James Talarico

Loving thy neighbor is really hard sometimes.

And the work I do in the legislature is my attempt to love my neighbor through the bills I pass, through the work that I do on prescription drugs, on child care, on public schools, on justice reform.

But I was losing faith on whether I was actually doing what I came here to do.

And so I made that decision to go to seminary to follow Jesus's first commandment, which is to love God.

Those are the two commandments he gave us, love God and love neighbor.

And as a seminarian and a lawmaker, I'm starting to figure out how these two commands, how they relate to each other, how they sustain each other.

You need that inner life, which I feel like I'm cultivating at seminary.

And then you also need this outer life of how does that impact your relationships and the work you do out in the world.

And you really can't have one without the other because if you do the second one, the workout in the world, you can burn out so easily, which I think I was about to burn out in that second term.

You can burn out if it's not sustained by that love of God.

And again, I don't mean God as that word is charged for a lot of people.

I don't mean like a sectarian religious orthodoxy definition.

I just mean that ground of your being, whatever that is.

Anyway, I don't know if it answers your original question, but... What was the main struggle?

Well, so there were several bills.

I mentioned the abortion ban.

Was it the actual— So the bill—this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Toward the end of that legislative session, my Republican colleagues brought a—

Again, this is the way I would describe it, a voter suppression bill, making it more difficult to vote in the state of Texas.

Again, Texas is probably the hardest place to vote in the country, just in terms of the paperwork, the requirements, the hoops you've got to jump through.