Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm Timothy Padgett.

Ben Sasse is an accomplished man.

He's a devout Christian and proud husband and father.

He has a PhD in history from Yale, and he served for a decade of more in higher ed and another decade representing Nebraska and the U.S. Senate, where he earned the sometimes unenviable reputation for not fitting in with any of America's

increasingly polarized camps. He's also a dying man. Back in December, he announced on X

that he had pancreatic cancer. As he noted in a recent interview with the Hoover institutions,

Peter Robinson,

this is a disease with a 97% mortality rate, and he has a particularly aggressive case.

His doctors gave him 90 days. He's hoping to get a little more time with experimental treatments,

but only a little. This kind of thing can focus someone's thinking about what really matters

in life. As he put it, whether you have 90 days or 12 months or 12 years or 75 years left to live,

we're all going to be pushing up daisies.

But knowing now that he has fewer days ahead than he'd expected,

he said he's determined to redeem the time.

The entire interview is worth your time.

It's a profound conversation. Sass seamlessly and

richly discussed the ideas of mortality, theology, education, technology, community, family, identity,

and many other fields. What's particularly interesting, given the years he dedicated to public

service, is that he has one of the healthiest attitudes towards politics imaginable.

He chided professional politicians for being more interested in becoming TikTok stars than doing

their jobs, and mourn the fact that for wider portions of population, politics has become their

...