Date/Time
Date(s) - November 29, 2017
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
MacLeod Building 254
Categories No Categories
Abstract
Limitless human potential and progress will result in this-worldly, pan-humanist fulfilment for all people groups. Inclusive pluralism, tolerance and respect will rule the day. Human possibilities will extend into a perfected and still perfecting future, supported by and supporting human autonomy, equality, and freedom.
These expectations (or values) form one stream of the Western political tradition—liberal democracy. It functions as a political “myth” that regulates our thinking about public discourse, political leadership and perhaps reality itself.
The myth has often been thought to originate within religious sensibilities and thought-ways, especially (but not exclusively) those of Christianity. Recent national and international political shock events have cast doubt on this myth and its inherent hopes for democratic polities like Canada.
Therefore, we want to circumspectly probe: What indeed are the foundations of such a myth? Can a rigorous examination of current events help us think more clearly about the meaning of such foundations in the light of institutions and emotions, virtues and vices? Included in this inquiry, we contend, is the understanding that they are arguably based in the same religious sensibilities that underpin the hope of human progress.
Professor Thomas Heilke will argue that the sources can be fruitfully examined, but also that their theological origins—alongside the parallel theological origins of progressivist thinking— must be more clearly discerned.
Biography
Thomas Heilke received his PhD from Duke University in 1990. After 23 years as a faculty member and a variety of administrative positions at the University of Kansas, he has been Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean of the College of Graduate Studies UBC Okanagan since January, 2014. He is the recipient of three teaching awards, and has written on a variety of topics in political philosophy, including civic friendship, political theology, the political thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Eric Voegelin, John Howard Yoder, and Thucydides, and Anabaptist political thought. He has authored or co-authored four books and edited or co-edited six further volumes.
His work has appeared in journals that include American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Polity, The Review of Politics, and Modern Theology. Among his published books are Voegelin on the Idea of Race: An Analysis of Modern European Racism (1990); Nietzsche’s Tragic Regime: Culture, Aesthetics, and Political Education (1998); Eric Voegelin: In Quest of Reality (1999). He co-edited with Ashley Woodwiss The Re-Enchantment of Political Science: Christian Scholars Engage Their Discipline, (2001). He belongs to the American Political Science Association and the Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for International Scholars.
https://ubcgcu.org/2017/08/03/gfcf-lecture-schedule-for-2017-18/