A Democratic Party “Contract for America”

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Doug Cumming

In May 1994, a conservative politics professor who would be my colleague at Washington and Lee University years later, Bill Connelly, was co-author of a new book on why Republicans were forever losing in Congress. It was titled, Congress’ Permanent Minority: Republicans in the U.S. House.

Later that year, Republican House leader Newt Gingrich released a “Contract for America.”

It was brilliant. It was clear. And it worked – in that the GOP took control of the House for the first time since 1953. And it took the Senate.

Gingrich and co-author Dick Armey had found issues that more than 60 percent of Americans agreed with, and included in the “Contract” eight bills to implement reforms in those “safe” areas. It avoided more controversial issues like abortion and school prayer.

It also described ten bills, less certain of outcome, that it promised to bring to the House floor.

The Contract for America fluffed itself out with text from Ronald Reagan’s 1985 Inaugural Address. It was released six weeks before the Nov. 8 midterm election in President Clinton’s first term.

The Republican Party flipped both chambers, gaining 54 House seats and eight Senate seats. Its legislative agenda was not a great success – most of the Contract’s bills failed or were vetoed by Clinton. But giving the “out” party control of Congress put that branch of government back in play as a co-equal balance, installed Gringrich as House speaker, and set a foundation for a conservative agenda that would grow and grow. The Heritage Foundation, which wrote Trump’s Project 2025, was responsible for most of the ideas in the Contract for America.

Credit for the Republican Revolution of 1995 might not rest entirely on the Contract.

But the Democratic Party should study it closely, and not wait until six weeks before midterm elections Nov. 3 to promise the American people something specific and popular. The Contract, signed by most Republican members of the House and Senate, nationalized the midterms. Democrats should do the same.

Smart people in the national Democratic Party should be able to come up with the wording on bills for things most people care about:

  • Help with the cost of healthcare, including mental health, and healthcare insurance.
  • Affordable quality childcare to provide families with choices and not discourage the having and raising of children.
  • Retain middleclass tax breaks but not for the super rich. Individuals earning more than – pick a high annual figure, including stock values – will be taxed at higher rates.
  • Some kind of reasonable regulation of AI and crypto currency that gives the American people at least a seat at the table with Big Tech.
  • Something about investment in a clean-energy future, emphasizing the opportunities for jobs and restoring America’s standing as a world leader on energy, not an imperialist plunderer of foreign oil.
  • Laws to clean up Congress’s own act. The Contract for America was explicit on ways to make Congress itself more transparent and less corrupt. Democrats could promise campaign finance reform, laws of self-restraint and maybe at least a debate on term limits.
  • A law protecting the independence of agencies whose non-partisanship was assumed, like with the Federal Reserve and the CDC. Also, restoring the role of inspectors-generals and other objective measures for holding government accountable, in both branches. Maybe also a law saying Presidential candidates must release tax forms and their physical reports.
  • A law that make explicit what is in the Constitution already, that the President cannot take or make money (much less, billions from foreign interests) for himself or his family while President. 

Trump is scared of the scenario. The Democrats win both chambers and he may be impeached again – and this time convicted. That may be. Jack Smith has testified about a strong case his team gathered for felony convictions on charges that were not brought in time for a trial. These were criminal charges, on solid law and evidence, that would make Trump the worst kind of criminal in U.S. history since Benedict Arnold.

But a Promise, or Covenant, or Contract from Democrats should be silent on Trump. It doesn’t move the needle to jump on Trump, except in Trump’s favor, oddly enough. This contract should not even propose an obvious Constitutional amendment not allowing a convicted felon to hold office. (He was convicted, remember, on a case much less important than the ones Jack Smith could have brought.)

Beth Macy, award-winning journalist from Roanoke who, after Democratic wins last November, decided to run for Congress.

Nor should it bring up ICE’s Storm Trooper actions, which are social-media content-providers that Trump and Miller have cultivated because it distracts Democrats and Resisters from their best winning issues with a losing issue for the Dems: immigration. All Americans support legal immigration and border security. But, sorry, Joe Biden’s tardiness in stopping a surge in illegal entry was part of his tragic hubris and identity politics. 

Instead, a Democratic contract should focus on laws that will bolster the power of Congress to check abusive Presidential power in the future, Right or Left, so that the legislative branch never again falls into the abyss where it stands today. For example, a law that says the President can’t “claw back” money already appropriated by Congress.

If I spend time this summer knocking on doors in the reddest congressional district in Virginia, which I hope to do for Beth Macy (a fellow retired journalist, author most recently of Paper Girl, pictured here), I want to be able to say what the Democrats will do if they win the House and Senate. And I hope the people I talk to can say, “Oh yes, I know what the Democrats have promised to do.” They may not agree with it, but at least they know what it is.

I don’t think any of us knows what it is yet.

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Indian Summer

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Doug Cumming

The fall sings in full chorus, but it speaks in a whispered word. A scarlet leaf of a sourwood tree whirls in the front yard, then smacks against the porch screen. It holds there, flattened and pinned by the warden wind like a captive pleading with me. Then, after a few seconds, it is yanked away.

It was like the Monarch butterfly I saw on the gravel road, displaying and folding the only bright color of that moldy November morning. The leaf, the butterfly. What were they trying to tell me?

The trees in chorus are something else. They fill the air in harmony, but like a church chorale, the words are hard to discern, English or Latin. In the meadow framing the woods, in this Indian summer sunshine, millions of particles are swirling with the warm breezes. I wonder if they are an offshoot of the uncut grasses, the rusty stalks as tall as fawns. I investigate.

They are insects, countless hoards. An infestation, but harmless. Ladybugs. Herman says no, they are kudzu bugs, swarming because the highway department killed off too much kudzu. I know they’re ladybugs, harmless but with hardshell wings. Their bright yellow or orange bodies, freckled in black (the Monarch’s black borders were freckled in white dots), hit me in the face and hands, so drunk on sunshine they were. Maybe they aren’t so harmless in this infestation. How can so many be around on just this last day or two of warmth in early November? Nature explodes, showing her potential for incredible abundance, or plague. And in contrast, a lone prophet tries to tell us, Prepare for one or the other.

Speak up. I don’t understand.

I lifted the Monarch off the road and set it on a crooked tree. The next day, it was still there, still barely alive. At least the slow wing motions seemed to show signs of art and life.

We like to imagine that the natives who were here before Europe invaded and settled were more attuned to Nature’s words and music. But they had their plagues, wars and hungers. David J. Silverman’s “This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanaug Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of the First Thanksgiving,” depicts an epoch of abundance for the red tribe of Cape Cod. Their God, Kiehtan, had been good. They mastered the maize horticulture that had spread across Indian culture from Mexico for a thousand years, but balanced that with summer fishing, and winter hunting. The women were in charge of edible plantings, which held female spirit and allowed for child raising, while the males were into fishing, hunting, tobacco, and war. They learned of the spirit world from dreams that one of their two souls could visit while the other kept the body alive. And in a special way, for males, from a rite of passage that involved fasting, sleep deprivation and ingesting of emetics and hallucinogens (Bradford’s history, p. 190).

But they were devastated by an epidemic around 1618. So when the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth in 1620, the Wampapaug sachem was ready for trading – which held promise of mutual benefit as well as symbolic meaning for a good relationship. Theirs was a gift economy. Our economy today has some of this understanding, mutual benefit in regulated commerce. But we tend to squash it with fear, distrust and not getting the symbolic, human part.

Phinizy Spalding’s “Oglethorpe in America” also tells a story, from 110 years later and down here in Georgia, of a benevolent and fairly equitable relationship between the colony’s founder and the Creek Indians. The Indians welcomed the treaty Oglethorpe negotiated on friendly terms, and they granted lands that they didn’t use for hunting and living.

The settlers were given to mistrust and fear, but an initial impulse for openness and mutual respect among leaders of both groups laid a good foundation. At least among leaders like the Wampanaug sachem Ousamaquin, the Creek leader Tomochichi, the “Pilgrims” Edward Winslow and Stephen Hopkins, and the last English knight errant James Edward Oglethorpe. (See Michael L. Thurmond’s “James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist.”)

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For Better or Verse

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Doug Cumming

Living for a couple of seasons in forested hills, our miniature “lake country” of North Georgia, is more than poetic. It is where we turn around on a trail when we hear the low growl of a mama bear, or marvel at the insane chorus of coyotes before dawn. It is where poetry happens, as it did for Wordsworth in his Lake Country.

I once asked a good published poet why she wasn’t writing poetry anymore. It takes too much time, she said. For her, it took about six months between even short poems, and she was too busy being a college dean.

I know what that means. But I have learned that other things are needed besides time to make poems: A little solitude and an interior life; a lot of reading and hearing of poems, and living close to nature and the seasons, away from town. Robert Graves said this about Robert Frost living for 10 years as a (not very successful) New England farmer: “The four natural objects proper to poems are, by common consent, the moon, water, hills and trees; with sun, beasts and flowers as useful subsidiaries.” He didn’t mean only as pretty objects in the poems, but also as the lived-in ecology of the writer.

One other thing is a frameable experience. This can be a burst of consciousness. Or it can be something as dramatic as Hurricane Helene’s devastation in parts of the Southeast last year.  Poems that writers made out of that are collected in a new anthology, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, edited by Hilda Downer, who is holding a series of readings around Appalachia. Last night, one was at Blacksburg Books. Tonight, from 6-7 p.m., there’s one at Black Mountain Library. I am glad to see the names of so many poets who will be there (and sorry I won’t join them, though I have a poem in the book): Ginger Graziano, Clint Bowman, Andrew Mack, Gene Hyde, Paige Ghilchrist, Michael Conner, Nancy Martin-Young, Pat Riviere-Seel, Rob Masterson, Whitney Waters, Lee Stockdale, Patricia Crittendon, Laurie Wilcox-Meyer, Paul Kanowski, Jennie Boyd Bull, Amy Tilley, Barbara Conrad, Hilda Downer.

It feels like I’m not doing much here in the mountains. But I do see that I’m writing a poem now and then, more than I used to. Here’s one, from a canoe trip my brother Walter took me on, on the Chestatee River out of Dahlonega.

On the River

A six-legged creature dents a surface that holds,
Making six giant craters in the smooth river shoals.
Then sensing a shadow with globular eyes,
It leaps, to be killed by a dragon that flies.

A million years later, or was it just now,
Two brothers are paddling, one stern and one bow.
The stern one is younger but like his canoe
Knows currents of rivers unknown to his crew.

Connecticut’s head in Vermont, just last week,
Was still in his blood on this slow Georgia creek.
No traffic, small eddies, mud turtles, all sorts,
Guitar for a bow sprit, his dog between thwarts.

Rivers all join, but family trees split.
So a branch from New England became Uncle Whitt,
And great-uncle Roger, on the Chattahoochee,
With a place you could swim from a river-skewed tree.

These brothers, from babyhood dunkings, were keyed
To slack water swimming, a lacustrine breed.
The first time they swam from that man’s riverbank
Was as if from some mystical liquor they drank.

What’s this? Moving water! The soul set aflame!
Like St. Stephen, the young one was never the same.
Rapids that plunge and rocks backward churning,
Waves for their origin endlessly yearning.

The spirit was restless that took him to go
Eternally seaward, whether tandem, solo,
Westward or eastward – the call was the sea.
The push was for Selfhood, for Being to be.

“With a lover’s pain to attain the plain”
So sang from fourth grade in the older one’s brain.
A stronger current under surface of prose—
The memorized song of Lanier still flows.

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Pickens Progress

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Doug Cumming

My wife and I are living for a time in an Appalachian corner of Pickens County, Ga., watching sunsets over a 2,800-foot-high lake. They talk about “two Georgias.” This is the “other” one — rural, heavily for Trump in the last election, relying too much on state and federal dollars but with that old Scots-Irish individualist pride and clan loyalty. Pickens is one of 94 of Georgia’s 159 counties with more deaths than births each year, according to the the blog by my friend Charlie Hayslett, “Trouble in God’s Country.”https://troubleingodscountry.com/

The Oglethorpe Monument in Jasper, Ga., with the historic Pickens County jail in the background.
The Oglethorpe Monument in Jasper, Ga., with the historic Pickens County jail in the background.

The turnout in the last election was huge — very democratic, small “d.” As The Pickens County Progress reported it: “Pickens County voters turned out in big numbers in the November 5 election, with 80 percent of registered voters casting ballots. In the presidential race, Donald Trump (R) took 82.7 percent, or 17,263, of the Pickens vote, beating Kamala Harris (D) who took 16.76 percent, or 3,499, votes.”

You may wonder why this locally-run weekly newspaper is called the “Progress.” It has something to do with being started in 1888, honoring the agrarian Southern rebellion against the Gilded Age Republican Party, a “Progressive” movement that was not too happy with the Democratic machine either. The need for real progress here is still obvious. I look for it in the newspaper, and when I saw it recently, I wrote this letter to the editor, which ran a few weeks ago.

Editor:

Reading the news takes effort, but it’s worth it when you find nuggets of good news. I don’t mean “soft news,” like gardening tips or high school sports, as nice as those are in The Pickens County Progress. I mean gold nuggets like Sheriff Donnie Craig telling the Chamber of Commerce’s monthly breakfast that crime in Pickens County has been falling for the past five years. Burglary, thefts and assaults are all much lower in the county today than they were in 2019.

But I always want to know the “why” behind the statistics – not just good news but good journalism. (I was a journalist, then a journalism professor.) One reason for the drop in crime, Sheriff Craig said, is that deputies for the past year have responded to domestic calls accompanied by a mental health provider. He called this having a “co-response” team. Such teams had responded to 169 calls since Craig, elected sheriff for the fourth time in November, adopted this change last year, he said.

Anyone involved in crime fighting (or reporting on it) knows that a lot of the job comes from problems in homes troubled by domestic violence, addictions and untreated mental conditions. A weapon in the home can make it worse, but having a mental health worker to de-escalate the problem is an idea that doesn’t have to wait on our endless gun-control debate.

Craig, a Republican, admitted he was skeptical at first of having “counselors” at crime scenes. But seeing how it worked in practice, he called it “one of the best things” he has been part of. The counselors are empowered to follow up after the initial call, helping provide mental health services as needed.

As I read the news these days, local and national, I see how President Trump has succeeded in targeting real problems (crime, immigration, inflation, government inefficiency, you name it) that had evaded solutions – but he comes blustering in with exactly the wrong solutions. Good TV, as he calls it, but not real solutions. Sheriff Craig shows how real solutions take time, an open mind, an honest set of statistics, and a willingness to try something that comes from a different perspective.

Doug Cumming

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1690: Two obscure beginnings of public trust

Posted on June 25, 2025 by Doug Cumming

How do you know . . . that South Korea had an authoritarian president named Yoon, and that Yoon declared martial law last December to shut down critics, an independent media and the National Assembly? Or that he was ousted by a snap election, and now faces criminal charges for leading an insurrection?

How do you know South Korea even exists?

How do I know that a South Korean family of three will be sending their first month’s rent for our furnished condo while my wife and I begin 12 months away? And that they will arrive soon, on a certain date?

The answer to the question “How do you know?” is always this: Trust.

I trusted the New York Times, AP, NPR, and in time, Wikipedia, to tell me the news about Yoon. I know the difference between trust-worthy news and trust-worthy opinion – such as the opinion of anti-Trump writers that South Korea’s ousting of Yoon is a good sign that democracy can win over authoritarian strongmen. That’s just an opinion, but at least it’s based on trust-worthy facts about what happened, and what’s happening.

I trust that South Korea exists, though I’ve never been to any Asian country. I was a questioning student, what they call a “critical thinker.” But the existence of South Korea cropped up in my schooling hundreds of times, from maybe 3rd grade and from my parent’s talking about the Korean War all the way to today. And there was never a suggestion – a conspiracy theory – that South Korea didn’t exist.

How do I know that our real estate agent found good tenants for our condo? It’s because of trust. I trust our real estate agent. I trust the confidential salary report from the man’s South Korean university, and the online conversion table from South Korean “Won” to U.S. dollars. And a hundred other tiny signs and signals. I see the peer-reviewed papers he’s written about de-carbonizing transportation through public policy. And it makes sense to me that Georgia Tech would be bringing him to Atlanta for a year-long research fellowship. My world makes sense to me, and I can act in that world, because of trust. I know that millions of people live in that world. Or used to.

Something has gone wrong. People have lost their trust in things they should trust (and correspondingly, they seem to trust things they shouldn’t, like the Truth Social posts of a TV-savvy president who says things like, “All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran”).

I don’t know what is happening to trust.

But I was wondering how it began in American history, and I happened upon an interesting beginning. It happened in 1690, with two events that occurred within four months of each other. Both involved a printing press – a key element of the trust that grew in the West out of Gutenberg’s machine – and both occurred in Boston.

One was the printing of “Publick Occurrences, both Foreign and Domestic,” on September 25, 1690, America’s first newspaper. Benjamin Harris, a British scofflaw who had immigrated to the Puritan colony of Massachusetts, printed this newspaper without the government’s permission. The first issue, containing various interesting news reports, declared the newspaper had several goals. One was to see that people paid attention to “memorable Occurrences of Divine Providence,” the idea that God was blessing America not just through one’s own interpretation of the Bible but through its news and history, as difficult as those seemed – death, corruption, wars and all that. Also, to “cure or at least charm” the spirit of Lying that prevailed among people without a newspaper.

The king’s governor shut down Harris’s newspaper after that one issue. But others would come soon enough, like the New England Courant that James Franklin (Ben Franklin’s older brother who taught Ben printing) established in 1721, also in Boston.

The other “origin” of trust came on December 10, 1690, when the Massachusetts colony decided to print paper currency for the first time on America’s shores. The government created 7,000 pounds of “bills of credit” to pay militia who had attacked French soldier in Quebec City. The battle was a humiliating defeat for the attackers from Massachusetts, who were further humiliated by their colony having run out of money to pay them. As any economist can tell you, printing currency for the first time, with no gold or silver in the treasury to back it, was a doomed experiment. Wildly inflationary.

But in time, slowly, the idea of paper currency and credit grew. It grew on trust, “faith and credit,” a value agreed-on in common by people who enjoyed the benefits of such common trust. It took a long time, and it took a sense of honor, and self, and the common good.

Today, I can trust that the exchange rate between the South Korean Won and the U.S. dollar will hold steady. So will planning to rent an apartment in Italy with Euros. These are democracies with checks and balances, mixed economies, and a measure of trust in news, in the meaning of words, and in a pragmatic sense of how things are, really.

But there are curious signs and signals that this trust is breaking down.

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Outage

Posted on May 6, 2025 by Doug Cumming

Our April morning peace was ripped—   
A boom and then the dark. What now?
Outside the squirrels began to mourn.
We know how lightning strikes have clipped   
These trees, blazed black trails to burn
Down mountain houses. Anyhow
This was no bolt, but just a tripped

Transformer. Our whole world shook. 
Out back, years of briar and vine
Have overtaken junked rolled fence   
And coiled barb wire that overtook
The last pole planted here since   
Georgia Power stamped the sign
Listing its history. Let’s have a look.

Lengths, years, and tree type: “Ches’n’t.
Cypress. Cedar. Pine,” painted
With creosote ninety-five
Years ago, this pole shouldn’t
Have been here that long, a live
Wire going where? Unacquainted
With our house, which was not

Here for another forty years?
The creosote has oozed like grief
To blacken the pinewood pole’s base.
This wasn’t lightning strike, but tears
For trees skinned, for nights, days,
Waiting to shed light. So this brief
Darkness, like a comma, appears

To remind us of how we fail
To honor roots and wild grape vines
That grow so slow on trees they seem
Like dropped cables, and steel barbs pale
Copies of cat briar. The man from the team
Stays on the ground, looks up and finds—
The pole has grown a stilled gray tail.

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Walker Percy: my favorite philosopher-novelist

Posted on April 24, 2025 by Doug Cumming

I’m offering another course at OLLI-Emory, the adult education program that has created a lively community of Baby Boomers who love teaching and learning, mostly in retirement. I don’t know if anyone will be as interested in this as they might be in other more practical courses for June, such as understanding kidney stones, garden slugs and defensive driving. In any case, here is the OLLI-Emory link and my Course Description.

Walker Percy: His Life, Novels and Ideas (Doug Cumming)

Instructor: Doug Cumming

Is there a writer you value as your favorite and a lifelong guide? Walker Percy is that writer for me. Percy, from Old-South families, was trained as a doctor and scientist, but recovering from TB immersed him in Russian novels, existential philosophy, Catholic conversion, and a riddling career as a novelist. His first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award in 1962. Five other novels followed until his death in 1990, along with collections of his fascinating works on language as the sole human mystery. I would like to present this writer’s worldview, humor and character in hopes that you will share some of how these have grown on me. One class: bio. Another: philosophical writings on language. Another: Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. Finally: The Second Coming. Books needed: “Love in the Ruins” and “The Second Coming”

 Bio: I taught journalism for 19 years as a professor at Washington & Lee University. This academic stretch came after 26 years of reporting, writing and editing for metro papers (including the AJC in the 90s) and magazines.

Thu 11:30AM – 1:00PM
Jun 05, 2025 to Jul 03, 2025

Available

$40.00

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Waves

Posted on March 14, 2025 by Doug Cumming

I miss waves. When my love and I transplant to Italy, it will be on the Adriatic. Waves there are small, but they have a lot of history. I look forward to walking the beaches of the Marche where Romans landed and 16th century galleons fought in a clash of civilizations. In the summer, the beaches are covered with rented umbrellas in bright colors and the waves are like a steady snore.

On the Outer Banks, long ago. Painting by Walter Cumming

Waves are endlessly fascinating. As a general principle, they are how energy is transmitted, whether that is in the slosh of the world’s oceans, or as sound waves or the mysterious “wave” of electromagnetic energy we call light. My love is a physicist, so she tries to explain this to me, and it only deepens my wonder.

The Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobin wrote a wonderful bossa nova he titled “Wave.” Right now, I am studying the chords, which curl and slide like I imagine the waves that inspired him in Rio.

Poets have been inspired too, drawn by the infinite meanings and rhythm of being shore to ocean, as one poet wrote. “Holding the curve of one position/Counting an endless repetition.”

But has anyone, from science or art, observed waves as beautifully as Gerard Manley Hopkins did in this passage I found from his journals? We’ve all stared at waves for a long time, so we can all nod yes, yes, exactly. But I wish I were patient enough to observe nature this steadily, and to get it down in writing. It’s a good example of journal writing and maintaining attention. I’m transcribing the whole thing here.

Aug. 10 [1870]. I was looking at high waves. The breakers always are parallel to the coast and shape themselves to it except where the curve is sharp however the wind blows. They are rolled out by the shallowing shore just as a piece of putty between the palms whatever its shape runs into a long roll. The slant ruck of crease one sees in them shows the way of the wind. The regularity of the barrels surprised and charmed the eye; the edge behind the comb or crest was as smooth and bright as glass. It may be noticed to be green behind and silver white in front: the silver marks where the air begins, the pure white is foam, the green/ solid water. Then looked at to the right or left they are scrolled over like mouldboards or feathers or jibsails seen by the edge. It is pretty to see the hollow of the barrel disappearing as the white comb on each side runs along the wave gaining ground till the two meet at a pitch and crush and overlap each other.

About all the turns of the scaping from the break and flooding of the wave to its run out again I have not yet satisfied myself. The shores are swimming and the eyes have before them a region of milky surf it is hard for them to unpack the huddling and gnarls of the water and law out the shapes and the sequence of the running: I catch however the looped or forked wisp made by everybig pebble the backwater runs over – if it were clear and smooth there would be a network from their overlapping, such as can in fact be seen on smooth sand after the tide is out –; then I saw it run browner, the foam dwindling and twitched into long chains of suds, while the strength of the backdraught shrugged the stones together and clocked them one against another.

Looking from the cliff I saw well that work of dimpled foaming – strings of short loops of halfmoons – which I had studied at Freshwater years ago.

It is pretty to see the dance and swagging of the light green tongues or ripples of waves in a place locked between rocks.

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Sparks from Ignatius

Posted on February 19, 2025 by Doug Cumming

I have had brief brushings with a 484-year-old club called the Society of Jesus. My first university job at age 51 was at Loyola in New Orleans, which was run by this club of Catholic priests called “Jesuits.” Ignatius de Loyola was the founder of their society in 1541. At Loyola U. on the streetcar line of St. Charles, I learned a little bit about the Jesuits, those black-clad bachelors with “S.J.” after their names. I spent half a day in one of their “Spiritual Exercises,” and learned about how they instructed the conversion of Walker Percy there at Loyola U.

Years later, in 2018, I took my magazine class to the New York offices of “America,” the Jesuit periodical. I asked an editor about another Catholic tradition, the Benedictine practice of withdrawing in community from secular/consumerist culture. Fr. Sam Sawyer said the Jesuits were the opposite. They have always gone out into the world to see how it is, with a well-trained and highly educated confidence that Jesus Christ and His (Roman) Church have a truth to tell at the highest level of relevance and intelligence. Pope Francis is the first Jesuit pope. Today, you can listen to a cool podcast of young lay America magazine staffers, “Jesuitical.”

It’s interesting how relevant the Jesuits can seem today, as the world faces a new form of an older battle between liberal democracy and illiberal authoritarianism. The Jesuits seem to be firmly on the side of liberal democracy, for all their loyalty to the illiberal authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The Jesuits, as much as our own Jeffersonians and Progressive lefties, can claim heroes of the 17th and 18th century European Enlightenment. I have recently run across two examples.

Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), a mathematician and musicologist known as the “father of acoustics,” was a French Jesuit educated at the Sorbonne in the Franciscan Marims order. He brought the New Science of the times, as it was called, to his monastery outside Paris, and his circle became a salon of intellectual ferment, frequented by Blaise Pascal and both Descartes, father and son.

Ippolito Desideri (1684-1733) was an Italian Jesuit missionary who spent some 12 years in India and Tibet. He was the first Westerner to study Buddhism in depth, a project he took on to better evangelize for Christianity. The book he wrote on Buddhism was remarkably objective, so lacking in a Christian “slant” that the Catholic Church prevented its publication. He also lost his plea with the Pope for the Jesuits to retain control of the Tibet mission, which yielded to the Capuchin order instead.

Desideri’s works on Buddhism and Christianity is described this way in a footnoted passage in Wikipedia:

“Between 1718 and 1721 he composed five works in the Classical Tibetan literary language, in which he sought to refute the philosophical concepts of rebirth (which he referred to as “metempsychosis“) and Nihilism or ‘Emptiness’ (Wylie: stong pa nyid; Sanskrit: Śūnyatā), which he felt most prevented conversions from Tibetan Buddhism to the Catholic Church in Tibet. In his books Fr. Desideri also adopted and utilized multiple philosophical techniques from Tibetan literature for scholastic argumentation. Fr. Desideri also used multiple quotations from the dharma and vinaya, and even brought the Scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas into a debate with the nihilistic Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna to argue his case for “the superiority of Christian theology.”[4]”

Imagine, if you can, the followers of Christ, today, spending 12 years seeking to understand, respectfully, the beliefs or non-beliefs of other people before trying to convince them of the better truth of Jesus. What the world needs now, beside “love, sweet love,” is the intellectual energy of the best of the Jesuits.

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Not the End of Civilization (only a re-start)

Posted on February 18, 2025 by Doug Cumming

The Middle Ages weren’t all bad.

There was a beauty in what C.S. Lewis called “The Discarded Image,” the orderly cosmology that connected the heavenly bodies with our own bodies and with Heaven itself (until science displaced these connections with facts, as Lewis acknowledged). And there was virtue in the bravery, devotion, and knightly character that Tolkein drew on for his Lord of the Rings books. But the Middle Ages also gave us bad things – gargantuan inequality, rat-borne diseases, arbitrary power. The bad things died out or were corrected by the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. Religion could flourish again, but only as a “sanctuary,” divided and restrained under a system of secular democracy, with the consent of the governed.

It would be a very useful project for some seminarian or theologian to point out all the ways that the Bible, from Genesis to Revelations, supports today’s secular democracy by way of human dignity, freedom, and an earth-loving kingdom-come.

These days, the President and his henchmen – like the four knights who broke into Canterbury Cathedral to murder Archbishop Becket in 1170 – want to bring back all the bad things about the Middle Ages, including a supposed unity of Faith. They are busy tearing down the long, hard work of the Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment.

It is easier to tear down, apparently, than to build up.

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