In our time, I don’t know that our political trouble is so much a failure to successfully persuade as it is to make the effort at true persuasion, which (etymologically) is to convince another through sweet reason. This presupposes, at the very least, a kind of civic friendship. We rarely persuade any, after all, with the sheer force of argumentative logic, or less still, shouts and insult. True persuasion comes by attracting another to our way of living in, and of seeing the world, and so first, we must share with them a good common to us both. It may well be — indeed, this is often the case, in my experience — that the good common to both is something of what we’ve just mentioned: that we, human beings, by our very nature, seek to do the good (even if our full accounts of the good differ, for now) but are always and everywhere rent by human frailty. Living as fallible human beings who seek the good together is perhaps the first step to true persuasion. We are very, very far from that today. Seeking and offering forgiveness and reparation (which presumes, of course, some shared good we have failed to attain) is just part of the warp and woof of life, but something our politics — both left and right — has entirely forgotten. […]
How do I think we’ve gone wrong in our discussions about all this today? Because we have forgotten that quintessentially human tension I just mentioned: we have no account of 1) virtue, the good to which we are all called, and 2) vice or sin, the falling away from that good. And so, in a very Hobbesian move, we increasingly conflate our lower appetites and our propensity to vice or sin (our fallen state) with who we are, rather than understanding ourselves as created good, fallen, and in need of the virtues and grace to flourish.
The whole interview is excellent. But this line is very rich and worth noting, bolded in the original for a good reason:
If virtue is the excellence of the soul, and each human soul is uniquely commensurated (or adapted) to its sexed body, there exists a beautiful array of what it looks like to be a virtuous woman or a virtuous man in the world. But when the two sexes are vicious, we tend to see deep gender stereotypes emerge.
The same goes for this:
But what to do about parents that think only about the good of their own children? I think a commitment to tithing is an antidote to that. I remember once explaining tithing to my eldest child (who was then four and is now a philosophy student at Notre Dame), and she responded: “So when Daddy gets paid [I was not working much then], that money is for both our family and the poor?” That’s a good insight to instill in children early on! I also deeply admire those families who make a commitment to serving the poor together. Basically, there has to be a sense in word and deed that as individual persons and as a family, we don’t exist for ourselves but for the good of others. That’s Christianity 101.