JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times--The 17th Annual Fall Conference of the Hannah Arendt Center

 

“We’re back from Covid! Finally,” said Christina Gonzalez Stanton, bursting with genuine joy, at the opening of the 17th annual fall conference of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Stanton is the executive director of the Hannah Arendt Center and one of the organizers of the conference. After years of difficulties with travel for attendees and speakers along with masking and distancing, this year saw the main auditorium and breakout sessions packed with conference goers. The attendees included students from Bard and many local high schools and colleges as well as members of the Hannah Arendt Center. Everyone crowded together in the common areas and the lunch line and registration area.

The conference, titled JOY: Loving the World in Dark Times, was held in Olin Hall on the campus of Bard College. To attend the conferences each year, I drive from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to attend the two-day gathering, this year on October 16 and 17, so I usually arrive as the first session is beginning. This year I drove well past Olin Hall to find parking, another indication that the attendance was much higher than in recent years. I have been attending the conferences since 2019, so after one year of a packed auditorium, Covid affected everything, including parking, which was easy in 2021 when the conference returned to in-person sessions after a webinar in 2020.

In future posts I will write more about the talks that comprise the conference program. I will admit, I had trouble linking Joy as a theme to Hannah Arendt. I have read all her works, many as part of the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center. Joy is not the first word that comes to my mind in works defining totalitarianism, chronicling the modern history of revolutions, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and presenting a unique view of love in Saint Augustine.  

Roger Berkowitz made a compelling case for connecting Hannah Arendt to the theme of the conference in his opening remarks. Other presenters tied various expressions of joy to their fields of study and to our current hour. In a discussion session, Teju Cole mentioned the joy one can feel in triumph over an opponent.

My own experience of joy is the overflow of happiness seen among friends and family at moments of reunion—possibly returning from a war, recovering from a serious illness, or after a long time apart. This bubbling happiness I have felt and seen in others is what I saw when Christina Stanton effused about this year’s conference soon after it began. She was in a moment of joy. 

That moment reflected the summary of Joy on the conference website: "Joy is at once more visceral and more risky than happiness. What brings you joy? Joy can emerge in a lover's gaze, in the transcendence of Beethoven's late sonatas, in the embrace of a once-wayward child. Joy is not mere happiness; nor is it satisfied contentment. Joy is the lasting delight we feel when touched deeply by what matters most." 

Following the theme of the conference, joy is most vivid in dark times or in the shadow of dark times. In Iraq, when helicopter crews returned from dangerous missions, sometimes in blackout sandstorms, the happiness bubbled over. The normal stoic affect of pilots, crew chiefs, and door gunners fell away for a while to share deep delight.

The conference presenters, necessarily, were trying to define and discuss joy, which requires dissecting—fatal for the subject of the study. Like those trying to define humor or love, they were striving to explain what ultimately must be experienced.

I couldn’t stay for every panel, but I didn’t need to. The theme of the conference wasn’t confined to the program. I saw joy in the crowded hallways, in the greetings between old friends, in the simple fact that people crowded together again after the disruption of the Covid years. It was the same kind of joy I’ve seen in soldiers home from war, reunited with their families. 

Joy also happens in small moments.  I had a chance to talk with Hillary Harvey, the communications manager of the Hannah Arendt Center between sessions. It was fun to catch up. It was the same with several other people I ran into during breaks and lunch. People I met at conferences since 2019 and who, like me, come back year after year.  It was fun to share small joys in the larger context of joy in dark times.

A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger’s A Death in Belmont is more than a true-crime account of the Boston Strangler murders — it is a deeply researched meditation on violence, race, fear, and justice in a turbulent time in America. Junger teases apart the tangled threads of a notorious serial murder investigation within the larger context of the 1960s, showing how the murder of President John F. Kennedy and the unraveling of public trust shaped the pursuit of a killer who terrified Boston for years. The result is a compelling, disturbing, and ultimately convincing narrative about guilt, identity, and darkness in American life.

Junger does not simply recount the crimes chronologically. Instead, he puts them in their historical moment — a time when America was reeling from shocking acts of violence. The assassination of JFK in November 1963 is not treated as a separate event but as a backdrop to the story of the Boston Strangler. 

Both cases — one a political assassination that shattered a nation’s confidence, the other a series of brutal murders that terrorized an entire city — represent a moment when Americans began to feel that the world around them had become unstable and frightening. Nuclear war came close to reality just the year before. Junger uses that national mood to deepen his exploration of how fear and suspicion shape the pursuit of justice.

At the heart of the book is the murder of Bessie Goldberg, a Belmont housewife strangled in her own home in March 1963. Goldberg had hired a Black handyman named Roy Smith to clean their house that very day. Hours later, Goldberg was found dead. Smith was arrested, tried, and convicted of her murder. He always maintained his innocence and died in prison.

Junger’s connection to the case is deeply personal. He grew up in Belmont about a mile from the Goldberg's home.  He was a toddler at the time of the Goldberg murder. His parents hired a contractor to build a studio onto their home. On the day Bessie Goldberg was killed, one member of the crew was working in Junger's home. That worker, Albert DeSalvo, a small-time criminal and sexual predator, eventually confessed to being the Strangler, but not to Goldberg’s murder. 

Junger use of this proximity, the murderer walked through his family’s living room, keeps the book personal and tense throughout his investigation into what really happened. He examines the broader series of murders attributed to the Boston Strangler, a name that came to embody fear itself in 1960s Massachusetts. Between 1962 and 1964, thirteen women (fourteen including Goldberg) were murdered in their homes, often sexually assaulted and strangled. The omission of Goldberg by DeSalvo has long fueled debate about whether DeSalvo was truly responsible for all the killings.

Junger treats this question with rigor and nuance. He reviews the evidence against DeSalvo and explores the skepticism that many investigators and journalists still harbor. There was no physical evidence tying DeSalvo to several of the murders, and his confessions contained factual errors. Yet Junger is unpersuaded by the doubts. He assembles the available evidence, the patterns in the killings, and the psychological profile of the man himself. The portrait that emerges is of a compulsive predator whose behavior fits the known facts of the crimes — including, Junger argues, the murder of Bessie Goldberg.

What makes A Death in Belmont so persuasive is its balance of forensic detail and broader social analysis. Junger delves deeply into the investigative techniques of the time — primitive by today’s standards — and the public pressure to deliver justice quickly. He also does not shy away from the racism of the Goldberg case: Roy Smith, a Black man in a white suburb, was an easy target for a fearful public and a prosecution eager for a conviction. Junger’s handling of this subject is unsparing, showing that racial bias contributed to a miscarriage of justice. In one of the very sad moments in the book, Roy Smith is convicted of murder on November 23, 1963, the day after Kennedy was assassinated. 

Yet Junger’s central conclusion is that Albert DeSalvo was almost certainly the Boston Strangler, and the weight of evidence suggests he also killed Bessie Goldberg, even if he never admitted it. The fact that Smith was convicted of Goldberg’s murder while DeSalvo confessed highlights flaws in the justice system. It also reflects the chaos and confusion of an era when trust in authority, shaken by Kennedy’s assassination and other national traumas, was collapsing.

In the end, A Death in Belmont is not just the story of a murder case; it is a story  about America at a time of national crisis. Junger shows how public fear, racial prejudice, and institutional failure can converge to distort justice. He also captures the way national events, like the assassination of a president, seep into local tragedies, shaping how they are understood and remembered.

This is a meticulously researched and deeply unsettling book. I found myself persuaded by Junger’s case: Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, and Bessie Goldberg was one of his victims. A Death in Belmont is a chilling reminder that evil often hides in plain sight. I was nine years old when I first heard reports of the Boston Strangler on the radio. Belmont is nine miles from Stoneham where I grew up. 

I loved this book. It deepened my admiration for Sebastian Junger’s work — an admiration that began after I met him at the Hannah Arendt Conference in October 2024 and has grown with each of his books I’ve read since. A Death in Belmont shows how deeply he can connect historical fact, personal story, and moral complexity.

 

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

 

C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces is his last and his best novel, my favorite of his more than 40 books. (I have read all the books published in his lifetime and many of the posthumous publications.) 

It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche transformed into a meditation on love, faith, and the blindness induced by our beliefs. It is a book that resists easy categorization: part myth, part psychological drama, part spiritual journey. More than any of his earlier fiction, it exposes how perception shapes reality and how love, when mixed with possessiveness, can turn divine beauty into human pain.

The novel’s narrator, Orual, is the older sister of Psyche, the princess whose beauty captivates their small, barbaric kingdom of Glome. Orual is plain, intelligent, brave, and fiercely loyal. She raises Psyche after their mother’s death and comes to love her with an intensity that borders on worship. When plague and famine strike the kingdom, the priest of Ungit declares that Psyche must be sacrificed to appease the goddess Ungit. Psyche is left on the Grey Mountain as a bride for the god of the West Wind. Orual’s world shatters.

From this point, the novel divides into two overlapping realities. Psyche, when Orual finds her again on the mountain, claims she is living in joy — rescued by a god who has taken her to a beautiful palace invisible to mortal eyes. She is radiant, serene, and transformed. Orual, however, sees only a desolate hillside and Psyche standing among the rocks and rain. To her, Psyche’s vision is madness born of trauma and loneliness. 

The mountain scene is the central confrontation of the book and one of the most haunting moments in twentieth-century fiction. Two sisters stand side by side, both utterly sincere, both certain of what they see — and both right in a sense. Lewis captures the agony of divided perception: one person living in a reality of faith, the other trapped in the limits of sight. 

When Psyche refuses to leave her invisible palace, Orual demands proof. She begs Psyche to disobey the god’s command and look upon him with a lamp while he sleeps. It is an act born of love but twisted by pride and fear. When Psyche does as her sister insists, the god’s wrath drives her into exile. Orual, realizing too late what she has done, spends the rest of her life haunted by guilt. “I did not know how I hated the gods,” she writes later. “I was their enemy for having loved too much.”

The second half of the novel follows Orual’s reign as Queen of Glome. She becomes a capable and just ruler, a woman who hides her face behind a veil and her heart behind the duties of power. Her wisdom and strength as a monarch contrasts sharply with her spiritual weakness as one who cannot forgive herself. Lewis shows her crown as both salvation and disguise: she fights for her kingdom with courage but never escapes the inner war with the gods. The political battles of her reign, defending Glome’s independence, administering justice, commanding loyalty, mirror her spiritual struggle for meaning. She wields authority outwardly while inwardly living in rebellion against divine authority.

What makes Till We Have Faces extraordinary is its moral and emotional honesty. Lewis does not offer easy redemption. Orual’s eventual vision — her final confrontation with the gods in a kind of dream-trial — reveals that her “complaint against the gods” was really a complaint against love itself. She wanted Psyche for her own; she could not bear a love that transcended her control. Only in the end, when her face is finally “given back” to her, when she sees herself truly, does she glimpse the divine beauty Psyche had seen all along. “How can they meet us face to face,” she asks, “till we have faces?”

Lewis’s prose in this novel is spare, rhythmic, and powerful. There is little of Narnia’s mythic brightness here; instead, he writes with the gravity of Greek tragedy. The landscape of Glome is as harsh and real as the human soul it represents. Every image — the mountain, the river, the dark temple of Ungit — serves as both physical place and psychological symbol.

Till We Have Faces a story of perception. The same scene on the mountain is heaven or rubble depending on the eyes that behold it. Psyche’s faith allows her to see the palace of the gods; Orual’s reason and jealousy reduce it to stone and mud. Between those two visions lies the entire struggle of belief. By the end, Orual’s reign, her power, her intelligence, and her love are all stripped bare until only one question remains: can the human heart bear to see truly?

In its depth and ambiguity, Till We Have Faces stands as Lewis’s best mature work in a widely varied corpus of brilliant books. It is a myth retold that is etched into my understanding of the world.  

The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel

 

In The Elements of Marie Curie, Dava Sobel presents the life of one of the most compelling figures in the history of science. Marie Curie combined relentless curiosity, monumental discovery, and personal sacrifice in a life marked by deep sadness. This book is a brilliant portrait of a scientist whose work fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the physical world whose story still inspires more than a century later.

At first glance, Marie Curie’s life might seem like well-trodden territory. She is one of the most famous scientists of all time — the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only person to win two Nobels in two different sciences (physics and chemistry), and a pioneer whose research on radioactivity altered the course of modern physics and medicine. 

Sobel’s approach is not that of a biographer merely listing accomplishments. Instead, she focuses on the elements — literal and metaphorical — that defined Curie’s life and character: her scientific discoveries, her intellectual resilience, her personal losses, and the historical forces that shaped her path.

Sobel’s narrative opens with Curie’s early life as Maria Skłodowska in Russian-occupied Warsaw, a childhood marked by both hardship and defiance. Her determination to pursue education — in an era and a country where women were excluded from universities — set the tone for the rest of her life. Sobel excels at highlighting the decisions that propelled Curie forward: her clandestine schooling in Poland’s “Flying University,” her move to Paris to attend the Sorbonne, and the single-minded focus that carried her through poverty and isolation to academic success.

The heart of the book, of course, is Curie’s collaboration with her husband, Pierre, and their groundbreaking work on radioactivity. Sobel recreates the grim physical conditions of their laboratory — damp, unheated, and barely adequate — as they processed tons of pitchblende in search of new elements. From this laborious, back-breaking work came polonium and radium, discoveries that transformed physics and chemistry and ushered in a new understanding of atomic structure. Sobel’s descriptions of their scientific process are clear and engaging, balancing technical accuracy with narrative flow.

But The Elements of Marie Curie is not just about scientific triumph. Sobel also delves into the intense personal cost of Curie’s work. Pierre’s sudden death in 1906 left Marie a widow with two young daughters and a research program to sustain. Rather than retreat, she stepped into his professorship at the Sorbonne, becoming the university’s first female professor, and carried on their work alone. Sobel portrays this period with particular sensitivity, capturing both Curie’s grief and her resolve. Sobel shows Curie not as a mythic icon, but as a human being, enduring profound loss while pursuing the deepest questions of nature.

The book also explores Curie’s fraught relationship with fame and recognition. Sobel presents the sexism and xenophobia that dogged Curie throughout her career. She recounts the vicious press campaigns that followed her affair with fellow physicist Paul Langevin, the scandals that nearly derailed her career and overshadowed her second Nobel Prize. Yet even in the face of public humiliation, Curie refused to compromise her dedication to science in circumstances that would have crushed most people.

Sobel is particularly vivid on Curie’s war year, later years, and legacy. During World War I, she personally outfitted and drove mobile X-ray units to the front, saving countless lives and advancing medical technology. She also trained a generation of scientists: including her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize herself. Marie and Irene are the only mother and daughter to win the Nobel Prize.  (Six father-son pairs have earned the Nobel Prize, most famously William Henry Bragg (father) and William Lawrence Bragg (son) who won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics together.)

What makes The Elements of Marie Curie stand out is its balance of science and storytelling. Sobel writes with clarity and elegance, never oversimplifying Curie’s work but always anchoring it in the human experience behind the science. The book is as much about persistence, courage, and identity as it is about radiation and elements. By the final pages, readers feel they know not only what Marie Curie discovered, but who she was in all of her complexity: a scientist, a mother, a widow, a patriot, and a pioneer. As Sobel said, “A scientist in the laboratory is not only a technician, but also a child confronted by natural phenomena more enchanting than any fairy tale.”

The Elements of Marie Curie is both a thorough introduction for those learning about Marie Curie for the first time and a portrait with a unique perspective for those already familiar with her legacy. Sobel weaves the story of the discovery of the structure of the atom into her narrative of Curie's life, which show just how rapidly the understanding of the atom and matter changed during Curie's lifetime, propelled in part by her discoveries.

On mark of Marie Curie's stature in the science community is that she was the only woman to attend all of the Solvay Conferences from their inception in 1911 to the conference in 1933 the year before her death.  In fact, only Paul Langevin also attended all of the conferences.  Other attendees included de Broglie, Einstein, Planck, Rutheford and other luminaries in the world of physics. Curie said of the conferences, “I take such great pleasure in speaking of new things with all these lovers of physics.” 

I loved the book. I have read several accounts of Marie Curie's life including a middle-school level biography in French. Each time I read about Curie I learn something new about her life. With Sobel's book, I felt most vividly how Marie Curie's life influenced the times she lived through.  

The Tragedy of Vietnam After Roosevelt’s Death

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The death of a single leader can shift the course of nations, topple empires, and condemn millions to suffering. Few examples are as stark as the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April 1945, just weeks before the Allied victory in Europe. Roosevelt’s sudden passing did more than end a presidency. It extinguished a vision for a postwar world in which colonial empires—French, British, Dutch—would not be restored at bayonet point but would instead give way to independence movements already stirring across Asia and Africa.

Nowhere was this failure of vision more tragic than in Indochina. The story of America’s three-decade entanglement in Vietnam, with its toll of millions of Vietnamese dead and more than 58,000 American soldiers killed, has many causes. But the earliest turning point lies at that moment of Roosevelt’s death.

The Collapse of the Old Colonial Order

World War II shattered European empires in Asia. Japan’s lightning victories between 1941 and 1942 humiliated colonial powers that had long claimed superiority. The British garrison in Malaysia and Singapore, thought impregnable, surrendered after only 70 days to a smaller Japanese invasion force. France, already defeated by Germany, saw its Indochinese colony occupied by Japan. The Dutch East Indies fell, and the Philippines endured brutal Japanese occupation.

When the war ended in 1945, the colonial order looked hollow. Nationalists across Asia declared that if Japan could topple Western armies in months, then Europeans were no longer invincible. From Jakarta to Manila, independence movements surged. The Philippines gained independence in 1946, Indonesia after a brief struggle by 1949, and Malaysia within a dozen years through largely peaceful negotiation. Even Singapore, once the crown jewel of Britain’s Asian empire, went its own way less than a decade later.

In this context, the French determination to cling to Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—was an anachronism, a refusal to recognize history’s direction.

Roosevelt’s Anti-Colonial Vision

Roosevelt had no illusions about French weakness. He despised the old colonial system and told his aides repeatedly that Indochina must not return to French rule. In March 1945, he declared to General Albert Wedemeyer, “I am going to do everything possible to give the people of that area their independence.” His view was pragmatic as well as moral: colonial rule was unstable, costly, and guaranteed further conflict.

Roosevelt also understood the importance of nationalist leaders like Ho Chi Minh, who had spent decades pressing for Vietnamese independence. Ho was, in 1945, not yet fully aligned with global communism; he was a nationalist first, eager to seek American support. In February and March of that year, Ho reached out to U.S. agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), offering cooperation against Japan and signaling openness to a postwar relationship.

FDR imagined a settlement in which Indochina would be placed under international trusteeship—possibly Chinese, American, or United Nations supervision—until independence could be secured. He believed colonial empires were relics of the past and saw decolonization as part of the Four Freedoms he had championed throughout the war.

Truman’s Reversal

Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945. His successor, Harry Truman, did not share Roosevelt’s anti-colonial instincts. Truman’s worldview was shaped less by opposition to European empire than by fear of Soviet expansion. Within months, the Cold War began to dominate American thinking. In that struggle, France was no longer a colonial oppressor but a vital ally whose cooperation was needed in Europe. Supporting France’s reassertion of control in Indochina became, in Washington’s eyes, a lesser evil compared to alienating Paris at the very moment NATO was taking shape.

Thus, when the French returned to Indochina in late 1945 to reclaim their colony, they did so with tacit American blessing. Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence, borrowing words from the American Declaration itself, fell on deaf ears in Washington. The United States, which might have championed Vietnamese independence under Roosevelt, instead bankrolled the French war effort by the early 1950s.

The War That Did Not Have to Be

The tragedy of Vietnam was not inevitable. If Roosevelt had lived, it is plausible he could have cut a deal with Ho Chi Minh and perhaps even with Mao Zedong, who was still consolidating power in China. Roosevelt’s skill in negotiation, his personal authority at the close of World War II, and his moral opposition to colonialism might have shaped a very different trajectory.

Instead, France fought a brutal war of reconquest, climaxing in its defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Geneva Accords called for national elections to unify Vietnam. But Cold War logic again intervened: Eisenhower admitted privately that Ho Chi Minh would have won 80 percent of the vote. Instead of elections, the United States backed the artificial creation of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem.

This decision locked America into a decades-long conflict, first by proxy and then directly with U.S. combat troops. Millions of Vietnamese perished, along with tens of thousands of Americans, all in a war fought to preserve a colonial arrangement Roosevelt had already declared obsolete in 1945.

China and the Wider Consequences

Roosevelt’s death also shaped China’s fate. Roosevelt had distrusted Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt regime and was open to pragmatic relations with Mao. Truman, however, quickly defined Mao’s movement as Soviet-aligned, missing opportunities for negotiation. The result was a hardened Cold War divide in East Asia, with the United States locked into supporting weak regimes in both China (until Chiang’s flight to Taiwan) and South Vietnam.

The consequences were immense: civil war in China, Communist victory in 1949, the Korean War beginning in 1950, and the Vietnam War escalating through the 1960s. Each conflict can be traced back to choices made in the immediate aftermath of Roosevelt’s death.

The Cascade of Death

The cascade of history that followed Roosevelt’s passing illustrates the fragility of turning points. One man’s vision might have offered independence without decades of bloodshed. Instead, Truman’s acquiescence to French ambitions, his fixation on Europe, and his early Cold War framing condemned Vietnam to thirty years of war.

By the time the last U.S. helicopters lifted off from Saigon in 1975, the toll was staggering: more than three million Vietnamese dead, Cambodia and Laos devastated, American society bitterly divided, and trust in government shattered. What might have been a peaceful decolonization like Malaysia or Indonesia had become a tragedy of global proportions.

History does not turn on inevitabilities but on choices. Franklin Roosevelt, even in his final months, made clear he intended to strip France of its empire in Indochina and support independence. His death removed that possibility. Truman’s different priorities, born of Cold War anxieties, restored empire where history had already passed its verdict.

The result was not only the Vietnam War (Called the American War in Vietnam) but also a chain reaction that reshaped China, Korea, and America itself. The lesson is stark: leadership matters. The death of one leader can alter the lives of millions and change the destiny of nations. In Southeast Asia, it meant tragedy instead of freedom, war instead of independence.

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind—left unfinished at her death in 1975—explores what it means to live a reflective human life. Though only the first two volumes, Thinking and Willing, were completed, they show how our minds work, how we deal with thinking and willing.  If death had not taken her, we would know much more about the process of judging, of looking into our own experience and evaluating the world around us. In addition to defining the modes in which our mind works Arendt wanted to look deeper into what she had seen in the trial of Adolph Eichmann, to ask why thoughtlessness could coexist with education and intelligence. Her answer was to return to the activity of the mind itself: thinking, willing, and judging.

In his lectures on The Life of the Mind at the Hannah Arendt Center, Roger Berkowitz said the key sentence of the entire book is in the Introduction on page 15 of the paperback edition:

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.  (These words are italicized in the book.)

Thinking as Interior Dialogue

For Arendt, thinking is not problem-solving or information processing but a withdrawal from the world into an inner dialogue. This is her Socratic inheritance: the “two-in-one” conversation where I, as thinker, am alone in the company of myself. This dialogue is a withdrawal from the world. Thinking refers to the present, to the here and now of existence, but in a way that suspends action. It is an activity that strips away worldly entanglements and confronts the mind with meaning rather than facts. Arendt insists that thinking is not about producing results; it is about keeping oneself in dialogue, preventing the collapse into thoughtlessness.

In thinking, Arendt says we are not searching for truth, but for meaning.  This search for meaning is individual and unique.  It may or may not lead to truth. 

In the context of Eichmann, this withdrawal is central. She believed Eichmann’s evil was thoughtless precisely because he lacked this inner two-in-one. He conformed, he obeyed, but he never withdrew to examine whether what he was doing was right. To think is to interrupt the chain of command within oneself, to stand back and confront reality in the present tense.

Willing as the Struggle with the Future

If thinking is rooted in the present, willing is oriented toward the future. It is the inner effort to control what is not yet, to choose between possibilities, to force action upon the world. Arendt describes willing as a divided, restless power: the will affirms and denies at once. Unlike the serenity of the thinking dialogue, willing is conflictual, almost violent. We both want and do not want; we command ourselves and resist our own commands.

Where thinking withdraws from the world, willing strains against it. It is the mind’s way of asserting itself against time, against the uncertainty of what comes next. For Arendt, this tension is central to understanding political action: willing is the seed of freedom, but also of frustration. We are never at peace with the will because the future is never securely ours.

Thinking, Judging, and Willing

Arendt’s tripartite scheme assigns each faculty a temporal orientation. Thinking deals with the present; judging, with the past; willing, with the future. Judging, which she did not live to write, she connected to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his idea of reflective judgment—how we make sense of past events, how we discern meaning after the fact.

Together, they give us three aspects of our inner life: thought that withdraws from the world, judgment that brings the past into evaluating the present, and will that looks to the future. The activity of the mind found in this temporal triad, is always in motion, changing and subject to chance as is all life.

The Christian Inheritance of the Will

The most striking feature of Willing is Arendt’s deep dive into the Christian tradition. She traces the genealogy of the will not to Greek philosophy, where the concept is largely absent, but to the New Testament. In Saint Paul she finds the first language of inner division: “the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The will appears here as torn between flesh and spirit, desire and command.

Augustine, whom Arendt calls the first Christian philosopher, builds on this Pauline insight. For him, the will is not simply choice but the innermost movement of the self toward or away from God. In Confessions, Augustine describes the paralysis of a divided will, torn between sin and obeying God. Arendt shows this is the decisive turn: the will becomes the core of human subjectivity, the theater of inner conflict.

Aquinas later systematizes the will into scholastic doctrine, aligning it with reason and natural law. Here the will finds its place within a rational order, no longer pure division but an instrument that can be directed toward the good. Arendt is less enamored with Aquinas than with Augustine, but she acknowledges the power of this tradition: Christianity gave the West the very concept of a faculty oriented to the future, an inner command that makes freedom both possible and perilous.

Along with Paul, Augustine and Aquinas, Arendt writes at length about Duns Scotus, a scholastic thinker who accepts contingency in life and through contingency shows that we truly have free will.  The first time I read The Life of the Mind I was unaware of Scotus.  In reading Arendt, I am delighted to find people and ideas I had never encountered. 

The Life of the Mind is brilliant. Arendt writes not as a metaphysician spinning systems but as a thinker who wrestles with the facts of experience and the inheritances of tradition. Her exploration of the inner dialogue of thinking shows why reflection matters in a world of conformity. Her analysis of the will uncovers both its torment and its promise: the divided power that enables freedom but guarantees restlessness.

That she died before completing the volume on Judging is a loss, but the fragments we have are enough to make her point. To be human is to be suspended between past, present, and future, always in dialogue with ourselves, never fully at rest. Arendt’s book is not a manual but an invitation to return to that dialogue, to resist thoughtlessness, and to confront the responsibilities of freedom.

Ten Central Beliefs of Christian Nationalists

Ten Central Beliefs of Christian Nationalists

1. America is a Christian Nation – The U.S. was founded explicitly as a Christian country, and its laws should reflect biblical values.

2. The Constitution is Divinely Inspired – The Constitution is viewed as guided by God, almost on par with scripture.

3. Separation of Church and State is a Myth – Church and state should be integrated, not separate.

4. Christian Morality Should Shape Law – Government should enforce Christian teachings on issues like abortion and marriage.

5. Religious Liberty Is for Christians First – Freedom of religion mainly applies to Christians, not equally to all faiths.

6. Christianity Confers Cultural Authority – Christians (white, Protestant, conservative) should hold primary influence in society.

7. America Has a Divine Mission – The U.S. is chosen by God for a special role in history.

8. Decline in Christianity Equals National Decline – Secularization is seen as the cause of America’s problems.

9. National Identity and Religious Identity Are Bound Together – To be truly American is to be Christian.

10. Authoritarian Leadership Is Justified to Protect Christian Order – Strong rule is acceptable to enforce Christian dominance.