Friday, 18 September saw the last two significant events of my stay in the Netherlands. That morning Hildebrand drove me the 30 kilometres from Nijkerk to Ede, the location of one of the principal Christian universities in the country. Its formal name is Christelijke Hogeschool Ede (CHE), also known at the Ede Christian University of Applied Sciences. CHE is a publicly funded university that accepts students from all backgrounds. It offers a variety of professional programmes, including business administration, human resource management, journalism, social work, nursing, theology, teacher education, and information and computer technology. My own experience, of course, has been with liberal arts education, and more specifically with political science. My reflections on political ideologies might be thought to be applicable within that field only. How then might we apply the method I employ in my books to the several professional fields taught at CHE? This is what I was tasked with doing during my conversation with faculty at this institution.
As a matter of fact, I believe that the sorts of idolatrous ideologies we meet within public life have their counterparts in other areas as well. The fields I addressed were journalism, business, the arts, and education, but I could also have touched on medicine, law, technology, and the various helping professions. Once again I found this a stretching experience, as questions posed by the CHE faculty in attendance required me to think outside the parameters of my own discipline. I enjoyed our conversation. I would have enjoyed a tour of the facilities, which are much more extensive than I had anticipated. However, we had to stick with our schedule, which required our presence at the studios of De Nieuwe Wereld in Leiden, just under 100 kilometres to the west.
De Nieuwe Wereld is a podcast that has 154,000 subscribers. Hildebrand and I arrived at the studios in the mid afternoon, with the interview set to begin at 3 pm. My interviewer was Govert Buijs, whom I had met before at a consultation organized by Jim Skillen around two decades ago near the Washington–Baltimore Airport. Buijs is one of the interviewers for this podcast. There is considerable overlap between Buijs' and my fields of competence, thus we had much to talk about. Buijs is a professor of political philosophy at the Free University of Amsterdam (VU). Our conversation ranged fairly widely, covering such themes as Christian nationalism and even the virtues of constitutional monarchy relative to those republics that combine head of state and head of government into a single executive office. I will alert readers when our interview is published online.
This interview marked the end of an exceedingly full three days, which were tiring but exhilarating. The weekend was fairly relaxed by comparison, yet it was filled with visits to various sites of historic significance and participation in some typical Dutch activities, including a Mannenzang and a sunday morning worship service, both at the Grote Kerk in Nijkerk. Stay tuned for more on these.
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