Politics

Hey, Pub Planters!

This Friday, May 2nd, marks the third meeting in our ongoing series on Politics and Theology/Religion.

We encourage all of you to keep working through the topic, particularly concerning the readings posted last month. There a lot of provocative ideas offered by Audi and Wolterstorff, notably their differing views on the place that one's religious convictions ought to have when advocating public policy in the political sphere.

Also, please feel free to sign up for an account here or login if you have one already and share in the comments area what questions and thoughts your groups have had on this topic. We'd love to hear from all of you and would enjoy engaging in more online discussion to help stretch all of us.

To help get things started, if any of you care to discuss this online, here's a few questions:

First of all, we want to apologize to all of you. Rob recently welcomed a new baby into his family, and I have been overworked with programming jobs that niether one of us has done a good job of making time for the Pub Planters readings this month. We should have done it weeks ago, but one often gets so distracted by the vagaries of life, that extracurricular obligations flee one's waking consciousness.

Pub Planters of the world ... Forgive!

Now, on to the matter at hand. We not only ask your forgiveness for our extreme tardiness, but we ask you all to relax. Discussing the intersections of politics and theology is a heavy undertaking, and I'd hate to just throw something out to all of you that wouldn't best serve our desire to grow from these discussions.

It is well understood in our culture that the average American table is not to be cluttered by two things: Theology (some people say Religion) and Politics.

Pub Planters gathers around bar tables each month to discuss the theology of one thing or another. We think it's important. We like to think that's the way things should be. More importantly, we think there is a theology to be found in most everything, which increases the importance of having discussions. Put another way, we would argue that a robust and developed theology can and should inform nearly all aspects of our lives, and people should talk about these things more often than our culture suggests we should.

In the past year-and-a-half, Pub Planters has discussed the theologies of church, the Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God. Now, in this time of unbridled contest leading up to all out electioneering in November, we think it is time that we bring that other white elephant into the room.

So, coming to a Pub Plant near you, we are diving into a new series regarding the Theology of Politics.

We won't be hosting any fund-raising dinners. You most likely will not find any Presidential hopefuls sitting at your tables, trying desperately to talk you into voting for their causes. We aren't going to tell you if you should be Republican or Democrat or Independent or Green or conservative or liberal or Libertarian or Vegetarian. However, we do want to reflect from what discussions we have had to the crazy realm of Politics.

Does God care about politics?
What do we think God might think about human government?
Does God care about representative government? Monarchy? Anarchy?
What approach might a theologically responsible person take when it comes to the public square?