My blog posts revolve around my interests and vocation as a historian: the intersection of history and contemporary church life, the intersection of history and contemporary politics, serendipitous discoveries in archives or on research trips, publications and research projects, upcoming conferences, and speaking engagements.
I sometimes blog for two other organizations, the Canadian Baptist Historical Society and the Centre for Post-Christendom Studies. The views expressed in these blogs represent the views of the authors, and not necessarily those of any organizations with which they are associated. |
It seems that political leaders who are seeking to leverage the current “War on Covid 19” to advance their radical political goals have taken a play from the playbook of Winston Churchill who quipped during the last world war to “never let a good crisis go to waste.”
To observers of the Canadian government seeking to take advantage of the current crisis to re-imagine and remake the economy into a green utopia, it may come as surprise to realize that this would not be the first time that a Canadian war effort was hijacked to advance a radical agenda.
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I enjoy science fiction, and one genre within the world of science fiction is that of utopian visions of the future. I have just finished reading Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), a description of an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Peru.
There were a few serendipitous moments as I read Bacon's vision of a utopian society. For instance, I was surprised at the Christian identity of the island, but even more so at the way in which the island became Christian. Emreculha, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons The recent Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region is a reminder of some pressing issues Christians need to consider when shaping informed opinions on two key matters related to warfare: territory and technology.
The following is a new article of mine published in the Journal of Presbyterian HIstory - click here for the link. It deals with interwar attitudes to war among Canadian Presbyterians. The full bibliographical information is as follows: Gordon L. Heath, “Canadian Presbyterians and the Rejection of Pacifism in the Interwar Years, 1919-1939,” Journal of Presbyterian History 98, 2 (Fall/Winter 2020): 67-77.
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