Contact information
Name:
Brett Hendrickson
Phone:
610.330.5963
Email:
hendribr@lafayette.edu
Categories:
When:
Thursday, October 24, 2024 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Where:
Colton Chapel
Presenter:
Dr. Stephen Prothero, Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Boston University
Price:
Free
One of the puzzles of American politics today is why so many Christians are eager to vote for a man who seems to hold Christian values so unbearably lightly. Isn’t it obvious that “real” Christians should not vote for a felon who takes his marching orders from conspiracy theorists rather than the Bible and seems unable to find even one of the Ten Commandments to his liking? This talk tries to answer that question by diving into “big history”—to the beginnings of the Agricultural Revolution (around 10,000 years ago) when humans stopped hunting and gathering and began to settle down as farmers. It will then race through the origins of the world’s religions in the first millennium BCE, Christianity’s many alliances with empires, the culture wars, and the tangled history of presidential piety from the Jefferson-Adams election of 1800 to the Trump-Harris election of 2024.
Sponsored by:
The Departments of Religious Studies and Government & Law, The Office of the Provost, and FYS 180: America's Public Theologians