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Katherine Stewart, author of Money, Lies and God will be speaking on this important book that exposes Christian Nationalism.
About Katherine:
Katherine Stewart has been covering the rise of the anti-democratic movement for over 16 years. Her latest book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (Bloomsbury 2025), is an instant New York Times bestseller. Her previous book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury 2020), won First Place in the Nonfiction Books category from the Religion News Association, as well as a Morris B. Forkosch Best Book award. The Power Worshippers formed the basis of the documentary feature God & Country, produced by Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner; Stewart served as executive producer. Her 2012 book, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, focused on the religious right’s efforts to undermine public education. Stewart’s writing appears in The New York Times op ed, New Republic, Religion News Service and others. Her substack is at katherinestewartbooks, and she is on Bluesky at katherinestewart.bsky.social.
Her books will be available for sale at the presentation and there will be a light reception afterward along with book signing.
There will be no Third Sunday Morning Meeting in July because of this presentation Sunday evening.
Please share this email with those who may be interested despite the notice below.
Come join an informal gathering for food and conversation at the Corner 16, 9637 Kroger Park Dr, Knoxville, TN 37922 near Pellissippi and Northshore.
If you are interested in seeing the menu beforehand, you can check it out here.
Please note that this is NEW LOCATION.
Disregard the notice below about forwarding this email. Feel free to share with others who may be interested.
Are You Going to Serve a New Lord?
Many social philosophers seem to think we are heading toward a Techno-Feudal state. They point to a society that is being led by a small elite that is increasingly hoarding all the wealth in society and dictating social norms and customs to the rest of us. This encompasses both the right and left and is the top few percent of the population. Social mobility is being reduced, and fewer people are able to rise above their class. See:
Our Neo-Feudal Future - First Things
"America has only a limited feudal past, the plantation aristocracy of the antebellum South and the enormous class chasms of the Gilded Age being pretty much our only examples. Yet today—after decades of social mobility, a digital revolution that was supposed to empower individuals everywhere, and the construction of a vigorous anti-discrimination apparatus that putatively ensures equal rights and status—a rigid new social order with feudal elements has come into view."
So, after serving your Lord, come and discuss with us your new future. We may Knight you.
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https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85804805144?pwd=aOtLYv2BIH6DmIby1mdreTdQgHQAQg.1
Meeting ID: 858 0480 5144
Passcode: 245124
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L.A. Paul
As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. When choosing whether to start a family, or deciding on a career, we often think we can assess the options by imagining what different experiences would be like for us. L. A. Paul argues that, for choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to - by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience -we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice.
Choosing rationally, then, may require us to regard big life decisions as choices to make discoveries, small and large, about the intrinsic nature of experience, and to recognize that part of the value of living authentically is to experience one's life and preferences in whatever way they may evolve in the wake of the choices one makes. Using classic philosophical examples about the nature of consciousness, and drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, Paul develops a rigorous account of transformative experience that sheds light on how we should understand real-world experience and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures. 202 pages.
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84055669501?pwd=vniR5kBSRfx2WIanLo3bnFTuZwXYsv.1
Meeting ID: 840 5566 9501
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Are Negotiations Always Better than Force?
Many of us feel that it is better to talk things through and work out a compromise rather than to use force. But what if talking just leads to more talking while damage and even death occurs? Is using force to set clear boundaries a moral option? Do we sometimes get things wrong and engage in catastrophe thinking because of a strong bias toward "talking" and "compromise". How do we know that compromise is even a solution? For a deterrence through strength argument see:
How the West got the Israel-Iran war so wrong
The sentiment betrays the Western delusion: that process is always preferable to power. That negotiation, however one-sided, is morally superior to pre-emption. But pre-emption is not always a moral failing. When executed with precision, intelligence and legitimacy – as it was in this case – it prevents greater wars. It reinstates deterrence. And it spares civilians, infrastructure and economies the toll of prolonged conflict.
This is the paradox many in the West struggle to accept: restrained power can be more humane than endless diplomacy. Especially when that diplomacy serves only to delay the inevitable, embolden aggressors and paralyze allies.
So where does this put us? Tip one way and we have endless war, tip the other way and we have instability and terrorism. Peace through strength has been around a long time, but so has fear of escalation.
What do you think?
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83710041855?pwd=kS2l7pKeieIBR5UTj6fX5t3v6RA8Fl.1
Meeting ID: 837 1004 1855
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