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. Ev ..read more

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 ..read more

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 Col ..read more

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 ..read more

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 to ..read more

A new anthology has just been published, titled, T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism, edited by Nathaniel Gray Sutanto and Cory Brock. Published by T&T Clark, a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, it includes essays by several scholars well known in the Neo-Calvinist tradition, including yours truly. I wrote chapter 33, titled, "Political Theology," pp. 415-425. The subheadings in my chapter are as follows:  I. The Place of Politics in God's World II. Every Square Inch III. Sphere Sovereignty IV. The Meaning of Public Justice: Constitutional Government and Federalism V. Concre ..read more

My next book, due out in November, has now been posted at the IVP website: Citizenship Without Illusions: A Christian Guide to Political Engagement. It can also be found at Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and even Lehmanns in Germany. It is even being sold by Amazon Brazil, but I hope that it will soon be translated into Portuguese for the benefit of a wider readership in that country ..read more

I have now posted my Global Scholars newsletter for March, which includes cover art for my forthcoming book, preparations for travels next month, and educational opportunities relevant to Brazil. Thank you for your support for my work ..read more

The March issue of Christian Courier carries my most recent column, The Midnight Office, continuing from last month's piece on daily prayer. An excerpt: Last month I recounted my youthful discovery of the discipline of daily prayer, also known as the daily office. According to this pattern, whose origins almost certainly extend back to God’s people of the old covenant, the entire day is divided up into approximately three-hour intervals punctuated by the several prayer offices. The number varies between five and seven, and sometimes more. However, one of these offices puzzled me, because it ..read more

More than four decades ago, I purchased a little-remembered but significant book at an antiquarian bookshop in or near South Bend, Indiana: The Heidelberg Catechism in its Newest Light, by the Rev. Prof. James I. Good, and published by the Publication and Sunday School Board of the [German] Reformed Church in the United States in 1914. Good taught at the denomination's Central Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. As I noted in a previous post about the Evangelical and Reformed Church, the RCUS eventually united with the Evangelical Synod in North America in 1934 and later with the Congregati ..read more