing of the soul, while Machiavelli’s is the accumulation of power and its subsequent preservation. Erasmus’s knight is a moralist, while Machiavelli’s prince is a pragmatist. Yet where Machiavelli’s vision of rulership is often shown as a testament to the various leaders in Italy during the Italian Wars, Erasmus’s shows the theological ideal of a Christian Humanist ruler, akin in character to Plato’s philosopher kings who should rule in a conjunction between “political power and philosophical intelligence.”^[11] Both Erasmus and Machiavelli reference Moses as fine examples of leadership, the former spending the first chapter of his Enchiridion discussing Moses’s role as leader of the Hebrews and his loyalty to God’s will and light^[12], while Machiavelli names Moses alongside Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus as “the most excellent”^[13] of princes. While Machiavelli considered striking Moses from this list because he was “a mere executor of things, that were made ordained by God,”^[14] and thus less a prince in his own right and more a vassal for a Higher Power, he nevertheless respected Moses’s leadership of the Hebrews and saw him as an equal to Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus through his deliverance of the Hebrews out of slavery.^[15]

Erasmus’s Enchiridion makes great use of Platonic philosophy, referring back to the Athenian academic’s teachings time and again in his work. Erasmus noted in the fifth chapter of his Enchiridion, entitled “Off the dyusitue of affeccions” that Plato and the later Stoics both saw “philosophy to be nothing else but a remembrance of Deth.”^[16] Interestingly, in Froben’s 1518 Latin edition this line reads, “with nothing else [Plato] thinks Philosophy however to be a meditation of death.”^[17] The differences in meaning between the words remembrance and meditation is striking. While they are synonyms, the former appears to have changed in meaning over the centuries, becoming today a manner of meditation about a person or event that takes place only after that person has died, while a meditation can happen when they are still living. For the translator of the Alnwick Manuscript, this difference does not appear to have been as profound, and by and large it would appear that, at least in that translator’s eyes, remembrance and meditation are a good pair of cognates.

Machiavelli’s text looks at death as an inevitability and in many cases a means to an end, especially for men who “forget more quickly the death of the father than the loss of their inheritance.”^[18] In Machiavelli’s view, while the living may mourn the dead, they celebrate in the riches left behind by the deceased and seek to improve their own fortunes off of the demise of their fathers. Machiavelli accepts that this degree of swift respect for the dead is tantamount to theft, yet he dismisses any degree of moral ambiguity by noting how common and easy the practice can be, writing, “it is always easy to find cause to take away property,” and “anyone who lives by theft will always find reasons to occupy the things of others.”^[19] For Erasmus, death is a moment of great spiritual significance, one to be taken seriously in securing the sanctity of one’s soul; yet for Machiavelli, death is a moment of great personal significance, one to be taken seriously in securing one’s fortune and power from the deceased, whether they be one’s father or another.

If philosophy is merely a meditation on death, as Erasmus argued, then what is life but a march towards that inevitable fate and, if one is fortuitous enough, Heaven, which “is promysed to hym that fighteth swftely.”^[20]The Humanist Knight, therefore, should strive to fight their battles with speed, and in doing so keeps in mind the prospect of eternal life in Heaven, and end the suffering of those whom they are fighting sooner. Fighting should only be a last resort, as the Humanist Knight should consider their moral and spiritual wellbeing before taking up arms against another. The promise of Heavenly reward drives the Humanist Knight, sending them into their world with the purpose of ensuring their own moral wellbeing and salvation. One’s soul should be “refresshed with manna from heven and with water that kame oute of the harde Rock,”^[21] consuming the heavenly donation and fortifying oneself so that “neither strength neither hie / nor lowe : nor no other Creature shall seperat us from the love of god which is Christ [Jesus].”^[22] In this sense, Erasmus argued that the rewards of mortal riches and conquests should not come before the spiritual rewards awaiting the Humanist Knight, faithful to Christ, in Heaven.

In contrast, Machiavelli argued in favor of prolonged war, if only to secure a prince’s authority over their own people and supremacy over their adversaries. A prolonged war, according to Machiavelli, is sometimes necessary to secure the authority of the prince against threats both foreign and domestic, and while one might lose some territory, or even some cities, as in the case of Philip V of Macedon, yet the loss of a few cities ranks lower as a threat to the stability and security of a prince’s power.^[23] For Machiavelli, Philip V was a strong leader because he acted when others would have passively watched as events unfolded in front of them. He stands as a good example of the Machiavellian prince, as he was willing to make sacrifices of his cities and territories, their populations included, in order to preserve his power. In contrast, for Machiavelli a bad prince is one who loses “their principalities after so many years of rulership not because of fortune but because of their own sloth.”^[24] The Machiavellian prince is an active ruler, directing their supporters on the ground with a tenacity that is matched in the Humanist Knight by the latter’s desire to ensure the purity of their soul, despite the devilish business of the titular Enchiridion, not only a handbook but also a hand dagger.

Both the Machiavellian Prince and the Humanist Knight have agency, the chief difference is in how they use it. For the Prince, their agency is best utilized through the fortifying of oneself and one’s possessions to weather any future assaults or other attempts at threatening the Prince’s standing. The Prince acts only to ensure the stability of their power and its continued vitality, standing on one’s own two feet rather than with the support of another. As Machiavelli wrote, the only sure way to preserve one’s power is through one’s own “virtue” or “power”, depending on the translation.^[25] The use of the word virtù for both “virtue” and “power” in Italian is striking, showing the intense relationship between one’s morality and one’s authority. With virtue and power standing hand-in-hand, Machiavelli’s perspective comes clearer to light. He is writing not just as a pragmatist, but also as a political veteran of his times, advising princes how to seek virtue, much like Erasmus’s advice to the Humanist Knight, only Machiavelli’s idea of virtue is clothed in the unstable trappings of the Italian Wars that raged throughout his life and deeply affected the world of the Italian city states.

For Erasmus, virtue comes from God, and is shared by all humanity; thus, Erasmus writes to the Humanist Knight “thow shalt be able to do all thing in the power of God”^{^[26]} but in order to do this the Knight must “take hede that thow be a member of the body”^{^[27]} It is interesting here that the Alnwick manuscript translator of the Enchiridion does not conjugate thow shalt be as thow shalt art or thow shalt beest as was used in some dialects of Early Modern English. This particular pair of lines in the Alnwick manuscript do not match exactly the Latin in Froben’s edition, where in English the Knight can do all things “in the power of God” in Latin they will be able to achieve the same “in capite”, who is identified in the previous sentence as Christ. Two points can be taken from this, firstly that Early Modern English verb conjugations inherited the structures of their Germanic roots, moving the conjugation onto the modifiers as in German and Old English. Thus, the verb appears as thow shalt be rather than thow shall art, which mirrors this verb’s Modern descendant you should be. Secondly, the translator of the Alnwick manuscript rephrased and adapted the text to fit the expectations of an English-speaking audience, especially when translating from a language with more fluid word order like Latin to one with strict rules like English.

The relationship between the Humanist Knight and the Machiavellian Prince shows the diverging perspectives of Renaissance Humanists on both sides of the Alps. Whereas Italy was embroiled in war between rival city states supported by distant powers, fueling the pragmatic political philosophy of The Prince, the political structures of Northern Europe remained largely stable, with the old kings, princes, and magnates ruling over the continent. Erasmus’s Humanist Knight seeks power, but only through the blessing and support of God. Thus, the Humanist Knight must remain a moral and upright person, standing firm in the warm glow of God’s grace. While the Prince believes he will find victory through his own exploits and prowess as both a politician in the government of his principality, and as a commander on the battlefield, the Knight believes that victory is “putt hole in the handes of God and by hym in our handes.”^{^[28]} The greatest difference between the Knight and the Prince is their understanding of virtue. For the Knight this comes from God’s favor of one’s good deeds, while for the Prince it results from political stability.

What can be seen in Erasmus’s Enchiridion and Machiavelli’s Prince are two very different views of the role of the ruler and the source of that ruler’s power. This reflects the differing political situations between Italy and Northern Europe in the early sixteenth century, when both authors were writing. Furthermore, when translated into English in the form of the Alnwick manuscript, the Enchiridion offers the modern reader not only an idea of what the ideal knight was for Erasmus and the manuscript’s translator through the translator’s interpretation of Erasmus, but also an image of the role of the faith in the promulgation of Humanist values amongst the English gentry and aristocracy in the first decades of the sixteenth century.

Thank you for bearing with an admittedly unusual Wednesday Blog this week. This idea began somewhat differently than it ended. I hope to return to this topic of leadership again and write about Pope Francis’s vision of the servant leader which I find quite compelling.

^[1] Desiderius Erasmus, Enchiridion militis Christiani cum alijs quoru[m] Catalogum pagellae, (Basel: Johann Froben, 1518), http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10164787-8.

^[2] “A compendus tretis of the sowdear of Christ called enchiridion which Erasmus Roteradame wrote unto a certen courtear & Frende of his,” [1523], Additional Manuscripts, 89149, British Library, London.

^[3] Anne M. O’Donnell, S.N.D., “Rhetoric and Style in Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis Christiani,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 77, No. 1: (Winter 1980), 26-49, at 30.

^[4] Brian Moynahan, William Tyndale: If God spare my Life: A Story of Martyrdom, Betrayal, and the English Bible, (London: Abacus, 2003), 26-27.

^[5] Judith Rice Henderson, “Language, Race, and Church Reform: Erasmus’ ‘De recta pronuntiatione’ and ‘Ciceronianus’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, Vol. 30, No. 2: (Spring / Printemps 2006), pp. 3-42, at 8.

^[6] Diane Shaw, “A Study of the Collaboration Between Erasmus of Rotterdam and His Printer Johann Froben at Basel During the Years 1514 to 1527,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, Vol. 6: (1986), pp. 31-124, at 35.

^[7] Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum omne, (Basel: Johann Froben, 1516), http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11059002-1.

^[8] Niccolò Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, (Florence: Bernardo di Giunta, 1532), 7a, http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k852526w; the original Italian reads “tal che la più sicura a via è, spegnerle, ó habitarvi.”

^[9] “A compendus tretis of the sowdear of Christ called enchiridion which Erasmus Roteradame wrote unto a certen courtear & Frende of his,” [1523], Additional Manuscripts, 89149 f.3v (1:140-141), British Library, London. In the Latin, “Quantus pudor, quanta penè publica humani generis execratio, cum à duce principe deficit homo?”

^[10] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.5v (1:235-6). In Froben’s Latin edition this reads as “At animam mori, infelicitatis extremæ est,” Erasmus, Enchiridion militis Christiani, (Basel: Froben, 1518), 6.

^[11] Plato, Republic 5.473d in Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 trans. Paul Shorey, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1969) in the original Greek, δύναμίς τε πολιτική καὶ φιλοσοφία.

^[12] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.1v-f.9r (1:1-397); Froben’s: Enchiridion, 1-9.

^[13] Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, 7b, “li più eccellenti.”

^[14] Machiavelli, “E benché di Moisè non si debbe ragionare, essendo stato un’mero esecutore delle cose, che gli erano ordinate da Dio.”

^[15] Machiavelli, “Era adunque necessario à Moise trovare il Popolo d’Israel in Egitto schiano, et opresso da gli Egittii: accioche quelli, per usare di servitù, se disponessino à seguirlo.”

^[16] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.28v (5:39-41)

^[17] Froben’s Enchiridion, 30, “cum nihil aliud putat esse Philosophiam, cumque mortis meditationinem.”

^[18] Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, 26a, “per che gli huomini dimenticano più tosto la morte del padre, che la perdita del patrimonio.”

^[19] Machiavelli, “Di poi le cagioni del torre la robba non macono mai,” and “e sempre colui, che comincia à vivere con rapina, truova cagioni d’occupare quel d’altri.”

^[20] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.5r (1:208); Froben’s Enchiridion, 5, “Cœlum promittitur strenue pugnanti.“

^[21] Machiavelli, f.10v (2:114-115); Froben’s Enchiridion, 12, “quam esset manna cœlesti, et aqua de petra scatente refectus.”

^[22] Machiavelli, f.18v (2:554-556); Froben’s Enchiridion, 20, “neque fortitudo, neque altitudo, neque pfundum, neque cretura alia, poterit nos se parare à charitate dei, quæ est in Christo Iesu.” This is a quote from Romans 8:38-39. The Greek original reads οὔτε δυνάμεις, οὔτε ὔφωμα, οὔτε βάθος οὔτε τις κτίσις ἐτέρα δυνήσεται ἠμᾶς χωρίσαι ἀπὸ ἀγάπης τοῦ θεοῦ τῆς ἐν Χριστῶ Ἰησοῦ. The Vulgate and Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum differ in their translations of the Greek, in the Vulgate, “neque fortitudo, neque altitudo, neque profundum, neque cretura alia poterit nos separare a caritate Dei, quæ est in Christo Jesu” while in Erasmus’s NIO, “neque futura, neque altitudo, neque profunditas, neque ulla cretura alia, poterit nos separe a dilectione dei, quæ en in Christo Iesu”. The NASB translates this verse as “… nor powers, ³⁹ nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is Christ Jesus…” The NIO leaves out neque fortitudo, jumping from neque futura to neque altitudo.

^[23] Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, 38.

^[24] Machiavelli, “Per tanto questi nostri Principi; i quali molti anni erano sta ti nel loro Principato, per haverlo di poi perso; non accusino la fortuna, ma la ignavia loro.”

^[25] Machiavelli, Il libro del principe, 38b, “Et quelle difese solamente sono buone, certe, et durabili; che dipendono da te proprio, et da la virtù tua.”

^[26] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.8r (1:367); Froben’s Enchiridion, 9, “et omnia poteris in capite.”

^[27] BL Add. MS 89149 f.8r (1:366); Froben’s Enchiridion, 9, “Tu modo cura ut sis in corpore.”

^[28] “A compendus tretis,” BL Add. MS 89149 f.8r (1:373); Froben’s Enchiridion, 9, “neuticibus à fortuna pendeat victoria, sed eaomnis in manu sita sit dei, ac per eum nostris quoquibus in manibus.”

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Politics and the Citizen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2016 Super Tuesday Democrats Abroad Primary

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

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Church and State

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carthāgō dēlenda est! | Carthage must be destroyed!
Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE)

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

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

“He said in reply, ‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
(Luke 10:27, NAB)

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

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

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Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

New Posts on Wednesdays

Tag Archives: Politics

On Democracy, Part II

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The Power of Hope

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On Political Violence

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An Election Year Independence Day

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Leadership

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Politics and the Citizen

Politics and the Citizen – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Church and State

Church and State – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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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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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The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, what does it mean for my community to call ourselves Irish Americans?

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On Democracy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, for my birthday I want to write to you about my belief in all of us and how democracy remains our best hope.

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The Power of Hope – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This past weekend, history was made when President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The next 48 hours inspired tremendous hope again.

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On Political Violence – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I feel compelled by this past weekend’s events to write about the follies of political violence.

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An Election Year Independence Day – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I’m writing to you with this week’s holiday in mind, with some of my aspirations and hopes for America.

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Leadership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

I’ve long wondered about what kind of leader I want to be. This week a coalescing of those ponderings.

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Politics and the Citizen – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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Church and State – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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