'Well, nobody's perfect.'

If the federal government has its way with Bill C-38, might the humour in this dialogue between Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Billy Wilder's classic Some Like It Hot be lost on a future generation of Canadians?

An odd provision

The drama over Patriarch Irineos' inconclusive ouster from the patriarchal see of Jerusalem continues, as the church's Holy Synod names an interim replacement. The AP report states something that would strike most westerners as bizarre:

Legally, though, church leaders cannot dismiss [Irineos]: Only the governments in areas where his congregation lives -- Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority -- have the power to do that, by withdrawing recognition of him.

Is this really provided for in the Orthodox Church's canon law? Does political authority really trump ecclesiastical authority on such a matter? If so, one wonders whether this is a holdover from Ottoman and Byzantine practice.

Categorical imperiousness

The following conversation may or may not have been overheard in an ethics class in East Prussia near the end of the 18th century:

Exasperated professor: "You have a duty to be morally autonomous."
Inquisitive student: "Why?"
"Because it’s a mark of mature adulthood."
"Why?"
"Because it just is."
"Why?"
"Because I say so."

Hey, where'd it go?

Perhaps this is the equivalent of our waking up one morning and finding Lake Ontario gone: "Lake disappears, baffling villagers."

Constitutional change and mass democracy

In the wake of yesterday's definitive repudiation of the new European constitution by French voters, the fate of the document is now in doubt. According to this report, "French voters stunned President Jacques Chirac and the continent's political elite." Really? Stunned? In fact, this was a fairly predictable result, as I have been saying for some time.

Dead in the water?

Is the new European Constitution finished? Might the European Union itself be put in crisis by France's rejection of the document? We shall see.

An anniversary

I wonder whether I am the only Reformed Christian to remember this tragic anniversary every year. Certainly the Orthodox can never forget it.

A graduation reflection

Today we witnessed the graduation of the class of 2005 at Redeemer. This was the 20th graduation and the 18th graduation of which I have been part. I am sure I am not the only one of my colleagues to find such occasions rather poignant, as they are times of saying farewell to young people in whom we have invested so much of our energies over four or five years. I myself tend to become (perhaps excessively) fond of my own students, and I still do not find it emotionally easy to let them go, even if the time is right for them to move on. Over the years God has seen fit to grant me the privilege of shaping some extraordinary young people. At the end of the day I cannot say whether they or I have benefitted more from these relationships. Perhaps both.

One of these remarkable young persons, Rob Joustra, has written yet another testimony as to how his experience at Redeemer shaped him over the course of four years. Rather than content myself merely to link to his thoughts, I here reproduce them in their entirety:

Redeemer University's annual commencement ceremony is set for this Saturday, May 28. Commencement has always had a peculiar flavour, in its mixture and tension of emotion. It is, absolutely, a time of celebration. But for those of us for whom our time at Redeemer has been a seminal, life-altering experience, it is also a justifiable time of lamentation. This time will not come again, and it's right at the close of it all to spend some time in meditation on what it has meant.

One of the things that Redeemer and its community has taught me is a radical redefinition of education and truth. Entering Redeemer I was no academic, or even budding intellectual, but all the same I possessed all the pride of one who could have been. I craved long CV's, complex arguments, and impressive displays of academic prowess. Intellect was power: the ability to manipulate in conversation, in definition and imposition. Education was elite. It drew me apart from the person on the street, and made me feel better than my other when I was reduced to conversing with my fellow man. Education was my ticket away from mediocrity. The truth of Christ already embettered me, gave me enlightenment over my secular compatriot, and Christian education could only further that gap. Education even gave me an edge over my brothers and sisters in other traditions. While it was true I would admit to their influence, and incredible gifts, only I could be in a position to truly suture and discern their tradition. I expected to graduate Redeemer with a shiny new gavel firmly in hand.

I was deep in prayer with a wonderful Pentecostal friend of mine this past week when we were struck with a new radical vision. To our collective surprise, we prayed that Christ would grant us towels in our Commencement, not gavels. Suddenly the journey of understanding of education burst open. We had this picture of being handed our diplomas, and of our diplomas being towels that we must wrap around our waists and use to wash feet. How many pieces of paper like that are just gavels, pieces of judgement, of elitism and pride? Contra the world, we graduate to service, not comfort. We graduate to compassion, love, and mercy, not judgement, condemnation and elitism. Jean Vanier writes of this truth we have pressed for in his Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John:

Even though truth makes us free, we never possess it.
We are called humbly to contemplate the truth that is given to us,
to search unceasingly in order to be drawn into truth,
to let ourselves be led, in the company of others,
into the unfolding mystery of truth,
to be possessed by truth and to serve truth.

To live truth is to live a relationship of love
with the Word of God made flesh,
who is truth, compassion and forgiveness.
To be true is to let oneself be challenged by others
and to accept all the brokeness in us.
The truth, then, is not something to make us feel superior.
On the contrary, it calls us into humility, to littleness
and to the light of love.
All the light in us comes from light of the Word of God.
The light of truth, then, is a gentle marriage
of what we see and experience,
with what we have received from above and the Word of God,
each one enlightening the other, each one calling us to live in God
and to see things through the loving eyes and loving heart of God.

May the towels we have prepared to receive this Saturday be worthy for such a task...

Incidentally, Mr. Joustra managed to win the coveted Faculty Award, thus making him the second of my protégés to do so in as many years. Congratulations! It seems our department is on a roll. Just wait until next year.

Coming to a riding association near you

The Globe and Mail is sitting up and taking notice: "Christian activists capturing Tory races." One hopes that The Globe's motive for publishing this report and Gloria Galloway's reason for writing it is not to advocate the imposition of a religious test on candidates for public office.

Doctorate conferred

In February one of my esteemed protégés, Paul A. Brink, successfully defended his dissertation, "The Idea of a Pluralist Politics: Pluralism and Consensus in John Rawls's Political Liberalism," at the University of Notre Dame, thereby earning the degree of doctor of philosophy. This past weekend Dr. Brink received the diploma recognizing this achievement at Notre Dame's annual commencement exercises.



Dr. Brink, with son Jesse

Paul graduated from Redeemer in 1993 with a degree in political science. From there he attended Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he received a master's degree in the subject. And then on to Notre Dame, where he focussed on the subfield of political theory. (Funny, but his academic garb looks vaguely familiar.) Congratulations, Paul! We're all very proud of you, and certainly no one is more so than I myself.

The decline and persistence of faith

Sociologist Steve Bruce of the University of Aberdeen asks of his own Scotland, "Is Christianity facing a slow, inevitable death?" Here he charts the decline of adherence to the national Church of Scotland, and even to the Catholic Church and the smaller free churches, over the course of 150 years. Concludes Bruce:

People do not accidentally become religious. Being a Christian is not "natural"; it is an acquired characteristic. Like a language, it must be learned and, if it is not used in the home, in everyday conversation and in public life, it dies out. As the population that speaks a minority tongue shrinks, decline does not slow; it becomes faster. There is no natural obstacle to the death of a language. I do not see why the fate of a religion should be different.

The analogy to language can be taken further than Bruce himself recognizes. Individual languages may indeed die out, as he correctly notes. Think of the fate of Cornish or old Prussian. But the human capacity for language itself does not. Even if, say, Occitan dies out, the descendants of its speakers simply take on French as their primary means of communication. Similarly the decline of Christianity does not mean the decline of faith; rather it means the taking on of another faith -- perhaps a secular one based on a closed view of the cosmos and bereft of a personal deity. But it is a faith all the same.

Site redesigned

Belinda Stronach's website has finally been refurbished. No Tory blue in the background. Just a waving flag with the parliament buildings behind. Stronach's photograph looks the same — taken, of course, before her defection.

Meanwhile in Newfoundland. . .

. . . the Liberals have held on to Labrador, thereby increasing their slender hold on the reins of power in Ottawa. No more confidence votes in the Commons for now, it seems.

The US President: kingly and prime-ministerial duties

Several years ago I received a phone call from the office of a member of parliament representing the old Reform Party. His assistant let me know that he would be at Redeemer on such and such a date, and would I like him to speak to my class. I immediately declined the offer, indicating that we were behind in the material to be covered and couldn't spare the hour. What I did not tell her was that I was reluctant to see my class turned into a partisan political platform by someone who would shortly be seeking re-election. One of my colleagues did indeed take up the offer, so I sat in on his class to see what happened. Sure enough, as I had feared, the MP had little of substance to say and he did indeed manage to turn his "lecture" into a campaign speech. My colleague later told me he had regretted turning valuable class time over to him.

I had this episode in the back of my mind when I heard the news that President Bush was to speak at Calvin College's commencement ceremony. I was not surprised to hear that many faculty and students objected to his presence, given that a partisan political leader inevitably carries with him the lingering scent of the controversies he and his policies may have stirred up in the course of his time in office. By hosting such a leader, the institution could be perceived to be approving such policies as well as the person behind them. I will not here comment on the substance of Bush's agenda or on the concerns of the faculty who took out the newspaper advertisement in advance of the President's visit. However, I think it worth noting that the American constitution prescribes a presidency which must inevitably unite in a single office what might be called kingly and prime-ministerial duties.

Here in Canada last week we saw a good deal of excitement in the House of Commons as a sitting government was very nearly defeated on a motion of nonconfidence. Two days earlier we saw a dramatic defection to the government front benches, and the animosities that this stirred up on the opposition side of the chamber. Meanwhile, the Queen touched down out west for her tour of Saskatchewan and Alberta, to celebrate one-hundred years since these provinces entered confederation. As head of state, the Queen stays above partisan politics, as (ostensibly) do her representatives, the governor general and the ten lieutenant governors. Thus she could remain blithely undisturbed by the events going on thousands of miles away in Ottawa, continuing to carry out her responsibilities as the chief symbol of the unity of the nation. Any university would be honoured to have the Queen at its commencement. Paul Martin, on the other hand, would be a different matter.

South of the border, however, head of state and head of government are combined in the single office of president. This means that, whenever a president undertakes a duty appropriate for a supra-partisan head of state, he inevitably runs the risk of being perceived as a mere prime minister, caught up in all the divisiveness of the day-to-day partisan political process. This is undoubtedly how many of the Calvin faculty perceived Bush's participation in last saturday's graduation exercises. Now I feel comfortable in the judgement that Bush gave a quite good speech -- a "kingly" speech really -- appealing to the students' youthful ideals and urging them on to service of God and their fellow human beings. Nothing was said about stem cell research, judicial nominations or Iraq. Moreover, his mention of Abraham Kuyper was a good example of knowing an audience and appealing to something to which they can easily relate. Bush, in my estimation, successfully left his prime-ministerial role behind and spoke in his kingly role.

Yet because a president must be both king and prime minister, sorting out the responsibilities of each and trying to maintain an effective separation between the two are not easy things to do. Presidents rarely make good kings and good prime ministers at the same time. They usually excel at one or the other, and they frequently excel at neither. They hardly ever do well at both. Did the Calvin faculty fail to honour duly constituted authority, as Chuck Colson charges in today's Breakpoint commentary? Given that I am currently writing a monograph on authority, this question is of particular interest to me. In response, I will only say that I would not go that far, as the protest against the actions of someone holding a particular authoritative office need hardly be understood as a denial of the authority of the office itself. However, it seems to me that the events last weekend in Grand Rapids, Michigan, illustrate at the very least the inevitable conflict of roles that comes with an office combining the functions of head of state and head of government in the same person.

Europe's constitution: back to square one?

If Ipsos is correct that French Voters Would Reject European Constitution, then a lot of effort will have been wasted on a document that will join Canada's Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords in the dustbin of constitutional histories.

Goals in tension?

"Catholic church launches recruitment drive for priesthood." Given priestly celibacy, one wonders whether this campaign might not conflict with the church's efforts to stem Europe's demographic decline and to bring the birthrate back up above replacement level. Or is that too protestant a question?

Unfair discrimination?

This is from an article in The Scotsman: "Atheist teacher at Catholic school was 'second-class citizen'." One wonders why Mr. MacNab finds it so outrageous that a Catholic school should prefer a Catholic to an atheist for the position of principal teacher of pastoral care. Would he think it amiss that an atheists' society would pass over a professing Catholic in filling one of its own leadership posts?

Two years of freer travel

The final sentence in Carol Pucci's "Postcard from Europe: Nicosia, Cyprus" is misleading. Travel between the two sides of the divided island was eased just over two years ago, in April 2003 — slightly more than a year before entry into the European Union, and a day or two after I began this blog.

Just a question


Thamesweb

Have Canadians lost sight of the true meaning of Victoria Day?

Europe's future: Ukrainians to the rescue?

Could the beginnings of Pope Benedict's spiritual renewal of Europe be seen in Viktor Yushchenko's Ukraine? Here is some intriguing evidence of this possibility: "Ukraine President Transforming Country into a Nation of God."