September newsletter now online

My Global Scholars newsletter for September has now been posted. My completed manuscript is now with the publisher, a chapter of mine is in a newly published anthology, and I recommend two books I've recently read.

Discovering Dooyeweerd

Some time ago I was invited to contribute a brief chapter to an anthology on Herman Dooyeweerd's philosophy by my friend Danie F. M. Strauss. The chapter is called, "Political Idolatry: Assessing the Ideologies of Our Day," and runs for about five and a half pages. There are 61 chapters in total, among whose authors are Strauss himself (who wrote 25), Roy Clouser, Michael Goheen, Calvin Seerveld, Harry Van Dyke, Alan Cameron, James W. Skillen, and Gerit Glas. The book is Discovering Dooyeweerd and is now out from Paideia Press and available for purchase.

Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) was a Dutch Christian philosopher in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper who produced a voluminous amount of scholarship in his field. His magnum opus is A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, whose third volume I have found especially helpful for my own discipline of political science. My PhD dissertation at Notre Dame was on Dooyeweerd's political thought as compared with that of the Neo-Thomist philosopher Yves René Simon. See my Introductory Essay to Herman Dooyeweerd's Political Thought for more information on this important 20th-century philosopher.

Publishing Pasternak: a gripping account

Decades ago I read Boris Pasternak's celebrated novel, Doctor Zhivago, along with several other Russian literary classics from the 19th and 20th centuries. Years earlier I had seen David Lean's sprawling cinematic version, which won five Academy Awards and contributed a memorable musical theme to the popular repertoire. The plot follows the life of physician and poet Yuri Zhivago from 1902 until his death sometime after the Russian Revolutions and the ensuing civil war. As a typical Russian novel, its plot is complicated, brings in numerous characters with triple-barrelled names and less-than-obvious nicknames, and has dark overtones. For those unfamiliar with the twists and turns of recent Russian history, the novel can be confusing because Pasternak focusses so completely on the lives of Zhivago and the people around him that the historical events forming the backdrop often go without explicit reference in the text. Thus a preliminary acquaintance with the history is arguably a prerequisite for a satisfying read of the novel.