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So I am a philosopher who studies the political things.

And as a philosopher, that means I fit the stereotype of kind of being up in the clouds

and not knowing a lot about what's going on in contemporary life and current events. So this talk

was not planned around. I've heard that there was an election of some importance that took place this week and some people

are excited, some people are really upset about it. It sounds like it was settled, though,

that one person has won and one is conceded and we're moving forward. This is just what

life has been like for philosophers for thousands of years. These things come and go,

and we're not really thinking about that. So I'm not here to talk about the election or contemporary

politics. I'm here to think about those eternal questions, these perennial questions that we

want to ask and they can help guide us when we think about elections and about

politics and our own personal lives. But the temistic approach, the philosophical approach in

general, is to calm the passions of the moment, to allow faith and reason to work to pursue the

truth, and to allow ourselves to rest in that truth that can then,

you know, again, guide us in our daily affairs. And so that's what we're going to do tonight.

I'm also conceiving this as something like in the Middle Ages, in the University of the

of the University of Paris, where Aquinas himself went and taught, the Lexio, a reading of

scripture that then was unpacked and guided a reflection on a topic, and combining that somewhat

...