Of Love and Empathy

Posted on March 26, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

What is love, and is it related to empathy? Can a person feel empathy if they do not feel love? Can I love a person if I do not empathize with them?

Great philosophers have written great books about such issues. One of the most famous if Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, in which he wrote that each human “carries within himself all of humanity,” that “there is nothing in another person which we cannot feel as part of ourselves,” that “I experience in myself that which is experienced by the other person and hence that in the experience he and I are one,” that “knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race, or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human.” Knowledge of another requires knowledge of self. Love of another requires love of self.

Is it possible to know what someone is feeling, to feel them in yourself, to empathize to where you know them, they no longer hold mysteries, that you know them in a feeling way, not mentally or consciously but you know them in a way best to know them? To know someone in such a way is to feel at one with them, to feel so natural with them, touching—their warmth becomes your warmth, their heartbeat merges with yours, and even if yours and their thoughts do not merge bodily, by means of an act in the immediate moment, you know this human being in a way you do not know those whom you have not touched. The touch does not have to be physical, however. Feelings can be touched, expressed, in other ways, by words, by a look in the eye, something that is shared, that relaxes, that opens up defenses, that makes a person vulnerable.

What does a person learn in such a situation? Ideas, thoughts, feelings that are not objective and identifiable, that deal more with humanity than with personality and behavior, that are not readily perceivable by the mind, nor readily put into images for analysis and expression—thoughts, feelings, and ideas of warmth, love, appreciation, commonality, that make us one, human.

The way to love a human, to empathize and know him or her, is to form this connecting link, to build this sharing; to open yourself to allow them to enter, and perhaps a mutual reciprocation occurs.

Is such love, empathy, a learned phenomenon, or innate?

Scholars, psychologists—such as Leo Buscalia—argue that love is learned, a product of the environment and culture. Such was Freud’s argument as well. I disagree. To me, love is innate; although degrees of love are learned over time, love itself is present in every human being from the moment of birth, and at the moment of death. Part of this belief comes from my notion that humans are created by an act of love, via the parents, via God. From the moment of birth, throughout our lives, we are a part, searching for completion. This search, which is innate, is the basis of love. All humans feel it, many try to ignore it. The striving for unity tugs at us, for we are alone, inherently, and desire unification–or reunification. Love is not of the moment, though we express it in the moment. Love transcends time, and this is evidence of its eternity and inclusiveness. It is experienced in the womb, and once exiting the womb, the desire for reunification drives us; we were once two, then become one, but wish to experience that oneness of the womb, hence we seek throughout our lives unification with others.

Love means life. Love means existence. Love is a source of truth, of unity, which necessitates life, experiences. Death might bring truth as well, but this we do not know. What we do know is that life brings some openings into truth, so to deny life is to deny this possibility of finding truth. Living life means to experience life. How can I love myself, or other humans, if I do not know, or try to know, them? Experiencing life to its fullest helps teach one about self and humans in general. Such knowledge helps me know, to love, me and others. Such statements assume that love for others is based on self-love, and self-love is based on love for others. Inexplicably this is true: to experience ourselves we must experience others, know others. Humans have a need to extend outward, to form a unity, but there can be no object with which to direct and fulfill this need without knowledge, which provides our objects of love.

The objects of love are largely transient, but love itself transcends time. Love is not dependent upon the moment, objective observation in time, which our knowledge of the objects of love depends upon. Rather love is not objective, is not something we know at a certain moment in time, but since it is present before the object is discovered, since it is present from birth, it is inherent, and does not depend upon time and chance. Our knowledge of love, as a result, can hardly be based on specific moments of time, although the objects we seek help us to recognize love. But love can never be fully known, only felt. Love is not connected to the mind, thoughts, images, but is connected with something else. What? The body? Thoughts and images of love spring from experiences and memory, but they are phenomena of the moment, they occur at a distinct moment in time. We feel things in the body at moments in time. Feelings of love are felt at such moments, directed toward some object of love. To know love requires, however, that we sense and remember all of the different instances of love directed toward multitudinous objects. To sense love requires the body as much as the memory. We remember feelings, but more, love is a truth that we sense with our whole being. It is like a sense of empathy with ourselves. To sense love one has to rely on images, but not exclusively or dominantly; one has to rely upon a feeling within oneself, not a bodily stimulus that occurs at a certain moment, but a general feeling of certainty that is not imagined, is not forced. The feeling of love is a vague feeling of being drawn toward another, some feeling that can be sensed, but not totally of the body, not totally of the mind, but both. Love is to sense, feel, empathize, based on memory. The body is drawn toward an object as it has so many other times, as recalled by memory. The mind is drawn to an object as it has so many times, as recalled by memory. Body and mind combine to form an awareness of love driven by experiences at different times and in different places.

Knowing something truly, feeling a truth within oneself, a truth that involves love or unity, right or wrong, God, hope, the future, can only be done by transcending the moment. One reason why absolute knowledge escapes humans is because they are prisoners of the now, the immediate, and only with great difficulty can they escape it. Knowledge is only possible by overcoming immediate thoughts, the imagination, immediate images. For example, lovemaking symbolizes but does not encompass human knowledge because it is so immediate and fleeting, not long enough to recognize its truth, the brief glimpse we have comes and goes. Likewise empathy. Empathy cannot be known in the now, the moment, the immediate. It requires extensive moments over time, transcendent moments and feelings, to empathize with another. This is difficult. To know another with true empathy requires that one know oneself—and who truly knows oneself?

Are Fromm and other philosophers correct that to love another person is to love all humanity, to empathize with another person is to empathize with all humanity? Perhaps in the glimpses of knowing in the immediate moments of feelings of love and empathy a person can start to recognize the transcendent truths that love and empathy are based on.

I believe I love but what love means is more difficult. To know I love is difficult to realize. Is there a means to express this knowing, to bring it to the surface? Is it by means of the creative surge? Or a time when one tries to express something felt, not consciously known, by means of timeless images? Isn’t this contradictory? How can I express something that seems literally inexpressible? How can I, sitting at one point in time, express truths that are beyond the moment, that make up a variety of moments, that depend not just on the past but the present and future?

Can love and empathy therefore be expressed? Somehow, if it were possible, the means of expression would have to be a spontaneous flow of feelings based on a multitude of moments rather than a well thought-out argument. Feelings and timeless images, not reason, must be used. In art, a sophisticated painting might represent in one glance, one canvass, the whole of love. Or perhaps a melody or song could do it. In writing, verse and prose might accomplish it, but it is difficult: how can abstract general truths be expressed without over-reliance on specific concrete examples? How can a general portrait be painted that is not just a patchwork of immediate impressions? In writing, the language used generates images that symbolize or express the general, the abstract. If a writer can express in one moment all the emotions, images, feelings, and thoughts that go into love, and this general impression hints at specific moments, might a truth be glimpsed by expressing all that goes into it? This truth is one that encompasses time, timeless images and feelings along with concrete feelings and thoughts.

Over the forty and more years that I have contemplated these ideas, and the difficulty that humans have in expressing truths that transcend the moment, the most accurate approximation I have experienced that puts into words, music, art, and symbols the transcendent truths of love and empathy is found in the Roman Catholic mass. The liturgy, the songs of praise, the religious icons, the overwhelming beauty of the service, the feelings of love expressed therein, hint at what true Love is, what is true Empathy, an experience that humans cannot match. But one Person has done so, Jesus Christ, and His mother, the Virgin Mary, as well. Contemplating Christ and the Virgin provides me with a sense of Love and Empathy that I cannot otherwise approximate.

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Reflections on Erich Fromm, “The Art of Loving”

Posted on March 24, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

For Erich Fromm (1900-1980), the German-American psychologist, love is active power, where one preserves one’s own integrity. Love helps overcome separation and anxiety, stimulates union. Love is part of a need to know, to know someone else or self. It is a moment of knowledge of oneself and other humans, all humans. Knowledge comes from the experience of union. 

Knowledge acquired from love based on empathy. Common experiences stimulate empathy. To empathize is to gain knowledge by means of re-experiencing what another experiences, or recalling in the past a similar experience. Empathy is the act of extending my feelings, my sensations, my awareness, my feelings, my memory, to another person. Empathy requires self knowledge. It is a process of self affirmation. 

Love is an act of will, a decision, a judgment. Love is oneness. To love God is an act not a thought. Love is a joining or sharing from a center of existence. Faith is based on awareness of love within oneself. 

Love is an extension outward in an act of certainty in one’s experience, in the unity one feels based on empathy with other people, a certainty that means one’s love is not wasted. It is also a search for knowledge by extending oneself out, to discover, to know.

For Fromm, as humans distance themselves more from nature so that they rely less on instinct unlike their animal counterparts, they fear the separateness that this distance from nature brings upon them. They try to fill in the gap of this separateness by artificial associations, work, corporate units, being like everyone else, keeping up with what everyone else possesses. In so doing a person fools themselves into thinking they will be less alone. They also fool themselves into thinking that the equality of everyone doing and having the same thing makes them feel complete. Only love can make a person complete. 

“Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an active power in man.” This involves giving. “In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. . . . I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. . . . In the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”

Love involves responsibility, a voluntary act to extend out to another, to recognize the value and worth of the other, whether it is a child, mate, or anonymous human. To respect them requires knowing them. 

Love allows for a union in a way that thought and knowledge cannot do.

Hence knowledge is not just what one thinks, consciously knows, but also what one feels, what is perhaps inexpressible but one knows nevertheless. I know another person over time by their likes and dislikes. I increasingly can predict how they might respond to a given situation. In the process of induction and deduction on my part, of observation and experience over time, I learn the character and traits of the other. But the more I know, intuit, the more I empathize. To empathize depends on my objective knowledge of the character and personality, from which subjective knowledge stems. I know a person’s feelings because I feel them too. The only way to know another person, therefore, is through love; otherwise it is superficial. To love is the willingness to extend myself out to someone, to relinquish myself totally in a desire to know what they are feeling, to give my support, my knowledge, my experiences, to them. This is empathy, an extension of my cares, my loves, my desires, concerns, fears, experiences to another. I am driven to this by feeling, of love.

From argues the love is not just a relationship to another but “an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one ‘object’ of love”–to love only one person is only a “symbiotic attachment or an enlarged egotism.” Regarding all humans, all other life, the more one knows, penetrates to the core, the more one finds not differences, but sameness, hence the ability to empathize. 

To have this ability of empathy implies self-love, that one has penetrated their own feelings, thoughts, past, to know, to understand. There is a desire to go beyond oneself to achieve “transcendence” with the other–nature, humans, God. Love is “respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one’s own self,” which “cannot be separated from respect and love and understanding for another individual.”

Erotic love is to know a person completely, to their being, their self, and hence to know the being of other humans in general. 

Love of God is the search to know God, to do so involving thought, but more, feeling, not contemplation but action. The more one loves others, the more one has acted upon love, hence the more one loves God, who is the Creator of all. “Love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.”

Love also involves humility. To love is to realize that one is not omnipotent, omniscient, hence narcissistic, but one knows what one does not know. 

Love helps us to develop faith, not belief, rather faith in oneself, something pervading one’s whole being, an attitude toward life. 

Faith is awareness “of existence of a self, of a core in our personality which is unchangeable and which persists throughout our life in spite of varying circumstances, and regardless of certain changes in opinions and feelings.” Such faith allows a person to know their ability to love. “To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith.”

Fromm appears to have professed himself nonreligious, but I find in reading his book that many of his ideas seem very familiar to the work of the Medieval German Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart.

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What is True History?

Posted on March 8, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

The mirror of the past is the only way to peer at the image of what is human. The reflection is darkened by time and sin. Specters of the dead, haunting the dusty stacks of long-ago thoughts, turn up repeatedly, if indistinctly, on library shelves and in the dens of archivists. Storytellers such as the Greek Homer, abstract philosophers such as the Athenian Plato and John the Evangelist, poets such as King David and the Italian Petrarch, historians such as the Romans Livy and Tacitus, biographers such as the Greek Plutarch and the Physician Luke, essayists such as the Roman Seneca, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne, lived the past, made it their own, spoke to it and heard a response. Such writers expressed empathy toward past lives that span the ages. They engaged in a dialogue with the past, a discussion of self in light of others, creating a sensitive portrait, based on the varied experiences of humans at particular places and times, of the image of God in human, apparent throughout the ages. This is true history.

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Son of Man

Posted on February 12, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

Today we celebrate the birth of 

the unknown,

Who came to earth as all men of a 

mother born,

He proclaimed himself unique coming

to atone,

For the sins of all mankind

so forlorn.

Such pain he took upon himself,

his body,

Suffering death for a truth he

proclaimed,

Crucified as a criminal by the Romans, 

so haughty,

His body nailed to wood, bleeding

and maimed.

He died, a sacrifice it is said to 

human sin,

A mysterious, magical concept hard 

to assess,

Another miracle—he rose from the dead to 

live again,

That’s what other’s saw–me? I’m not 

a witness.

An executed criminal: that’s whose life we 

honor today,

A rabbi, a teacher, though a carpenter

by trade,

Arrogant of his powers, though humble in the

words he would say,

Words and deeds remembered—an organized religion he

has made.

His words naked and without ceremony,

all alone–

Read them without interference of priest

and feel;

I see the truth in what he said, a trust he 

must have known

Words about the state of man, words that are

so real.

He speaks in different ways, to each

one unique,

His message can’t be made a

formula,

He speaks to those who know, 

those who seek, 

A personal truth, neither belief, creed,

nor dogma.

To the rich, whether in power, wealth, 

or fame,

He says: Become poor, not in goods but

in spirit,

Poverty is poverty, whether for gold or glory is 

the same, 

Poverty is humility, he says to those who

can hear it.

Love your neighbor is a difficult rule to

follow,

Listen with your heart, the meaning 

is so clear, 

To give gifts to another, that’s superficial, 

that’s hollow,

Love means to look into the eyes of another

without fear.

To turn the other cheek seems the same as 

to love,

What if you’re slapped? Who can but

attack?

He means but this: keep not a wolf but

a dove,

To learn how not to be slapped–that is 

the knack.

Do unto others, as you would have them do

unto you,

In our age of long lines and traffic?

C’mon, that: so absurd!

All it takes is forbearance—if you want more,

take a few,

And patience: time is a gift to all,

Equally endured.

Look within yourself, he says, see who you 

truly are,

To put on airs, to become something more, is plain

imbecility,

A man doesn’t make a god, nor a star-beam a

shining star,

Who shall inherit the kingdom? Those

with humility.

Break down the barriers,

give in to love,

Put trust in what you feel, what’s in

your soul,

It’s not going to come from God, from

heaven above,

Body and mind combine, from parts forge

a whole.

Faith is not simply a belief in Jesus,

the Lord,

It comes not from the Other, rather inside, 

the “I”,

Oneself is the wellspring, from which to go

toward,

Not others–humans, or the divine, 

most high.

The Bible is a good source to

go within,

Religion is to recognize whence

blessings flow,

Happiness is within—to reject it 

is to sin,

Peruse the pages of your soul—  

you will know…..

The contentment within your soul.

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Review of the novel Joe, by Larry Brown

Posted on February 12, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

Joe is a book showing the underside of rural life among the poor and ignorant in late 20th century Mississippi. The protagonist Joe is a drunk and aggressive man with few concerns about anyone else besides himself but who has an inherent sense of right and wrong and a basic morality of when you can and cannot cross the line of morality/honor. He befriends a teenager, Gary, who has been abused his whole life by an alcoholic, violent, murderer who is father of Gary and four other children, one killed, one sold, one prostituted, and one runaway. The wife/mother is overwhelmed by violence and intimidated by her husband, so completely ineffectual. Joe realizes over time this abuse and slowly begins to do something about it, by educating Gary in his ways or drinking and whoring but also in allowing him the independence of work, making money, and having his own truck. Teaching him to be a man. In the end Joe sacrifices his own well being and independence and freedom for the sake of teenage Gary and his younger sister.

Throughout the book the author provides a background of the peace and quiet and sameness of nature that contrasts with the activity, violence, and artificial actions of human beings. We see this in the epilogue. The author highlights the savagery of humans throughout the book. For example, of the characters, the only one with any common sense is Gary; his mother is crazy, his sister rebellious and hates her father, his younger sister is overwhelmed and internalizes the aggression imposed upon her, his father is a violence criminal, and Joe is a drunkard.

It is a story about survival: survival of the fittest in the natural environment including human environment of animalistic humans. It is a coming of age story, of a boy who learns about life, becomes a man.

Joe, who has nothing to live for, finally discovers something to live for in Gary. Joe realizes the inherent misfortune of Gary’s life, and he becomes a father figure for Gary.

Other themes: Human relations ultimately insignificant according to the backdrop of natural environment; Inherent evil and misfortune of life, little to live for; just a glimmer of hope in the inherent evil and misfortune of life; ignorance of humans in the rural South at the end of the 20th century, which leads to suffering and tragedy.

In sum, Joe is all of the above, but mostly it is a book about the overall insignificance of human affairs in the wider reality of nature, which overwhelms humans and often forces them to act like civilized animals, people who have developed machines and artificial substances and ways of doing things to cover, or enhance, the basic animal tendencies that they still have. The epilogue reveals the author’s overall point of view. There is a greatness and grandeur in nature that dwarfs humans. Modernization has elevated humans but at the consequence of irrational beings that have way too much power and cannot achieve the tranquility and inherent contentment of the past. Morality has been dwarfed by people living in the moment seeking some sort of meaning and contentment but not being able to find it, so they turn to artificial substances and machines to make them feel powerful, better. There is a basic sense of morality that you don’t hurt an innocent, that you try to be fair to others, your equals, and if you can’t keep from hurting, can’t be fair, you will be punished by meaninglessness and hopelessness but also by other humans. It appears to be a godless society, but as the epilogue reveals, there is a basic natural truth that exists that humans can understand and admire.

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Reflections on Daniel Boone, American Frontiersman, and John Filson, his First Biographer

Posted on February 12, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

John Filson, in his 1784 portrait of “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” appended to The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, declared that “curiosity is natural to the soul of man.” With these words Filson sparked the beginning of the legend of Daniel Boone, the explorer and frontiersman who more than any other American was responsible for the penetration and settlement of Kentucky. Filson, a schoolmaster who wanted to bring fame to Kentucky and fortune to himself, purported to record Boone’s own story, though in the process Filson added his own words and ideas, to create an image of the “natural man,” Daniel Boone, which continues even today. Boone is a good example of fact and folklore coming together to garble the historical reality of one person’s life.

Indeed, historians and biographers of the American frontier often have to use anecdote and traditions to recount lives. Carl Sandburg did this in his monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln. With such sources, a historian can often assume based on a critical perspective that stories might originate with the person under study, hence stories of Boone might have originated with Boone himself, or his family, and that they contain a kernel of truth. The documentary evidence for Boone’s life is sporadic, so that Boone and his children’s stories are perhaps autobiographical, hence valid evidence to reconstruct his life.

Filson uses such folklore though he is at times carried away with it, presenting episodes in the life of Boone as actual occurrences rather than somewhat remote distorted possibilities. Tradition has it that Saucy Jack, a Catawba Indian, lost to Boone in a shooting competition. Saucy Jack’s pride was hurt, and his anger, being nourished by drink, spilled over into threats on Boone’s life. Squire Boone, Daniel’s father, decided to deal with Saucy Jack before something happened to Daniel. Saucy Jack fled to avoid the wrath of Squire Boone. Daniel recounted this story to Filson, and Filson used it in his book. But whether the story was fact or fiction seems to get lost in the narrative: it might just be a story. But then again, it might be a good story that tells of the character of Squire Boone.

Such stories build the character of a man resistant to authority who sought the wilderness as a release from civilization. He admired the ways of the indigenous inhabitants and was more comfortable in the wilderness than with his roles in white society as father, husband, soldier, landowner, and business person. Later, when Boone was living his final years along the Missouri River, and after he died, historians more content with images than reality created a romantic, frontier hero.

John Filson had Daniel Boone say in 1784 that “it requires but little philosophy to make a man happy.” In this simple statement we see the origins of the fascination Americans have had with Daniel Boone. From the security of civilization, it is exciting indeed to imagine oneself pushing the limits of the frontier into the wilderness. Boon did precisely this, but without the romantic courage and suffering that has made its mark on American novels and films about the frontier. Armchair explorers cannot help but assume that such a man would stand taller and appear with more bravery than his contemporaries and descendants.

Filson’s Boone tells us that the explorer is but a normal person made heroic by events, a person who explores not to push forward the boundaries of civilization, who in fact dislikes what civilization represents. Rather this is a man who explores to make a living, because of wanderlust, because he loves solitude, because he fears some of the responsibilities of civilized living, and chiefly because, in Boone’s words, of his “love of Nature.”

Besides Boone, there were countless explorers and hunters who went into the wilderness as the forerunners of civilization. Some are well known. Some are unknown, and are remembered only by a name or passage in a book. One example is a hunter and frontiersman of the Arkansas Territory in the early 1800s, around the time of Boone, whose name was Lee, otherwise little known except that he was a hunter and guide for the natural Thomas Nuttall when Nuttall journeyed up the Arkansas River in 1819. I have told the story of Lee in my book, The Land Between the Rivers: Thomas Nuttall’s Ascent of the Arkansas, published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. If interested, you can purchase the book here: The Land between the Rivers: Thomas Nuttall’s Ascent of the Arkansas, 1819: Lawson, Russell M.: 9780472114115: Amazon.com: Books

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Tecumseh: A Reflection

Posted on February 11, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

When I wish to find out about a person from the past, the first thing I look for, to wrap my mind around so that I feel like I might know this person, is an image, a portrait or photograph. But Tecumseh lived before the days of photography and, according to Glenn Tucker, in a recent biography, Techumseh, A Vision of Glory, “Tecumseh would never allow a white man to paint his portrait, and no Indian undertook it.”

So Tecumseh joins a large list of famous and not so famous people from the past for which no image from life exists. As my mind seeks to know this person, lacking an image, I must go to other sources: recorded descriptions of him, literary sources, traditions. But why is a physical likeness important? A portrait based on life allows the observer to gleam personality traits and characteristics by gazing at the image. The lack of such a portrait leads to so much speculation and imagination. In my own writing and research I have spent years coming to know people from the past for which there are no images from life: Jesus of Nazareth and Christopher Columbus, for example; I have even written books about people, contemporaries of Tecumseh, one of the them a French scientist named Berlandier, another an American frontiersman named John Evans, for whom no portrait survives, which has forced me somewhat reluctantly to describe them without quite knowing what they looked like. Proponents of the old pseudo-science of physiognomy used to claim that by examining the facial and cranial features of an object of inquiry the observer could gain important insights into character. I could not do this with the objects of my inquiry. Nor with Tecumseh. So, I must rely on other sources to paint a visual portrait in my mind.

My mental portrait begins, therefore, with any kind of personal connection I can make with Tecumseh. The first of which is that there is evidence, not conclusive, that he was part Muskogee Creek, his mother having been descended from the Muskogee Creeks of the American Southeast. I teach at an institution, Bacone College, founded in 1880 on the lands of the Creek Nation in Muskogee, OK. Everyday I teach students of varying tribal backgrounds, especially the Creeks, about history and philosophy. I was born and raised in Tulsa, OK, which was also part of the Creek Nation. The Muskogee Creeks have been a part of my life for the three score years, though subconsciously; not until I took my present job at Bacone College in Muskogee did I realize how much the Indian heritage meant for me, a person born and bred in Oklahoma, which until 1907 was associated with Indian Territory, and still retains so many connections with the Indian past that I hitherto had largely ignored. Although I am not Indian, I have been around Creek Indians my entire life; perhaps Tecumseh had some of the same physical and emotional traits as these people.

The next step in my mental portrait: Tecumseh’s mother (perhaps) was Muskogee Creek, but Tecumseh himself was born in Ohio in 1768, his parents having moved from Alabama in the previous few years. The second connection I can make with Tecumseh is based on my frequent driving of Interstate 70 through the American Midwest. Tecumseh was born near Springfield Ohio on the Mad River, about where Interstate 70 crosses the Mad River, which I have driven over countless times on my way to and from New England, and recently, to and from Canada, as I have traveled back and forth from Oklahoma to New England, where my wife’s family lives, and back and forth from Oklahoma, where my family are, to Canada. On such long drives of over 700 miles my mind seeks diversion, and I find it in thinking about what this area would have been like in 1768, just a few years before the beginning of the American War for Independence. This was a frontier land under competition by whites and Indians; it should have been land shared by all, but human acquisitiveness and lust for power made it otherwise.

The third connection I can make with Tecumseh as I research his life, was that he was raised in the surroundings of continual violence between American frontiersmen and the Shawnee and other tribes. His father, for example, was murdered by whites when he was a young boy, which provided him with an initial childhood reaction to hate war, though war would in time consume him. I have never experienced such tragedy as Tecumseh did, but as a child growing up during the Vietnam War of the 1960s, I grew to hate war as well, and ever since my adolescent years, watching on television the images of war in a far-off country, I have spoken out against, and despise, war.

The fourth connection I can make with him is more difficult, as he sided with the British in the War of 1812, and I was born and bred an American.

But I can empathize with his cause, to unite his people in the face of aggression, to seek a way to gain what is right and just for his people in the face of centuries of dishonesty, violence, broken treaties, and broken promises. I have taught at a college where half the students feel the same way that Tecumseh felt, and I, a white Caucasian, everyday have to meet the challenge of what my ancestors did to the Indians, and I ask myself the question, am I responsible for the mistakes of my ancestors? And my answer is unclear, except that I taught at a small college, Bacone College in Oklahoma, which is dedicated to helping educate the American Indian to help them embrace their future in an America that is no longer tainted so much by prejudice and violence. Perhaps that I, a white male, taught at such a school, which for 145 years was oriented toward helping the Indian, is an answer to my question.

The fifth connection I can make with Tecumseh is that I have repeatedly driven Canadian Highway 401 from Windsor to Hamilton to St. Catharines and back, and I drive over a flat, fertile land, well-watered, where grapes and grain grow. Near where I drive, on the Thames River in Chatham, Ontario, is where Tecumseh met his death facing overwhelming American forces in October, 1813. For some reason the mere fact that I drive across this land where nearly 200 years ago this man died violently stirs some emotion, some connection, in me, and I feel I know him a bit better for seeing where he met his end.

The sixth and final connection I make with Tecumseh is that I have studied Protestant and Catholic missionaries to the First Nations of Canada, particularly in Ontario, and I found, in my research, the following account by the American missionary Jedidiah Morse: “Tecumseh, before his untimely death, had conceived a plan of collecting all the Indians of N. America on some portion of the continent, not inhabited by white people, there to dwell together under their own government and laws, to enjoy their own customs and religion, inherited from their ancestors—to live in a state of independence; to sell no more of their lands to the white people; to cultivate, by all means, peace with them; to wage no other than necessary defensive wars; to quit roving and hunting for subsistence; to divide their territory into farms; and to live, as do the whites, by agriculture and the arts. In this way, and by these means, he conceived that Indians might recover what they had lost, rise again into importance and influence, and once more assume their rank among the nations of the earth. This plan, though no adequate means of accomplishing it exist, is a noble one, and worthy the great and patriotic mind of its author. Had he lived, and in earnest attempted its accomplishment, it probably might have been easily shaped, and, by compromise, have been brought, to coincide with that which is now contemplated by the government of the United States.”

What is remarkable about his comment, penned by the American scientist and clergyman Jedidiah Morse in 1821, is that just eight years before, in 1813, Tecumseh would have been considered the inveterate enemy of any patriotic American, which Morse was. Now just a few years later he lauds this man, a Tory and an Indian, as reflecting the same principles that he, Jedidiah Morse, has been espousing for decades. And these principles were that the Indians of America deserved the freedom to pursue their own lives, to pursue their own destiny, in a continent the dominant government of which espoused the same principles, that freedom and equality are the paramount rights of all peoples, everywhere, on the earth.

Let me conclude with a final anecdote, taken from the many sources on Tecumseh, that relates what his character was like, and also provides us with a fitting connection to another person honored in Canada, General Isaac Brock. According to Benjamin Drake, in his Life of Tecumseh, written in 1841, when the two men were contemplating the attack on American forces at Detroit during the War of 1812, the following event happened:

“Previously to general Brock’s crossing over to Detroit, he asked [Tecumseh] what sort of a country he should have to pass through, in case of his proceeding farther. Tecumseh, taking a roll of elm bark, and extending it on the ground by means of four stones, drew forth his scalping knife, and with the point presently etched upon the bark a plan of the country, its hills, rivers, woods, morasses and roads; a plan which, if not as neat, was for the purpose required, fully as intelligible as if Arrowsmith [the great mapmaker] himself had prepared it. Pleased with this unexpected talent in Tecumseh, also by his having, with his characteristic boldness, induced the Indians, not of his immediate party, to cross the Detroit [River], prior to the embarkation of the regulars and militia, general Brock, as soon as the business was over, publicly took off his sash, and placed it round the body of the chief,” which was a distinct mark of honor.

(The foregoing is the gist of remarks I made at the “Tecumseh and Brock Portraits Unveiling” at Brock University, Ontario, October 15, 2010)

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Who Discovered America? If it wasn’t Columbus, if it wasn’t the Vikings, then who was it?

Posted on February 7, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

A historical investigator par excellence, Jeremy Belknap, who lived in late eighteenth-century New Hampshire, posed this question to his many readers in a two-volume work, the first of its kind in American publishing history, The American Biography. He began his two volumes, which was filled with biographies of the first explorers and the first English colonizers of America, with an interesting essay, Preliminary Dissertation. on the Circumnavigation of Africa by the Ancients; and its probable Consequences, the Population of some Part of America.

This question of who first came to America had exercised the minds of European and American intellectuals and historians since Columbus’ four voyages to America ending in 1504. The Europeans were astonished to find a new continent, a New World, other than the three continents taught by the ancients, Europe, Asia, and Africa. And to find this new place, America, inhabited by people hitherto unknown, was even more astonishing.

Ancient writers had long speculated on the possibility of lands to the west of Europe and Africa. Plato placed his imaginary Atlantis there. Now to actually prove the existence of such an unknown land and people required European intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, and theologians to discover how and when such people came to America. And had no one from the Old World ever crossed the Atlantic or Pacific to visit and perhaps influence the development of these people?

The great European intellectual Michel de Montaigne wondered about the Americas in his essay, Of Cannibals. Thomas More imagined a Utopia across the Atlantic. Francis Bacon imagined a superior culture in New Atlantis. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as the English historian William Robertson speculated on the first visitors from the Old World to the New World. Thomas Jefferson hypothesized that people had migrated from northeast Asia to northwest America in the distant past. Others wondered if the indigenous people could have been descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.

Of great interest among the intellectuals of North America was a stone in Massachusetts with ancient writing inscribed upon it: the Dighton Rock. Intellectuals from Cotton Mather to Ezra Stiles tried to decipher the strange script. Stiles believed it was of Phoenician/Carthaginian origin. He wasn’t alone in his interpretation.

One of the leading scholars of the eighteenth century, William Robertson, had hypothesized that the ancient Phoenicians had the seafaring ability to cross the Atlantic in the centuries before Christ. There was much literary evidence in support of such a conclusion. Most noteworthy was the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who in his Histories recorded a story of ancient Phoenicians about six centuries before the birth of Christ voyaging south from the Red Sea along the African coast into the southern hemisphere, where the sun was always to the north (rather than the northern hemisphere, where the sun is always to the south). As they sailed west then north around Africa into the Atlantic, they apparently had the navigational ability to parallel the African coast tacking into the northwesterly trade winds, thereby returning through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. If the Phoenicians could do this, then why not cross the Atlantic with the benefit of the trade winds into America? Carthaginians, Phoenician colonists in North Africa, also had the ability to sail far into the Atlantic, and there are various ancient sources recounting stories of their voyages finding unknown lands. Would the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, had they arrived in America, had any impact on the indigenous people by which to remember them? This is an unanswered question.

More modern researchers into this question, such as the Norwegian archeologist Thor Heyerdahl, have discovered evidence that the Egyptians and the people of Iraq, the Mesopotamians, built reed ships out of the papyrus reed. Heyerdahl made some dramatic voyages, one successfully crossing the Atlantic in a reed vessel, to show the possibility that ancient Egyptians could have come to America. Heyerdahl, in another much publicized voyage, built a reed boat on the Tigris River and sailed down the river from the Persian Gulf to Indus River. Heyerdahl and others of his ilk are cultural diffusionists, convinced that ancient societies shared knowledge all over the world. Why else would there by pyramidal like structures in America, Egypt, and Iraq, than by communication between cultures?

Some scholars argue that the ancient Greeks had the ability to sail the Atlantic. An example is Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles France), three hundred years before the birth of Christ, who sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar) to the Atlantic, sailing north to a place called Thule (Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, or maybe even America).

Others argue that before Columbus the Irish could have made their way to America. Fanciful evidence is the story of St. Brendan, an Irish monk who according to legend about fourteen hundred years ago sailed with his fellow monks in an Irish curragh (small boat made of seal-skin), where they discovered Paradise, saw a Crystal Castle (iceberg), and met a friendly whale who told them the directions. Timothy Severin, a modern explorer, built an Irish curragh and repeated the feat, sailing from Ireland to America.

Beyond historical evidence is the imagination. What would Phoenicians three thousand years ago who came to American shores have experienced? Would they have interacted peacefully with the indigenous inhabitants. Would they have introduced their polytheistic pantheon of deities to the Americans? Would Baal have been worshipped about the campfire in the northeastern American forest of thousands of years ago?

Let your imagination run wild reading a fictional account of some of the information presented in this blog post. “The Search for the Bronze Amulet” is a fictional historical fantasy about eighteenth-century seekers of the bronze amulet of Baal, left by Phoenicians along the New England coast centuries before. The fun can be experienced by purchasing the paperback on Amazon at this link: The Search for the Bronze Amulet: Lawson, Russell M.: 9798246856833: Amazon.com: Books

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New in Historical Fantasy Fiction: The Search for the Bronze Amulet

Posted on February 7, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

The Search for the Bronze Amulet is historical fantasy fiction, the story of a young Congregational minister (Jonathan Tucker, called Tuck) after the American Revolution who takes a position as pastor to impoverished fishers and their wives on the Isles of Shoals, off the Maine/New Hampshire coast. He is very uncertain about his call to minister to these people. The islanders are extremely poor and very superstitious. He does his best to gather the flock, and begins to have strange dreams….

…. of a ship blown off course that is about to sink; the captain of the Roman vessel tells his slave, a Phoenician nicknamed Punic, to take the helm, and the ship arrives safely at an island. Punic is a priest of the god, Baal; he wears a bronze amulet devoted to the god. Over the course of several dreams/nightmares, Tuck seems to be taking on the persona of Punic. In the dreams the Romans eventually kill Indians who come to the island; the Roman leader suspects Punic of being in cahoots with the natives; he is crucified, and the bronze amulet is left in the ashes.

Meanwhile, Tuck is intrigued by a recluse, Matthew Randolph, who lives on one of the islands; Randolph seems to know a great deal about philosophy, religion, and history, is a skeptic, and has a “museum” as he calls it on the island where he keeps various treasures he has discovered on the isles. Tuck is also intrigued by a young woman named Etsy, who is the daughter of a fisher, is beautiful, a bit mysterious, very independent, and convinced that the islands are haunted by something that invades people’s dreams.

The story takes a turn south to Boston, where a physician, Ebenezer Norton, is fascinated by all sorts of science and history. He has been corresponding with some of his friends about the Dighton Rock, a rock with strange, confusing hieroglyphics. One correspondent believes that they are Phoenician letters, similar to the Algonquian language. Norton knows that the Algonquians were once led by Passaconaway, a chief reputed to have remarkable powers. But his descendants, having fled north to Canada, were crushed by Robert Rogers and his Rangers in 1759. Norton’s correspondent, Rev. Daniel Cotton, knows of a survivor of that attack on the St. Francis Indians of Canada, a man named Abel Crawford, a drunken pauper who lives in Portsmouth, NH. He says that he will talk to him when he has a chance to see what he recalls about the attack.

Abel Crawford, meanwhile, in Portsmouth, recalls the old days, when he and other Rogers’ Rangers attacked the village of the St. Francis Indians; Crawford had taken away silver and a bronze amulet. He and a few others fled to the White Mountains, where vengeful spirits killed all save him, who fled the mountains to Portsmouth, where he was never the same. He has itched to return to find the treasure, and finally finds a man, called only the Captain, in whom he confides his hopes; the Captain, however, kills him.

Daniel Cotton writes Norton of the news of Abel Crawford’s death, which the two minister/scientists think is suspicious, and they decide to act as sleuths and investigate, Norton travels to Portsmouth. Upon arriving they interview various people who say that Crawford seemed to have had a connection with a recluse who lives at the Isles of Shoals, Matthew Randolph. The two men decide to sail to the Isles to see if they can interview Randolph. There they meet with Randolph, and see Etsy and Tuck.

Meanwhile Tuck has gotten to know Randolph, and has had the time to investigate his “museum,” where he has found an ancient manuscript, written in Greek (which Tuck can read), in which a forlorn Greek, Polybius Marcellinus, traveling with Romans, is holed up in a small rocky hideout on an island; he realizes that he is going to die. All that remains of the Romans is himself and a bronze amulet, which he knows the Indians want. He ends the manuscript calling upon his gods, to no avail. The manuscript shocks Tuck, who realizes that his dreams have a connection with the distant past of these islands. The dreams about Baal and an amulet cause him to question his faith in Christ.

At this point Etsy happens upon Tuck. She can tell that he is frightened. She assumes it is the “curse” and flees; she takes to her rowboat, and is soon out to sea. Tuck waits, and falls asleep as night falls. Etsy, who is adept at rowing on the sea, makes her way to the mouth of the Piscataqua River, and Portsmouth. There she finds a hidden cove she often stays at; unfortunately, there is a man next to a fire, who sees her, and grabs her. It is the Captain. He takes her as a hostage, his intent unclear. She rows him up the Piscataqua. Daniel Cotton, who is pastor at Kittery Point, happens to see her row by; he knows who she is. He calls, she ignores him. He knows something is wrong. Quickly he goes to his friend Norton’s lodging in Portsmouth, and they decide they must do something. They send a letter to Randolph, who upon receiving it decides that she is in trouble. He and Tuck go in pursuit, sailing to the Piscataqua, where they join Cotton and Norton, then proceed up the river to Dover, where they learn that the man and girl have disembarked and are heading north–to the White Mountains! Clearly, the Captain has learned from Crawford where he thinks the treasure might be in the mountains.

They go in pursuit, following the path north to the Ellis River, which leads to the Great Mountain [Mt. Washington], which they ascend. Randolph assumes the lead, now letting everyone know that he has been here before. They separate. Randolph and Tuck make their way, eventually, to a cave. When they arrive, they find Etsy tied up, a captive. Tuck goes to help, but is hit from behind. He enters a dream-world. The Captain also attacks Randolph, and takes from him the amulet, which Randolph has had in his possession all along.

The Captain escapes, Tuck and Randolph (recovered), and Etsy in pursuit. Thunder surrounds the mountains. They reach the Western Notch, on the western side of the Great Mountain. There they see the Captain, on a ledge, surrounded by wolves. The amulet is around his neck. The wolves attack; the Captain falls from the ledge to a river (the Saco) below. Just then a flash flood rages through the Notch, destroying everything in its path. Randolph helps Etsy and Tuck to safety but is swept away. Tuck and Etsy, with the help of a Penacook Indian, Indian Jack, pass through the Notch, following the Saco downstream, looking for bodies, a sign: nothing. They assume Randolph died along with the Captain. The amulet is lost.

Tuck and Etsy return to Isles and his parish. He is no longer haunted by dreams. A freak wave has destroyed Randolph’s hut on White Island. Tuck and Etsy over the course of the journey have fallen in love; their future is known.

The book concludes at the Western Notch. Indian Jack leads axe-men and road-builders through the Notch to build a road. Wolves are about. He knows that the spirit of Passaconaway had sent the wolves to destroy the Captain, to keep anyone at bay who threatens the peace of the mountain wilderness.

The paperback book can be purchased on Amazon at this link: The Search for the Bronze Amulet: Lawson, Russell M.: 9798246856833: Amazon.com: Books

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Richard Hooker’s Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity and the Postmodern Episcopal Church

Posted on February 6, 2026 by theamericanplutarch

My wife comes from a family of New England Episcopalians. She is a cradle Episcopalian. We were married in the Episcopal Church. I converted to Episcopalianism and its parent belief, Anglicanism. However, with all of this tradition and important life experiences to support our beliefs, we have strayed from the Episcopal Church. Why? Because it has strayed from us.

Case in point: The Episcopal Church, an offshoot of the English Anglican Church, lauds its greatest theoretician, philosopher, and theologian, the Elizabethan Richard Hooker, who wrote the ponderous The Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity. This is an erudite and very difficult book to read. Few people have read it, I think; nor have Episcopalians, I gather from the evidence of my own experience participating in the Episcopal Church for twenty years.

There is a reason why, however, during the past four centuries Hooker’s work has been called the sine qua non of Anglicanism and Episcopalianism. The only other three books that provide the basis for the Episcopal Church are the Old Testament, the New Testament, and The Book of Common Prayer.

Hooker wrote the book to defend the union of Church and State represented by the English monarchy, as well as to argue why Anglicanism is a more fundamental representation of Christianity than the Puritans of England, the followers of John Calvin.

Hooker also provided a basis for Christian morality in general and the moral precepts of the Anglican Church in particular.

The reason why I said at the outset that the Episcopal Church has strayed from the Episcopal liturgy, ritual, and beliefs that I had come to know is because the Episcopal Church has strayed from Richard Hooker’s arguments in the Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity. The Episcopal Church today is so focused on gender transitions and sexual choice that it strays far from what the church once stood for, and in so doing contradicts the chief point that Hooker made in the Laws.

Hooker’s arguments against the Puritans can be used especially well to condemn the postmodern Episcopal Church. In general, Hooker criticizes the Puritans for focusing too much on personal beliefs, for focusing too much on the present moment, for deciding that whatever they feel or think in time is in accord with God. He argues that they seek power as the moment, circumstance, and whim occurs. The result is inconsistency.

Hooker had a wonderful view of the errancy of individual human behavior and how a standard—the Scripture, Book of Common Prayer, and Church—can provide constancy and stability in our lives. “Nature worketh in us all a love to our own counsels. The contradiction of others is a fan to inflame that love. Our love set on fire to maintain that which once we have done, sharpeneth the wit to dispute, to argue, and by all means to reason for it.”

He wrote further, “nature teacheth men to judge good from evil, as well in laws as in other things” by “the force of their own discretion.” It follows then that “whatsoever we do, if our own secret judgment consent not unto it as fit and good to be done, the doing of it to us is sin, although the thing itself be allowable.” Some things (truth, morals) are obvious to all humans, but some things in Scripture are not, hence we rely on the wise to interpret them for us.

Hooker argued that the foundations to know what is true are three: Reason, Experience, and Tradition. Of reason, he wrote: Reason not feeling is key to knowledge; one must focus on “the nature of that evidence which scripture yieldeth.” The Holy Spirit, he implies, speaks to us through Reason. Feelings lead us to see how different we are from one another, thus it helps foment division. But “nature, Scripture, and experience . . . have all taught the world to seek for the ending of contentions by submitting itself unto some judicial and definitive sentence.” God, Hooker argued, prefers to have disputes settled in an orderly fashion by impartial judges who might err, have erroneous conclusions, that in time will be settled correctly, rather than to have continual disorderly disputes. God here is willing to be patient with humans to in time discover the truth. God is the author of peace not confusion; he wishes us to be patient in our discovery of what is true, and to yield to peace and order not confusion and disorder.

Are the current moral fads of the past twenty to thirty years so pressing, so obviously true, that an entire worldwide church would change its traditional path to follow a postmodern path?

Hooker wrote pointedly and truthfully: “For my purpose herein is to shew, that when the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded that it is the will of God to have those things done which they fancy, their opinions are as thorns in their sides, never suffering them to take rest till they have brought their speculations into practice.” Even more powerful was his argument that people who dispute the current order will always have hearers because of human restlessness and dissatisfaction, unlike those who defend the current order.

Also, a wonderful condemnation to the restlessness and rampant change of our times is this: of God’s laws we are generally ignorant, knowing only bits and pieces of the whole. Humans perceive disorder and chaos because we are ignorant of God’s true purposes and His eternal laws: all things work according to His will, which is good and perfect. The key to discovering the way to moral goodness is by following “the natural way of finding out Laws by Reason” so “to guide the Will unto that which is good.” To expand, he believed that the voice of reason and authority of teaching over time is the way to know the Good. Humans inquire for preservation, simply to know, and as a means to know how to act. Humans know what is true and right by examining all things in relation to themselves over time. The deep understanding of our soul or mind is the First Law, the basis for understanding all subsequent laws and actions. Intuitive natural understanding teaches us “axioms and laws natural concerning our duty.”

Therefore, humans who behave most closely to the apriori truths of nature most closely imitate nature, hence mirror the truth, that is God. There is a universal morality and truth.

Hooker argued for a kind of society based on simple human reason, like that formed by the Pilgrims in the Mayflower Compact. Hooker wrote, twenty-five years before the voyage of the Pilgrims: “To take away all such mutual grievances, injuries, and wrongs, there was no way but only by growing unto composition and agreement amongst themselves, by ordaining some kind of government public, and by yielding themselves subject thereunto; that unto whom they granted authority to rule and govern, by them the peace, tranquillity, and happy estate of the rest might be procured.”

Richard Hooker ultimately argued that tradition, experience, and reason–not the whims of the moment, what is popular today—are the basis of order, the basis of morality, the basis of government, and the basis of the Christian Church. Today we see governments, and even churches, forgetting such wisdom. The Episcopal Church used to be a stalwart for tradition and order against the whims of the moment and the tides of change. But no longer. Now the Episcopal Church has become a Postmodern Church rushing along on its happy path into oblivion.

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