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.

Robert Joustra

Articles by Robert Joustra

  • Wiebo's War

    With Wiebo Ludwig's passing of esophageal cancer last month, at the age of 70, op-eds and even a documentary, "Wiebo's War," covered the clash between Wiebo Ludwig and modern society ...

    Read more...

  • The Tyranny of Extroverts

    But if even the ivory refuge of introverts is yielding its place in the shade to stop and have a good think, if even it must be reduced to bullet points and action items and publishing lists, we may indeed have arrived at a tyranny of extroverts. ...

    Read more...

  • Our Dystopian Rut

    Gene Rodenberry's Cold War idealism had company in others, like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, in which psycho-history grounded an intellectual approach to the macroscopic manipulation of the rise and fall of empires The disruption in our fantasy has in fact become so dire that Neal Stephenson st...

    Read more...

  • The Games of Yanks and Canucks

    We had Monopoly at home in rural Ottawa, but it was a distant second to Kiwi-inspired Poleconomy, a game that introduced everything from bond markets, to inflation, to major Canadian companies and advertising agencies And here's the real kicker: Canada's game of capitalism, undoubtedly a pinko-inter...

    Read more...

  • Grab your Bag. It's On.

    That's where Seiple says point three bleeds through: bring the kingdom of God as his ambassadors of reconciliation Taylor is probably right that our greatest battles, our hardest tests, are about right orientation, about the worship of God, and the denial of self ...

    Read more...

  • Christian Labour as Competitive Advantage

    But I think two overlapping trends in the next decade(s) will actually turn what has been a liability—a religious designation—into a competitive advantage: the global resurgence of religion and the dawning post-American world In short, global economic productivity is shifting to the cultures and soc...

    Read more...

  • The Vanity of Foxes

    Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into these two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing All people, foxes and intellectuals of any stripe, who receive that truth, know one big thing ...

    Read more...

  • Don't let the smallness confuse you

    Likewise, a foreign policy driven by national interest, and so-called shared Canadian values, also is a grand vision Foreign affairs is one portfolio this government will not (cannot) download, and has demonstrated, via the shuffling in of Minister Baird, a strong potential for defining a new Canadi...

    Read more...

  • Union Metaphors

    Certain goods in the State of the Union were transparently obvious: "We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000," the President said President Obama opened and closed last night's State of the Union with a series of auspicious military metaphors ...

    Read more...

  • The Instant Super Cities of Oil Empires

    But what Paul Collier calls the resource curse, and what other economists call Dutch disease, faces Kazakhs still: their challenge will be exploiting Kazakh oil for not just a city to be proud of, an urban dream that points to hope, but something that realizes that hope in a sustained way ...

    Read more...

  • Have think tanks stopped thinking?

    The point is rather to create the space and the culture within which think tanks might recover the serious reflection for which they were founded Emerging after the first World War, think tanks were designed to serve two functions: policy development and political combat ...

    Read more...

  • There can be no peace, after Westphalia

    Realists would tell us that peace is the absence of war, but Epiphany reminds us that there can be no end to war, neither that within or without, apart from adoration which is shown, today, by the Magi Where there is no room for direction, O'Donovan writes, "Society is ruled by the imperative of uni...

    Read more...

  • Is all foreign policy missiology?

    So, then, I beg the question: is all foreign policy, all extension of statehood and state interests, really a kind of missiological projection of liberal moral order? Is liberal state building—schools, roads, markets—a work of conversion? Is, in fact, the work of secular foreign policy really not so...

    Read more...

  • How to Tax the Rich

    Canadian legislation undergoes none of that: our Prime Minister commands the confidence of a House he or she normally has a majority in, and so the government can make whatever unpopular or arcane laws it sees fit, provided it is willing face the electorate on that record every four years or so Maki...

    Read more...

  • Some corrections from last week

    It takes uncharacteristic idealism, maybe even huge naïveté, to suggest that slow justice rather than fast revolution can fix anything; that the system, the people, can survive slow repair or even that there is enough redeemable in it to justify the enormous patience of reform Power just spent the l...

    Read more...