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Michael Brendan Dougherty writes on Sen. Josh Hawley’s address at last night’s American Principles Project Foundation Gala in Washington, DC:

Missouri senator Josh Hawley might be the most interesting thinker the U.S. Senate has seen since Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Or at least, he’s the senator today who most resembles Moynihan as a sweeping and adventurous social critic.

Last night, at a dinner held by the American Principles Project Foundation, Hawley gave a remarkable speech. Like most good political speeches, it was straightforward and accessible. But unlike most good political speeches, it was also a searing piece of cultural criticism, an indictment of America’s economic and social arrangements. This is notable because at the moment, the president of the United States — a man who happens to belong to Hawley’s party — is touting the unparalleled success of the American economy. …

For basically my entire adult life, the default mode of Republican speechifying has been a kind of reheated “optimism” with lots of waxing poetic about the great reserves of American can-do waiting to be tapped. These attempts to recapture “Morning in America” have been delivered through clenched, Prozac-like smiles by men who promptly enter black SUVs to be hurried off back to their gated communities. I’ve always accepted that this is the way of electoral politics, which doesn’t have much to do with a conservative intellectual disposition that tends to be more dour, or at least skeptical.

But Hawley’s speech went from those baleful statistics to a prophetic critique of a cult of the individual and self that is “so thoroughly ingrained in American culture.”

Hawley called it the Promethean idea: “This is the individual as creator, as self-creator, maker of meaning and author of reality, rather like Prometheus who in the ancient myth created all mankind. So call this view of the human person the ‘Promethean self.’” …

Hawley went on to say that “the Promethean ambition leaves us lost and unmoored. And the market worship and cultural deconstruction the Promethean vision has inspired have failed this country.” This is likely to be met with disdain or active resistance by many Republicans, including some of my own colleagues here at National Review. So too is Hawley’s mention of labor unions as one of the institutions that bring people together and ground them in their communities. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

Hawley ended with a rousing call for “a new politics of family and neighborhood, a new politics of love and belonging, a new politics of home.”

I was there last night at the Mayflower for Sen. Hawley’s speech. Stylistically it was disappointing in that he spoke from a teleprompter, but substantively it was solid:

What Sen. Hawley and Sohrab Ahmari and others are attempting to articulate isn’t simply a new generation of conservatism so much as a new vision for American solidarity.

I attended a Communion and Liberation gathering tonight after work at Saint Matthew the Apostle. I read Fr. Luigi Guissani’s “Christ, God’s Companionship with Man” earlier this summer. Tonight we discussed this excerpt from Who Is This Man?” on authority:

The most important factor for a people as a people, for a companionship as a companionship, is what we call “authority.”

There is a deep need for us to tear down, down to the last stone, the image we have of a “robotic” authority or leadership, almost as if it were a person, [as if] it were people closed up in a tower, directing, sending down signals, directing how things go from above.

Authority, leadership, is the exact opposite of power; there is not even a
trace, not a hint, of the word “power.” Consequently, there is a total absence 10 regarding the concept of authority in the people of God, at any level. There is a complete absence of any glint of fear: because fear goes along with power, and to free oneself from fear, you have to defiantly disregard power. What is this authority? I will give a definition. [Authority] is the place–because you, too, are a place, right? A person is a place–it is the place where that battle to affirm, the battle of the prophecy and its verification, the place where that battle and the verification that our proposal, which is Christ’s proposal, is a response to what is perceived in the heart… authority is the place where the battle to affirm, and the verification to confirm that Christ’s proposal, is true, meaning it is a response to the perception, to the needs of one’s heart (to the religious sense, which is given by the needs of one’s heart, and assesses the response placed in front of it) is clearer and simpler–so it does not breed fear–it is more peaceful. Authority is the place where the verification that compares the perception, the needs of one’s heart, and the response given in the message of Christ, is clearer and simpler, and therefore is more peaceful.

A line from Pasolini, one that I have quoted often lately, says that men are not educated, that young people are not educated: if someone educates them, it is with his being, and not with lectures.

Authority is the place where the connection between the needs of the heart and the response Christ gives is clearer, simpler, and more peaceful. [This] would suggest that authority is a way of being, not a font of discourse. Lectures are part of what makes up one’s being, but only as a reflection. To summarize, authority is a person who, when you see them, you can see how what Christ says corresponds to your heart. This is what guides a people.

Now, the second idea: the problem is not following… The problem is following, but it is not described completely or best by the word “following:” it is better described by the world “sonship.” An authority has sons and daughters. A son receives his family tree from his father. He makes it his own; he is made up of that family tree his father gives him, he is made up of his father. Therefore, he is entirely absorbed. Authority absorbs all of me. It is not a word I fear or dread or that I follow. It absorbs me. The word, “authority,” then, … the word “authority” could have as its synonym the word “paternity,” meaning generativity, generation, the communication of a genus, communicating a living family tree. That living family tree is my “I” which is overtaken and made different by this relationship.

The word “authority,” which coincides with the word “paternity,” is followed by the word “freedom.” It generates freedom. Being a son or daughter is freedom. The Gospel, in fact, says this at various points. “Tell me,” Jesus says to Peter, “is it the king’s son who pays the tribute? No, it is the servants, because what belongs to a father belongs to his son.”

Therefore, authority is true, or truly experienced as such, when it ignites my freedom, when it ignites my personal awareness and personal responsibility, my personal awareness and responsibility.

This means, as someone rightly observed, that when Jesus turned and said, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Christ’s questions moved Pe- ter from a logic of friendship–before he was a friend, an acquaintance–to a responsibility of his personal awareness, to the order of personal responsibility. It was his responsibil- ity when he said, “You are the Christ, the Son of God;” in that moment, the friendship he had with Christ became…it was suddenly illuminated by personal awareness and responsibility, of awareness and responsibility that expressed that awareness.

There is no relationship with a place of authority, with the person who is an authority, if you do not feel your freedom bursting forth as personal awareness and personal responsibility.

Third: if authority, then, is such a source of freedom, it becomes a place of comfort and makes the entire companionship, the entire people a place of comfort. In what sense? A place of comfort because, if I see a person in whom Christ has conquered, conquers, claims and convinces, it shows how He corresponds to the needs of the heart. If someone shows me, is proof of this to me; if in seeing a person I understand that this is happening in him, then I begin to understand that this also happens for the companionship. So then–no matter how I feel, no matter what mood I am in, whether I have taken many steps or just a few–I am filled with comfort: “Your precepts bring joy to the heart,” bring comfort, because Christ conquers.

Authority is the place it is evident that Christ conquers. What does it mean that Christ conquers? That Christ demonstrates, even in appearances, even in the realm of appearances, He demonstrates that He corresponds, He corresponds to the needs of the heart in a persuasive, a prophetic way. The same will happen for me, too. It seems impossible. For that other per- son who is an authority, it was impossible, but now it is possible; it is a reality. Christ conquers.

Authority, then, is a place of paternity where new life–the life in which Christ responds to one’s heart, [to] that for which man is made, where Christ responds to man’s heart–is more transparent, clearer and more transparent. This is true authority. This means the old woman who puts the coins in the treasury of the Temple can be an authority, even more than the head of the Pharisees.

This paternal, generative authority makes itself visible in the experience of greater freedom, personal awareness and personal responsibility, so that even if everyone went away, if everyone was out of the picture, if everyone else betrayed–as one really beautiful quote that I read at the last day of the year, the first day of the year–if everyone else betrayed, I would still say to you, “Yes!” This is personal awareness and responsibility. And because of this, authority is a place of comfort, where you see that Christ conquers. And, in this way, authority completes its true mandate, because it exalts the people, it helps you understand that the entire people, the entire companionship is the place where Christ conquers.

Bishop Robert Barron has spent the past few days in Washington, speaking to members of Congress, staff, and others:

Lawmakers must rediscover their call by God to pursue justice, Bishop Robert Barron told members of Congress and staff on Tuesday.

“In Catholic theology truth itself, goodness itself, justice itself, are simply names for God,” Bishop Robert Barron, auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, said to an audience of members of Congress, staff, and others at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

The bishop told legislators that they were right to think of their role pursuing justice through public service as a vocation, and they were really called by God to do so.

“When you were seized by a passion for justice, I would say you were called by God at that moment,” Barron said. …

There are three transcendentals that culture is based upon, Barron said, the “true,” the “good” and the “beautiful.” Politics, he said, is especially connected to the “good.”

Barron exhorted members of Congress “to find it, to fight for it, to propagate it.”

“What animates that work?” he asked rhetorically of the pursuit of the “good” of those in public service. “It’s a passion of justice that lies at the bottom of the soul,” he said.

God called those in public service through a desire for justice, he said, emphasizing the need for “bringing our lives into harmony with the integrity and beauty of that call” where “everything I do is about serving justice.”

That, he warned, might make members “unpopular,” “less rich,” or see them “attacked.” However, he added, “The way you measure life now is how you respond to this call.”

And last night Bishop Barron spoke to a few hundred people on the past, present, and future of Word on Fire near Union Station, where I met him after his remarks:

Bishop Barron has been a spiritual support for me for years. An honor to meet him tonight. Pray for our priests and religious.

It’s starting to feel like autumn in earnest at this point. Each morning becomes somewhat less inviting in terms of getting out of bed, but stepping out for the first time each morning also feels a bit better as the chillier air greets you and forces you more fully awake. A few of the scenes below are Saint Matthew the Apostle, and there’s one of two from my walk to/from work, but most are from Georgetown:

We might have our first snowfall within the next month or so.