I renamed my blog “the Eclectic Christian” a few months back for several reasons, some I stated when I renamed it, others I didn’t. In the subtitle of the blog you will find the main reason, “Musings of a curious Christian”. I am by nature a very curious person, and always have been. If you ask my Mom she will tell you I could be a very annoying child because I always wanted to know everything I could about lots of different things. Often if my parents invited friends over I would want to stay with the adults because I wanted to listen to what they were talking about, and often add my own opinion…usually to my Dad’s chagrin. But I’ve realized that my blog hasn’t been very “Eclectic” lately, and I’m resolved to changing that.

One area that I’ve always been fascinated by is politics. At first I thought of politics, the way I imagine most of us do, primarily in how we govern ourselves and make policy. Even though I’ve always been aware of the use of the word politics in many other types of situations, that was still how I’d always perceived it. As I’ve aged though, my awareness of other types of politics has developed. Technically speaking, the word politics can be applied to the way any group of people make decisions, even if that group is relatively small. It is also often applied to the way individuals make decisions that involve other people. This has especially caught my attention lately when decisions are made not to find the best solution to an issue, but to make the people happy who are the most important. There are examples of this everywhere and involving almost any situation you can imagine because where there are people involved in making decisions, there are politics. Since the thing that is ultimately the most important to me involves people, my Christian faith, politics has become an interesting subject. As I’ve thought further, this seems to me a quintessential topic for Christians to be concerned about. One of the biggest areas we are to be shaped in by our faith is how and why we make decisions.

In some of the next several posts I want to look at a few different types of ways politics has affected our world and how as Christians we might want to approach our involvement. This will involve larger government politics because that does impact us, but there are many other types I also want to explore that may have a bigger impact than we may have expected. Politics in the scientific community, in the business community, in journalism, even in religion, as well as many others have had a tremendous impact on almost every facet of our lives. I’m curious…I would like to explore this more.