Robert J. Joustra is an associate professor of politics and international studies at Redeemer University, outside Toronto, Canada. He is an editorial fellow with The Review of Faith & International Affairs and author and editor of several books, including most recently Power Politics and Moral Order: Three Generations of Christian Realism (Cascade, 2022). He tweets sporadically @rjoustra.
Herbert Butterfield, despite having been one of the world’s foremost Christian Realists, was deeply conflicted on nuclear arms.
Robert JoustraJanuary 20, 2023
Jocelyn Cesari’s latest—”We God’s People: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in the World of Nations”—will take readers’ full attention. She does not suffer fools, either in style or substance, but those who come with a bit of background and an honest and sincere interest are not likely to find many her match.
Robert JoustraJune 14, 2022
Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press argue in “The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution” that the Atomic Age isn’t too different from other ages. Geopolitical rivalries, arms races, military doctrines, stalemates, and much else are still the same.
Robert JoustraSeptember 1, 2020
Abraham Kuyper unquestionably had his failures and his blind spots. But he also labored to find balanced and faithful Christian realist positions on international affairs. We would do well to imitate those principles today.
Robert JoustraMay 28, 2020
We have an introductory, if provisional, picture of anti-Revolutionary foreign policy and Abraham Kuyper’s platform coming into the highest political office in the Netherlands in the early twentieth century. How did this platform fair? What “necessary adjustments” (as Kuyper called them) did he need to make between his Calvinistic international theory and the actual work of foreign policy?
Robert JoustraMay 15, 2020
While much has been made of Abraham Kuyper’s Calvinistic contributions to domestic political theory, very little (in English) has been said of his foreign policy.
Robert JoustraMay 6, 2020
Jealousy, love, and punishment are not bad ways of understanding the rise in both government-based religious discrimination and societal religious discrimination, as Jonathan Fox shows in his newest book, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me: Why Governments Discriminate against Religious Minorities.
Robert JoustraApril 13, 2020
Dmitry Adamsky’s outstanding Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy explains the religious imagination that has swept not only through the Russian nuclear arsenal since 1991, but also into all levels of the country’s nuclear tirade, military forces, and even Russian foreign policy more broadly.
Robert JoustraJune 13, 2019
In Right Here, Right Now, Stephen Harper, Canada’s former prime minister, explains how his Canadian conservatism bridges the gap between populism and the establishment.
Robert JoustraOctober 18, 2018