Robert Joustra
Robert Joustra is Associate Professor of Politics & International Studies at Redeemer University, where he is also founding-Director of the Centre for Christian Scholarship. He is an editorial fellow with The Review of Faith and International Affairs and a Fellow with the Center for Public Justice, in Washington D.C. His writing and commentary appear in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, The National Post, and elsewhere.
Bio last updated November 16th, 2021.
Articles by Robert Joustra
Here Come the Wonksters
By Robert Joustra
April 5, 2013
The wonksters are not the occupiers, or the greenies; their ideology is not thick, but variable and pragmatic, pivoting on a political slogan not unlike "the boomers screwed us
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I, for one, Welcome our new Ambassador of Religious Freedom
Robert Joustra
February 18, 2013
Cardus has long been an outspoken supporter of religious freedom at home and abroad, believing in institutional and religious pluralism as the bedrock of a liberal democracy ...
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Are Missionaries the Henchmen of Empire?
Robert Joustra
February 15, 2013
What Preston calls the cultural imperialism of missionaries he compares against the work of present day human rights NGOs, which certainly present certain perspectives—on the human person, and their dignities and rights—as universal, and push, sometimes force, changes in law and cultural practice in...
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Why I am For an Islamic Law School
Robert Joustra
February 8, 2013
Indeed, if it is to be the case that Canadians expect a diversity of intellectual and religious traditions, if we are to expect the Kantians, as well as the Muslims, the utilitarians and libertarians, as well as the Christians, to enfold the secular principles of Canadian society, then we must encou...
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The Peril of Christian Humanitarianism
Robert Joustra
February 1, 2013
Meral argues that Christian advocacy in particular has grown a great deal in the past decade for persecuted Christians, and while this is important and laudable, it weighs the risk of unintentionally ignoring the suffering of other religious groups ...
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Needed for Rebooting Conservative Aid Policy: Less Fox, More Foxes
Robert Joustra
January 11, 2013
Foreign policy isn't the natural bedrock of Canada's conservatives in the way it has been for America's Republicans, until very recently ...
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Pressing Upon the Imagination of the Cynical
Robert Joustra
January 3, 2013
It's hard not to feel cheated at Christmas, a supposed revolution of rest and revitalization, which in truth is often characterized as frenetic and feverish.
And amidst winter flurries of tweets and threats about fiscal cliffs and Mayan Armageddon, Hadfield has been rounding the world every 90 minutes or so, tweeting from the inky black of "international" space (@Cmdr_Hadfield), giving Canadians—and the world—the Christmas gift of wonder So enters Canada...
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Bring on that Foreign Policy Review
Robert Joustra
December 13, 2012
Why a foreign policy review for this? The government is in the midst of commissioning something like a review already, even if leaked copies amount to more of a restatement than a new direction for Canadian foreign policy But since a review is in the works, that review should state clearly the value...
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Stealth Fighter Fever
Robert Joustra
December 7, 2012
A full, public, foreign policy review, with Minister Ambrose's steady hand on procurement, could yet connect value to dollars, and hardware to vision Second, rebooting a major defense procurement right in time for a foreign policy review gives Conservatives a chance to not only tether value to dolla...
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Wishing for a Secret Agenda
Robert Joustra
November 21, 2012
I challenge you to find a secret set of government documents that more redundantly states what this Prime Minister has transparently said, over and over: trade, growth, jobs Now, we have "leaked" documents on this government's new foreign policy: so banal, so self-obvious, so redundant that it's pos...
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The Devil's Advocate
Robert Joustra
November 2, 2012
The problem, as our president noted, is that libertarians have absorbed the logic of subsidiarity and made a snappier brand out of it, poisoning the well for non-libertarian thinkers ...
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Meet the New Boss
Robert Joustra
November 1, 2012
TV's darkest political drama is so ripe with corruption we're lucky it's not on smell-o-vision.
For all the fuss about Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom, this fall's runaway political favourite, a counterdrama is unfolding in the more obscure, certainly more explicit, Chicago-centred drama, Boss The familiar trope of a system that demands sacrifice for the greater good, of a system of human design that ...
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The Kung Fu Panda Problem: Gangnam Style goes Global
Robert Joustra
October 26, 2012
And this is the reason that Osnos says censored regimes like China could never produce a parody like Gangnam Style In an interview with Evan Osnos, Osnos says that the reason that South Korea could produce something as off the mainstream, and frankly as bizarre, as Gangnam Style is because of the hi...
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Religious Freedom and Social Architecture
Robert Joustra
October 15, 2012
Often religious freedom, including the freedom of faith-based service organizations, is treated as a matter of a limitation on what government may do: it should not pass laws that require religious organizations or persons to violate what their religion persuades them to do or not do—and if a law wo...
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Naughty News Makers
Robert Joustra
September 28, 2012
Plagiarism, after all, is an academic sin, not a legal crime, so there is no "letter of the law" but only the spirit of passing off someone's work as your own Zakaria, Wente, and countless pundits are not original thinkers ...
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Millennials Will Save Cities, and Destroy the Country
Robert Joustra
September 20, 2012
The next big question, according to Rolf Pendall at The Atlantic, is "will Millennials stay?"—and if they do, will they raise families? If they don't, the ironic demographic conclusion will be that Millennials may yet save some cities, and destroy the country ...
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Culture without War still needs Parties
Robert Joustra
September 6, 2012
For her courage and conviction McAvoy rewards her with the simple invocation, "You do After a sophomoric question, "What makes American the greatest country in the world?", McHale writes and McAvoy repeats to the crowd, in one of the series' finest moments: "It's not, but it can be ...
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Alone in the Void
Robert Joustra
August 3, 2012
Maybe we are not alone, but are in fact in a universe charged with "the grandeur of God"—vast and unimaginable, poking and prodding human intellect to nobler truths than self-interest and fear, to better moral and political impulses than survival and pleasure ...
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The Caspian Sea Monster
Robert Joustra
July 27, 2012
The petro-politics of the Caspian lack the fire power of the South China Sea, and we are far from a flashpoint, but as more rogue states of the world find solace behind the regional interests of emerging autocracies like Russia, we may be wistful for some old time rights talk from an honest broker ...
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The Leaning Tower of Ivory
Robert Joustra
July 20, 2012
Not so the independents of the post-secondary world, who rid education of the fashionable philosophical fictions of academic freedom, and talk frankly about ends, means, telos Public education should, in fact, be at the service of the public, and if a public administration feels that job is being do...
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The Chickens are Restless
Robert Joustra
July 12, 2012
Quota is the key to the supply-management system Quota and the supply-management controls have produced an artificially inflated market, one in which the prices of cheese, chicken, and the like cost Canadians nearly $5-billion a year, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Devel...
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The Third Option
Robert Joustra
June 28, 2012
For the time being, much of Canadian business and trade flows south Whatever you make of Mitchell Sharp's Third Option, we're back at it again, but this time for very different reasons ...
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A Revenant Renaissance
Robert Joustra
June 15, 2012
The bifurcation between material and spiritual, between death and life, has been absorbed into many European religious traditions in a way that might be unintelligible to their premodern, even co-religious, ancestors Writes Nancy Caciola in Wraiths, Revenant and Rituals in Medieval Culture, “… intim...
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Superheroes: the Saints of the State
Robert Joustra
June 8, 2012
In Comment's latest print issue, Adam Barkman argued superheroes are the saints of the state, the embodiment of the virtues and rituals, the faith and hope, that underline the so-called secular state ...