Where would I be without Bob Goudzwaard?
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Where would I be without Bob Goudzwaard?

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…

Mulroney’s contested legacy
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Mulroney’s contested legacy

Born and raised in Baie Commeau, Québec, a mill town five hours northeast of Quebec City, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney seemed to embody the diversity of Canada in his own person. His parents were Irish Canadians but he grew up speaking both French and English. In his youth he was inspired to work within…

An enduring hope
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An enduring hope

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…

The midnight office
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The midnight office

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…

Daily prayer
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Daily prayer

When I was in my early twenties, I visited the bookstore of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and purchased a copy of The Daily Office, edited by Herbert Lindemann and published by Concordia in 1965. A small volume, it nevertheless runs to nearly 700 pages and includes liturgies for morning and evening prayer organized…

Seeking our roots
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Seeking our roots

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?…

Anna’s unexpected blessing
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Anna’s unexpected blessing

She is not one of the better-known women of the Bible and appears in only a few verses at the beginning of the gospel of Luke (2:36-39). The prophet Anna endured a long life and saw some of the most difficult events in Israel’s troubled history. As a descendant of Jacob’s son Asher, she is…

Parental rights
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Parental rights

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…

Mapping the globe
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Mapping the globe

When I was four years old, my parents gave me a set of geography flashcards. On one side was the outline of the country and on the other was the name of the country along with significant facts about it. In this way I learned to identify countries by their shape, including now defunct entities…

Contributing Factors in the Israel-Hamas War
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Contributing Factors in the Israel-Hamas War

I am old enough to remember two general Middle Eastern wars, the second of which started right after I had begun my undergraduate studies in Minnesota. With Israel’s victory in these wars, the Jewish state had acquired an aura of invincibility, despite the enmity of its numerous and much larger Arab neighbours.  On October 7,…

A critic’s gratitude
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A critic’s gratitude

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…

A spiritual wasteland
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A spiritual wasteland

In 2010, Operation World published a map showing the growth of evangelical Christianity throughout the world. In the vast majority of countries, including ostensibly secular Europe, the growth in the numbers of believers was outpacing population growth. But in Canada and the United States, the increase in the numbers of Christians was lagging behind population…