Gideon Strauss

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I am visiting Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, and enjoying it immensely. As I talk with students, faculty, and staff, I am realizing that students who graduate from Dordt enjoy a significant advantage: yes, Dordt is far from the culture making hubs of the world, but here in this greenhouse environment students enjoy a community in which their character is being formed as citizens of the kingdom of God, so that when they are transplanted out into the post-college world they have strong roots and can flourish. At Dordt students breath the atmosphere of the Spirit, are rooted in the soil of the people of God, are watered with the gospel.

No wonder, really, that the Center for Public Justice has its historical roots in the same Siouxland countryside as does Dordt. And no wonder that CPJ and Dordt share a vision of equipping the people of God to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven … and therefore graceful citizens of this American republic, seeking the common good because of our knowledge of God’s common grace.

Yesterday I enjoyed giving an address on “Silly walks need no justification” (Monty Python meets Hans Rookmaaker), engaging two of Dr. Don King’s politics classes in conversation, having lunch and dinner (a very fine dinner!) with students, faculty and staff, and giving a public lecture (with several long-time CPJ suppporters and the chair of our board, Harold Heie, in the audience) on “Graceful citizenship.”

Today I have wall-to-wall appointments for conversation with individual Dordt people, as well as a radio interview with President Carl Zylstra and a conversation with Jason Lief and Barb Hoekstra’s Gen 300 capstone class.

I am beginning to wonder how to track down the Dordt diaspora of students across America, and how to connect the gifts they have received on this campus with the needs of people elsewhere seeking to live as citizens of the kingdom of God, but lacking a similarly deep learning … ?

Robert Minto writes:

CPJ’s potential could be maximized by working to become a viable political alternative at two levels: theoretical and practical. What politically-minded and -disatisfied Christian need is alternative political theories and alternative political policies to advocate. To waste itself by focusing exclusively on either of these things would result in a movement without a mission or in a mission without a movement. Currently, if I were to be audacious and upstartish enough to critique something that I am only recently familiar with, I would suspect that they err in the direction of offering theoretical alternatives without practical ones, a mission without a movement—but what do I know.

Nonetheless, going off my supposition, it occurs to me that a grassroots (cliche, but powerful) model of development at both a theoretical but also and especially a practical level would be catalytic to the formation of a movement from CPJ’s very admirable mission.

For more of Mr. Minto’s thoughts, read the rest of the post on his blog.

I now follow Sojourners and ROFTERS on twitter. Who else should I be following at the faith/politics intersection?

… do please consider becoming a fan of the Center for Public Justice on Facebook!

While there will be many discontinuities to my work life before and after October, one continuity will be Comment magazine — to my great gratitude and relief. If you are unfamiliar with Comment, do pop over to its web page, where you can see the most recent online articles, and search its growing archives. For a sense of what we are trying to do with the magazine, I suggest that you take a look at the 2008 Comment Manifesto. I also recommend that you become a fan of Comment on Facebook!

Comment is a publication of Cardus, a think tank equipping people of influence with credible theories and practices of public life that will contribute to a renewal of North American social architecture. I have been involved with Cardus since 1999, when it was called the Work Research Foundation, and owe a vocational debt of gratitude to its founder, Harry Antonides, to Ray Pennings, my colleague at Cardus from the start, and to the president of Cardus, Michael Van Pelt — all of whom are not just colleagues, but dear friends. Working alongside the Cardus crew is one of the great delights of my life, and I am grateful to be able to continue to edit Comment alongside the wonderful Dan Postma and Alissa Wilkinson, after starting my formal role here at the Center in October.

If you are new to the work of the Center, please consider signing up for Citizen e-Link, the Center’s free, periodic electronic news bulletin. Today’s issue highlights new publications by Civitas scholars and Center staff: William Inboden’s Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960, James R. Skillen’s The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West, and Prospects and Ambiguities of Globalization: Critical Assessment at a Time of Growing Turmoil, edited by James W. Skillen. It also mentions Church, State and Citizen: Christian Approaches to Political Engagement, edited by Sandra F. Joireman, which includes a chapter by James W. Skillen titled “Reformed and Always Reforming . . . ?”