Redeeming The Time — Part I
We live in a culture that is very good at avoiding ultimate questions. Death is kept offstage. Time is treated as infinite. The modern self is trained to strive, consume, showcase, curate, and distract, but not often to reckon. The deepest matters are postponed, not necessarily out of malice, but out of habit. There is always another headline, another obligation, another performance of busyness. That is why the most recent conversation that Ben Sasse had with interviewer and journalist Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institution (a conservative think-tank associated with Stanford University) lands with unusual force, at least for me. On its surface, it is an interview with a former United States Senator, who is also a former university president. In reality, it is something rarer in modern elite discourse; an unsparing confrontation with mortality. Sasse, who is 54-years-old, has been diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer. T...