PODCAST · news
The George Buchanan Forum
by The George Buchanan Forum
We want to see Christians well-equipped to live their lives according to truth, and that truth should extend to every nook and cranny of life. When it comes to discussing politics, and the issues surrounding politics, we see Christians plagued by inconsistent thought. We need more intellecutal maturity in the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. The George Buchanan Forum was created to provide and provoke this sort of consistent thought.
Episodes
-
Jon Staab: Protocols for Conviviality
Digital communication technology has exceeded its optimal scale, establishing a radical monopoly over human interaction. Internet platforms intermediate private relationships, extract value through surveillance capitalism, and reduce people to quantifiable metrics. However, certain digital tools...
-
Jonathan McIntosh: Minding Your Own Business: A Libertarian Reading of Plato’s Republic Bks I-II
Plato's Republic is regarded by many as the foundational text in the history of western political philosophy. Yet with its totalitarian and communistic "ideal" or "noble" city at its heart, the Republic might seem to contain little of value to the libertarian. A careful reading of the opening two...
-
Jordan Dorney: The Killing of Cardinal Beaton - Three Views
What happens when priests obtain “the whole regiment of the realm,” with “[the Devil’s] own son” as the head of this ecclesial usurpation? In this talk I will present the views of John Knox, George Buchanan, and David Hume on the killing of Cardinal Beaton (d. 1546) at St Andrews Castle. Was this...
-
Jeremy Bunch: Paul Kingsnorth, Capitalism, and the Machine
Paul Kingsnorth's recently released book Against The Machine pushes the discussion on modern cultural and religious disintegration in a significantly helpful direction. His analysis places the blame for global dehumanization largely upon technocracy, individualism, and the pursuit of...
-
Jonathan McIntosh: Figuratively Speaking: the Old Testament, Natural Law, and Libertarianism
According to the natural law tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Old Testament civil law wasn’t merely political, but was also “figurative” or symbolic in nature. Yet in his actual interpretation of the judicial precepts, Aquinas treats them almost entirely as political, an error that results in...
-
Nathan Stenzel: Preambles to Politics - Reformed & Roman Catholic Views of Human Constitution
Behind Roman Catholic and Reformed debates over soteriology, or the doctrine of salvation, lie conflicting views of man’s pre-fall nature. The donum superadditum, or “superadded gift,” is the Roman Catholic doctrine that when Adam was created, he had to be given a special, supernatural grace just...
-
Will Boyd: We Are Not Beavers - The Cost of Creating Slack Water
The free-running Snake and Clearwater Rivers once provided significant natural assets to mankind: beauty, clean water, fish, recreation, transportation, inspiration, waterfowl, solace. Many of these assets are now compromised. Since the four lower Snake River dams were finished in 1976, return...
-
George Harrell: Re-enchanting History in an Age of Woke Ideologies and Christian Nationalisms
Through historical narratives like the 1619 Project and critiques of the “post-war consensus,” both the post-liberal Left and Right seek to find meaning in our past while dismantling our national myths. This raises a critical question for Christians: are the historical methods employed by these...
-
Jeremy Bunch: Burning the Land Slowly
This talk will help define the increasingly popular term 'regenerative agriculture,' and will explore how it intersects with critical elements of food production sustainability, which is foundational to civilization itself. The systems we have built to produce and distribute food, and just about...
-
George Harrell: Peter Zeihan & The Myth of the Pax Americana
Contrary to the post-Cold War, triumphalist narrative, after WWII the United States did not altruistically transcend power politics and become the world’s stabilizing umpire. Geopolitics was never turned off as Peter Zeihan claimed, nor did history end as Francis Fukuyama predicted. Instead, it…
more -
Jonathan McIntosh: Why We Must Get Serious About Natural Rights
Cherished by some while deplored by others, the concept of natural rights has had a deeply ambivalent legacy among conservative Christians. This presentation will give a definition and short history of the concept of natural rights, review some of the main objections to the idea, and conclude…
more -
Tim Nadreau: Fascism By Any Other Name
Monetary and fiscal policy have undergone dramatic changes since Covid-19, and movement towards Modern Monetary Theory has accelerated in the U.S.. Economics as a profession still views the theory as heterodox and has largely left it alone to “die on the vine” as it were. Because MMT is a bit of…
more -
Jordan Dorney: Xenophon and Socratic Libertarianism
Why does it seem so difficult for people to acquire, exercise, and establish political rule over others? Why can't human rulers get their human "herds" to obey them willingly like shepherds can with sheep? Why is everyone always revolting against the regime? Xenophon's Education of Cyrus begins...
-
Jonathan McIntosh: More Mere Than Mere Christendom
For over a decade Pr. Douglas Wilson has been introducing the highly suggestive term Mere Christendom into contemporary Christian discourse as a way of describing what it is that Christians ought to be striving for politically. With the recent publication of his book by the same title, this is as...
-
George Harrell: A Conservative Rethinking of the French Revolution, Part 2
The French Revolution has entered the popular imagination as a class conflict arising from Rousseau’s Enlightenment philosophy. However, if we analyze the French revolutions of 1789 and 1792 with a proper historical approach that appreciates the true nature of human action, we discover that the...
-
Brian Points: The Quibbling Rabble: The History and Future of US Housing Policy
Believe it or not, land use policy and its array of offshoots form one of the most hotly contested political issues in the USA today. Topics such as comprehensive plans, conditional use permits, re-zoning, and variances are keeping some of your neighbors up at night. With materials and…
more -
George Harrell: A Conservative Rethinking of the French Revolution
The French Revolution has entered the popular imagination as a class conflict arising from Rousseau’s Enlightenment philosophy. However, if we analyze the French revolutions of 1789 and 1792 with a proper historical approach that appreciates the true nature of human action, we discover that the...
-
Isaac Madsen: Antidote to Anecdote - Statistics As Crucial to the Mission of Tertiary Christian Education
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted an issue in tertiary Christian education. Many Christians are deficient in their understanding of statistics. Whereas a lack of understanding in specialized fields (e.g. soil science) results in an excusable knowledge gap, an inadequate understanding of…
more -
Jonathan McIntosh: "I didn't agree to that!" - Consent and Other Theories of Political Obligation
Does government derive its legitimacy from the consent of the governed? In the modern era, the doctrine of consent has become so popular as to be commonplace, yet it is far from clear what it would actually mean for government to be truly based on consent, or how such a theory is to be reconciled...
-
Jeremy Bunch: Frederic Bastiat - Economic Harmonies & Discord
Frédéric Bastiat's (1801-1850) project of critically explaining the glories of free and voluntary markets from an economic perspective went left unfinished due to disease that took him at a relatively young age. However, many of his key thoughts are contained in his book Economic Harmonies. For...
-
Jeremy Bunch - A Libertarian View of Christian Nationalism
Christian Nationalism has specifically come into its own in the last year as an ideological movement. One of the core driving forces of this movement is the insistence on recognizing objective truth about the world, not giving into ideologically progressive lies about the nature of creation, and...
-
George Harrell: These Un-United States: National Myth and Political Reality in the American Founding
Calls for a resurgence of American nationalism are often defended by a supposed historical American national identity that emerged either with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or with the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1789. And indeed, throughout the 1770s, 80s and 90s, American...
-
Chris Walker - The Last Chain: Building Economic Networks
A dive into a critical analysis of monetary premia held by current currencies, and a proposal to support local human flourishing through digital currencies targeting local price stability via algorithmic central banks. George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used...
-
Jonathan McIntosh - What Should We Think About The Social Contract?
Social contract theory is the idea that the political community has its origins in, and that political legitimacy and obligation therefore rest upon, the consent of the governed. This lecture will revisit John Locke’s famous version of the social contract, while also touching briefly on both its...
-
Jonathan McIntosh - Common Grace vs. Political Presuppositionalism
The doctrine of common grace is important for helping us avoid two opposing ditches that Reformed Christians are prone to fall into in thinking about the possibility of a shared social order between believers and non-believers. Related to avoiding these two ditches, the doctrine of common grace...
-
George Harrell - How to Create a Coup: How the 1953 Overthrow of Iran Became a CIA Blueprint
In 1953 the CIA secretly paid for and organized a coup against Iranian Prime Minister, Mossadegh, overthrowing Iran’s parliamentary government and replacing it with the dictatorial regime of the Shah. This event, the CIA’s first coup, became a turning point in CIA history. The ease with which…
more -
Jeremy Bunch - Rothbard: Enemy of the Egalitarians
Murray N. Rothbard critiqued egalitarianism for its unreasonableness and its truly horrific agenda. Egalitarianism, according to Rothbard, is a revolt against the order of nature, and such revolts must be exposed for their evil intents. Socialism, a political and economic revolt against nature,...
-
Jonathan McIntosh - Pre-fall Civil Government? Why There Wasn’t, and Why It Matters
Recorded October 22, 2021 at the 2021 Fall Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. Would there have been political authority had Adam and Eve never fallen? St....
-
Timothy Nadreau - Ag Subsidies: The World's (Other) Oldest Profession
Recorded October 22, 2021 at the 2021 Fall Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. Every OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] nation, with...
-
George Harrell - The French Road to Vietnam
Recorded October 22, 2021 at the 2021 Fall Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. The Vietnam War has become the symbolic hot conflict of the Cold War. While the...
-
Jeremy Bunch - Hard Hearts & Monarchs: Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel
Recorded October 22, 2021 at the 2021 Fall Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. The interpretations of the people of Israel asking for a king in the narrative of…
more -
Jonathan McIntosh - Theonomy, Westminster, and Libertarianism
Recorded July 23, 2021 at the 2021 Summer Forum in Moscow, Idaho. The George Buchanan Forum was created to further develop consistent Christian thought through the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history.
-
Luke Mason - Cyberpunks for Jesus: A Theology and Praxeology for Christian Hacktivism
This talk examines Christian hacktivism from an ethical, historical, and philosophical perspective, and establishes a bird's-eye view of the current climate. It touches on issues of governance, privacy, property rights, and much, more. Recorded July 23, 2021 at the 2021 Summer Forum in Moscow,...
-
George Harrell – The Munich Myth: Re-examining the Lead up to WWII and Appeasement
Chamberlain’s failed policy of appeasement at Munich has become a byword for kowtowing to evil. It has also become the argument for every foreign intervention since WWII. However, the popular “lesson of Munich” narrative fails to capture the complexities of 1930s European geopolitics, as well as...
-
Chris Walker – Taking from Caesar: Cryptocurrency as a Better Game of Money
Cryptocurrency has pushed the boundaries of how economists have traditionally thought about the nature of money. Exploring the differences between cryptocurrency and more traditionally defined forms of money helps us understand a way forward toward a moral monetary system, one that has separated...
-
George Harrell – Southern Slavery and Confederate Socialism
In the antebellum South the planter-class used fundamentally anti-free market means to build a slaveocracy, with which they exploited and oppressed not only black slaves, but also non-slave owning whites. This system of state and federal coercion eventually then evolved into full blown economic...
-
Jonathan McIntosh – Evaluating Calvin: A Critique of “On Civil Government”
Calvin’s “On Civil Government,” from book 4, ch. 20 of his Institutes, is a foundational text in Reformed political theory. Though Calvin situates himself within the classical natural law tradition, adapting it to a new, Protestant context, in important ways his work marks a regression from some…
more -
Jeremy Bunch – An Integrated Theology of Biblical Kingship
The biblical role of the magistrate in society has long been debated in the church down to our own day, but the theological approaches to the matter have largely leaned on a systematic theological approach, where proof texts are plucked out of Scripture without recognition of an overarching...
-
Jonathan McIntosh – Towards a Natural Law Libertarianism
Though usually thought of as antithetical philosophical frameworks, classical natural law theory and political libertarianism belong together. Natural law theory provides libertarianism (the political theory based on the non-aggression principle) with the theological and moral framework in which...
-
Tim Harmon – Faith and Reason in Protestant Scholasticism
This paper addresses the place of faith and reason in human apprehension of the law of God. It does so in order to offer theological clarity regarding key concepts (faith, reason, and the law of God) appealed to in Christian political thought. While drawing on Protestant Scholastic categories and...
-
George Harrell - “Politics as Usual: The Making of the U.S. Constitution”
Americans, and especially conservative Americans, hold the Constitution with a certain holy reverence, as though it was the product of the founders’ unified, political ideology for how best to run a government. In reality, the U.S. Constitution reflects not just the founders’ good intentions, but...
-
Jeremy Bunch – George Buchanan: Scots-Reformed Resistance Theory
George Buchanan was a sixteenth century Scottish Calvinist and humanist, whose “unparalleled reputation as a Latin poet, playwright, polemicist, historian and political theorist” brought him to the middle of the complex political and ecclesiastical issues of the Scottish Reformation, as well as...
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
ABOUT THIS SHOW
We want to see Christians well-equipped to live their lives according to truth, and that truth should extend to every nook and cranny of life. When it comes to discussing politics, and the issues surrounding politics, we see Christians plagued by inconsistent thought. We need more intellecutal maturity in the integration of theology, Natural Law, and history. The George Buchanan Forum was created to provide and provoke this sort of consistent thought.
HOSTED BY
The George Buchanan Forum
CATEGORIES
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The George Buchanan Forum have?
The George Buchanan Forum currently has 42 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The George Buchanan Forum about?
We want to see Christians well-equipped to live their lives according to truth, and that truth should extend to every nook and cranny of life. When it comes to discussing politics, and the issues surrounding politics, we see Christians plagued by inconsistent thought. We need more intellecutal...
How often does The George Buchanan Forum release new episodes?
The George Buchanan Forum has 42 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The George Buchanan Forum?
You can listen to The George Buchanan Forum on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The George Buchanan Forum?
The George Buchanan Forum is created and hosted by The George Buchanan Forum.
URL copied to clipboard!