Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. His work focuses on values-based leadership, ethics, and decision making. A former Air Force officer, Terry also previously served as Director of the Horace Mann Learning Center, the training arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and as Dean of Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. Terry is co-editor and author of The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships That Make Government Work (CQ Press, 2011). He also wrote Statesmanship, Character and Leadership in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government (Loftlands Press 2015).
The Senate confirmation process through which we recently passed was a test of our American experiment. In regard to the character of the nominee, the President, the Senate, and many of the people themselves, America failed the test.
Forgetting is human and necessary. Yet acting as if we always remember accurately is self-delusional and can be dangerous in our personal and national lives.
Freedom is not an end in itself. The Constitution treats it as a means to an end. James Madison reminds us that “justice is the end of society.”
Recent years have witnessed many calls for more direct democracy, but its passions threaten to break free from reason and compromise. The Constitution was wary of democracy. We should understand why - and use appropriate safeguards.
My stained glass work is part of my answer to the question: what is a full life? It brings a measure of sanity in an often crazy world.
The pardon power was designed to protect those wrongly convicted and contribute to healing the nation in times of turmoil. It belongs to the president alone, but how do we decide if it is properly used?
My brother passed away recently. His final weeks in hospice care somehow stand out as one of the richest parts of my life. I was surprised and initially troubled at that thought. How could this be so?
If we used logic alone to decide our views on public policy issues, we should expect much less extreme partisanship. So there must be something going on below the level of reason and conscious awareness. There is.
The seesaw between personal freedom and social obligations has waxed and waned. The last fifty years, however, has seen an imbalance: the demand for more rights without a corresponding balance of social responsibility.
We enter the world alone, in the first of life's separations, and we hold the hands of those leaving life so that death is not such a lonely parting. Our lives in between are a search for connection. Holding hands unites us.
Yearning for dignity is human. Having it is foundational to the American republic, built as it is on respect for the individual. Yet so many Americans demand respect but don’t extend it to others.
We can choose to live a life of gratitude, for both the gifts of love, beauty, and life we receive and for those we are privileged to be able to offer others.
It is easy to forget what is good in America. Negativity seems to sell much better, and the virtual world makes it so much easier to spread. But if we allow ourselves to believe that America is coming apart at the seams, we bring that reality closer.
When we twist morality to serve politics, we damage even more than individuals; we threaten the society upon which all our hopes for human betterment depend.
Congress does the nation a disservice when it fails to faithfully execute its constitutional role. Presidents go too far when Congress does not go far enough. Fixing the latter is the best way to constrain the former.
As we confront the horror of Las Vegas, we are framing the problem the wrong way: solely as an issue of gun control. This distracts us from asking why Americans want guns and why some use them in violent acts.
The survival of our nation depends on political leaders with the moral courage to do the popular if politically difficult thing. Until voters demand and reward that behavior, we will continue to get political cowardice.
During Hurricane Harvey, the federal government stood by our side. That's worth remembering the next time a politician, pundit, blogger, or even our neighbor invites us to act as if the "feds" are a nuisance at best and the enemy at worst.
In regard to the health care debate, we seem to be in a zero-sum game. Anyone who benefits from a change would do so at the expense of someone else, for whom a musical chair is pulled away. Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions, framing the problem in the wrong way.
Those who want to extend life indefinitely seem to lack the understanding of how precious life is precisely because it is short. They would live in just one world, as if the earth and the sun could be as majestically glorious without each other.
