January newsletter online

I have now posted my Global Scholars newsletter for January on this blog. Included are news about my forthcoming book, a visit to an Indonesian church in Toronto, and three posts on matters liturgical. Thanks for your support for my work.

Seeking our roots

Lucy Jane with three of her children

My January column for Christian Courier has just been posted online: Seeking our roots, with the following subtitle: "Each life found on a genealogy is a miracle that shows God's goodness." An excerpt:

Since childhood I have wanted to know who my ancestors were and where I came from. This flowed out of a general interest in history. I knew the major milestones such as the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and the exploration and settlement of the Americas. But where did my own family enter the picture?

Fortunately, my maternal great-grandmother, Lucy Jane Bentley Hyder (1875-1948), had the foresight to record two reminiscences of her own forebears extending back to the late 18th century. These included her grandfather David Wells (born c 1815), of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, who, on the day the American Civil War ended, was murdered by “the Raiders or Ku Klux Klan as they were sometimes called.”

Incidentally, I discovered through my genealogical research that I am distantly related to Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Abraham Kuyper's 19th-century mentor in the anti-revolutionary movement in the Netherlands.

Liturgical standards and living faith: the case of the Evangelical and Reformed Church

My latest post in Kuyperian Commentary can be found here: Liturgical standards and living faith: the case of the Evangelical and Reformed Church. An excerpt:

So what was this Evangelical and Reformed Church? It was created by the merger of two predecessor bodies, the (German) Reformed Church in the United States (RCUS) and the (German) Evangelical Synod of North America. The German Reformed were the descendants of Reformed Christians who had immigrated from German-speaking Europe, especially Switzerland and the Palatinate, the latter of which was once ruled by Elector Frederick III “the Pious” (1515-1576), who commissioned the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563. The German Reformed began in 1725 and were initially under the care of Classis Amsterdam of the Dutch Reformed Church until 1793. During the late 19th century, efforts to unite with the (Dutch) Reformed Church in America were unsuccessful.

Read the entire article here.

Anna's unexpected blessing

Christian Courier has published my latest column, titled, Anna's unexpected blessing, and subtitled, "The forgotten character of Jesus' story." Here is an excerpt:

How Anna becomes a prophet we do not know. What we do know is that, in addition to experiencing the subjugation of her own people, she has seen sorrow in her personal life as well. She married, likely in her youth and perhaps to a much older man, who died seven years later, after which she remained a widow, a status that makes her particularly vulnerable to abuse.

From then on, she has devoted her life to prayer and fasting and appears to have taken up residence in the temple. Perhaps it is here that she was endowed by God with her prophetic gifts. One can imagine her reputation growing with the years, with visitors to the temple seeking out the wisdom of this remarkable woman of God.

Read the entire article here.

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.

Parental rights

Who has the major responsibility for determining the education of children? Plato thought it was the polis, or city state, a conviction echoed by Aristotle and many others down through the centuries. However, following the example of our Jewish forebears, our Christian faith tells us something different, as affirmed in the Scriptures (e.g., Psalm 78:4-8; 145:4). Christian Courier has now posted my own thoughts on the subject: Parental rights. An excerpt:

Recently the Canadian media have been puzzling over the notion of parental rights, a concept they appear to regard as strange and unusual. Generally, the commentators take a condescending tone, assuming that all right-thinking Canadians would naturally defer to their betters in the provincial public education bureaucracy. The flurry of articles surrounding parental rights has come in response to the 1 Million March 4 Children protest in September, which the media have portrayed in a largely negative light, depicting the protesters as disseminators of hate.

In a secularized Canada such caricatures are not unusual, but they are certainly unfair.

Read here for more.

Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a Christian

I love to read conversion stories. Decades ago, I read John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua in which the 19th-century cleric and Oxford Movement luminary recounted his departure from the Church of England for Roman Catholicism. Many of us know C. S. Lewis's story of his own conversion to Christianity in Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. However, there are few available stories of Muslims or ex-Muslims converting to Christianity, mostly because abandoning Islam is a punishable offence in many predominantly Muslim countries. There are indeed such converts, but for obvious reasons they prefer to keep a low profile.

Earlier this month, Ayaan Hirsi Ali put aside such reticence and published this statement: Why I am now a Christian. Ali's story may not be familiar to everyone, but here are the basics: Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, to a politically active father who fell afoul of the Marxist regime, she and her family moved to Nairobi, Kenya. After fleeing a forced marriage, she wound up in the Netherlands in her early twenties. She became a Dutch citizen and even served in the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament before moving to the United States and becoming an American citizen. By the turn of the millennium she declared herself to be an atheist, having become disillusioned with her Muslim upbringing.

November newsletter online

I have now posted my Global Scholars Canada newsletter for November. Included is a statement on terrorism, an address to a Latin American consultation on Christian higher education, an analysis of pro-life setbacks in the United States, and a brief update on my forthcoming book.

Where are the pro-life majorities?

Kuyperian Commentary has published my latest piece, Where are the pro-life majorities? In the wake of the recent poll in Ohio that entrenched abortion rights in the state constitution, some might wonder what happened to the pro-life cause, which many thought to have a demographic advantage. Here is an excerpt:

Peter Berger once observed that, if Sweden is the most secular country on earth and India is the most religious, America is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. This saying is appealing to those who prefer to think that their troubles can be attributed to unaccountable elites who are out of tune with the people they lead.

Yet this attitude fails to account for the complexities of human nature and draws too drastic a line between leaders and led, much as Marxists persist in positing a facile cleavage between oppressors and oppressed when in reality, each of us is both oppressor and oppressed, depending on the constantly shifting circumstances in which we find ourselves. George Bernard Shaw’s wry observation is closer to the truth: “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” Leaders and led are inextricably connected with each other, and the gap between their respective worldviews is less than some would prefer to believe.

Read the entire article here.

Calling terrorism by name

Black Lives Matter is an organization seeking to defend the rights of African Americans, prompted by the tragic deaths of George Floyd and others at the hands of police in major urban centres. Unfortunately, it has not limited itself to such cases, as Newsweek reports: Black Lives Matter Org Praises Hamas, Sparks Backlash. After the recent horrific terrorist attack on innocent civilians, a Chicago chapter of BLM issued a statement supporting Hamas. Although the statement has since been deleted, controversy continues. Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, responded with outrage:

Mapping the globe

Ever since I was a small boy, I've had a fascination with maps. Read about it here: Mapping the globe. An excerpt:

One of my prized possessions is a 1901 Cram’s Modern Atlas of the World which I purchased at an antique shop in my hometown at age 16. It’s a hefty volume with numerous indices and other helps in addition to the maps of every country in the world. The United States had only 45 states. Canada had seven provinces. To my delight, this atlas boasted a large map of Cyprus, nominally part of the Ottoman Empire but administered by Great Britain. My paternal grandparents would have been quite young in that year.

So what’s the allure? For one thing, I think in terms of maps. Familiarity with maps allows one to navigate the surface of God’s good earth. As I write, we have just returned from visiting family in the Chicago area. I know by heart the roads in the western suburbs and could easily find my way around, despite all the changes that have occurred since my youth. If I navigated by landmarks, I’d be lost in my own homeland.

Read the entire article here.

October newsletter now available

My Global Scholars newsletter for October is now online. Included are articles on Israel and Palestine following Hamas' recent terrorist attack, an online event with a pan-European audience, and historical parallels to the current discussion here in Canada of parental rights in education.

The fight for parents' rights in Canada

First Things has just published my article, titled, The fight for parents' rights in Canada. Here is an excerpt:

Last month the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) published an article with a rather condescending tone: “Where did the term ‘parental rights' come from?” Other media outlets have published similar pieces, all imbued with the notion that parental rights is a foreign concept invented by malcontents who should be trusting their betters in the provincial education bureaucracies. These articles are responding to a recent series of protests throughout Canada, a movement called 1 Million March 4 Children. The protesters are parents concerned about public school board policies that encourage gender transitioning and the use of preferred pronouns. The media have generally portrayed these protests in a negative light, with some going so far as to depict them as disseminating hate.

Sad to say, this attitude is not unusual in Canada, where secularization has largely emptied the historic Protestant churches, including Anglican and Presbyterian congregations and the United Church of Canada.

Read the rest of the article here.

Contributing factors in the Israel-Hamas war

Christian Courier has published my analysis of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in which I isolate three structural factors rendering the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian struggle almost perfectly intractable: Contributing factors in the Israel-Hamas war. Here's an excerpt:

Israel vs Hamas

I had just begun my undergraduate studies at Bethel College (University) in Minnesota when Israel's Arab neighbours launched a surprise attack on the country coinciding with Yom Kippur in the Jewish calendar. This was the fourth major Arab-Israeli war and lasted from 6 to 25 October 1973. Half a century later, Israel is at war again after Hamas' surprise attack on Israel at the weekend. But the current situation is different from what it was fifty years ago. Over the ensuing decades Israel has managed to make peace with several of its neighbours, beginning with Egypt in the Camp David Accords of 1979. In 1994 Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan signed a peace treaty, and even the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel under the Oslo Accords of 1993.

Meeting with European young adults

On friday, 29 September I spoke to a group of young Christians with an interest in bettering their European homelands. I had already conversed with a subset of the larger group a few months ago at the invitation of my friend Samuel Vandeputte. This time I was invited by a new friend, Hildebrand Bijleveld, to speak to a somewhat broader group on the topic of Ideologies in Christian Perspective, followed by discussion. The participants in this group were from the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Poland, and Italy.

Whenever I meet with such a group, I wish that I could have been with them in person. Perhaps I'll have that opportunity one day.

A critic's gratitude

Christian Courier has published my article titled, A critic's gratitude. As academics, my wife and I were trained to be critical, but criticism has its limits. An excerpt:

As an academic, I freely admit that people in my profession share a rather unattractive quality: we are terribly critical. Worse, we tend to approach life in general from a critical posture. We get out of bed with criticism. We eat critically. And we retire for the night with criticism haunting our dreams.

How often have I settled down with Nancy to watch a period film, only to become distracted from the plot by what to me is an obvious historical error or anachronism. Of course, I have to mention it on the spot. Even in an exhaustively researched historical monograph, I tend to fixate on the misfires, a skill undoubtedly developed during three decades of marking student papers. Given that Nancy and I are both academics, we easily feed each other’s critical inclinations. Obviously we’re quite the fun couple at cocktail parties.

Read the entire article here.