Gideon Strauss

I am at the beginning of a 40-Day Journey with Gerard Manley Hopkins during my morning devotions, and thought one of the instructions for the day quite apt: “Pray in praise and thanksgiving for God’s creation.” The day’s two Bible readings helped prompt such prayer:

But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.

(Job 12:7-10)

Praise the LORD from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy winds fulfilling his command! Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!

(Psalm 148:7-10)

I have so many things to be thankful for here at CPJ: we are blessed with a wise and visionary board, I am blessed with enterprising and diligent colleagues in Jim and Doreen Skillen (and soon Stephanie Summers), we enjoy the support of a faithful and encouraging network of associates,  we have good work to do under the provident guidance of a good and trustworthy God, and we live at a moment when the prospects are good for our work to flourish and bless others. With my dear friend (and favorite bookseller) Byron Borger I rejoice that we live in a moment when an abundance of Christian writers and publishers are “doing books about social justice, for and from the new generation who are serving the poor, and resources for those who are taking up this struggle to seek God’s reign in ways that bring hope to the hurting and hungry.” (And yes, Byron does mention CPJ in his Thanksgiving note.)

As a family we Strausses also have much for which we are grateful: among many other things, Angela and I enjoy the privilege of meaningful, remunerative work, she as a church musician and liturgist, I here at CPJ and as the editor of Comment magazine; our daughters Tala and Hannah are daily making fresh discoveries and diligently persevering in the faithful practice of their skills as students, Tala as a first-year student at Gordon College and Hannah as a high school senior; we enjoy the freedom to gather for worship with the good folk of New City Church, and to share the good news of the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the reign of God.

But what I am most grateful for today, prompted by my morning devotions, is bees. Angela came home from fetching Tala (home for Thanksgiving) at the airport yesterday all enthused by a radio program she had heard about the wonders of bee life and of honey, and deeply concerned over the crisis of colony collapse threatening the honeybee population of North America. As I listened to her, spooning a little honey into my rooibos tea, it is for these creatures that my heart filled with thanks. What a wonderful God, to have made the bee! May our gratitude continue to translate into caring stewardship and ingenious work to let bees flourish and participate in the disclosure of the rich possibilities of God’s world.

Terry Woodnorth

All of the photographs of the 2009 Kuyper Lecture and the celebration of Jim Skillen published on the CPJ website, including those in the preceding few blog entries, were taken by Terry Woodnorth, one of our trustees. Here, in stark contrast, is one of the pictures I took, of Terry. You can see why we rather used Terry’s pictures.

The CPJ board of trustees commissioned a song for Jim Skillen. In this picture Terry is switching on the recording to play for the assembly of celebrants. To hear the song, follow the link from the main page for this celebratory event.

Carol Veldman Rudie, Jim Skilen

In addition to the book of remembrances presented by Harold Heie, the CPJ trustees also gave Jim a “book-clock” to help him keep track of time as he writes his next several books.

Mark Davies, John Hulst, Rockne McCarthy, Case Hoogendoorn

While he was being honored for his service to CPJ, Jim also honored people present at the celebration who had been involved with CPJ from the very beginning: Mark Davies, John Hulst, Rockne McCarthy, and Case Hoogendoorn. The camaraderie between these stalwarts of a public justice-oriented approach to politics is encouraging as we look forward to encouraging a next generation towards graceful citizenship.

Norm Steen

Norm Steen, Gideon Strauss

Pastor Norm Steen of the Washington DC Christian Reformed Church, Jim and Doreen Skillen’s home congregation, closed the evening in prayer.

Several of the speakers at the CPJ celebration of Jim Skillen honored him for his wisdom and love as a teacher.

David Kim, Jim Skillen

David Kim (of the Manna Fellowship at Princeton and the Gotham Fellowship at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC) spoke of Jim’s ability to address David’s deep existential questions in the Civitas program. David liked Civitas so much he came back for a second round recently! (I owe David a personal debt of gratitude for encouraging me to consider a position with CPJ.)

Dale Kuehne

Dale Kuehne, who teaches at Saint Anselm Colllege and pastors Emmanuel Covenant Church in Nashua, NH, valued Jim’s mentoring so much he moved to Washington DC for his graduate years so that he could spend time learning from Jim. He spoke movingly of the hundreds - perhaps thousands - of people who had their understanding of political life transformed by Jim’s mentoring.

Bruce MacLaury

The Wrestlers Class at National Presbyterian Church in Washington DC also benefited from Jim’s teaching, according to Bruce MacLaury, president emeritus of the Brookings Institution.

We celebrated Jim Skillen’s leadership of the Center over the past 28 years last week at an event attended from far and wide. For a wonderful picture of Jim and Doreen at the podium, see the main page for the event.

Jerry Herbert

Jerry Herbert, a sometime CPJ trustee presently working at Nyack College in Washington DC, emceed the evening’s program with wit and verve.

Priscilla Gault

Priscilla Gault and her husband have been friends of Jim and Doreen Skillen from their school years. As I listened to her reminisce about the headlines Jim made over the years I prayed that my own children, now college age, would have friendships like these, stretching over the decades.

Case Hoogendoorn

Case Hoogendoorn is another friend of Jim who has supported the Center for the length of its existence. (I am personally grateful to Case for his wise counsel since I started thinking about CPJ as a potential place to work. Angela and I are growing fond of people like Case and CPJ board chair Harold Heie, who are not only stalwart supporters of CPJ, but admirable for their kindness… and their humor!)

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 … ?

“Let princes hear and be afraid.”

I still remember the cold thrill with which I read chapter 20 in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion on train rides toward downtown Cape Town in 1989.

Dissatisfied with passive resistance against apartheid, uncertain that I had an understanding of political life that was both faithful to the teachings of the Bible and adequate for making sense of the tasks of government after apartheid, and unaware of the tectonic shifts already taking place below the surface of South African politics — shifts that were to bring about a quake of change the following year — I had been reading backwards from a book that had opened up fresh possibilities for me, Bob Goudzwaard’s Idols of our time. Goudzwaard made Christian sense of the political situation in which I found myself, and I wanted to understand where he came from. So I read those that influenced him, slowly making my way backwards into history: Herman Dooyeweerd, Abraham Kuyper, Guillaume Groen Van Prinsterer, Johannes Althusius, a slight detour to Samuel Rutherford, and then, John Calvin.

I think I can date my grafting into this tradition — going beyond ambivalent interest, joining the tribe — to the morning that I read these sentences very near the end of the Institutes (in the Beveridge translation):

When popular magistrates have been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings … so far am I from forbidding these officially to check the undue license of kings, that if they connive at kings when they tyrannise and insult over the humbler of the people, I affirm that their dissimulation is not free from nefarious perfidy, because they fraudulently betray the liberty of the people, while knowing that, by the ordinance of God, they are its appointed guardians.

But in that obedience which we hold to be due to the commands of rulers, we must always make the exception, nay, must be particularly careful that it is not incompatible with obedience to Him to whose will the wishes of kings should be subject, to whose decrees their commands must yield, to whose majesty their sceptres must bow. And, indeed, how preposterous were it, in pleasing men, to incur the offence of Him for whose sake you obey men! The Lord, therefore, is King of kings. When he opens his sacred mouth, he alone is to be heard, instead of all and above all. We are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against Him let us not pay the least regard to it, nor be moved by all the dignity which they possess as magistrates — a dignity to which no injury is done when it is subordinated to the special and truly supreme power of God.

(I prefer the Ford Lewis Battles translation, which I discovered ten years later when studying with J.I. Packer at Regent College. It translates the first of the sentences above in this more imaginatively compelling way: “I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of kings, that, if they wink at kings who violently fall upon and assault the lowly common folk, I declare that their dissimulation involves nefarious perfidy, because they dishonestly betray the freedom of the people, of which they know that they have been appointed protectors by God’s ordinance.”)

The work of John Calvin changed cultures in ways that go far deeper than politics — and influenced my own life, eventually, in ways that go far deeper — but my first debt to Calvin is a political debt: he wedged open anew a way for Christians to understand that political authority is relative, and that there are times when tyrants must be resisted, and centuries later I, too, could slip through that wedged opening, with deep gratitude.

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.

This being Memorial Day, I recommend to you the Center’s Guideline for Security and Defense, and Jim Skillen’s reflections on the guideline from late 2007. A year from now I hope to write more extensively here on this day and what it commemorates, but for now I offer only this prayer from the 1941 Episcopal Prayer Book for Soldiers and Sailors:

    O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.