Please fill out this form to be put on the email list for future Maurin Academy seminars, short series and other events: https://pmaurin.org/newsletter/ … More What’s Wrong With Democracy? (Politics of the Real 9)
Please fill out this form to be put on the email list for future Maurin Academy seminars, short series and other events (no donation necessary): https://pmaurin.org/newsletter/ … More The Private is Public (Politics of the Real 8)
Laurie discusses Chapters 1 and 2 of DC Schindler’s The Politics of the Real: The Church Between Liberalism and Integralism, In this section, she concentrates on what Schindler thinks is the fallout of liberalism, what we’ve gained during the rise of liberalism, why “Nature’s God” is a generic or empty God, and why the American founding was not a Christian event. … More Was the American Founding a Christian Event? (Politics of the Real, 3)
cussing different views of virtue that developed at different times in history but are still with us, either as ghosts or as confused and contradictory aspirations. I suggest a new view of virtue has taken over, hyper-bourgeois virtue. … More Virtue: Ancient, Christian, Bourgeois, Hyper-Bourgeois
God’s will with the will of the nation and resolve morality into the aims of national power, or to choose the “local tradition” of adherence to God’s priorities even when they clash with the priorities and values of empire. The latter involves first recognizing that there is a necessary and unresolvable conflict between any national will and Judeo-Christian morality. Brueggemann asks, will the Christian church be a national church or will it be governed only by God? … More Against the Ideology of Certainty Besetting US Christians (Out of Babylon 3)
the second chapter of Walter Brueggemann’s book Out of Babylon, the “local tradition” of the United States, as the “shining city on a hill,” is explored in the context of prophetic calls for examination and repentance both in the Old Testament and in Walter Brueggemann’s theology. People always design narratives to explain their situation and role in the world, and Brueggemann teaches that this is not only inevitable but good–or it can be, if the story we tell is not simply delusion but pushes us to act in according to the values we say we embrace. In this case, he’s talking about Biblical Christian values and he is asking American Christians what (or who) they really stand for. I think this is a very worthy question, so this session is devoted to it. … More The Price of Hypocrisy (Out of Babylon: Brueggemann 2) ft. Nietzsche
discussing Brueggemann’s view that US Christians who hew to the “City on the Hill” ideology are committing idolatry and are aligning with Empire and not with God, the two being ultimately opposed. This is not to establish a mere negative argument (as in, this is what a Christian is not), but rather to begin to point to a positive pronouncement (this is what a Christian or other person faithful to God is) . … More Empire and God: Do They Mix? (Out of Babylon, Brueggemann 1)
Chesterton says of Christians “…if they had served their God as they have served their Pork King and their Petrol King, the success of our whole Distributive democracy would stare at the world like one of their flaming sky signs and scrape the sky like one of their crazy towers.” (p. 123, The Outline of Sanity) Part 2 of this book includes discussion of how Christians actually think about topics like capitalism, socialism, and Distributism, and how Chesterton wishes they’d think. Characters like the “old gentleman” and the “poor old clergyman” show how focusing on the favored target (socialism) or simply living in an imaginary world (the land of competitive capitalism) keep many such characters in a situation that amounts to giving up and rolling over. … More “If they served their God as they have served their Pork King…” (4)
Chesterton says of Christians “…if they had served their God as they have served their Pork King and their Petrol King, the success of our whole Distributive democracy would stare at the world like one of their flaming sky signs and scrape the sky like one of their crazy towers.” (p. 123, The Outline of Sanity) Part 2 of this book includes discussion of how Christians actually think about topics like capitalism, socialism, and Distributism, and how Chesterton wishes they’d think. Characters like the “old gentleman” and the “poor old clergyman” show how focusing on the favored target (socialism) or simply living in an imaginary world (the land of competitive capitalism) keep many such characters in a situation that amounts to giving up and rolling over. … More “If they served their God as they have served their Pork King…” (4-Video)
In this first part of our recent conversation, Spencer and I discuss what we took away from Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon. I did a series on this book not long ago, and I”ll put the playlist in a link below. We discuss the question of where Christianity started going wrong, McCarraher’s adoption of Romanticism, his preference for socialism and socialism’s compatibility with Christianity, and his even greater preference for some sort of Christian anarchism. What is the role of the church in creating community–and why doesn’t the church do it well? And we don’t mean getting together for a book club or coffee klatsch. … More Where did Christians go wrong? A conversation w/ Spencer Hess on The Enchantments of Mammon (1-Video)
Political Philosophy 