Gideon Strauss

Gideon Strauss, Alvin Taveras

Alvin Taveras is a new CPJ friend - this past summer he interned with Jim Skillen and took part in our Civitas summer school. Two other 2009 Civitas participants drove down from Princeton and Philadelphia with Alvin for the Kuyper Lecture, Drew Harmon and Philip Ney - I’ll have to see if I can track down photos of them at the event.

Art Simon, Jim Skillen

Art Simon, founder and president emeritus of Bread for the World, has been a friend of Jim’s and of the Center’s for a long time. I remember reading him on poverty and hunger, and the call to Christians to address these blights, as a freshly converted believer in my teens. It is such a privilege that the Center enjoys the encouragement and support of pioneers like the Rev. Simon.

Gideon Strauss, John Hulst

If Alvin Taveras represents the newest friends of CPJ, John Hulst represents those who have been our friends since the very beginning. President emeritus of Dordt College, Dr. Hulst was not only involved in CPJ’s predecessor organizations, he continues to be involved, and next week will be my host at a CPJ event in Pella, Iowa! (In this picture I think I was saying something about the great hopes I have for CPJ, even though it is by every organizational measure mustard-seed-tiny for now.)

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 … ?

Come October I will be on the road much of the time, meeting face-to-face with the constituency of the Center. One of the challenges of the non-profit road warrior is the lunch meeting: how to ensure that it is (1) pleasant, (2) healthy, (3) cheap, and (4) conducive to good conversations.

My provisional plan is to turn my lunches on the road into a quest: the quest for the perfect urban picnic. I am looking for locations where I can meet with people for free, but locations that offer both comfort and a little urban magic. Some of these can be out of doors (for meetings in three of the seasons), some will have to be indoors. And I am looking for the kind of picnic lunch that I can put together from just a handful of simple but tasty foods, bought locally. A freshly baked bread, a great cheese, some fruit, and a drink, perhaps.

My travel schedule will take me, first, to a band of communities that stretch from Sioux Center and Pella, Iowa, through the Twin Cities and Chicago, to Grand Rapids and surroundings, Michigan. Then I will do some bicoastal travel: Los Angeles and San Francisco, Boston, New York City and Washington, DC. And then we’ll see …

If you have suggestions of great picnic spots in any of these  towns and cities, available to the ordinary traveller by public transport or on foot, please let me know.

And if you know of great places to buy fresh bread, artisanal cheese, local fruit, and local drinks, please also let me know. I shall post some of the advice I’ve received so far via Twitter and Facebook here, soon.