Kairoticast

After our last episode a listener reached out to me and said, hey, I liked your episode on Christian Nationalism and church/state issues, but could you talk about things a bit more current?

So, I decided to continue the conversation about religion and the state with a look at one of the most recent cases to come out of the Supreme Court. It made a lot of headlines because it was one of two major church/state cases of the last year. Both cases ultimately eroded the separation between church and state, but as somebody who grew up with prayers at high school football games, this one struck a chord with me. [Read More]

Speaking at a religious service on June 26th, Lauren Boebert told worshipers: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it.”

She added: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.”

This conflation of church and state is not new, but it is a growing part of public discourse. Christian Nationalism, which is a driving force behind certain political forces in America today, encourages people to merge their religious and their national identities. [Read More]

This is our 100th episode. Carl and I want to thank you for joining us on this little journey of ours. We have had a great time and appreciate that you have chosen to give us a little bit of your attention during your busy week.

For this special episode we thought we would return to the very beginning – who we are. We chose the name Kairoticast because it is a blend of the Greek work “kairos” and “podcast.” Clearly, you know what a podcast is. But let’s talk for a minute about kairos. [Read More]

This week we address the dissent in the Dobbs case.

We explained last week why dissents can be so important. Eventually the reasoning of a dissent can become the common understanding. More on that in a minute.

Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan list MANY reasons for their dissent, a number of which have been circulated among popular discourse. [Read More]

Where to even begin?

In a normal world (or whatever that means) the big news of the week would have been the January 6th committee. It continues to lay out a devastating case against the former president and has even called a special session that wasn’t originally scheduled because of new evidence it has received while the proceedings have been going on. So it’s a pretty juicy story. And the bombshells that it dropped this week were pretty big, no doubt. But it has to share the headlines. I mean, we’re basically having public hearings on whether a sitting president fomented insurrection, and it’s not the major news of the day. That cannot be a good sign for us, as a nation. [Read More]