Essay

1060 RESULTS

Replacing the Pan-Canadian Consensus

The 2006 election may prove to be the beginning of a political realignment, making a decisive shift away from what the authors term the “pan-Canadian consensus,” which has governed Canada since the 1960s. Ray Pennings and Michael Van Pelt propose a most interesting theory: revisiting “the very idea of a ‘Canadian consensus’ and ‘Canadian values,’ and asking whether there really is a homogeneous mainstream that represents, whether with a right or left emphasis, a clear path on which to govern.”

What is to be done… about schooling?

Aaron Belz thinks the contemporary high school classroom is a bastion of the bourgeois, that students who excel in this environment are gifted at waiting in line at the drinking fountain, and that the Socratic method is a form of hectoring. He offers an alternative way of doing . . . schooling.

The Calgary School and the Future of Canada

The Calgary School and its advocates are often accused of wanting to Americanize Canada. Heavily influential in the Conservative Party of Canada and in this country’s broader public debate, the School is a collection of political theorists, pundits and public intellectuals, including Rainer Knopff, F.L. “Ted” Morton, David Bercuson, Barry Cooper and Thomas Flanagan. What shall we make of the Calgary School?

What is to be done… in the public square?

Domesticated religion isn’t for Ray Pennings. Not for him, Christian faith that “knows its place” . . . as a private, highly individualized religion of the prayer closet and the cloistered chapel. Instead, Pennings calls Christians out of the cloister and the closet to pursue a strategy of cultural change as a public religion working together across disciplines, through institutions, over the span of generations.

What is to be done . . . toward a neocalvinist agenda?

What is to be done . . . toward a neocalvinist agenda?

Neocalvinist philosopher and theologian Al Wolters calls present and future generations of neocalvinists to look back to neocalvinism’s intellectual roots and forebears, to look forward to alternative ways of expressing neocalvinist commitments to our world. Neocalvinism is a considered, Christian response to the broad, controlling philosophy of our times—modernism—and an attempt to account for the myriad ways in which our society develops into various categories of activity.

What is to be done… in politics?

What is to be done… in politics?

To say, “That’s just politics,” misses the point. There is a domain of the political, and politics can be a noble calling. Russ Kuykendall suggests an approach that accounts for the political domain, and how politics can be ennobled.