What is to be done?

Gideon Strauss writes about the need for manifestoes and strategic explorations in an editorial on the next few months' theme for Comment Online.

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?

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.

Six things necessary for the development of the kind of non-reductionist political theory we need now.

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.

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.

Two millennia of Christian theology does not mean there is no work left to be done. Starting out from the beginning—the doctrine of creation—Vincent Bacote identifies priorities for theology in the early years of the 21st century.

Gideon Strauss points to "the sweetly destructive force" of liberal capitalism. Then Strauss turns his attention to the other great, global challenges of the times: Salafiyyah Islam, China, and post-Western Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

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.