c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Everybody talks about political pundits but nobody does anything about them. The shadow spreading across our national life falls less from the century rising before us than from the pundits hovering over history like ambulance-chasing lawyers at a traffic accident.

The great task for well-trained theologians and Scripture scholars is described as hermeneutics or interpretation, that is, a fine and scholarly examination of texts to discover the depths and riches of their true meaning.

This has been appropriated in America by the pundit class who crawl and crowd the television grid as primates do the monkey bars. They are everywhere in election season, turning interpretation inside out by offering unscholarly impressions of the surface of significant events.

Real depth in this field may have died with the late Eric Sevareid whose true learning and experience made him a man wise enough to establish some distance between himself and the personalities and events on which he commented. He not only cared about truth and falsehood but he understood attributes, such as honor, that are hardly mentioned these days.

Indeed, so fascinated with themselves are many current oracles of the media that when they run out of topics, they talk about themselves or each other. It is almost impossible to watch anything, such as a presidential debate, without pundits first telling us what we will hear and then telling us what we have heard.

This excess of explanation, often slanted one way or the other, is oppressive and removes us, by at least one degree of abstraction, from being contacted by, or making contact with, the candidates themselves. That is hard work in itself since we must give our full attention to what office seekers say and how they say it if we are to establish that minimum of relationship that may be termed human.

This is sacred ground because only through that real human contact can we truly say that we have faith in, or that we trust one or the other.

That is a spiritual exchange and it not only requires the candidates to pierce their public relations-engineered phoniness and reveal what they are really like. It also demands that we attune ourselves to them, that we scrub, as surgeons do before an operation, so that we will not be contaminated by the preconceptions, often as subtle and invisible as bacteria, left on us by pundits.

The proof that we need to be pundit-free, whether we are Democrats or Republicans, comes from the sentiments expressed by so many people after the presidential debates.

Perhaps even you have overheard yourself saying of one candidate or the other, “I was surprised that he was different from all the things said about him or from all the impressions I had of him.” This shows how pundit interference (“This is what he will say … This is what he said.”) interferes with your own ability to see and hear for yourself.

Pundit means, first of all, “a Brahminic scholar,” and, secondly, “a learned person,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary. Now we are getting somewhere in understanding and arming ourselves against pundits.

In Hinduism, Brahmin refers to “the essential divine reality of the universe; the eternal spirit from which all being originates and to which all returns” _ exactly what pundits claim as their own territory.

Brahmin also means “a member of the highest caste, originally composed of priests, but now occupationally diverse.” Pundits functioning inside the Beltway certainly see themselves as members of a higher caste or they wouldn’t talk down to us so much.

Brahim also refers to “a breed of domestic cattle … having a … pendulous dewlap.” How often the pundits resemble cattle, milling among each other, making the same lowing sounds and, yes, some have dewlaps.

To test this notion, ask yourself when was the last time that you heard a contemporary pundit utter a truly original thought? America needs Pundits Anonymous. That way, when one starts to pontificate, he or she calls another up to get talked down from it.

In the last weeks before we make choices that will shape the century, we may serve ourselves, our souls and our country well by turning off all pundits and following the advice of St. Thomas Aquinas, “Trust the authority of your own instincts,” that is, what you see and hear in and through yourself and your own experience.

That is spiritually sound and patriotic at the same time. It also will be a great relief.

KRE END KENNEDY