When people ask me for prayer, sometimes it bugs me. This morning, after years of my feeling this way, Meister Eckhart offers me an explanation: People often say to me: “Pray for me!” Then I think: “Why do you go out of yourselves? Why don’t you stay within yourselves and grasp your own blessings? After… Continue reading And heaven and nature
Category: Hannah Arendt
Stolen voices
Victoria and I talked this morning about our fears of not being heard. For my part, I’ve been working on a book that I may or may not ever finish. I’ll let Victoria speak for herself. Hannah Arendt’s vision of the political is essentially positive: the political is a realm where people are seen and… Continue reading Stolen voices
Primal political events
There’s Euphoria, another TV show I’ve never watched but read about in, this time, The New Yorker Today. Euphoria is about the homeland generation, the generation I teach. I didn’t know all of this was going on outside of my classroom. The New Yorker review accounts for “all of this” in part by citing this generation’s “primal political event”… Continue reading Primal political events
Tyranny’s freedoms
American freedom, as most people experience it, could be experienced just as well under tyranny. In fact, because our freedom to do as we please is no less threatened than it was a few years ago, we might complete our slide into tyranny and say with perfect justice to anyone we find in that darkened state, “It’s a free country.”
Executive function
I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Politics,”… Continue reading Executive function
Ilk & elk
Is there a correlation among high ceilings, high church, and the highbrow? Among low ceilings, low church, and the lowbrow? I’m returning to a delicious, low-ceilinged affair on Groundhog’s Day, Graves Mountain Lodge’s annual Wild Game Night. Venison, buffalo, and bear with steak sauce. The last time I was there, February of 2016, I saw a… Continue reading Ilk & elk
Action & the news
The Muslim ban began almost two years ago, on January 28, 2017. When a friend texted me about the executive order, I jumped in the car and drove to Dulles Airport, about fifteen minutes from home. I was surprised at the sense of local responsibility that had overcome me. The strangers I met that night… Continue reading Action & the news
Grieving
With eyes closed, I am talking to a quite lively ghost.1 My father died the morning of December 1. He would have been 95 this Valentine’s Day. His poor health, unusual for him, to some extent prepared us for his death over the past six months. It’s all grief, whether it came before he died… Continue reading Grieving
Arendt & this year’s reading
So far I’m finding The Life of the Mind to be a philosophical defense of some of Hannah Arendt’s big political science concepts. Her “it-seems-to-me,” for instance, reappears here, but not strictly as a celebration of plurality as it appears in, say, Between Past and Future. In The Life of the Mind, it-seems-to-me becomes the… Continue reading Arendt & this year’s reading
How important is the Supreme Court?
In 1831, two young Frenchmen visited America, charged by their government with investigating the American prison system. They finished in nine months. They also spent those months months investigating “all the mechanisms of this vast American society,” as the leader of the pair, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it (Tocqueville vi). The result is Democracy in… Continue reading How important is the Supreme Court?