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.
Notes from a Byzantine-Rite Calvinist
09 April 2021
Dampening the culture wars, 9: Cyprus
06 April 2021
Dampening the culture wars, 8: Canada
- 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)
05 April 2021
England and the 'peculiar institution'
01 April 2021
Dampening the culture wars, 7: Belgium
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.
30 March 2021
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.
26 March 2021
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.
25 March 2021
Our Need for a Creed
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.
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?
22 March 2021
City planning: Paris in Chicago
19 March 2021
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.
12 March 2021
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.
10 March 2021
Canada's Crown: more than a symbol
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.
09 March 2021
Dampening the culture wars, 2: the features of power-sharing
08 March 2021
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.
Robert J. Bernhardt (1940-2021)
05 March 2021
Dampening the culture wars, 1: how to get along while agreeing to disagree
However, a few countries, while similarly divided, were spared the worst effects of this cleavage. Here the leaders of the different communities learned to co-operate for political and other common purposes, even as their respective constituents remained separated within their own communities. No longer was each side attempting to defeat the others and to gain power at their expense. Rather, they formulated ways of sharing power at the higher levels while tolerating a wide scope of diversity on the ground. Catholics, Protestants, liberals, and socialists maintained their own distinctive institutions, ranging from fraternal societies, schools, business enterprises, labour unions, artists co-operatives, and charitable foundations to print and electronic media and political parties. In short, the communities' leaders had come up with a way, in effect, to live and let live, permitting a high degree of communal autonomy so that one community would not feel oppressed by the others. Political mechanisms—some constitutional, others statutory, and still others merely conventional—were established to maintain a precarious balance among the several communities, often based on grand coalitions among several political parties, coupled with qualified majority requirements for the most significant of policy issues.
02 March 2021
Academic freedom in crisis? Towards genuine educational pluriformity
26 February 2021
Dois livros recebidos
Esta semana eu recebi dois livros de Editora Monergismo, Brasília: Thiago Moreira, Abraham Kuyper e as Bases para uma Teologia Pública (2020) e Derek C. Schuurman, Moldando um Mundo Digital: Fé, Cultura e Tecnologia Computacional (2019). Schuurman é um bom amigo meu, e eu tive o privilégio de escrever o prefácio para o livro dele.
Trent University Conservative Club
Here is an earlier version of this talk which I delivered at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2017. Naturally last evening's version was adapted to a different audience, but the substance was the same. This one includes Portuguese subtitles for my Brazilian readers.
22 February 2021
February tidbits
Here are links to three articles that have come to my attention in recent weeks. All have to do with religion's influence on public life.
The American Exception: How faith shapes economic and social policy, by Benjamin M. Friedman, in the January/February 2021 issue of Harvard Magazine. Excerpt:
Because it is true that economics emerged from the Enlightenment, and because the conventional image of the Enlightenment downplays the importance attached to religion in favor of humanistic thinking, the commonplace assumption is that economics in turn likewise stands apart from religious ideas. This is not true, nor has it been, ever since the inception of economics as a modern intellectual discipline. Taking account of the influence of religious thinking is essential to a full understanding of one of the great areas of modern human thought.
If evangelical Christians are called to live in truth, why do so many believe political conspiracies?, by Peggy Wehmeyer, in The Dallas Morning News. Excerpt:
People I know and care about still hold a shocking but unshakable belief that a deep state, involving the Supreme Court, federal judges, election officials and mainstream media, stole the White House from Donald Trump. But evangelical Christians are people who are called to live as though the truth is true, no matter the cost. I share my friends’ conservative moral values as well as their disdain for some of the progressive policies of the Democratic Party. But my fear of where President Joe Biden might take us doesn’t tempt me to swallow a web of conspiracy theories whole.
How the Civil Rights Movement Converted Liberal White Protestants to Secularism, by Daniel K. Williams, at Anxious Bench. Excerpt:
After the 1960s, mainline Protestant denominations experienced a decades-long continuous decline in membership. While the causes of the decline are complex, most analyses have pointed to one central factor: the failure of mainline Protestant churches to retain their children, first with the Baby Boomers, and then with Gen-Xers and millennials. And while a few of these youth left mainline Protestantism for conservative evangelical or Catholic churches, most became nonreligious. Yet in many cases – especially if they pursued graduate education – they retained the progressive political commitments that some of their pastors had acquired in the civil rights movement. But now that they had the moral commitment that came from the civil rights movement, they no longer saw the need for organized religion – especially organized religion that was not quite as fervent in its social justice commitments.
18 February 2021
The Enthroned Self: Carl Trueman’s Account of a Revolution
In exploring the Revolution’s architecture in part one, Trueman draws on three twentieth-century figures—Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre—whose categories he believes help us to understand recent history. Rieff, whose Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) anticipated current trends, analyzed western history in terms of three successive worlds. The first world is pagan, and its ethic is rooted in myth, such as the predictive power ascribed to the Delphic oracle. Human beings are subject to an impersonal fate that prevents them controlling the outcomes of their lives. Man in a first-world culture is political man (Trueman, 44). The second world is characterized by faith rather than fate—a faith in a God who has revealed himself in specific ways to specific peoples. Human laws are in some sense based on the will of this God, who underpins the customs and mores of entire societies. In a second-world culture, political man gives way to religious man. Both the first and second worlds justify themselves by reference to a transcendent sacred order.
17 February 2021
Biden's Burden
I’ve often said that an American president must function as both king and prime minister, and that few have played each role equally well. I believe that Biden’s address was a suitably regal speech, laudably attempting to unite a divided nation – something that his immediate predecessor seemed altogether incapable of doing. But what sort of prime minister will he make? Presidential promises to bridge divisions too often falter over the reality of divisive policies pursued in the Oval Office and in Congress. And these will inevitably hamper his efforts towards unity.
Historically Biden has been a moderate Democrat, shunning the more radical elements in his own party. But over the decades he has also shown himself to be flexible, or, to put the matter more negatively, irresolute, changing his convictions as the times and his party appear to demand. This makes Biden’s actual discharge of his duties somewhat difficult to predict. Will he expand and harden the Democrats’ non-discrimination regime, even at the expense of religious liberty? Or will he refrain from unduly interfering in the institutions of civil society and the standards they maintain as part of their core identities? How he approaches this will determine whether he is genuinely capable of reaching out to his political opponents.
11 February 2021
Christianity and Political Life
Just over a year ago, in November 2019, I spoke at the Indonesian Reformed Evangelical Church (IREC) Trinity in Toronto, pastored by the Rev. Joshua Lie, on the subject of "Christianity and Political Life." Here is the video of my talk, which I've also posted on my RECENT ACTIVITIES page. You may need to turn up the sound to hear it.
WSJ on Catholic social teachings
On 5 February this article by Francis X. Rocca appeared in The Wall Street Journal: Can Catholic Social Teaching Unite a Divided America? Subtitle: "President Biden, Sen. [Marco] Rubio and many non-Catholic thinkers see a way forward in the church’s long tradition of public discourse, even as they disagree in interpreting it." The article is behind a pay wall, but here is a brief excerpt:
What is Catholic social teaching? And why should it matter to the nearly 80% of Americans who do not belong to the church?A body of doctrine on law, politics and economics developed by popes since the late 19th century, Catholic social teaching has historically been more influential in Europe and Latin America than in the U.S. But some on both sides of the aisle, not all of them Catholic, say its concepts are especially needed at this fractured moment in American politics. “If you’re looking for a way to bridge differences and find some unity and healing, Catholic social teaching offers a path forward that challenges both right and left and calls us to work together for the common good,” said John Carr, a former adviser to the U.S. bishops who teaches at Georgetown University and who endorsed Mr. Biden last fall. “In a society with very few strong moral paradigms left, Catholic social thought is a well-organized tradition that has something for both left and right,” said Adrian Vermeule, a conservative professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. “Catholicism, despite or because of our polarized age, is becoming something like an organizing common language for a great deal of American public life.” . . .
10 February 2021
Schuman Talk
Yesterday Jeff Fountain interviewed me for the latest episode of Schuman Talks, under the auspices of the Schuman Centre for European Studies. Robert Schuman (1886-1963) was a French statesman born in Luxembourg and one of the founders of the European Union in the 1950s.
The Last Caravan
My father died in August of last year at the good old age of 92.
09 February 2021
Order of Malta
I've long been fascinated by the Order of Malta, formally known as the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, because of its unusual status as a holdover from a much earlier era and its one-time connection with my father's native island of Cyprus. Established almost a thousand years ago in 1048, it was once headquartered successively in Jerusalem, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Malta. As such it functioned as a sovereign territorial entity with its own military, led by a grand master. Sovereignty over Malta ended when Napoleon captured the islands in 1798 during his Egyptian expedition. Now located in the Grand Magistral Palace, on Via Condotti in Rome, the Order of Malta still retains some of the trappings of statehood and maintains diplomatic relations with 110 states. It mints its own coins, produces its own stamps, and issues its own passports. However, without territory many would judge that it cannot be considered a state, as James Kerr-Lindsay concludes in this video:
In 2008 the Order established diplomatic relations with Canada, although the two did not exchange ambassadors as such. Canada's contact with the Order is through this country's ambassador to the Vatican.
04 February 2021
Laymen's Lounge interview
I would love to see Christians and other likeminded citizens mobilize to launch a public justice movement. What would it look like? Unlike liberals and socialists, it would unequivocally affirm the institutions and communities of what collectively is often called civil society. Rather than attempt to have government solve every problem, it would recognize that a healthy society requires a variety of communal formations to function according to their respective callings. Businesses take seriously their stewardship of the limited resources of the earth. Families nurture the next generation and care for the aged. Schools educate children and youth. Churches gather people together to worship God and serve their neighbours. Labour unions protect workers in the workplace. Political parties formulate policy agendas seeking public justice and the common interest. You get the idea. Government would be less about solving problems and more about maintaining the legal space for a variety of agents—both individual and communal—to do what they do best.
Read the entire conversation here. Learn more about The Laymen's Lounge.
03 February 2021
Joseph's 'Little Bible'
As I was preparing a chapel meditation on Job some weeks ago, I read a commentary that described Job’s story as a microcosm of the entire biblical redemptive narrative. It begins with an idyllic life of one of God’s servants, takes him through the darkest valleys of affliction, brings in his friends’ proposed solutions to his plight, and ends with God restoring Job’s fortunes. This prompted me to look at other examples of “little bibles” in the Scriptures, and I believe several can be found in the first book of the Bible, one of which I will explore here.
The story of Joseph always moves me emotionally when I read it, as it recounts a tale of reconciliation and forgiveness in a severely dysfunctional family. Yet it has some peculiar features which make for a complicated relationship with the larger biblical narrative. Joseph is the hero of the story. Or is he?
02 February 2021
Schuman Centre talk coming up
The Schuman Centre for European Studies will be hosting this online event next week. The time will be noon EST in North America. I'll be speaking with Jeff Fountain.
01 February 2021
Electoral reform at last? The case for representation
Both Canada and the United States operate according to what political scientists call a single-member-plurality (SMP) system, or what the popular media call first-past-the-post. In a single-member constituency candidates compete for one office, the winner being the one receiving the largest number, or plurality, of votes. Where three candidates are evenly matched, it is possible for one to win with only slightly more than a third of the total number of votes cast. In the last Canadian federal election in 2019, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party received 33.12 percent of the votes cast--just under a third of the total! Yet Trudeau remains prime minister leading a single-party minority government against the preferences of two-thirds of Canadian voters. That this is considered acceptable in a democratic country skirts the edges of insanity.
29 January 2021
A path away from Kant?
It’s early pages yet, but the idea is striking: not simply that we’ve been getting it wrong with liberalism, but quite specifically: that the key mistake of liberalism is to ground all our ideals in liberty as such rather than to see individual liberties as a proper response to the authority of a human person qua human person: that abridgements of liberties are abridgements not because liberty is itself the supreme ideal but because it is violating another’s rightful authority over her own person (an authority that itself stands under the authority of God the creator).
Every prior critical treatment of liberalism I’ve read has had a fundamental failure: it had no answer for why we should see individual liberties as goods worth preserving. Koyzis, it seems, does. . . . Color me deeply, deeply intrigued.
Keep reading, my friend! Prospective readers can obtain We Answer to Another from the publisher or from the usual online vendors.
26 January 2021
Misreading Kuyper? Stewart, Hawley, and The New York Times
Enlisting Kuyper into the contemporary North American culture war has a certain plausibility, because there really are battles to be waged in the larger culture. . . . However, and this ought not to be forgotten, the antithesis between belief and unbelief does not run quite so tidily between different groups of people. Any effort to assess in a spiritually discerning way the true character of the various ideological visions and illusions on offer cannot be content to point fingers. On the contrary, we must begin within ourselves. True knowledge begins with self-knowledge, and without the latter, our efforts to remove the speck from our neighbour’s eye will be unpersuasive.
21 January 2021
Context appearance
Last week I was interviewed by Maggie John for the programme Context which airs over Yes TV in Burlington, Ontario. The topic was the storming of the Capitol two weeks ago.