James Talarico Is a Christian X-Ray; The New York Times, March 8, 2026

DAVID FRENCH , The New York Times; James Talarico Is a Christian X-Ray

"If you were to crack open Scripture today and start reading, one of the first things you should notice is that the Bible contains remarkably few political mandates. You can read it from cover to cover and not know the definitive biblical tax rate, welfare program or foreign policy.

But the next thing you’ll notice is that there is an immense amount of guidance describing how Christians should behave. Indeed, in the book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul says that the fruit of the spirit is a set of virtues — “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”..

But what if the coming thermostatic reaction isn’t about ideology as much as about character and temperament? What if we’re seeing a 21st-century version of the American public’s movement away from the cruelty and corruption of Richard Nixon toward the ethics and integrity of Jimmy Carter — a man who won for all the right reasons in 1976, even if his presidency didn’t live up to his promise?

It’s too soon to be that optimistic, but that’s what I see in people’s attitudes toward Talarico. That’s what I see in Cornyn’s surprising plurality over Paxton. This miserable political moment won’t end when the left takes back the government from the right or if the right continues to beat the left. It will end when our politicians — especially Christian politicians — forsake cruelty for compassion and realize that we shall know Christians in politics not by their stridency and ideology, but by their integrity and love, including their love for, as Talarico put it, “all of our neighbors.”

That’s the significance of the Talarico moment: not the old news that a Christian can be progressive but, rather, that Christian politicians can actually act like Christians. Kindness still has a place in the public square, even if it doesn’t always seem that way."

The Blue Wave Cometh?; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, November 7, 2025

Ezra Klein

Produced by Annie Galvin and Claire Gordon

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; The Blue Wave Cometh?

"Klein: [Laughs.] So this Judith Shklar essay that you’re mentioning — I want to read another part that you had sent me because I think it gets at this conversation we’re having in an interesting way, as well as at something that I am trying to get at when I talk about love or respect or politics as a difficult but worthwhile act.

Virtues are hard to carry out. That is why they are virtues. If they were easy, they wouldn’t be virtues.

So Shklar writes:

Courage is to be prized since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats both physical and moral. This is to be sure not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set and still before us is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence but between cruel military and moral repression and violence and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, Black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is in fact extremely difficult and constraining. Far too much so for those of us who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity and the risks of freedom.

I do find something very inspiring in that.

Retica: I hoped you would. [Laughs.]

Klein: Not just that liberalism should be about trying to protect against fear, about cruelty, but this idea that it actually takes tremendous courage, that it takes tremendous self-discipline, that it is a part of yourself that you are honing and working on and strengthening — a muscle you are strengthening.

There’s something Obama has been saying as he’s been back on the trail in the last couple of weeks that I found interesting. He said it, too, in his interview with Marc Maron: that for a lot of us, none of what we believed has been hard. We didn’t grow up at a time when it was hard to believe in political freedom, hard to speak our mind. There was no risk to any of it — not really. There have been at other times in our history — Jim Crow, the Red Scare, World War II.

He said: It has not asked that much of us to believe in political freedom, to believe in liberalism. And all of a sudden it does. And right now we’re seeing who is willing to have that asked of them — who’s willing to believe some of these things when it’s hard.

And his point was that a lot of the leaders in civil society, business leaders and so on, have performed very poorly in this era. They’ve bent the knee — particularly compared with the first era of Trumpism.

Now they go give Donald Trump golden gifts in the White House. They are very much willing to pay to play. And not just pay money, but pay out in terms of other people’s freedoms. Pay out in terms of other people’s safety. Pay out in the kind of society that, if you had explained it to them a couple of years ago, they would have told you they did not want to live in that."

The virtues of Superman; Thinking About..., September 25, 2025

TIMOTHY SNYDER, Thinking About... ; The virtues of Superman

[Spoilers for 2025 Superman film]

"Superman’s victory, in the end, is crowned with an argument about humanity. For Luthor, humanity is genetic. He is human because he is genetically so. And whatever he does is therefore human, in the interest of humanity. The better it feels, the more human it must be. Superman counters with an ethical definition: to be human is to be humane. It is to try to do what is right. It is to take risks and pains to try to find the truths, including about oneself. Luthor, naturally, laughs at all of this. 

Luthor has himself raised a super-clone of Superman to be loathsomely obedient. But whose point does that really prove? Superman was genetically the child of parents who wanted him to take over the earth in a display of his own genetic superiority. But he was raised by kind people and became a kind person. Parenting, it turns out, makes the difference."