7/18/2022

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal leads off with Mike Sabo’s interview of Hans Zeiger, who will take over as President of the Jack Miller Center on August 1. Sabo also reports on JMC’s ambitious five-year strategic plan to reinvigorate American civic education. Previously, Zeiger spent nearly a decade in the Washington State legislature, serving in both the House of Representatives and Senate, where he chaired the Early Learning and K-12 Education Committee and gained a reputation as a bipartisan collaborator and a supporter of civic education reform.

“We have lost a sense of common purpose, a sense of what it means to hold citizenship in America,” Zeiger argues. “It’s a fundamental challenge to our future. All of us bear responsibility as citizens for the success of our experiment in self-government. And that is why civic education is essential.” As he takes the reins of JMC, he looks to expand its existing national K-12 teacher education efforts such as the American Civics and History Initiative, a partnership with the Ashbrook Center and the Bill of Rights Institute, and prepare for celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding.

At American Reformer, Thomas Tacoma reviews a recent book by Gary Steward, “Justifying Revolution: The American Clergy’s Argument for Political Resistance, 1750-1776,” that surveys the support among Protestant pastors for declaring independence from Great Britian. He argues that in contrast to recent scholarship, Steward correctly shows that the push by Protestant clergy for independence was “traditional, not novel – demonstrating constitutional and religious continuity with their forebears, not rupture.” In Steward’s careful study of sermons and tracts written in that era, Tacoma says that Steward “proves that the religious leaders of the Revolution were in fact true to the Bible as exposited by their Reformation fathers.”

Rounding out this week’s curation, RealClear American Civics editor Mike Sabo reviews Daniel J. Mahoney’s new book, “The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation,” at RealClearBooks&Culture. Mahoney profiles eight statesmen in the history of Western civilization such as Cicero, Edmund Burke, and Abraham Lincoln who “utilized a rare combination of cardinal virtues and philosophic insight to save their respective nations from destruction.” These statesmen, Mahoney argues, used prudence to secure the common good of their nations, applying unchanging principles to the circumstances they each faced. He concludes the book by calling citizens to “open ourselves to excellence in all of its forms” and reaffirm the “spirit of gratitude for what has been passed on by our forebearers as a precious gift.” “The outstanding examples of human greatness that Mahoney profiles,” Sabo writes, “should fire the imaginations of future statesmen looking to preserve our civilization.”