Notes from a Byzantine-Rite Calvinist
18 March 2024
Citizenship Without Illusions now at IVP website
15 March 2024
March newsletter online
04 March 2024
The midnight office
Last month I recounted my youthful discovery of the discipline of daily prayer, also known as the daily office. According to this pattern, whose origins almost certainly extend back to God’s people of the old covenant, the entire day is divided up into approximately three-hour intervals punctuated by the several prayer offices. The number varies between five and seven, and sometimes more.
However, one of these offices puzzled me, because it occurred in the middle of the night when I assumed most normal people would be sleeping. If we are sleeping an average of eight hours per night, wouldn’t rising to pray in the middle of this period be a huge disruption? Perhaps that’s why the daily office was relegated to the monks, who were accustomed to cultivating heroic disciplines for the sake of their Saviour.
More than ten years ago, I learned something that solved the puzzle.
29 February 2024
The Heidelberg Catechism in the RCUS
27 February 2024
Shaw on democracy
George Bernard Shaw |
A case in point is an observation widely attributed to the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): "Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve." Clever indeed and boasting more than a measure of truth. We might well include it in our standard undergraduate political science textbooks as an easily verifiable principle.
20 February 2024
Daily prayer
When I was in my early twenties, I visited the bookstore of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and purchased a copy of The Daily Office, edited by Herbert Lindemann and published by Concordia in 1965. A small volume, it nevertheless runs to nearly 700 pages and includes liturgies for morning and evening prayer organized according to the church calendar. This ancient practice, usually associated with monastic communities, was unfamiliar to me, but it transformed my prayer life.
15 February 2024
February newsletter online
12 February 2024
Rhapsody in Blue
I don't usually write about music in this blog, but I cannot allow this significant anniversary to pass without comment. Exactly one-hundred years ago tonight, George Gershwin's classic piano and orchestral work, Rhapsody in Blue, premiered at the Aeolian Hall in New York City. The composer was all of 25 years old, and his audience included the likes of Sergei Rachmaninov, John Philip Sousa, Jascha Heifetz, Leopold Stokowski, and actress Gertrude Lawrence. The occasion was a concert by Paul Whiteman's orchestra, titled, "An Experiment in Modern Music." Whiteman had invited Gershwin to compose a piece for this event, and Gershwin thought he had declined the offer. But Whiteman went ahead and included him in the lineup anyway, inducing something of a panic in George when he learned about it only weeks in advance. Here's the rest of the story:
05 February 2024
The Christian Underground Podcast
At the weekend I was interviewed by Joseph Shehan for The Christian Underground Podcast, and the interview has now been posted. This is the description from the YouTube channel: "Does Political Ideology offer a false salvation? Can Christians fall prey to this form of idolatry? Our interview with Dr. David T. Koyzis, political philosopher, and author of Political Visions and Illusions, seeks answers [to] these questions and more."
Despite some technical glitches, we had a great conversation. I anticipate more such conversations with Shehan in the coming months, including after the publication of my next book.
01 February 2024
Citizenship Without Illusions: updated table of contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Belonging: benefits and responsibilities
A Clash of Ideologies
Plan of the book
25 January 2024
Disarming Leviathan Podcast: part 2
19 January 2024
Disarming Leviathan Podcast: part 1
Pastor Campbell graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Masters of Arts in Ministry from Phoenix Seminary in 2015 and is currently a doctoral student at Fuller Theological Seminary.
He has served at Desert Springs Bible Church, in Phoenix, AZ since 2006, serving as Lead Pastor since 2015.
He also serves on the board of United Pastors of Arizona and as the state-wide regional director of the Surge Network. He has spoken at events hosted by Acts 29, African American Christian Clergy Coalition, the Surge Network, Grand Canyon University, Converge Arizona, Young Life and Phoenix Seminary.
I will link to part 2 once he has posted it.
17 January 2024
January newsletter online
16 January 2024
Seeking our roots
Lucy Jane with three of her children |
Since childhood I have wanted to know who my ancestors were and where I came from. This flowed out of a general interest in history. I knew the major milestones such as the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and the exploration and settlement of the Americas. But where did my own family enter the picture?
Fortunately, my maternal great-grandmother, Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder (1875-1948), had the foresight to record two reminiscences of her own forebears extending back to the late 18th century. These included her grandfather David Wells (born c 1815), of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, who, on the day the American Civil War ended, was murdered by “the Raiders or Ku Klux Klan as they were sometimes called.”
Incidentally, I discovered through my genealogical research that I am distantly related to Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Abraham Kuyper's 19th-century mentor in the anti-revolutionary movement in the Netherlands.
12 January 2024
Liturgical standards and living faith: the case of the Evangelical and Reformed Church
So what was this Evangelical and Reformed Church? It was created by the merger of two predecessor bodies, the (German) Reformed Church in the United States (RCUS) and the (German) Evangelical Synod of North America. The German Reformed were the descendants of Reformed Christians who had immigrated from German-speaking Europe, especially Switzerland and the Palatinate, the latter of which was once ruled by Elector Frederick III “the Pious” (1515-1576), who commissioned the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563. The German Reformed began in 1725 and were initially under the care of Classis Amsterdam of the Dutch Reformed Church until 1793. During the late 19th century, efforts to unite with the (Dutch) Reformed Church in America were unsuccessful.
01 January 2024
Anna's unexpected blessing
Christian Courier has published my latest column, titled, Anna's unexpected blessing, and subtitled, "The forgotten character of Jesus' story." Here is an excerpt:
How Anna becomes a prophet we do not know. What we do know is that, in addition to experiencing the subjugation of her own people, she has seen sorrow in her personal life as well. She married, likely in her youth and perhaps to a much older man, who died seven years later, after which she remained a widow, a status that makes her particularly vulnerable to abuse.
From then on, she has devoted her life to prayer and fasting and appears to have taken up residence in the temple. Perhaps it is here that she was endowed by God with her prophetic gifts. One can imagine her reputation growing with the years, with visitors to the temple seeking out the wisdom of this remarkable woman of God.
28 December 2023
Your support makes a difference
26 December 2023
Kuyper on education
FEBRUARY 1, 1905Mr. Van Houten and I appear to disagree very little on the meaning of justice, but not on what freedom means. His freedom leads only to state tyranny. He wants the government to operate schools that teach young people to practice critical thinking even if it goes against their faith. In other words, it is to be a school that satisfies Mr. Van Houten and his like-minded friends and with which all who think like him are content. That school, he says, must be financed from the public treasury, hence must receive favored treatment, because that is the only real school. Everybody else has full freedom to establish other schools, provided they do not ask for money from the public treasury. You are entirely free, but you will have to pay for it yourself. Thus the honorable member first takes [through taxes] from the purse of those who do not support public education the money needed tor the government schools that he supports, and when the nonsupporters have spent all they could on education he says to them: "Now that I have pumped you dry you are welcome to establish schools with your own money."
15 December 2023
December newsletter online
12 December 2023
City on a Hill podcast: We Answer to Another
Estep and Reavely are pastors at New Life Church in West Linn, Oregon, United States.
22 November 2023
Parental rights
Recently the Canadian media have been puzzling over the notion of parental rights, a concept they appear to regard as strange and unusual. Generally, the commentators take a condescending tone, assuming that all right-thinking Canadians would naturally defer to their betters in the provincial public education bureaucracy. The flurry of articles surrounding parental rights has come in response to the 1 Million March 4 Children protest in September, which the media have portrayed in a largely negative light, depicting the protesters as disseminators of hate.
In a secularized Canada such caricatures are not unusual, but they are certainly unfair.
20 November 2023
Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a Christian
Earlier this month, Ayaan Hirsi Ali put aside such reticence and published this statement: Why I am now a Christian. Ali's story may not be familiar to everyone, but here are the basics: Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, to a politically active father who fell afoul of the Marxist regime, she and her family moved to Nairobi, Kenya. After fleeing a forced marriage, she wound up in the Netherlands in her early twenties. She became a Dutch citizen and even served in the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament before moving to the United States and becoming an American citizen. By the turn of the millennium she declared herself to be an atheist, having become disillusioned with her Muslim upbringing.
17 November 2023
November newsletter online
14 November 2023
Where are the pro-life majorities?
Kuyperian Commentary has published my latest piece, Where are the pro-life majorities? In the wake of the recent poll in Ohio that entrenched abortion rights in the state constitution, some might wonder what happened to the pro-life cause, which many thought to have a demographic advantage. Here is an excerpt:
Peter Berger once observed that, if Sweden is the most secular country on earth and India is the most religious, America is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. This saying is appealing to those who prefer to think that their troubles can be attributed to unaccountable elites who are out of tune with the people they lead.
Yet this attitude fails to account for the complexities of human nature and draws too drastic a line between leaders and led, much as Marxists persist in positing a facile cleavage between oppressors and oppressed when in reality, each of us is both oppressor and oppressed, depending on the constantly shifting circumstances in which we find ourselves. George Bernard Shaw’s wry observation is closer to the truth: “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” Leaders and led are inextricably connected with each other, and the gap between their respective worldviews is less than some would prefer to believe.
30 October 2023
Calling terrorism by name
19 October 2023
Mapping the globe
One of my prized possessions is a 1901 Cram’s Modern Atlas of the World which I purchased at an antique shop in my hometown at age 16. It’s a hefty volume with numerous indices and other helps in addition to the maps of every country in the world. The United States had only 45 states. Canada had seven provinces. To my delight, this atlas boasted a large map of Cyprus, nominally part of the Ottoman Empire but administered by Great Britain. My paternal grandparents would have been quite young in that year.
So what’s the allure? For one thing, I think in terms of maps. Familiarity with maps allows one to navigate the surface of God’s good earth. As I write, we have just returned from visiting family in the Chicago area. I know by heart the roads in the western suburbs and could easily find my way around, despite all the changes that have occurred since my youth. If I navigated by landmarks, I’d be lost in my own homeland.Read the entire article here.
17 October 2023
October newsletter now available
16 October 2023
The fight for parents' rights in Canada
First Things has just published my article, titled, The fight for parents' rights in Canada. Here is an excerpt:
Last month the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) published an article with a rather condescending tone: “Where did the term ‘parental rights' come from?” Other media outlets have published similar pieces, all imbued with the notion that parental rights is a foreign concept invented by malcontents who should be trusting their betters in the provincial education bureaucracies. These articles are responding to a recent series of protests throughout Canada, a movement called 1 Million March 4 Children. The protesters are parents concerned about public school board policies that encourage gender transitioning and the use of preferred pronouns. The media have generally portrayed these protests in a negative light, with some going so far as to depict them as disseminating hate.
Sad to say, this attitude is not unusual in Canada, where secularization has largely emptied the historic Protestant churches, including Anglican and Presbyterian congregations and the United Church of Canada.Read the rest of the article here.
12 October 2023
Contributing factors in the Israel-Hamas war
Christian Courier has published my analysis of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in which I isolate three structural factors rendering the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian struggle almost perfectly intractable: Contributing factors in the Israel-Hamas war. Here's an excerpt:
09 October 2023
Israel vs Hamas