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From Enlightenment ideals to the myth of the American frontier, the founding ideologies of the United States have long shaped how we define humanity, progress, and belonging. In this episode, Dr. Todd Stockdale invites us to trace how these ideologies, especially the Western liberal view of the autonomous individual, intersected with Protestant theology and national identity. Drawing on the work of John Locke, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, we explore how these frameworks have informed what counts as good and bad, civilized and savage, included and excluded, preserved and erased. And we ask what it would mean to reimagine our shared future not through domination, but through a deeper vision of what it means to be fully human.

Dr. Stockdale challenges us to examine how our ideas of justice, freedom, and selfhood have been formed by settler colonial logics, and how healing might begin by telling a different story. This conversation builds a bridge between earlier episodes exploring Indigenous erasure and theological complicity, and the final arc of this season, which seeks to confront systems of race, class, and gender that continue to shape our country and Northwest Arkansas today.

https://www.theunderview.com/episodes/the-underview-the-founding-ideologies-dr-todd-j-stockdale

About the underview:

The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.

Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠
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Host: @mikerusch

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