“We’re settling into our Thanksgiving days,” I tell a friend from Europe, explaining that it entails “a great amount of cooking, and eating, and mostly doing nothing for a few days.” I try to explain that it is an important kind of “laying fallow” in American culture which specifically calls us to give thanks to God for giving us a homeland. Perhaps some take America for granted. Some will be tempted to despair, others will not have enough faith to know Whom to thank for anything. But I tend to think that most Americans will at least think about God as the cause of all good things — but especially they might think about God as the cause of the common goodness of the American thing. The thought of the Res Americana might pluck some mystic chord of gratitude within them between all the preparations and feasting. We owe God so much more than this, of course, but suffice it to say that I tried to communicate to my friend how Thanksgiving reminds us who we are as a people. It’s both deeply Christian and deeply American at once. Our next 250 years depends on how this day orients us. These fallow days inscribe in us a civic awareness that Christianity is not only an essential makeweight against disorder in the soul, the family, the nation, civilization itself — it’s also ennobling, it elevates. It’s like a grace which operates on us, and we Americans should lean into it.

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) Requiescat in pace

Among many key points that struck me during this conversation with @PatrickDeneen & @gjpappin was the idea that an American pope breaks the false Lockean notion that the pope is a “foreign potentate” — rather the pope is close to us, a guardian of every common good.