"James Talarico and Adam Hamilton... draw on the Hebrew scripture, especially Micah 6:8..."

"... where the prophet says the Lord requires us 'to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.' They draw, too, on the New Testament: the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Sermon on the Mount; on the two great commandments to love God and to love your neighbor; and Matthew 25, where Jesus says that whatever we did for the least of these we did for him. There are Christians all across America who may not agree with Talarico and Hamilton on every issue but who are deeply grateful these men won, because they offer an ethic and a disposition profoundly different from those of MAGA world. The senators-elect from Texas and Kansas believe that statecraft is soulcraft, that words should heal rather than wound, and that mercy is not weakness. They take seriously Isaiah’s invitation: 'Come now, and let us reason together.'"

Writes Peter Wehner, in "A Good Night for the Christian Faith/A pair of victories may do much to help the Democratic Party—and even more for the evangelical world" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"Statecraft is soulcraft" — is that a standard phrase? Apparently, it is. There's a 1984 George Will book called "Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does." He says things like "I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation."

Will is not mentioned in the Atlantic article, and I'll take that as a sign that Will's idea caught on. Checking my 22-year archive — because I didn't remember ever seeing the phrase before and I felt sure if I ever saw it, I would blog about it — I had to laugh when I found a post titled "Soulcraft," from October 1, 2021:

"In the Hobbesian formula, the Leviathan relies upon fear to suppress pride. It is pride that makes men difficult to govern."

"It may be illuminating to view our Covid moment through this lens and consider how small moments of humiliation may be put in the service of a long-standing political project, or find their meaning and normative force in it. Specifically, to play one’s part in Covid theatre, as in security theatre at the airport, is to suffer the unique humiliation of a rational being who submits to moments of social control that he knows to be founded upon untruths. That these are expressed in the language of science is especially grating. We need to consider the good faith intellectual positions that greased the skids for our slide into an illiberal form of governance. For, in addition to the political opportunism surrounding Covid, there were also well-meaning efforts to control the pandemic by altering people’s behaviour. The question is: what were the means employed for doing this, and what was the view of human beings that made such means attractive? What we got, in the end, without anyone really intending it, may fairly be called a propaganda state that seeks to manipulate without persuading...."

"The new public health despotism/Draconian rules are suppressing our humanity" by Matthew B. Crawford. There's much more at the link, but let me give you a little more below the fold:

"High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become 'knowledge workers.'"

"The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses." 

I greatly enjoyed this essay by Matthew B. Crawford, which is adapted from his book "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work." Crawford is highly educated and has worked in information economy jobs and the sort of jobs you learn to do in shop class. He's got a lot to say about what these different kinds of jobs have to offer. I do have 3 criticisms, however. 

1. Crawford's hands-on real-world job is working in his own business as a motorcycle mechanic and his reward-for-going-to-college job was cranking out abstracts of scholarly articles that he couldn't understand for $23,000 a year. So the "real world" job was particularly good and the "information" job was particularly bad. You've got to concede that there are plenty of good, bad, and middling jobs in both categories and to match up 2 good ones or 2 bad ones or 2 middling ones to make a fair comparison about what different sorts of work do to your soul. 

2. Crawford had a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, so he is not just another guy that got shuffled into college on the theory that the whole economy is going to be about knowledge and you're going to have to fit into it. He had big hopes of an academic career, and ending up in that article-summarizing job must have hurt him in ways that have little to do with how average guys who could have learned trades feel when they end up slotted into Dilbert cubicles. Now, the plight of those average guys is tremendously important, but Crawford is not one of those guys. His experience was different. He belonged in a university, but the job market in academia is tough. 

3. Crawford has written a book about it all, and book-writing is an "information" job. So he can't really say that working with your hands is completely fulfilling. He had to think about and analyze his experience and make it into an intellectual project. That's fine, but this making it into a book is a proper part of the story about his soul that he wants to tell. It's not in the essay. Maybe it's in the book.