The unpopular choices in this year’s presidential election are causing Christians to seriously rethink how they engage politics for the first time in a generation. This class weaves together scripture, theology, and history to help us hear how God is calling us to participate in the public square today. Rather than focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of candidates, the class unpacks the assumptions we hold about faith and politics, why we hold them, and what it means to cast our vote in faith rather than fear.
This first class was held on October 16, 2016, at Wellspring Alliance Church in Wheaton, Illinois. There will be five classes in total. Each week the latest class will be posted here.
Topics covered in this class session include:
Welcome & why this class? (0:00)
Politics vs. partisanship (4:04)
Why are we so divided? (5:45)
Where I’m coming from (10:40)
Statistics – How are evangelicals voting? (19:15)
Pluralism and the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (27:20)
Four Christian views of government (50:20)
Brett Victor: What can a Technologist do about Climate Change?
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities, I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our problem-solvers are assuming that someone else will solve it.
The Depressed Person, by David Foster Wallace
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
Progressives: non-theistic sect of Protestantantism
How Richard Dawkins Got Pwned and An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives — Mencius Moldbug (Both very long.) I am not a neo-reactionary, but sometimes I think Mencius Moldbug is the greatest living political thinker. His claim that progressivism is a non-theistic sect of Protestantism, with all of Protestantism’s evangelism and intolerance of heresy, is in particular very persuasive to me. I also think ‘neocameralism’ is quite a cool model for a state and I’d like to see it tried out somewhere.