Richard McKnight

Every election season, politicians ask us for the same things: Vote for me. Donate. Knock on doors. Put a sign in your yard. Then the election ends. They go off to govern. We go back to our lives. End of story. Isn’t something missing? Imagine a politician who stood before a crowd and said: “I can't fix this country by myself. Neither can Congress. If we’re going to make America stronger, I need your involvement—not just your vote.” How often do we hear anything like that? Most...

NEAR THE END OF HIS MAGNIFICENT BOOK, Man’s Search for Meaning, written in 1945, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl offers an observation that feels surprisingly relevant to America today. “Freedom,” he writes, “is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” What he meant was freedom without responsibility is no more than selfishness. In this book, Frankl makes a remarkable suggestion. The Statue of Liberty on the...

Book: Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America, by Chris Murphy (This review was published by The Fulcrum on July 18, 2026.) By Richard McKnight, PhD Author of When We The People Lead, The Leaders Will Follow Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, has written an important and timely book. Although he writes as a Democratic politician, his central concern transcends party politics. He asks why in America, by most standards the...