Unmoored: America Adrift in Historical Forgetfulness and Finding Our Way Back22 Okt 2024

Lessons from Early US Colonization

We've seen that Christianity is vital to the type of society that everyone seems to want—individual rights, protections in liberty, etc… This vital need is both in acknowledging how Christianity brought these concepts to the West (and then others through "the West") and how Christianity as guiding structure provided US culture the means for its success (that others strive to move here for).

So, we NEED Christianity…but WE ALSO HAVE SEEN that the "Christendom" concept ("Christian Nationalism") is ruinous to the faith and also how the faith is expressed, especially in a civic structure. So, what did our first colonists believe?

Were the first colonists trying to establish a "Christendom," a "Christian nation"…a nation only for Christians where there would be religious faith requirements before holding office or opening a business, as was true in the nations from which these colonists came? Or, were they somehow trying to escape religion altogether, eager to create a nation on some broad concept of "Natural Law" in which formal religions would be either absent, or at worst, only something for the individual, something kept quiet and private? To find these answers, we must examine the first English-speaking colonies to see what lessons they can provide.

We will read The Mayflower Compact and also excerpts from the Sermon of John Winthrop. Both documents are crucial to understanding the colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. We will also examine Jamestown and St. Mary's. For St. Mary's we will read excerpts from their revolutionary Maryland Toleration Act of 1649.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(17)

Invitation to listen to Uncovered: the Bible as Historical Document

Carl and Matthew are back in the studio with this next, but new, podcast. This "episode 0" is an overview intro of the coming podcast. Episode 1 will come out September 16, 2025 with the following ep...

9 Sep 202517min

Bonus Episode with Kurt Powers: Carl's Hypothesis Challenged

Surprise! I am so happy to share this fourth bonus episode with you in which my friend Kurt Powers joined me for a last examination of the argument of the podcast. Kurt used to manage his own podcast...

1 Mai 20251h 4min

Bonus Episode: Lessons for the Christians

Throughout the entire podcast, the audience was designed for both people of no spiritual religious faith claims and those who openly state that they are Christians. Matthew and I did our very best to ...

23 Jan 202553min

Finding A Safe Harbor, part two

Continuing the examination of solutions, we bring the podcast (at least season one) to its conclusion. Here in part two, we return to the three crucial problems that I laid out in episode 1: our nati...

19 Nov 202439min

Finding A Safe Harbor, part one

We come to the end of our journey and its time to draw out conclusions, hopefully seeing possible solutions that will help us move into a safe harbor. Episodes 8-10 examined the core foundational docu...

12 Nov 202445min

Bonus Episode on Four Founding Themes from US Colonization

For our second Bonus Episode, I am returning to a historical point that I made in Episode 8. In that episode, I first introduced my concept of "Four Founding Themes" that emerge from an examination o...

8 Nov 202440min

Within Governing Documents

Episode 10 considers the creation of our second set of governing documents, what we today call "The Constitution," in 1787, ratified in 1788, provides us our last bit of evidence to the larger point o...

5 Nov 202454min

Impact of the 1776 Guiding Documents

In trying to understand the unique concepts of the USA, we need to start with two key documents written in the heady days of the Second Continental Congress: The Declaration of Independence, and the A...

29 Okt 202451min