Watching the Cross, on Calvary, about 3 PM or so, the Roman centurion recognized the truth: “This man truly was the Son of God!”
This thought comes to mind watching the coverage of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in the last twenty-four hours. I did not know him, nor was I a follower of his. In many respects, I am not his target audience. I am nearly a generation older and a constitutional conservative, born in another country and in another era.
However, the clips and videos I did catch over the years, as well as reruns in these last hours, do indeed paint a picture of an articulate and eloquent man, with that rare quality of speaking in short and clear sentences about truths that have required volumes of ink and centuries of intellectual distillation. Good for him and good for the students with whom he engaged.
I offer one hope for this despicable and heartbreaking, tragic loss of a father and husband.
The so-called “march through the institutions,” the decades-long effort that plumbed the depths of academia, turning it to a shadow of its former self, to shape young minds away from natural law and the natural order of reality, may have finally met its match! What was once a top-down imposition may now have given way to the bottom-up re-flourishing of reason and reality.
It may just be that Charlie Kirk’s activities—Turning Point USA is now present in 3,500 campuses—and, now, his legacy will be the backbone that turns the natural human intelligence toward its actual goal: the intelligibility and order of reality, and away from relativism and wish fulfilment. May it be to his great credit for having pushed back against the ideology that thought by itself can fashion reality into whatever one wants. May it be to his great credit that thought based on reality, as it is and as we find it, ultimately reflects reality accurately. Only then can we tell if what we believe is true or false, correct or incorrect, to be confirmed in our efforts or to have the ability to change our minds.
The centurion’s words were a realization based on the reality before his eyes and ears. Let us return to that tradition, where our thinking is based upon what is given, not what is wished. Let our universities and higher institutions of learning return to the proper study of reality, without fear. And let our students, of either political persuasion, find once again the honesty of learning from reality and its comprehensible structure.
Image: “Charlie Kirk” by Gage Skidmore on Flickr
