Your support makes a difference

Dear Global Scholars support community:

It's now been settled. My forthcoming book will be called Citizenship Without Illusions: A Christian Guide to Political Engagement. I have just received word that InterVarsity Press's publications committee approved the title. The book will be out in November 2024.

In these final days of 2023, please consider making a financial contribution to my work with Global Scholars Canada, a registered charity with the Canada Revenue Agency.

GSC's page for giving can be found here. Once you are in the page, scroll down to the heading marked DONATION DETAILS, and then choose one of the options under FUND. Americans may donate through our sister organization in the US, a registered charity in that country.

Kuyper on education

A good friend alerted me to this quotation from one of Abraham Kuyper's parliamentary speeches delivered in his last months as Prime Minister of the Netherlands:

FEBRUARY 1, 1905 

Mr. 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." 

December newsletter online

My Global Scholars newsletter for December is now online. Items include: a publication date for my next book (November 2024), podcast interviews, and even a visit to a local high school class.

City on a Hill podcast: We Answer to Another

Not quite two years ago, I appeared on Aeric Estep and Scott Reavely's City on a Hill podcast to discuss my first book, Political Visions and Illusions. Last week the duo interviewed me on the subject of my second book, We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God: We Answer to Another: An Interview with David Koyzis. I found my conversation with them most enjoyable and hope others will as well. I expect that I will be talking with them again after my forthcoming book is published next November.

Estep and Reavely are pastors at New Life Church in West Linn, Oregon, United States.