The Stump

Proper forgetting depends on the idea of a nation itself. For Renan, “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle” built on two things, the past and the present.

To prove the American proposition, we must dedicate our lives to its truth with our deeds every day, and maybe someday with our lives themselves.

Like the very young and the very old among us, we must forget the learned delusion of independence that revolution prefers and accept the radical dependence of the human condition.

Perhaps one day moral clarity on this issue will be found or the values of the American people will align more neatly. Until that day arrives, if ever it does, let the people themselves reach across the proverbial aisle so that they may reach one another.

A democracy is not kept by filling in a ballot bubble once every four years. It’s kept by responsibly and virtuously exercising our freedoms in our homes, communities, and institutions day by day.

When Christ died on the cross, the disciples did not know he was going to rise again. But for Christians today, we see the full picture, and these are not meaningless tragedies.

If there ever comes a true accounting of the costs we’re racking up for making, using, and discarding our mobile (de)vices, we will be obliged to admit that there has been no net gain. The withdrawals from the account exceed the deposits in both number and in sum.

You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature – and let the chips fall.

If we choose to befriend our many obligations—to connect with other people, to love, to serve, to create, to borrow, to lend, to repair, to celebrate, to support—instead of buying a product or a service—then we are cultivating fertile ground for a healthy form of gendered cooperation to (perhaps) re-emerge.

It is a reality not frequently enough acknowledged: like so many other things in life, the love of reading is caught, not taught.