Continuing the examination of solutions, we bring the podcast (at least season one) to its conclusion. Here in part two, we return to the three crucial problems that I laid out in episode 1: our national addiction to ease and comfort, hyper-individuality leading to collapse of community, and postmodernism which enshrines a viewpoint that "the only thing that is true is whatever I deem true for me." We spend time discussing these three issues as a part of finding safe harbor, offering ideas and actions one could take to address each problem. Individually, each of us can take action to mitigate the problems that have negatively impacted society.

To conclude, we come back to our two characters of the story and address each. Each has the opportunity to be brave in confronting their stance about or relationship to Christianity, especially with that faith's core position in our national history. Whether a person or group will actually want to help find safe harbor remains to be seen, but I believe we can find our way forward, away from this unmoored dangerous situation if both of our characters address the spiritual interior issues.

Then to conclude the episode and the podcast overall, we come back to our two characters of the story and address each. Each has the opportunity to be brave in confronting their stance about or relationship to Christianity, especially with that faith's core position in our national history. Whether a person or group will actually want to help find safe harbor remains to be seen, but I believe we can find our way forward, away from this unmoored dangerous situation if both of our characters address the spiritual interior issues.

Thank you for listening through this podcast. If you ever had any questions or want to make any comments, you can always reach me at carl@carlcreasman.com.

We come to the end of our journey and its time to draw out conclusions, hopefully seeing possible solutions that will help us move into a safe harbor. Episodes 8-10 examined the core foundational documents of the USA and from those we have see how our "Founders" constructed the nation. From that, we discerned within the founding the vital element of the Christian spiritual ethos that they believed were central to that founding, and yet that faith was not enshrined as a singular or sole core founding theme.

Due to time considerations, our conclusion will stretch over two episodes. In this first part, we begin the conversation going slightly deeper into "civic lessons" related to the USA founding documents. Then we look at some general observations based on the information we've previously discussed. We lay out then core points that comprise what a solution broadly can be for us, painting a path forward. We review the lessons from Rome and Athens that remind us how easily "government of the people" can be lost.

Finally, noting that IF we do want to try and keep our unique structure, then we must be willing to work collectively to restore our spiritual moral and virtue foundation. To that end, we consider how a spiritual foundation could be restored or, potentially, constructed anew, even if the society no longer holds one singular majority religious faith.

We can find common ground around morals and virtues, and then we must determine to teach those morals and virtues to the children of the nation. We can leave this unmoored, "in danger", state and move forward to a safe harbor.

For our second Bonus Episode, I am returning to a historical point that I made in Episode 8. In that episode, I first introduced my concept of “Four Founding Themes” that emerge from an examination of English colonization. When I cover European colonization in my college classes on early US History, one thing that I do with my students is to look for larger patterns to help us understand what is going on. I do this with them as we look at Spanish, French, and Dutch colonization, and then go into even more depth on English colonization. With the English colonies, we spend more time here is because the British won the geopolitical struggle for dominance in Europe, and that played out in the New World. So, what clues can we discover that helps us understand how those colonies developed into a new nation called the United States? For me, then, there are four dominant themes that one can uncover with these early colonies: Capitalism, Christianity, Risk, and Rebellion. In this bonus episode, I explore this in-depth with you to help explain what I had briefly described in the earlier episode.

If you want to read more about some of the historical moments that I mentioned, here you go:

• Bacon's Rebellion
• Paxton Boys or you can read more in this Brittanica article
• Shays Rebellion
• Frederick Turner's "Frontier Thesis" about the impact of the closing of the US Frontier, paper given in 1893
• About the concept of "Frontier Thesis"