Former Sen. Ben Sasse joined Peter Robinson on “Uncommon Knowledge” after his stage 4 cancer diagnosis in December 2025. He reflects on faith, mortality, his time in Congress, higher education, and our fragmented, attention-starved republic. Sasse argued that Congress has become performative and institutionally weak, and that restoring self-government requires electing people who see public service as temporary, not a career. He also defended the civic purpose of higher education while criticizing ideological “nichification” in the humanities. Sasse reflects on “redeeming the time” he has left and expresses regret over workaholism. He speaks about a renewed focus on his family, and a conviction that abundance and technology won’t save a society lacking character and self-restraint. “Redeem the time in my theology means it is a great blessing to be able to live a life of gratitude to God by doing stuff that tries to benefit your neighbor. It is a blessing to get to be co-creators, but we don’t build any storehouses that last. The things that matter and endure are human souls and things way bigger than any of my projects,” he said. “Nothing we build is going to last, but that doesn’t mean nothing matters. The chance to love your neighbor and serve is a blessing. And that’s what the Puritans meant by redeem the time.” “I was given 90 days to live in mid-December. I got into this clinical trial. It’s really aggressive. I’ll live a lot longer than 90 days, but I don’t know how many months that is. But whether you have 90 days or 12 months or 12 years or 75 years left to live, we’re all going to be pushing up daisies,” Sasse said. “So it seems like trying to figure out what the important things are – what the eternal questions you need to wrestle through are, what it looks like to see the relationship between sin and death and a broken world – and yet the chance to hug my wife this morning, to love my kids, and to reflect on some important questions with my friend Peter.” Here’s his recent Wall Street Journal piece: “Politics Should Be More Like the Super Bowl”
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