How Travis Kelce upped his game courting Taylor Swift

Certified romantic Tory Baucum is swept off his feet by how the celebrity romance unfolded.

Tory Baucum

Tory Baucum is the director of the Benedictine Center for Family Life, Benedictine College, in Atchison, Kansas.

A montage shows Taylor swift leaning and singing into a microphone. And, Travis Kelce in his team's kit.

Swift: Ronald S Woan Wikpedia; Kelce: All Pro Reels, Flickr.

If you live on planet earth, you no doubt have heard of our now famous local love story: Kansas City Chiefs tight end player Travis Kelce is courting pop sensation Taylor Swift. One can read multiple accounts of this special love story on the Internet. (One of my favorites was written by London's The Guardian.) I don’t intend to repeat this well-known narrative. Rather, I wish to add commentary from what my wife calls a certified “Catholic Romantic”, or what my students call me, “a lover of human love.”

From the outset, please don’t get me wrong. I do not mean to canonize Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce or propose that their relationship is the ideal. I merely want to notice some very healthy things about it.

I tip my hand in the opening sentence. I describe the relationship as “courtship” not “dating.” Courtship differs from dating in terms of its intention, methods and goal. A man courts a woman whenever he pursues her seriously for a romantic relationship that is opened to the exclusiveness of marriage. The intent (serious) and goal (exclusive) determines the methods.

They met on common turf with uncommon talent. But she first made him work “for the right to party.”

After Ms. Swift declined Mr. Kelce’s unimaginative “I’m just a good ole boy” friendship bracelet, he decided to up his game – or better – run his own route. He invited Swift to return to Arrowhead Stadium to watch him “light up the stage” just as she had done three months earlier. She accepted this time. They met on common turf with uncommon talent. But she first made him work “for the right to party.”

Courtship requires work, which brings clarity to the relationship. Ends determine methods.

Another difference between courtship and dating is that it’s a family affair. Persons are more than individuals; we are social creatures who live, move and have our being in webs of relationships. We cannot know each other truly or deeply apart from those webs that create and sustain us. At the first two Chiefs games Ms. Swift attended, she was seen cheering alongside Mr. Kelce’s mom. After those central relationships have been honored, the widening circle of friends are introduced. And good friends know their role: circle the couples relationship and then face the crowd.

Kelce’s teammate Patrick Mahomes, as usual, threaded the needle, saying:

“She’s good people. Now let’s let them alone.”

What Kelce recently told reporters was refreshing. “It feels like I was on top of the world after the Super Bowl and right now I’m even more on top of the world,” he said. And when asked about having to navigate so much public interest in his relationship, he said, “You’ve got a lot of people who care about Taylor, and for good reason.” Excellent answer.

Finally, not all courtships end in marriage. And if this one doesn’t it is not a failure. If the couple loves each other well they will leave the relationship better for having known each other. Courtship is always a growth in self-knowledge by way of self-donation. They will grow as they learn to give of themselves. May they give of themselves and by so doing learn to make their love work.

As others have already said, this is the best catch of Travis Kelce’s life. And I, for one, hope he never lets her go.

This article was first published as: The Kelce Courtship of Taylor Swift, on the Benedict College web site.

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28 November 2024

4 min read

Here's why we need to keep democracy holy

It's much more than a utilitarian deal that benefits the most.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A sign reading 'polling station' stands by the entrance to a church.

Red Dot on Unsplash.

One of the more ludicrous constitutional contributions of late has been the parliamentary petition, with well past two million signatures when I last looked, demanding another general election be called, because the Labour government, elected in July, has “gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead-up to the last election.”

Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has surprised precisely no one by saying that he won’t be calling one. And so we’ll move on. But, in passing, what is truly breathtaking is how little our democracy is understood and, apparently, how unseriously democracy in the west is now taken. If that sounds unduly censorious, I have a two-word response: Two million!

Little time need be spent on demolishing the premise of this spurious petition, other than to wonder how many of those signatories would have appeared on one calling for, say, a fresh mandate after the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg (where is he now? Ah yes) performed a massive reverse-ferret on a manifesto pledge not to raise university tuition fees.

Or how many of these same fearless electors believe the result of the Brexit referendum should be voided because of the lies of the Leave campaign, most notable the one painted on the side of Boris Johnson’s battle bus. But no – two million residual, self-righteous righties can only be mobilised against a Labour government.

This event none the less raises valid questions about what our democracy is (and is not) and why we should want to protect or even cherish it. These questions become the more critical because there’s a tangible feeling of slippage in western democracy, as if we’re growing a bit tired and even contemptuous of it.

There’s the ominous re-growth of nationalism across Europe. And not a few bien pensants – me included, to my shame – might admit to a feeling after Donald Trump’s re-election as US president that democracy is too important to be left to the people.

Slightly more seriously, we need to ask ourselves what the qualities of democracy are that we should seek to defend. The first of these is, quite obviously, the rule of law. Should a political actor seek to overthrow a democratically established electoral process, then that is a crime within the rule of law. Witness the horrors on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on January 6 2021.

That’s the Feast of the Epiphany as it happens, but nothing to do with the coming of wise men. With Trump at the centre of it. Draw your own democratic conclusions – and weep for the rule of law.

Natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence.

Again, why does this matter and what is it about democracy that we hold sacred, even holy? It can’t simply be that we hold dear a kind of hard utilitarian ideal that what we elect to do is for the benefit of most of the people, for most of the time, as decided by popular mandate among the demos.

If we believe in democracy, as I believe most of us do, we’re presented with a choice: We can look to secularism as a solution, universal Enlightenment principles built on citizenship and equality before the law. Or we can look to a multiculturist model, keeping the peace between essentially separate communities and the state.

Or we can shape something on Augustinian Christianity, that recognises the limits of political democracy, which would eschew undemocratic theocracy, but which would hold that no political order other than the Body of Christ (the Church) can claim divine authority.

We’re in classic Rowan Williams theological territory here: “[T]he Body of Christ is not a political order on the same level as others, competing for control, but a community that signifies, that points to a possible healed human world.”

Unsurprisingly, I buy that. Williams goes further to state this spiritual effect on the political environments in which we find ourselves is likely to be “sceptical and demystifying.” Which seems to be a reasonable manifesto in a democracy.

The principle of election can be a worrying one in theological terms. We don’t “elect” God, though some secularists would claim that the Godhead is our invention. Rather, it has sometimes been perceived to be the other way around historically.

Reformational Calvinism would hold, among many other things, the rather terrifying view that we’re elected by God. “The Elect” are those who will be saved, while the rest of us (I presume) can rot in hell. Little democracy there.

Less deterministically, a more modernist worldview would argue that the Christian faith, on which foundation western civilisation is built, offers a viable moral definition of the lawful state, with which politicians of all (democratic) persuasions can tackle issues of global justice.

One such issue of natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence. That’s an important aspect of Christian witness and will require true grit in in its application during the years ahead. That’s, if you will, our grit in the democratic oyster.