Ben Sasse on facing his imminent death from pancreatic cancer: "Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived." I’ve followed Ben Sasse’s career with curiosity as he represents one of the most prominent public figures to collide the worlds of U.S. evangelical Christian public witness and secular higher education. He was an on-again-off-again college professor (PhD historian by training) who served as a GOP senator and had a brief but tumultuous stint as the president of the University of Florida (obligatory “booo!!” as a FSU graduate). I’ve spent a significan... nic.babarskis.blog

@thebigbabooski I didn’t follow Sasse (I just don’t follow politics or world events in general) but used to assign one of his political speeches to my public speaking students if they needed a makeup assignment. It was almost odd to hear a politician talk who sounded like he’d actually thought about the issues he was talking about and trying to offer something of a via media. I was teaching a by and large politically conservative group, so listening to the speech was actually in part to help them warm up to #metoo.

@thebigbabooski Good article and interesting interview (got about half way through and realized I should prolly listen to it): “that we treated disagreement as a beginning rather than an ending.” I think one of the points Klein makes nicely in the intro is that the “other” needs to be simplified to be vilified. Just really hard to want to destroy a complicated being.