It’s remarkable how often de Lubacian themes come up in political discussions nowadays.

Kahn: In calling citizens to sacrifice, “Political rhetoric affirms that in the life of the nation, we never die. We are assured of a kind of secular resurrection: he who believes in the nation shall never die. Calling it secular, however, only refers to its institutional form. In itself, it is a form of faith as deep as that of any religion. Political rhetoric is the contemporary language of transubstantiation . . . . In the popular sovereign, we do not die, despite the death of the body. The popular sovereign is the contemporary mystical corpus of the state.”