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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Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

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

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.