Remembering the 4th of July

When Americans think of the 4th of July, what first comes to mind are such things like family picnics, smores, and fireworks. Perhaps after this, we remember that the 4th of July celebrates our independence from England, an independence declared by our civic leaders and won by our men in the field. There is a big difference, however, between thinking about the 4th of July and remembering the 4th of July. Catholics who know their theology, however, should understand what I mean by this distinction. In the Greek, anamnesis means to remember but, more than this, it means to participate in the past event through remembering it. Liturgically-minded Catholics in this way are best prepared to celebrate tomorrow’s July 4th celebrations. But we should also recall our American history following the War of Revolution. Today, July 3, we also remember the saving of the Union at the Battle of Gettysburg.

So let us now remember our past by reading anew the words of five men: Thomas Jefferson, Joshua Chamberlain, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the following words of Thomas Jefferson constitute the core of the Declaration of Independence. What began in 1776 continued in the Civil War of the 1860s, and came full circle in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness… And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

Joshua Chamberlain won the Medal of Honor for saving the Union Army from Southern forces under Robert E. Lee at the Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. In the following speech from the movie Gettysburg, Chamberlain rallies the men of his regiment for battle.

This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. This has not happened much, in the history of the world: We are an army out to set other men free. America should be free ground, all of it, from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow, no man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was. Here you can be something. Here is the place to build a home. But it's not the land. There's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me. What we're fighting for, in the end... we're fighting for each other.

General Robert E. Lee may have fought on the side of the South, but his faith and character made him America’s most beloved General. Today marks the day of Pickett’s Charge, the failed attack on the Union center that lost the South the war. In the following words from the movie Gettysburg, Lee speaks to one of his generals before the Charge and gives us an insight into his thinking before launching such a disastrous attack:

General, soldiering has one great trap: to be a good solider you must love the army. To be a good commander, you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love. We do not fear our own death you and I. But there comes a time... We are never quite prepared for so many to die. Oh, we do expect the occasional empty chair, a salute to fallen comrades. But this war goes on and on and the men die and the price gets ever higher. We are prepared to lose some of us, but we are never prepared to lose all of us. And there is the great trap General. When you attack, you must hold nothing back. You must commit yourself totally. We are adrift here in a sea of blood and I want it to end. I want this to be the final battle.

By the end of July 3, 1963, 58,000 Americans had become casualties of this battle, the greatest battle fought in the Americas.

In November of 1863, five months after the battle, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous speech, the Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln alluded to the civic sacrifice made by the brave men in the field of combat who consecrated the land by their blood. In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln makes the connection of the blood to the will of the Father:

…It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. gives us our final witness for our remembrance today. His words are both the closest to our modern day and also the most biblical. Seeing himself as a new Moses, he worked to bring civil freedoms to his people while also preparing for a Christ-like death:

“We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Today and tomorrow, let us not only think of the events of the past, let us remember them and remember the sacrifices of our civic forefathers. Let us participate in their work and never fear carrying it out next week, next month, and in all the years to come.

Review: The Enemy At Home

The Essays of Orate Fratres now includes my new review of Dinesh D'Souza's book The Enemy at Home. In the book he offers a much broader understanding of Islam and the events before and after 9/11. D'Souza's thesis is that radical Islam seeks to destroy us because of our decadance, not our democracy.

From the Review:

While Dinesh D’Souza is best known for going head-to-head with atheists in public debates, this Catholic scholar from India, also has a knack for connecting faith to global affairs, foreign policy, and cultural reform on the domestic front. Indeed D’Souza’s book, The Enemy at Home, struck a cord among liberals and conservatives alike, calling out the secularists and making the case that our own moral depravity, sponsored by the secular Left, was the root cause of 9/11. D’Souza argues that conservatives have missed a perfect opportunity to link the culture war with the war on terror – that radical Muslims do not hate democracy, free markets, or new technology, but rather our permissive culture. Contrary to the Left, no Middle Easterner believes America is seeking a new hegemonic, territory-based imperialism. What struck fear into bin Laden was the new “cultural imperialism” of the radical Left which poses an existential threat to Islam.

You can click here for more.

Reveiw: Saving Christianity from Empire

An excerpt introduction to the review of Saving Christianity from Empire:

The political left… has seemingly distanced itself from religious language in general and Christian language in particular… Very rarely today do we find a book by a liberal author meant to seriously address Christianity and its relationship to the nation in a positive light. Rarer still is such a book written for a mass audience of average Christians unfamiliar with the many complex and abstract concepts of theology.

But this is exactly what the theologian and politician Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer has attempted to do in his book Saving Christianity from Empire. Pallmeyer is a professor at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN), teaching both theology and justice and peace studies. While Pallmeyer may be best known for his run against Al Franken for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 U.S. Senate election, he is one of the few liberal politicians to be as equally committed to faith as to politics. A lifelong Lutheran, Pallmeyer earned his bachelor’s degree from the Lutheran St. Olaf College and then a Masters of Divinity from the Union Theological Seminary before becoming a St. Thomas professor where he has taught for fifteen years.

Now for most American’s, Pallmeyer’s argument [will need] some convincing – and often times the best way to convince someone is by telling them a story. Like every good story, we could say that Saving Christianity from Empire examines the United States, as well as Christianity, in the following way: the story is setup, upset, and reset. The setup represents the protagonist’s original upright beginnings while the upset refers to that which becomes an obstacle for the protagonist to overcome. Of course, no story is complete without a reset, that is, either a return to the original good or to the protagonist’s eventual doom. Every good story has either a happy ending or a sad ending. No good story has a non-ending.

Pallmeyer tells his story as one of optimism for the United States and Christianity, but he casts both of their modern-day versions as their own worst enemies. In his narrative, the United States is a good republic turned empire and Christianity is a good religion subverted by empire into a caesaropapist puppet of injustice. The narrative’s hopeful reset, however, relies on a revitalized Christianity which is able to resist and by doing so restore the evil empire to its former status as a good republic. In this way Pallmeyer’s thesis rests squarely on his theology, not on his indictments of American economic or foreign policy. In other words, Pallmeyer is offering Christians a hopeful means of social and political change precisely by way of their faith and not merely through a sociopolitical process devoid of faith. Could this be a postmodernist return to the power of religion which enlivened movements led by great men like Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Read the full review to examine Pallmeyer’s theology and find out.

When Farmers Fight for Freedom

Anyone who has seen movies like 300 or Alexander must know their Greek history, right? After all, doesn’t everyone learn in high school world history class that Athens and Sparta led a Pan-Hellenic alliance to hold back a Persian invasion – the Spartan ground forces holding back the Persian army at Thermopylae while the Athenians logistically ending the war by the naval victory at Salamis – only to turn on each other, thus paving the way to a Macedonian invasion under Phillip II and his son Alexander?

This is certainly the narrative I was raised with. Indeed, the modern student of history is often left with the impression that Spartans stood alongside Athenians once more – this time against Phillip’s Macedonian army – at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC and that the Greeks fell together under the weight of the Macedonian machine.

But this is simply not the case.

In his book, The Soul of Battle, Victor Davis Hanson corrects our history by telling the story of Thebes and their greatest leader: Epaminondas. As it turns out, the once utterly defeated Athens was present at Chaeronea while the renowned Spartans could no longer field a sizeable army. More surprising was the fact that the key ally of Athens at Chaeronea was Thebes, not Sparta. Somehow in the short 66 years between Athens’ capitulation to Sparta in 404 BC and the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, the Thebans under Epaminondas had achieved something that Athens never accomplished in almost thirty years of war with Sparta.

And it only took Epaminondas three months to do it.

To find out how he vanquished tyranny, helped to establish the first Greek nation, and launched the most daring invasion in Greek history, read my full essay over at the Essays of Orate Fratres site.

Aristotle's Children

Over on Farmer's Pence blog there is a great new post on Plato and Aristotle that reminded me of a review I wrote two years ago for a book called Aristotle's Children. The book is well worth the read, but if you'd like to learn more, here's a reposting of my old review:

At the start of the Protestant Reformation, an argument was made against the Catholic Church that it blindly adopted the philosophy of the Greek pagan Aristotle and subverted the faith of the Apostles with the ancient beliefs of polytheistic, idolatrous heathen. What’s more, Catholics had taken centuries to show how faith and reason were not opposed to each other – but for Martin Luther, who kicked off Protestantism, reason was “the devil’s whore.” Moreover, in the classical Protestant view, humanity was so corrupted by sin that not only could no man trust his reason with certainty, he could neither do any objectively good deed whatsoever.

But while Protestant anthropology may be a better topic for a different post, it must be said that Aristotle was as much a controversial figure in the Catholic Church as the Church herself became for Protestants – at least according to Aristotle’s Children by Richard E. Rubenstein. Rubenstein, a George Mason University public affairs professor, paints an epic picture of the loss and subsequent rediscovery of Aristotle and his philosophy. The story of Aristotle’s incorporation into Catholic thought and medieval scholasticism is one of intrigue, infighting, but most of all, synthesis with the Gospel.

Synthesizing classical philosophy with Christianity might seem like a tricky task, but the job is made tremendously easier by the fact that Aristotle and Plato wrote hundreds of years before Christ. As medieval Christians (and Christians of the modern era) argued, these writers simply did not have Christianity before them to work from and they did what they could given what they had. Reason alone can figure out an awful lot, but where reason falls short, faith stands strong.

As Rubenstein points out, synthesizing classical philosophy with Christianity had been going on since the early days of the Church. St. Augustine, perhaps the greatest of the late patristic writers, is known for his Christianization of Plato during the 5th century. Sadly, Aristotle’s works were not taken up as closely as Plato. This was, for one reason, because of how his philosophy conflicted with the calamitous events of the fall of the Roman Empire. Plato’s philosophy spoke in a way that treated this world as temporary and imperfect – and only another almost heavenly reality is where perfection is found forever. In other words, it fit well with the persecutions that had befallen Christians in the past and fit just as well in the face of Rome’s destruction; in other words: don’t worry about this world, think about the next.

Aristotle, on the other hand, pointed out the harmony in this world and how everything can find an order and a purpose in the way things are. There is beauty, goodness, and truth to be found in this life as well. His view painted a much prettier picture of reality’s self-congruence and our ability to enjoy discovering its secrets - or put another way, he exemplified the fact that God created a "good" world. Aristotle, like Plato, believed in a God who gave the universe its start and fundamental meaning – but many of his other views seemed quite controversial. It was in part because of this, coupled with St. Augustine’s triumphant use of Plato, that Aristotle’s works fell to the wayside for over half a millennia.

What I particularly enjoyed about Rubenstein’s book was that it captured the events which led Christians, Jews, and Muslims to translate and distribute the works of Aristotle – and then captured the shockwave of Europe’s dealing with the philosopher’s thoughts. More importantly, Rubenstein looks at the rise of the university system established by the Catholic Church and how Aristotle was so influential in helping some of the greatest theologians of history better articulate the Faith using reason. When Cathar heretics used Aristotle to back up their claims (e.g. that there are two gods), the pope made the controversial decision to allow Catholic monks and university teachers to pick up Aristotle and show how his ideas were not contradictory to the Faith - and help quench the layman's thirst for a deeper understanding of Christian doctrine. In this way, and in many others, Aristotle helped shape the future of Church history as well as western civilization in the Middle Ages.

Without giving too much more away, Aristotle was heavily studied during the 12th-13th centuries as Europe was blossoming religiously, politically, and economically – but he began to be abandoned once more with the darker 14th century and beyond as Europe fell into the horrors of the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death, the Avignon Papacy, and the Great Western Schism. This was only further deepened by the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation and another century of religious wars.

It was also during this time that faith became more and more divorced from reason. Reason (reduced to a materialist-atheist scientism) took over the public sphere while faith became a private matter to be kept out of society and public policy. Though so many people think of the Middle Ages as nothing more than a theocracy, the beauty of medieval Catholic scholasticism was that it kept faith and reason in dialogue with each other. This dialogue was never a fusion of the two as one or identical, but rather as a means of finding deeper truths about God, humanity, and the world around us.

Today we are left with a schizophrenic worldview that must be reconciled once again.

Rubenstein argues that the present age of globalization may be a good time to rediscover Aristotle and do just this. Aristotle’s “ideas have always seemed most relevant to those inhabiting an age of expanding trade, increasing intercultural connections, and rising expectations for human development. The Aristotelian project, which seemed irrelevant in an age of political and religious fragmentation, may serve in the next phase of human history as an inspirer of creative, integrative thought.”

Philia Love and the Liturgy

Read the short essay Philia Love and the Liturgy on The Essays of Orate Frates.

In my previous essay Ordering Freedom and the Four Loves, I described anew the four loves handed down to us from the ancient Greeks. Now with a renewed understanding of philia, this essay examines what effect it could have on the life of the Church, particularly as it shapes the liturgy and the apostolic fraternity of the all male-priesthood.

The Essays of Orate Fratres

Since this blog was launched, there have beeen some short posts and some essay-length posts. The nice thing about blogs is that they should provide a short snippet, packed with information, but not too much information.

Because of this, I have decided to launch a website where some of my essays can be read. As they come up, I will post an entry here on the blog and with a link to the new site: The Essays of Orate Fratres.

Be sure to check it out!

Ordering Freedom and the Four Loves

Visit the Essays of Orate Frates to read this short essay on ordering freedom and the four Greek loves. In short, the essay seeks to offer a new argument amidst our modern crisis. If we properly understand freedom and love, we can move away from language of secular rights and pick up the more ancient ecclesial language of love. Furthermore, through rediscovering the meaning of the four loves, we can come to appreciate the apostolic fraternity which provides the nation a form of protective, masculine love.

Review: The Origins of Political Order

Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order (volume one) is a rich source of information for those who want to understand the historical roots of our modern political institutions. The nations did not pop up over night, and Fukuyama takes great care in showing the different paths towards a strong nation. His method is not in advocating a deterministic model built on the laurels of Athens and the Magna Carta. Instead, he roots his argument first in human nature, after which he offers us a truly global approach to the creation of the first modern governments at the dawn of the American and French Revolutions.

From the outset it should be said that Fukuyama’s work seeks to update Samuel Huntington’s book, Political Order in Changing Societies. As a protégée of Huntington, Fukuyama has been greatly influenced by his ideas and now seeks to update them for the 21st century. The Origins of Political Order begins and ends with the rejection of progressivism: the notion that things always get better. Indeed, when we look out across the globe in the two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have not seen democracies flourish. Russia seems to be backsliding into authoritarianism, Islamic radicals are doing whatever they can to keep democracy out of the Middle East, South America still struggles with dictatorships, Africa remains impoverished, and China is as tyrannical as ever. Fukuyama points out, however, that one cannot talk about decay until one shows how order came about in the first place.

Hence the need for a book called The Origins of Political Order.

Political order, according to Fukuyama, comes about when three important institutions are emplaced among a people. These political institutions are: the state itself, the rule of law, and accountable government. Why are these three institutions so important? In short, because human nature necessitates them. In a rejection of Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s conception of the state of nature, Fukuyama uses archeology, sociology, and anthropology to argue that man is a social being from the beginning and as such human societies most naturally tend towards an association called reciprocal altruism (what Fukuyama likes to call “patrimonialism”). This reciprocal altruism can be defined as the favoring of one’s family and friends over others in the realm of protection and production in social and political structures. Because this kind of system is often rife with corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency, there arises the need for impersonal institutions to create a just and ordered society where personal merit, not personal connections, determines one’s position in the societal hierarchy.

In order to generate the nation, the three aforementioned state-level institutions are requisite. First there must exist the state itself, represented and imaged by a strong executive (i.e. king, emperor, president). The state is important because it is able to concentrate enough power to protect the nation from external threats while breaking the power of an entrenched nobility who might seek the benefits of their own individual family. Following the creation of the state, an effective rule of law created strong private ownership whereby wealth could be created and accumulated by a newly developing middle class (what Fukuyama likes to call the Third Estate). The rise of free cities in Europe, which allowed peasants to escape from the local lords and take on specialized jobs, and were protected by kings – thus further weakening the nobility. Lastly, in places like England and Denmark, accountable government was able to place checks on the king’s authority and the new middle class began to invest itself in the state-building project.

Fukuyama notes that once these three institutions were founded in England, the English citizenry were willing to tax themselves at rates of up to 30% in times of need while in France, where there was no accountability and no personal investment in the nation, the king was never able to succeed in collecting taxes at 10-15%. In short, these three institutions were able to take a small, island country and propel it to dominance above such seemingly powerful absolutist nations like France and Spain. Fukuyama also alludes to his notion of social capital as a force behind the final formation of the nation. Strong self-government (at a local level) and religious ties created an environment of cooperation and solidarity among those differing in social status. In Denmark, for example, the Protestant notion of sola scriptura led to high literacy rates in the peasantry, thus preparing them to take on jobs which required higher levels of education.

That being said, religion and culture are not Fukuyama’s primary concern in this volume. Because he concentrates on the origins of political institutions, Fukuyama draws on economics, culture, and religion only when they played a role in shaping and creating the necessary institutions. As such, we see that the lack of organized religion in China helped it create a strong state early on but the same absence harmed China’s development of a rule of law and accountable government. Fukuyama also shows that religion in India made for such a complicated social and political structure that no strong state ever emerged. Islam and Christianity are also discussed in detail, both of which focused on bringing men out of their family groups and binding them to sovereigns unrelated by blood.

After having read this book, a man formed by a Catholic worldview like myself can walk away with some of the following insights:

1. Institutions are Important: Samuel Huntington, Fukuyama’s academic mentor, defined institutions as “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior”. Those who claim to dislike “institutional” or “organized” religion and a ritualistic liturgy fail to remember that their bodily livelihood depends not only on the need for “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior” at a state-level but also on the “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior” in their own chest (i.e. the much valued need for a steady and stable heartbeat!). We should not find it surprising that when people withdraw from the spiritual institution of the Church, they also begin to withdraw from social institutions of the nation, and heart disease becomes the number one killer of men and women.

2. The Need for Recognition: Men naturally seek status and honor, and to be respected by equals is a potent force for political and national development. Fukuyama notes that even kings can be dissatisfied by receiving honor from a nation of slaves. Tyrants, like the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, may be satisfied with cheap honor but real men are not. In religious terms, this provides an effective argument against those who deride Christianity as a religion which makes men God’s slaves, as if God simply wants an army of zombies to worship Him. Precisely the opposite is at play: Through baptism, God claims us as His adopted sons in the one Son, Jesus Christ, and by re-creating us with a share of His own nature, God makes us fit for worship as His obedient sons, not slaves. This model of sonship, filial obedience, and status change should be a clarion call for our own civic interactions. In such a way, sacraments are not only the outward signs of invisible grace, but they are the icons for public order.

3. Marriage and Private Ownership: Fukuyama tends to reduce the rule of law to merely the means of protecting private property rights from encroachment by the state or by the nobility. At the same time, he spoke in detail regarding the role of marriage in Europe and in India. In the former, the Catholic Church helped the state break up the tribal associations of the barbarian invaders while in the latter, cross-cousin marriage and the caste system hampered national development. The insight I have drawn, though not found specifically in the text, is the need for the institutions of marriage and private property. If institutions are important (insight #1) and if men have a need for recognition (insight #2), then not only is it man’s best interest to invest himself in his nation, but he also stands the best chance at a natural sense of pride and recognition through the ownership of a home and in having a wife and family. Marriage as an institution, the lifelong union of a man and a woman, was invented not by women who sought the security of a man but rather by men who could secure for themselves a wife while limiting the ambitions of the alpha male. The social acceptance (not the merely legal toleration) of divorce, coupled with the sexual revolution has done more harm to man’s need for honor, a wife, and a home than atom bombs ever could.

4. Transcending Family Values: Catholics who are naturally appalled by the Democrat's support of abortion and gay marriage have flocked to the Republican Party, delivering the presidency to George W. Bush in two elections – and they would have done it again had the GOP ran a consistently pro-life and pro-marriage candidate in 2008. Nevertheless, Catholics who adopt the secular arguments of the GOP (comprised of Protestants) fail to realize a point made by Fukuyama and manifested in the Catholic Church: family values are not enough. Indeed, in order to create the nation, the strong ties between families and friends had to be severed – either willingly or forcibly. This is certainly not a rejection of marriage and family (see insight #3), rather it is an ordering of loves – and in a nation like the United States whose sovereign is God, agape (divine love) is able to purify, shape, and order philia (brotherly love). Republican candidates like Rick Santorum are not taken seriously because they focus on the narrow issue of abortion. Strong pro-life candidates must not only condemn the damage of an eroticized culture, but they must also offer a national vision of duty, the sovereignty of God, and the deep bonds of philia which enable men to transcend the family and build the nation. Priests do this to build up the Church, we as lay Catholic men must do it to make the nation.


The few things I’ve said here only scratch the surface of Fukuyama’s work. More insights are sure to find themselves popping up in future blog posts, but suffice it to say that I highly recommend The Origins of Political Order as an excellent source of interpretive history, political theory, and the interplay of many fields of study with the development of nations.