Suggested books for students

During my recent visit to Grove City College, I was given the opportunity to have lunch with some students in the cafeteria, along with Michael Coulter, my principal host in the political science department. During our conversation, Michael asked which books I might recommend the students to read. As I had just discussed Dietrich Bonhoeffer's witness the previous evening in response to a question from the audience, the first book I thought of was his Life Together, a magnificent book that emphasizes the need to love the existing Christian community, with all its warts and flaws, over our own aspirations for such community.

Where would I be without Bob Goudzwaard?

Christian Courier has picked up my tribute to Bob Goudzwaard: Where would I be without Bob Goudzwaard? Subtitle: "Goudzwaard always emphasized the human side of economics. He passed away at age 90."

Catholic integralism: response to a response

During my time at Calvin University earlier this month, I was invited to respond to an important book by Kevin Vallier, titled, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford: 2023). The subject is Catholic integralism, a position calling for the state to establish the Roman Catholic Church, giving it a privileged position above other churches and religious faiths. In his book, Vallier, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University and a convert to Orthodoxy, makes a carefully argued case against integralism, effectively demonstrating its flaws with respect to history, symmetry, transition, stability, and justice. He then examines Confucian and Islamic anti-liberalisms before proposing in an epilogue his own alternative, which amounts to tolerance of "integration writ small," that is, local experiments in integralism within an adapted liberal order coupled with a more decentralized federalism: "Liberals must both unite to protect liberal order and concede some political independence to nonliberal communities of faith" (275).

Bob Goudzwaard (1934-2024)

This past weekend we learned that Bob Goudzwaard has departed this life at the age of 90. Goudzwaard was a political economist who was steeped in the Christian tradition, especially in that branch of the faith downstream from Augustine, John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, and Herman Dooyeweerd. Born and raised in Delft, the Netherlands, he lived through the difficult war years. When he came of age, he studied at the University of Rotterdam and came under the influence of Johan P. A. Mekkes (1898-1987), an adherent of the school founded by Herman Dooyeweerd known as the Philosophy of the Law Idea. Eventually he would teach at the Free University of Amsterdam and also served for a time in the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament with the Anti-Revolutionary Party.

April newsletter online

I have now posted my Global Scholars Canada newsletter for April, which includes travels to Calvin University and Grove City College, where I spoke on sections from my forthcoming book, Citizenship Without Illusions.

Grove City College stay

Not quite two weeks after my visit to Calvin University, I drove down to Grove City College, a Christian university in the Reformed tradition where my great friend Russell D. Kosits now teaches. I had, of course, heard of the place, but this was the first opportunity to see it for myself, and I very much liked what I saw. The drive from Hamilton is about four hours crossing the border via the Peace Bridge connecting Fort Erie and Buffalo. The weather co-operated quite nicely, and my time there coincided with two bright spring days, with trees on campus just beginning to flower.

Grove City College is nearly 150 years old, having been established in 1876. It once had a connection to the Presbyterian Church (USA), but no longer. It is a private liberal arts undergraduate university and has more than 2,000 young people enrolled as students.

An enduring hope

My regular monthly column for April has been posted at Christian Courier: An enduring hope. An excerpt:

When we are young, we don’t bother to think much about our eventual demise, assuming that a good half century or more stretches before us, if God is willing. During my own youth, I was more likely to worry about what I would fill those future years with so as not to waste the gifts God had given me. When I began writing this column, I was all of 35 years old, with most of my academic career still lying ahead.

But now that I approach the biblical three score years and ten, my vantage point has shifted. Over the past five years, I have lost both of my parents and both of my parents-in-law. A close friend of mine – younger than I by a good ten years or so – recently lost his wife and his father-in-law in short order. And now we have received the news that my father’s sister-in-law in Cyprus has departed this life.

Read the entire article here.

Mulroney's contested legacy

Christian Courier has published my assessment of our recently deceased prime minister: Mulroney's contested legacy. An excerpt:

Becoming leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives in 1983, Mulroney put together an unprecedented coalition of often fractious groups within the party, cruising to victory the following year. For the first time since Diefenbaker’s 1958 majority government, Mulroney brought Québec into the Conservative Party, winning 58 of the province’s 75 seats in the Commons. But rather than forming an enduring national base for his party, he succeeded only in stitching together a precarious patchwork that began to pull apart during his second term.

Read the entire article here.

Calvin University visit

I have just returned from nearly a week at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I attended two back-to-back conferences. The first was the annual Kuyper Conference, which lasted from tuesday, 2 April to thursday, 4 April. The second was the biennial Henry Institute Symposium, which ran from thursday, 4 April to saturday, 6 April. The Kuyper Conference was devoted to "Stewardship in the Kingdom: Business, Academy, and Society." It began with a plenary session consisting of a live podcast discussion among James Eglinton, Gray Sutanto, Cory Brock, and Marinus de Jong. This was part of their Grace in Common podcast, on which I myself appeared last year. My involvement with this conference was minimal, extending to hearing plenaries and short papers.