Reflection Essays

By Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Thanksgiving, now past, and Christmas and New Year’s, now near at hand, bring with them the prospects of family gatherings. While we often look forward to these gatherings, they may also fill us with some amount of dread. “All happy families […]

By Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation On this day of thanksgiving, it seems worth our time to reflect on the virtue of gratitude. It typically doesn’t occupy a high place on our taxonomy of virtues, but it is in many ways one of the most essential virtues,

by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation I recently asked a friend in our student life division if he had seen a picture showing three persons of differing heights standing behind a fence trying to watch a baseball game. “Only about a hundred times in the past week,”

by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation The fundamental thing about any technology is that it alters our relationship to the world. One way to evaluate such alteration is to calculate the costs and benefits associated with the introduction of any new technology, keeping in mind that we

by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Americans like to think they have solved the problem of the relationship between political life and religious life. Usually this takes the form of referring to “the separation of church and state” as a simple, elegant resolution of the difficulty. This

by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation The problem of “Dirty Hands” becomes especially acute in the Christian era. One recalls that Socrates was a distinguished soldier, and The Iliad and The Odyssey drip with blood. The Hebrew Scripture presents us with the God Yahweh who commands his

by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Last week we introduced readers to the political concept of “dirty hands,” by which we mean the use of ethically dubious means to achieve morally desirable ends. Conceding the point, how do we calculate which ends justify which means? Are there

by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation [Note: we hold learning seminars with our Forum Fellows, the most recent of which was on the problem of “dirty hands.” Herewith some reflections related to that seminar.] In a democratic polity such as ours we have strange and frequently paradoxical

by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Last week I wrote about the decline of friendship in America and mused on why that spelled trouble for civic life. In some ways, that’s an audacious claim. E.M. Forster once wrote that if he had to choose between a friend

by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation The tyrant’s dream is to separate people and then isolate them, making them easier to control. In the 20th century we witnessed this strategy playing out on a large and horrific scale, leading to situations where a small coterie of leaders