Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine, and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St Joseph.

I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Tomistic Institute, and this is Pines with Aquinas.

As you know, it's election season here in the United States of America

and the season has already proven plenty exciting but there is more excitement in store.

So as we think and prepare for conversations and maybe

confrontations, we want to cultivate the habits of mind and heart and involve

ourselves in the relationships which help us to be good

social and political actors rather than just getting tossed this way and that by

whatever's thrown at us. So I have a little list for you of seven small things

that you can think about and put into practice in preparing for and making your way

through the selection season. So here we go. Okay so seven things. The first one is

take stock of your emotions. Obviously we get bound up with the election season because our society

attributes a great deal of importance to it and it's important and we feel acutely

how the future of our country and the future of our families and

municipalities and whatever else are affected by that. So yeah there's there's just a lot of emotional and psychological turmoil that can result.

So I think that on the one hand we have to have modest expectations.

It's like are people going to lie? Yes. Are people going to steal? Yes. Are people going to cheat? Yes.

We're dealing with fallen human beings ourselves included and so there's bound to be a little bit of kind of human

confusion and yeah human malfeasance involved so yeah we shouldn't be surprised or

scandalized when it arises. Just know that we're being kind of

chewed up and spit out by the media cycle and the political process to a certain degree or extent.

And a lot of that is going to prey upon our human capacity for, on the one hand, fear

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