Imagine, if you will, a café somewhere between Amsterdam and Cairo circa 1964… two men sit, oblivious to their surroundings, engaged in a frank discussion about how to structure a society so that it reflects the will of God in all its particulars. Let’s call those men Herman and Sayyid, Herman Dooyeweerd and Sayyid Qutb.
Though terrorism and security are dominant issues in the current campaign for president of the United States, no election can occur without abundant reference to family values. Debates over who and what constitutes a healthy family take place everywhere, from our churches to our political talk shows.
Labour officials and activists have been known to point out that corporations have a responsibility to the communities in which they operate. Whether in the maquiladoras along the Mexico-United States border or in small-town Ontario, a company has a moral responsibility to invest in its community.
The church needs more well-trained Christians, clergy and lay, who are willing to play the role of doctrine cop in a way that protects the church from errant ideas that may cause greater long-term harm to the church even as they seem to be practically helpful. The church needs doctrine cops who don’t mind being theological thought police.
For eleven years, when asked my occupation I responded “Union Representative.” This usually made my conservative political friends and business acquaintances squirm uncomfortably. They knew me well enough to know I advocated a different type of labour relations than the stereotypical adversarial relations that are associated with contemporary unionism.
The connection between fair trade, as a response to the excesses of global capitalism, and the Christian faith is natural, given a solid theology of work and the imperative to open our ears to the cries of the poor. In today’s global political and economic climate, individual disadvantages result from worldwide structures of trade.
As the Cold War was coming to an end in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, then an official with the US State Department, published a ground-breaking article, “The End of History”. Fukuyama’s thesis is only the most recent manifestation of the general belief that history not only has a purposeful character, but at some point will reach its final consummation, a notion owing much to Christian eschatology, albeit in secularized form.
One of the most popular questions I have come across on campus from both struggling Christians and skeptical non-Christians is why does a good and all-powerful God allow so much evil and suffering in the world? The very fact that the question is posed shows the almost universal consensus that something is very wrong with the world and that evil and suffering is somehow not the way it is supposed to be.
The recent death of Ronald Reagan and the publication of Bill Clinton’s memoirs provide occasion to consider the relationship between faith and public life. Both of these men, though vastly different, had notable similarities. Perhaps the most interesting similarity with contrast is the fact that both men had a very private, interior faith.
In my last article, I said guilds could be the vanguard of a new civil society. Valiant words, but there are significant obstacles to overcome before we see any progress. Moreover, all the examples of functioning guilds that I have used so far have one thing in common: they are not in Canada. The question then arises, can guilds can ever take hold in Canada? If so, how?
An interview with Ashley Lande on psychedelics and Christianity.
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