Spiritual Quote of the Day (Jean Bethke Elshtain, on Peace, Love and Justice)

“This is where love comes in — love of God and love of neighbor — and this is where justice comes in as well. Augustine's alternative definition [of the commonwealth] starts with love. ‘A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.’ It ‘follows that to observe the character of a particular people, we must examine the objects of its love. No single man can create a commonwealth. There is no ur-founder, no great bringer of order. It begins in ties of fellowship, in households, clans and tribes, in earthly love and its many discontents. And it begins in an ontology of peace, not war.”—American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013), Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1996)

Quote of the Day (Jean Bethke Elshtain, on 9/11)

“An image that crowds out many others in my mind is that of tens of thousands fleeing New York City by foot. As I watched and wept, I recalled something I had said many times in my classes on war: ‘Americans don’t have living memories of what it means to flee a city in flames. Americans have not been horrified by refugees fleeing burning cities.’ No more. Now we know.”—Political philosopher and ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013), quoted in Paul Vitello, “Jean Bethke Elshtain, A Guiding Light For Policy Makers After 9/11, Dies at 72,” The New York Times, August 16, 2013

(Photograph of dust-covered 9/11 victims taken by Don Halasy)

Quote of the Day (Jean Bethke Elshtain, on Loyalty and God)

“To be loyal to some person, thing, idea, institution, or way of life is to define oneself. One cannot be a self without other selves around it. One requires the rough give-and-take of complex human lives. If, however, we lift our lives up to God, if we ask his forgiveness and place our weaknesses before him, we will not only come to know a peace we had not previously known; we will also be able to handle conflicts of loyalty in a spirit of good humor and fellowship.”-- Jean Bethke Elshtain, “On Loyalty,” First Things, August/September 2013

Ever since reading Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Democracy on Trial (1995), I have sought out work by this elegant and erudite public intellectual every chance I could. I read with dismay, then, the news of her death this past week at age 72.

Predictably, The New York Times went into automatic default mode in the first couple of paragraphs in its obituary of this University of Chicago political philosopher and ethicist, noting that she had become “an intellectual beacon for neoconservative policy makers in the post-9/11 era.” Later in the piece, the author, Paul Vitello, seems to have repented this stereotyping, noting that Dr. Elshtain “staked out positions across the political spectrum: insisting that society had a responsibility to help the poor and the vulnerable, questioning what she called the American cult of individualism, arguing that moral issues had a place in the political discussion and advocating all-out war on terrorists.”

Coming early in the culture wars that have proved so convulsive in the last two decades, Democracy on Trial has proven all the more relevant with each passing year. Its plea for civility has been sadly ignored by policymakers.

I knew about Dr. Elshtein’s moral astringency, but nothing about her courage until I read Princeton philosopher Robert George’s affectionate tribute, which recalled how she refused to let the limp she had developed (after contracting polio 60 years ago) dominate her life.

Two years ago, Dr. Elshtein converted to Roman Catholicism, the same faith as her longtime cultural hero, St. Augustine. May she rest in peace.