Recent activities for March 2025

My Global Scholars Canada newsletter for March 2025 is now posted. Included is a 30th anniversary celebration of the organization I serve, podcast and radio interviews, and an essay to mark the 1,700 anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea.

The Idolatry of Politics

Last summer Peter Bell interviewed me on the subject of my two best-known books, Political Visions and Illusions and Citizenship Without Illusions. In this conversation I discuss two events in my youth that pushed me to the study of politics and, much later, how I came to write my books. The length is just under 50 minutes.

Faith Today review of CWI

Another review of my Citizenship Without Illusions has been published in the March/April 2025 issue of the Canadian periodical Faith Today. The author is David Daniels, a retired Baptist minister. An excerpt:

Balancing political engagement with ultimate allegiance to God’s Kingdom has always challenged Christians. Tackling that challenge, Koyzis draws from the experiences of people and movements ranging from biblical antiquity to the present. He addresses the legitimacy (or not) of civil disobedience, providing guiding principles for those who choose to resist governments. He warns readers of the ever-present danger of falling prey to political illusions imbedded in an over reliance on ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, conservatism and nationalism, to name a few. He reminds Christians that allegiance to the Christian gospel “may come to be regarded as an affront to the jealous gods of expressive individualism” so evident in western democracies today.

The full review can be found here.

Assessing 'Hopeful Realism'

One of the benefits of being an author with InterVarsity Press is that the publisher occasionally sends me other books it has published in my field. One of these is Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics, written by my esteemed colleagues Jesse Covington, Bryan T. McGraw, and Micah Watson, whom I regularly see at the biennial Henry Institute Symposia at Calvin University. The co-authors here undertake to address the relative paucity of evangelical political reflection and the tendency of flesh-and-blood evangelicals to embrace dubious political positions without engaging in the due reflection necessary for wise political judgement and action. Thirty years ago historian Mark Noll wrote that the "scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." As we approach the quarter-century mark, our co-authors express a similar lament:

Kesler on national conservatism

I have written before in this space and elsewhere on the American-Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony and his distinctive approach to nationalism and conservatism. A principal difficulty with Hazony's approach is that his defence of his purported national conservatism, as he calls it, is basically historicist, assuming that norms for political action are reducible to traditions specific to given national communities. This leaves him fundamentally unable to challenge injustices occurring elsewhere in the world and leaves him without any norms to judge these traditions.

First Things articles archived and reposted

The journal First Things recently revamped its website and in the process deleted virtually everything I wrote for them as an occasional blogger between 2009 and 2023. Although many of these posts were already crosslisted with this blog, others were not. I have thus created a page with links to nearly 40 of the more significant of these: First Things posts. An archived list of links to the original posts can also be found here. (Oddly enough, even the temporally-specific pop-ups have been archived too!)

I assume that items written by other past bloggers have been deleted as well and that my 21 January post, FT's evolution: 'populism' overtakes 'highbrow', didn't play a role. But who knows?