Show Notes
How does a person of faith stand firm in an increasingly secular public square? In Part 2 of our conversation on the Nuance podcast, host Case Thorp dives into the personal life and spiritual journey of Dr. Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University.
While our first episode focused on the philosophical roots of human rights, today we explore the personal convictions that drive Dr. George’s work. He opens up about his unique upbringing in West Virginia, the profound influence of medieval philosophy, and his experiences navigating 41 years at Princeton University as a conservative Catholic. Whether you are concerned about the state of higher education, the shrinking attention spans of modern students, or the decline of the family unit, this episode is packed with essential wisdom for passing down virtue to the next generation.
Missed Part 1 of Case’s conversation with Dr. George? Catch it here: https://youtu.be/-zSdDKRPnzM
🔑 Key Topics Covered in This Episode:
Unlikely Alliances: Dr. George discusses his decades-long collaboration and deep friendship with Dr. Cornel West, highlighting the importance of engaging across political divides to seek the truth.
Defending Free Speech: Hear why both scholars have taken to the road to advocate for freedom of expression and open debate on college campuses.
Redefining Human Rights: Dr. George details his experience chairing the Commission on Unalienable Rights under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and why the commission was formed to clarify American diplomacy.
The American Founding vs. Modernity: Discover how the original American understanding of “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness” (rooted in flourishing and virtue) differs from the modern concept of “license”.
The Source of Human Dignity: The conversation explores how true human rights are rooted in Genesis 1 and the concept of Imago Dei, rather than being arbitrary gifts from governments or human powers.
Raising Virtuous Citizens: Why “more is caught than taught” when it comes to passing down character, self-restraint, and courage to the next generation.
📚 Episode Resources:
Natural Rights, Culture, and the Common Good: https://america250.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/George_Natural-Rights-Culture-and-the-Common-Good.pdf
Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights: https://fedsoc.org/events/the-commission-on-unalienable-rights-report-human-rights-and-u-s-foreign-policy
America’s Pastor, the biography of Billy Graham: https://a.co/d/hbmPOGB
Learn more about Salem Camp Meeting: https://www.salemcampmeeting.org/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
As Cicero taught, the foundation of justice is good faith, the trust and fidelity that binds us to one another. And as we discussed last time with Dr. George, this virtue rooted in devotion to family, community, and what’s right. It shapes a person’s character from the ground up. So today we continue our conversation with my guest, Professor Robert George of Princeton University. Welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. Dr. George, thank you for being with me again this week.
Robert George
Thank you, Case. It’s a pleasure to be back with you.
Case Thorp
So listeners, as a reminder, please like, share, leave a comment. My goodness, our reach goes even further and we’re able to bless more with these Christ-centered insights on shaping culture. Well, last week with Dr. George, we had a wonderful discussion on the common good and how human rights need to be rooted in such a way that it is not just about what makes us happy in the psychological sense, but rather that our rights are rooted in our Creator in that foundational sense that will far surpass any ruler or ruling body in any one age. Well today I’d like to go in a bit of a different direction and we’re going to discuss his faith and his convictions as a Roman Catholic and how his faith supports his scholarship and public commitment. Now, George, I was interested to read this. You’re the father of Syrian descendants and your mother was Italian and you grew up in West Virginia. Now come on. There’s a mixture of cultures right there.
Robert George
Yeah, and a mixture of branches of Christianity. So of course, from my father’s side of the family, I was exposed to the profound spiritual riches of the Eastern traditions. My father was Syrian Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox. And of course, that’s a profound tradition of Christian spirituality. My mother, of course, being Catholic, Latin right, Italian heritage. And of course, I was, growing up, majority of my friends and everyone in our community, the people that I…I grew up in the hills of West Virginia, hunting, fishing, and playing music. The people that I was interacting with in all of those pursuits were what we would today call, we didn’t call them this back then, but what we would today call evangelicals, certainly Protestants, but not just like mainline Presbyterians or congregationalists or anything like that. These were what we would again today call evangelical Protestants. And so I had these influences coming from these different traditions of Christianity. It was very enriching.
Case Thorp
Sure, sure. Well, I’m in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church denomination, the EPC, so I can relate. Now, you were at Swarthmore and it was medieval philosophy that caught your attention. What about medieval philosophy was so interesting?
Robert George
Well, the great medieval thinkers, the great medieval philosophers, and not just the Christians like Aquinas and Anselm, but the great Jewish thinkers of the period like Moses Maimonides, the great Islamic thinkers of the period, think of Averröes and others, they were deeply interested in ideas and in using the intellect, what we would today call critical thinking, to move from ignorance to truth. So the Medievals would think of a proposition that could be debated. It might be true, might be false. How do we figure it out? And then they would try to think their way to a conclusion by considering the best evidence, the best arguments on this side, and then the best evidence, the best arguments on the competing side. That’s sometimes come to be known as the scholastic method. And in a certain sense, it’s just formalizing the method of inquiry with which philosophy was launched all the way back in Greece when Socrates, on the streets of Athens, as reported to us by Plato in any case, that Socrates, buttonholing people on the streets of Athens and asking them for their opinions about things, raising questions and then proceeding by considering the best arguments on one side and the best arguments on the other side. Certainly in the domain of philosophy, we’ve never found a way to improve on that method of considering the best that’s been thought and said, best that’s been written on the competing sides by the greatest minds living and dead. It’s what I try to do in my own published scholarship. It’s what I try to teach my students to do. It’s what I do in my classroom. And my principal influences really were the Medievals. Plato himself, at least in the dialogues in which Socrates is presented, as modeling the use of that method.
Case Thorp
Now, was your faith in your childhood or young adult years, was it as strong and captivating as it is now in your life?
Robert George
I was brought up with a strong faith by both my parents. Both my parents were strongly religious people. And of course, I was surrounded by people who were devoutly religious. When I was a young adolescent, my best friend’s mother…she was a widow at that point. I hadn’t known her husband, the father of my pal, but he had been a Southern Baptist preacher, Southern Baptist minister. And her name was Frances Altop, Mrs. Altop. She would take her son, David, and me to the movie houses when the films of the Billy Graham Crusades were being shown. The Warner Theater, for example, in Morgantown, West Virginia. There was never a Billy Graham Crusade anywhere near where we were because we were too rural and distant from a big city. But the theaters would show the New York Crusade or the London Crusade, wherever Billy Graham was drawing tens and tens of thousands of people. And I greatly admired his preaching and certainly his message resonated with me. And I came even then to have a very strong appreciation of the evangelical tradition in Christianity. Myself being Catholic, in those days, that was considered quite a chasm between evangelicalism and Catholicism. It doesn’t seem quite as broad a chasm today, but it certainly seemed like that in those days, but it didn’t seem that way to me because I kind of felt I was getting the same message, basically the same message in the Billy Graham crusade that I was getting in church or in catechism class, you know, there were obviously difference in specifics, some of them quite important theological differences, but the fundamental Christian message was there. And it seemed right to me. It always seemed right to me. Even when I got to college and I thought, well, you know, I should challenge myself on this. I really need to consider sharp critics of Christianity and of religious belief more broadly. I remember asking one of my teachers, one my professors, to tell me who the best atheist thinker was because I wanted to read him and see what he had to say for himself. And he put me on to Nietzsche. I think I’d never heard of Nietzsche before. But Nietzsche was very powerful in the 19th century.
Case Thorp
That’s quite an atheist to start with, right?
Robert George
Yeah, so I went to the library and I found The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil. I started reading each. But honestly, I thought, well, you know, I owe it…I need to give this point of view a thought. It could be that I was brought up in this other tradition, but maybe it can’t withstand critical intellectual scrutiny. And if so, I need to know that. But in the event, at least it seemed to me that Christianity more than withstood Nietzsche’s critique, powerful though it was. And I thought that the Christian view actually won out over Nietzsche’s view. And that experience actually ended up strengthening my faith. My political views tended to change quite a bit from college and then onward, but my religious views simply deepened.
Case Thorp
Well, in my home growing up, there was Jesus, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Billy Graham. They were the Trinity.
Robert George
For us, because remember that both my grandfathers were coal miners and we were in the heart of Appalachia in West Virginia. So we were brought up to believe in four things. Jesus Christ, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and the United Mine Workers of America. Those were the four. And all I can say is, Case, I still believe in Jesus. Not so much Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party or the United Mind Workers of America, but I still believe in Jesus.
Case Thorp
Right. Well, then my parents came along and they replaced Roosevelt with Reagan. So that was very influential. But I had always hoped to be able to see Billy Graham before his crusades ended, and especially after I had had my call to ministry when I was an undergraduate. And I did actually get to go see his crusade in Atlanta. And my roommate at Emory had said, well, I’m gonna set you up with a friend of mine on a blind date to go. And let me tell ya, it was an amazing night with Billy Graham. It was not so great with her. And it was the only blind date I ever went on and the only Billy Graham crusade I got to attend.
Robert George
Well, lucky you to have seen Billy Graham in the flesh. I had a very great honor some years ago. And that was when the new big biography of Billy Graham by a professor at Duke University, a very distinguished scholar, came out. And I think it was called America’s Pastor. You may know the biography, big, thick biography. Well, I was invited by the New York Times to do the Times Book Review of the biography and it gave me a chance to dig in not only to the book but to do some of my own research. It is a very good book by the way. I really commend it to people. It’s a very fair, honest treatment of Reverend Graham, excellent. You can learn a lot from it. I certainly learned a lot from it. But I really enjoyed doing the review. And one of the things I highlighted, being Catholic myself, was the friendship that formed between Billy Graham and Pope John Paul lI.
Case Thorp
Sure. We’ll put a link in our show notes.
Robert George
They were, had a big mutual admiration society. And when they finally met, the first time they met, I think it was, Reverend Graham was visiting Pope John Paul at the Vatican, the Pope grabbed him by the thumb. I don’t know why the thumb, but instead of a handshake, the Pope grabbed Pastor Graham by the thumb and said, we are brothers. Isn’t that beautiful?
Case Thorp
So good.
Robert George
I learned something else interesting when I was doing the review. The book did not report on something that I had always heard, which was that when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Albany, not Birmingham, that came later, but when he was arrested for civil disobedience in Albany, that the money to bail him out of jail was put up by Billy Graham personally.
And well, it wasn’t in the book. I was trying to figure out, is that just a myth? Is that just a legend? So I couldn’t, I thought, well, what do I do? So what I did was I got in touch with, down in Atlanta, the Martin Luther King Center. And I asked them if there was any documentation on this. And they said, yes, there is. And they put me in touch with that documentation. So in my review, I noted that this event had in fact happened and hadn’t been reported in the book, for some reason the book didn’t. Well, the author of the book didn’t. And he said, but by the way, you and I had heard that same rumor, I couldn’t track it down, couldn’t validate it. And therefore, that’s why I left it out of the book. He said, but how did you track it down? I said, well, actually very simply. I got in touch with the Martin Luther King Center.
Case Thorp
And maybe you know from the book that his wife was a Presbyterian her whole life. Grew up on the mission field. Well, back to your journey. So, before heading to Oxford, at Harvard you earned both a Master of Theology and a JD, a law degree. Now, when I was at Emory that was a new combo, a new degree that was put together. I feel like it’s more common now, but was that a common thing in those days and why those two disciplines?
Robert George
It was not a common thing, but you must know John Witte at Emory was doing what I was, If my recollection is correct, he was doing a law degree and a theological degree at the same time. That is what I was doing. I have to admit now, the reason I was doing the theological degree was that I wanted an opportunity to do some more medieval philosophical study. I wanted to deepen my dive into medieval philosophy. And the master’s degree offered by the Divinity School at Harvard in those days gave me an opportunity to do that, not just at Harvard, but at Boston College and at some other institutions in the area that were part of a theological consortium. So honestly, to tell you the truth, I didn’t study all that much theology, but I studied an awful lot of medieval philosophy under the guise of studying for my master’s degree in theology.
Case Thorp
Well, a THM, as you know, is a great degree that’s often a filler of time before you get to your PhD or more than a filler, but a preparation for such work.
Robert George
Yeah, it was good preparation for me and it was very useful to have that study under my belt when I then, after law school, went over to Oxford University and did my PhD in philosophy of law.
Case Thorp
Now you’ve been at Princeton, my goodness, what, 40 years?
Robert George
41 years.
Case Thorp
41 years. What has changed over that time, not only institutionally, but with your students?
Robert George
Well, there have been some significant changes, certainly, on the faculty. When I arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1985, as far as I can tell, there were no out of the closet full board conservatives. I think I was the first one. And I came in without hiding. I didn’t hide my opinions. Everyone knew when they hired me. And good for them. They were willing to hire me anyway. They knew that I was a…
Case Thorp
Even then. But why were they willing to hire you?
Robert George
I have no idea, hand to God, as best I can tell. But they hired me knowing that I was a dissenter from the main political viewpoint on the campus, including on the hot button, all the hot button issues. But they’ve been very good to me. I mean, my goodness, I’ve had a blessed career. They gave me tenure. They installed me in one of the university’s most celebrated endowed chairs. They allowed me to create and build my own program, the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions. They have allowed me to teach anything I wanted to teach. They’ve never interfered with anything that I’ve wanted to do or say in the classroom or outside the classroom. The university has showered on me every honor and recognition they seem to have available. Now, I know lots of conservatives who’ve been victims of discrimination and prejudice, but I’m not one of them. Princeton has been very, very, very good to me. But in those days, the dominant view on the campus was what I then called liberalism and what I today call, and I’ll explain why, old-school liberalism.
And I just assumed that was the natural state of affairs in academic life, that the vast majority of people in the academy would be liberals, old school liberals. The big change is that they are now an almost extinct species. They are almost gone. There are more conservatives than there were when I arrived, which is interesting, not a lot, but when I arrived, I was the only one out of the closet. We had a few, two or three Republicans, but they did not identify as conservative. I remember one of them, the great late great international relations scholar, Robert Gilpin, who once introduced himself in my hearing to someone as a Republican, but he said, I’m not a Robbie George type conservative Republican. But we didn’t, I mean, I was as far as I could tell, the only out of the closet, genuine conservative. But now maybe between 20 and 25 out of the closet conservatives. Now, in a faculty of a thousand, that’s not a lot, but it’s sure a heck of a lot more than when I arrived. But the more interesting thing is that what I now call the old school liberals have largely been replaced by people very considerably to their left. So these are people who are not liberals, but are left, progressive, woke people who don’t have the old fashioned liberal principles that were dominant when I was here. For example, the old school liberals really did strongly believe in free speech. These were old ACLU type liberals. That was kind of classical.
Case Thorp
Even classical liberalism with lower case l.
Robert George
Yeah, they were people, for example, who stood up for the rights of that Nazi group to march through Skokie and Illinois. They didn’t like the Nazis. They didn’t like what the Nazis said. They abominated them, of course, but they were strong believers in free speech.
The people who have replaced the old school liberals, by and large, are not people who are so sensitive about free speech. They’ve gone a long way towards squelching speech that descends from their own perspectives on our campuses. These were the people who made cancel culture such a toxic thing in that period from, I don’t know, roughly 2017 or so to 2024. So that’s a major change. Among the students, the most significant change I’ve seen has been since about 2013, 2014 or so, just in the last little over a decade. And that is the shortening, the considerable shortening of the attention span. Even my best students today do not have as long or broad an attention span as the ordinary students had when I began and for a couple of decades after I was teaching here. Now my friend John Haidt at New York University, the famous social psychologist, says that it’s the screens, it’s the devices, the cell phones and so forth and social media. That could be. John knows better than I do, so I defer to him on that. But I can tell you for sure that the phenomenon is real. The attention span is shortened.
I’ve had to deal with it. Now I have not changed my policy of rigorous grading. I don’t inflate my grades. I’ve held the line on that. I still assign challenging readings, every bit as challenging as I assigned back in the 1980s. I still insist on the highest standards of critical thinking in our discussions in class and in exams and so forth. But the one place, Case, I’ve had to yield, I’ve had to give, force majeure, there’s nothing I could do, is I’ve had to cut down on the volume of my reading. And that’s simply because the students today are incapable, not unwilling, incapable of doing the amount of reading over the course of a week in preparation for a class that I used to be able to count on them to be able to do.
Case Thorp
And would you say the attention span concern is in the hour of the classroom or also over the course of a semester?
Robert George
It’s over the course of the mean, it suffuses their lives. I mean, they can’t sustain attention to a matter, especially when it’s reading. But they can’t sustain attention to a matter that I took as a matter of course, students being able to sustain for three decades.
Case Thorp
Well, to your family. So you are married, two children, three grandchildren, you told me. Tell me about life as a grandfather.
Robert George
That’s right. The best things ever. No matter how much you look forward to it, no matter how great you think it’s going to be, it’s even greater. It’s like I compare a case to the Grand Canyon. If someone hasn’t seen the Grand Canyon, there is no way you can explain to them how magnificent the Grand Canyon is. You can show them pictures. You can use words. You can do your best.
There’s no way you’re going to elevate their expectations to the point where they’ll be disappointed. When they see it, it’s going to be greater than they ever could have imagined. That’s like grandparenthood. You can build it up. People can look forward to it. They can know it’s going to be great. But it’s greater than you can even know.
Case Thorp
Right? Right? Well, in our last episode we spoke of virtue and the way in which family is the primary institution that passes virtue on to the next generation. How has your role as a father informed your work as you write publicly and look at virtue in the family?
Robert George
Well, you know, I think it’s important, especially if you’re a public person like I am to protect your family’s privacy. So one thing I do is I avoid, you know posting about my family or talking much about the specifics of my family. I don’t mind people knowing that I am married that I have grandchildren, but you need to, if you’re in the public light, you need to protect your family as best you can. I mean, to some extent, you know, there are limits on what you can do, but I think you have to honor that and respect it. I know people in public life, for example, politicians, they have a terrible situation where there’s just too much curiosity about their families. They’re kind of living in a fish bowl.
That’s hard. It’s hard for people. But I think that family life is the greatest thing in the world. I can tell you that. And it’s confirmed my sort of theoretical beliefs about the importance of family. The greatest joys and the greatest sufferings come as a result of our being integrated into families. Greatest sufferings come when, for example, you lose a parent or Heaven forbid, the worst thing in the world, you lose a child. It’s just the worst thing I can imagine. I saw my own grandmother go through it twice. I had friends who’ve lost children in early childhood or adolescence. Worst thing in the world, but that’s the price you pay for the immense love you have for your children.
It’s really so central to what it means to be a human being. We’re made to be parts of families. We in America, especially today, think of ourselves very individualistically. We tend to have a very individualist understanding of what we’re all about. We’re losing some wisdom that some other cultures are better at here, where they see us as people in communion with others, beginning with our parents, they bring us into the world, our siblings, and then we create our own families. There’s that profound bond between husband and wife, and then the children that come out of the marriage. So this is why I try to avoid speaking of the individual so much, and I speak of the person. Because the persons are made for community. Individuals, yeah, OK, I know that we come packaged as individuals. But our fulfillment lies in no small measure in our relationships with others, beginning with those most intimate of relations in the family, with mom and dad and grandma and grandpa and auntie and uncle, and the siblings, and then your spouse and your children, and of course you’re integrated into your spouse’s family, your spouse is integrated into your family. And it’s part of the great thing about living a human life. If you’re blessed and are fortunate enough to form a family of your own.
Case Thorp
Well, as a pastor, I make no apologies for the amount of investment we do as a church in the family unit, the coming together of one of the primary means through which God’s mission to the world is accomplished. And yet, I also am so grateful that the church is one of the few places where brother and sister is made beyond blood, that there is a place for the widow and the orphan and new family can be created. So important.
Robert George
Absolutely right. These are the foundational institutions of civil society on which everything else depends, the family and the religious community. That’s where it all begins.
Case Thorp
And the decline of religious communities in America particularly is very concerning.
Robert George
And of families. And it’s no accident that they rise and they fall together.
Case Thorp
Now that’s a good insight. A friend of mine here published a very popular book called The Great Dechurching. It was one of Christianity Today’s and the Gospel Coalition’s top books of the year last year. He co-wrote it with Michael Graham. His name is Jim Davis. And they did a great deal of research with a sociologist, Ryan Burke. I believe that’s right.
One of the interesting things they found was the greatest predictor as to whether one would drop out of their church involvement was moving. That if you moved, often the family would just get too busy and not reconnect and therefore lose that connection. And I can imagine in moving you’re also leaving that family system and the blood family that you left behind who may be more involved in their religious institution.
Robert George
I see it, that’s right. And you know, it’s a special challenge, I think, for families who have to move, military families, for example, or families where breadwinners are in corporations that move them frequently around the country and sometimes even abroad. It’s tough because we need to be rooted. We need to be rooted. And if you’re moving all the time, you don’t have time to root. And then, of course, it’s painful when you’re pulled up by the roots and have to move again.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, as a pastor, I’ve had to move and all of my wife’s family are in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana area, mine are in the Atlanta area. And yet we have been very intentional about getting back, getting back regularly, having them here. One of the most rich traditions in my life that I know you’ll appreciate is the camp meeting tradition, part of the second great awakening. So we have what’s called a tent. It’s really a cabin, but the old school word is a tent at Salem Camp Meeting, a Methodist campground about 30 minutes east of Atlanta. And I grew up going, there’s a large tabernacle in the middle of the grounds with sawdust floors surrounded by about 25 family owned tents. And we will go back for a week of revival.
Worship at seven in the morning, 11 in the morning, eight at night, and every year there’s two preachers because it’s a Methodist campground, one’s always a Methodist, the other is either a Baptist or a Presbyterian. switch in and out. But what I love about it is it is a place of rootedness for my children that we go every summer. We spend a week. We revisit with friends that we only get to be with one week a year. We sit on those front porches and catch up on life and yell and scream about predestination and prevenient grace. And it’s just a glorious rootedness that I’m grateful our family has.
Robert George
No, that’s great. Is it old school enough that you have dinner on the ground? There you go. There you go. See, again, I remember growing up in West Virginia.
Case Thorp
Yes, for sure. Yeah, in fact, Conyers First United Methodist Church is the lead choir every year on Friday night. And it’s the campgrounds between Conyers and Covington. And they always have an incredible potluck supper out on the picnic benches. And I went there as a child, I haven’t been there in 30 years, but we still sneak over and eat at the potluck, because they’re glad to see us and it’s good food.
Okay, just last insights on seeing leadership at that level. They’re still humans. They’re still people. And what do we miss because of the view through the media?
Robert George
Absolutely. Something actually I learned from Henry Kissinger. We look at these political leaders, presidents, governors, secretaries of state, wielders of power, and they make decisions. And we just assume that they were always going to make those decisions. They went into office pre-planned, having made those decisions. And we either like them or we don’t, depending on our political perspective or our political party. Kissinger made the point to me once that it’s not like that. Said most of the decisions and just about all of the important decisions that we have to make when we’re exercising power, he himself had been secretary of state, of course, he was very close to more than one president. Said, we don’t know what decision we’re going to make. It’s 51-49. And we’re stuck there. We don’t know. Is this the right decision? Is it the wrong decision? And at the end of the day, we have to make the call because it’s our job and there’s no one else to do it. So he said, people think we went in there with this plan and we’re just carrying out our plan. He says, no, that’s just not the reality. And I’ve had the opportunity to be an advisor to presidents and governors and so forth pretty close in. And I can verify what Kissinger said. I remember one time it was a question with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office of the White House. I was there advising him, serving at the time on the President’s Council on Bioethics. And he was facing a very difficult question of whether to veto a bill that would have overridden his own prohibition on the funding of embryo destructive research, embryonic stem cell research. And the president had me and there was a scientist with me from Oregon, had the two of us in there, not to tell us what he already decided to do, he needed our advice in order to make the decision. He needed to know some things on the science and he needed to know some things on the ethical side of things. He needed to know basically the status, biological and moral status of the developing human being in the embryonic stage. And he was hearing all sorts of things from different political advisors, and he was hearing all sorts of opinions from people. He just decided, I’m going to have a couple of people in who I trust, who I think know their way around these issues, and they’re going to advise me, and then I’ll make the decision. President Bush wasn’t looking to me, and to, Markus Grompe was the scientist named, Dr. Grompe for political advice. He had plenty of that.
We weren’t the expert at that. He had a decision to make, and it was an ethically very important decision. And he had us come to help to fill his knowledge base with the information he needed in order to make an ethically sound decision. Now, as it happens on that occasion, he made what I thought was the ethically sound decision. But he didn’t go in there in advance knowing what the right thing to do was. He had a difficult judgment call. He had to listen to the evidence and arguments on the competing sides. I’m sure he had people in that weren’t there with us on that day. I’m sure he had people in who were arguing the other position.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Real people, real situations. Well, Robert, thank you so much for helping us reflect both with rigor and with hope. For our listeners, we will link a number of the things we’ve discussed here, especially his essay with the American Enterprise Institute that we discussed last week, and also the James Madison program that he created and leads at Princeton University. Robert, thank you so much.
Robert George
It’s my pleasure. Thank you, Case.
Case Thorp
Well, that’s all for today. Thank you for letting us join you on your commute or your workout. Appreciate the time together. If something has challenged or encouraged you, share this episode with a friend, text it to them, put it on your social media. You can learn more about our work at The Collaborative at wecolabor.com, wecolabor.com. Drop us your email and we’ll send you the latest journal called Zeitgeist, Reflections on Faith, Work, and Culture. Many thanks to the Magruder Foundation for making today’s episode possible. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessing’s on you.
