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The Templeton Foundation. Stay curious.

Nothing is helping me more right now.

As I watch human tragedies unfold on the US-Mexican border and elsewhere,

then a conversation I had last year with literary historian Lindsey Stonebridge

on thinking and friendship in dark times.

She applies the moral clarity of the 20th century philosopher Hannah Rent to now,

an invitation to dwell on the human essence of events we analyze as political and economic.

Our dramas of exile and displacement are existential, she says,

about who we will all be as people in political community.

What Rent called the banality of evil was at root an inability to hear another voice.

I think she might say very politely, I did tell you.

And I think for me, the so-called refugee crisis is actually part of a continuous history.

The Rent gives us the tools to understand partly because of her thinking and partly because

she lived it. She was an enemy alien, as we said. She was an enemy alien. She was a refugee.

She was stateless for 18 years of her life. She says, you know, the world found nothing sacred

in the abstract nakedness of being human. I'm Christopher Tippet and this is on being.

Hannah Rent, a German-Jewish philosopher, journalist, and political theorist,

...