Abdullah Onar, architect

Abdullah Onar at his office, 1957

My father's best childhood friend was a Turkish Cypriot named Abdullah Onar (1929-2019) who came from a neighbouring village in the Karpas Peninsula. He became an architect who designed many buildings in the island. He was also a competent artist, some of whose works I have posted below. I recently came into contact with his great-grandnephew who lives in England, and I quickly discovered that we are distant DNA cousins, which likely means that Abdullah was related to us as well.

Dampening the culture wars: a review

My series on Dampening the culture wars is now complete. Here is a review of the entire series for those wishing to read it from start to finish:

1. How to get along while agreeing to disagree

2. The features of power-sharing

3. What is to be done?

4. What is to be done? continued

5. The Netherlands

6. Lebanon

7. Belgium

8. Canada

9. Cyprus

10. The United States of America

11. Concluding remarks

 I will likely be returning to this topic in future, but this is all for now.

How does politics shape the way we see the world?

Some weeks ago Andrew Bertodatti, of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, interviewed me on the subject of my Political Visions and Illusions: How does politics shape the way we see the world? This was posted yesterday. Here is an excerpt:

How do you suggest believers approach public justice? In your view, what is the source of our disagreements about what justice requires?

There are two sources of our disagreements. First, we may disagree on basic principles of justice, in which case it may be that we have been negatively influenced by the redemptive stories told by the secular ideologies I treat in my book. Perhaps we have become Christian socialists, or Christian nationalists, or some such. A major reason for my writing this book is to move believers into examining themselves to see whether they are in fact accepting an unbiblical redemptive narrative and whether this might be adversely affecting their approach to political life.

Dampening the culture wars, 11: Concluding remarks

My motive in writing this series has been to explore the ways in which people in leadership, representing diverse and potentially antagonistic communities, have undertaken to co-operate for political purposes. In the 1960s and '70s such arrangements were grouped together under the general rubric of consociationalism, a term borrowed from the writings of 16th-century political philosopher Johannes Althusius, whose Politics represents a minority pluralist stream in the modern age, otherwise dominated by a monistic emphasis on undisputed sovereignty. We noted at the outset that Sir Bernard Crick famously defined politics as the peaceful conciliation of diversity within a given unit of rule. All politics presupposes diversity in some measure: a diversity of political philosophies, a diversity of prudential judgements on practical policy issues, a diversity of legitimate interests, and so forth. But sometimes this diversity is of such an extreme nature that it threatens the ability of the system to accommodate it within a single framework. This is where a consociational arrangement can play a significant role.

Prince Philip's long life and Christian faith

My regular column in Christian Courier was posted yesterday: Prince Philip's long life and Christian faith, subtitled, "From a troubled childhood to the longest-serving prince consort." An excerpt:

Baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church, Philip converted to the Church of England at the time of his marriage to Princess Elizabeth in 1947. At the same time he was granted several titles, most notably Duke of Edinburgh.

The writers for The Crown suggest that Prince Philip flirted with atheism in his younger years, but former Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, claims to The Yorkshire Post that Philip discussed with him freely his and the Queen’s shared rootedness in the Christian faith: “Of course, the Queen and I are so strong in Jesus Christ.” His remarkable mother, Princess Alice, had founded an order of Orthodox nuns in Greece, spent the war years sheltering Jews during the German occupation, and ended her life at Buckingham Palace with her son and daughter-in-law. Her presence in Philip’s life likely had an impact on his own faith. Nevertheless, he was known to be inquisitive about other religions and was interested in fostering interfaith dialogue.

Read the entire column here.

Dampening the culture wars, 10: the United States of America

Thus far we have examined several countries, most of which have attempted in large or small ways to bridge the chasms separating distinct communities within a single polity by formulating practical means of sharing power at the level of leadership. In the Netherlands the cleavages were religious and ideological. In Belgium they started out religious/ideological but shifted to linguistic after the Second World War. In Lebanon the cleavages were religious—or sectarian, as some prefer. In Canada the cleavage was primarily linguistic, with elements of religion and ideology thrown in. In Cyprus the cleavage was ethnic and religious, greatly exacerbated by nationalist ideology.

Now we turn to the United States, which, over the past two generations, has become increasingly divided along ideological and religious lines. In this respect, the United States, which once stood aloof from the trends affecting Europe, is coming to resemble France in the wake of the Revolution and ensuing Napoleonic debacle.

Dampening the culture wars, 9: Cyprus

Cyprus is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, located off the coast where Asia Minor turns into the Levant. It has been a crossroads of virtually all the imperial powers in the region, having been controlled successively by the Romans, the Byzantines, the Lusignan dynasty, the Venetian Republic, the Ottoman Turks, and finally the British, before receiving independence in 1960 as a member state of the Commonwealth of Nations. The population of Cyprus is overwhelmingly Greek-speaking, with the Greek presence in the island dating back nearly 3,000 years. The population has, of course, fluctuated over the centuries and is currently estimated to stand at just over 1 million. Around half a century ago, the island had around 650,000 people of whom 80 percent were Greek-speaking and Orthodox Christian, and just under 20 percent Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslim. The Turkish-Cypriot community was a remnant of the centuries of Ottoman occupation between 1571 and 1878.

In 1878 Great Britain received administrative control over Cyprus as part of the settlement that ended the Russo-Turkish war of the previous year. The first British colonial high commissioner was Sir Garnet Wolseley (1833-1913), who had put down the Red River rebellion in Canada nearly a decade earlier. From 1878 until 1914, the island's residents remained nominal subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, but when Britain entered the Great War against Turkey, she annexed it outright, lest its residents be considered enemy aliens. Cyprus became a Crown colony in 1925. My father was born there three years later and grew up in the Greek Orthodox community, although he had Turkish Cypriot friends, including a boy born exactly one year after he was. This man remained one of his best friends throughout their long lives.

Dampening the culture wars, 8: Canada

Ordinarily we wouldn't think of placing Canada in the category of consociational arrangements, and for the most part we'd be right. The Westminster system of cabinet government seems tailor-made for a polity characterized by a high degree of internal homogeneity, which Canada obviously is not. The current British system, on which Canada's is based, developed gradually over the course of many centuries without the guidance of a constitutional document but under the accumulated deposit of a large number of statutory instruments, including the following:

• Magna Carta (1215)
• Petition of Right (1628)
• Habeas Corpus Act (1679)
  
• Bill of Rights (1689)
• Act of Settlement (1701)
  
• Reform Act (1832)
• Various acts expanding the franchise (1867, 1884, 1928)
  
• Life Peerages Act (1958)
• Scotland Act (1998)
  
• House of Lords Act (1999)
  

England and the 'peculiar institution'

Recently I read an abridged volume of Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, which were published between 1765 and 1769 in four books, titled Of the Rights of Persons, Of the Rights of Things, Of Private Wrongs, and Of Public Wrongs. Blackstone's Commentaries were hugely influential on the American founders, who drew on his analyses as they were establishing their new federal republic in North America. (Blackstone appears to have been less influential in Canada. I find only two references to him in the parliamentary debates leading up to Confederation in 1867, and one of these is negative.) Yet one area in which Blackstone was not followed consistently was on slavery.

Dampening the culture wars, 7: Belgium

These days when we hear of Brussels, we think, not of the kingdom of Belgium of which it is the capital city, but of the European Union and its institutions, many of which are located here. When Europeans complain about Brussels, they generally have in mind faceless "Eurocrats" whose decisions are often seen as needlessly interfering with their lives and livelihoods. But Belgium as a country, so often overshadowed by its better-known capital city, merits examination as an historical example of consociationalism, and one whose character has shifted over the past century, as language has come to supplant religion and ideology as the principal line of cleavage in its divided populace.

Belgium became independent almost by accident. For centuries its fate was tied to that of the remainder of the lowlands of northwestern Europe, a part of the Holy Roman Empire that passed into the hands of Spain in 1556. While the Dutch revolt beginning in 1568 sent shock waves throughout these provinces, the Spanish Habsburgs under Philip II managed to retain control of the southern provinces, cut almost in two by the episcopal principality of Liège, a collection of ecclesiastical lands over which the Bishop of Liège exercised political rule. In 1714 the Spanish Netherlands passed into the hands of the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs, who retained control until they were dislodged by the French Revolution.

Dampening the culture wars, 6: Lebanon

The Middle East, at one time called the Near East, has been politically unstable for just over a century, when the victors in the Great War divided the territory of the former Ottoman Empire between them. France and Great Britain were the principal parties to this division, with the former receiving Syria and the latter receiving Palestine and Mesopotamia. The borders were artificial and did not correspond to the boundaries between the various communities in the region. Britain set up Iraq (southern Mesopotamia) and the Trans-Jordan as monarchies under the Hashemite dynasty. 

For its part France divided the former Ottoman province of Syria into two, with the southern coastal area, with its Christian majority, designated as Lebanon, or the Lebanon, as it was often referred to in English. France deliberately separated Lebanon from the remainder of Syria to accommodate this Christian population, who would otherwise have been a minority in a greater Syria. Christian communities survived in Lebanon because of their relative isolation in its higher-elevation topography. Nevertheless, Lebanon had a substantial Muslim minority who were more oriented towards their co-religionists in neighbouring Syria than to the west. For them the division of Syria seemed arbitrary and artificial.

Dampening the culture wars, 5: the Netherlands

In the first four instalments of this series, we explored some of the principal characteristics of power-sharing in a divided polity, which collectively are often called consociational. I noted that there is no single form of consociational arrangement but that all are intended to facilitate co-operation among leaders of sharply divided communities for proximate political purposes. Each country that has happened upon such an arrangement has its own story. Today I will focus on the Netherlands.

Our Need for a Creed

Kuyperian Commentary has published my article, Our Need for a Creed. The occasion for my writing this was our congregation singing a hymn not usually sung in churches standing in the Reformed tradition: "My faith has found a resting place, Not in device nor creed," which suggests that there is something wrong with creedal statements. An excerpt:

The most ecumenical of our creeds, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, was compiled in the heat of controversy over the person of Christ and the divinity of the Holy Spirit in the 4th century, when on two occasions the bishops of the church were assembled, following the precedent established in Acts 15, to settle the issues at stake. The result was a creed that is binding on both eastern and western churches. Originally expressed in the first-person-plural—”We believe in one God”—it was later modified to speak in the first-person-singular: “I believe in one God . . . .” But whether in the plural or the singular, it expresses beautifully the faith of a community. Adhering to this faith is not only a sign of inclusion, as some might express it today. It is a matter of life and death, as the pseudo-Athanasian creed tells us: “This is the catholic faith: one cannot be saved without believing it firmly and faithfully.” To stray beyond the boundaries of the faith is to place oneself in peril. Thus the need for a creed.

Read the entire article here.

The Virtual Illusion: Social Media’s Uneasy Relationship with Real Community

Cateclesia Forum has just published my essay, The Virtual Illusion: Social Media’s Uneasy Relationship with Real Community. An excerpt:

We live in an age when there is an unprecedented amount of information bombarding us from all directions. With computer technology’s great leap forward in the 1980s and ’90s, our social networks have expanded exponentially, keeping us in constant contact with friends, family, and co-workers around the world. This interconnectedness has refashioned our notion of community, bursting through the old geographical limits that once circumscribed our social circles.

But what has this done to our lives as members of specific communities? If our loyalties are more diffuse than ever before, and if each of us can in effect create his or her own community, how has this affected, for example, the political bonds of solidarity that hold citizens together in a public legal community ordered to doing justice? What, further, is this doing to the church institution?

Read the entire article here.

City planning: Paris in Chicago

When I was a child, I fancied myself becoming an architect or a city planner and nurtured this ambition right up until my first year in high school. Growing up near Chicago, I was fascinated by this city's many cultural attractions, of which the Art Institute in particular stands out. Around 1850, when my 4th great-grandparents, Jeremiah and Nancy (Bridgeman) Davis moved from North Carolina to Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, along the Ohio River across from Kentucky, Americans thought that the centre of population growth in Illinois would be along the Rivers in the southern part of the state. At the time Chicago was a village of some 30,000 people along Lake Michigan in the far north.

Dampening the culture wars, 4: what is to be done? continued

In last Friday's post I outlined four initial characteristics of a consociational political arrangement. These are 1. Executive power-sharing or grand coalitions; 2. Balanced executive-legislative relations, semi-separation of powers; 3. Balanced bicameralism & minority representation; and 4. Multi-party system. Now we move on to numbers 5 and 8 which will fill out the principal characteristics of a political arrangement based on power-sharing among potentially antagonistic communities.

Dampening the culture wars, 3: what is to be done?

In my previous posts I discussed the role that various consociational mechanisms have played in allowing potentially hostile subcultures to live together under the same political system. In my last post I mentioned four broad characteristics conducive to this co-existence: (1) élite accommodation, (2) mutual veto or concurrent majority, (3) proportionality in representation,  and (4) segmental autonomy. Now it's time to unpack these further into eight categories, which are useful as we compare them to the majoritarian principles employed in most English-speaking democracies, including Canada and the United States. These eight characteristics, four of which we shall look at today are based on empirical observation, but they might also be said to constitute an agenda for allowing potentially antagonistic subcultures to live together in peace. It might not fit well on a placard, and it doesn't lend itself to easy sloganeering, but it may be time to move beyond that.

Canada's Crown: more than a symbol

Following the explosive interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle earlier in the week, Canadians and citizens of other Commonwealth realms may be rethinking their ties to the Crown. After a royal scandal, we can almost always count on someone, usually at The Toronto Star, to write an op-ed piece advocating that we scrap the monarchy and adopt an elected head of state. Thus it is refreshing to read this analysis at CBC News by Aaron Wherry: Time for Canada to retire the Queen? It's not that simple. An excerpt:

Any move to cut ties with the monarchy would, for instance, likely bring with it renewed calls for an elected head of state. That might seem like the sort of thing any respectable nation should have in 2021. But the possible future implications for the rest of Canada's political system should not be ignored.

Dampening the culture wars, 2: the features of power-sharing

The late British political scientist Sir Bernard Crick (1929-2008) famously wrote that politics is all about the peaceful conciliation of diversity in a particular unit of rule. "Politics arises from accepting the fact of the simultaneous existence of different groups, hence different interests and different traditions, within a territorial unit under a common rule." It represents "at least some tolerance of differing truths, some recognition that government is possible, indeed best conducted, amid the open canvassing of rival interests." Totalitarian regimes pretend that a single interest characterizes entire societies and treats those failing to conform to it as enemies of the state. But ordinary politics presupposes diversity and formulates ways to address it rather than to suppress it.

A Creed for troubled times

Christian Courier carries my monthly column in its new issue: A creed for troubled times: Proclaiming the resurrection amidst lockdowns and political tension. An excerpt:

Throughout the world many Christians recite or chant on a weekly basis the ancient Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, with these familiar closing lines: “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” When repeated so frequently, it is easy to neglect their inner meaning. Yet the words enter our hearts in a subconscious way, available to us when we need them.

And now, of all times, we definitely need them. The past year has been difficult for so many people. We long ago tired of the imposed (necessary) lockdowns. Tensions have boiled over into violence in the United States, Russia, and even the otherwise peaceful Netherlands. Existing societal divisions have been exacerbated by the need for physical distancing. More than two million people have died from COVID-19, and some of these deaths have touched family and friends. . . .

During these troubled times, the message of Easter takes on deeper meaning. In 12 years, we will celebrate the 2,000th anniversary of Jesus’ death and resurrection, by far the most significant events in human history. For just as God raised Jesus from the dead, so he has promised that we too shall be raised at the last day. This is something that I am taking great comfort in after seeing so much adversity in so many people’s lives.

Read the entire column here.