John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, Canada, where he teaches political philosophy and religion and politics. He is author of Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (2001), and coeditor of Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought (2008) and Civil Religion in Political Thought (2010), as well as two volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. The topics of his scholarly articles include friendship, cosmopolitanism, liberal education, multiculturalism, empire, civil religion, political representation, citizenship, republicanism, just war, Islamic political thought, leadership, America as symbol, and religious liberty in Canada. His editorials have appeared in the Globe and Mail (Toronto), Calgary Herald, C2C: Canada's Journal of Ideas, and Comment. He was the 2010 Hill Lecturer and is currently president of Civitas, "a society where ideas meet." He is currently at work on a book-length study on the political significance of friendship.

Bio last updated January 30th, 2020.

John von Heyking

Articles by John von Heyking

  • Canada: Intimations of Liberty

    Hearing the seductive, loon-like call of so-called postnationalists who claim Canada is without identity, political philosopher John Von Heyking insists the Fathers of Confederation would have seen the “ironic pose of non-identity as infertile soil for heartfelt protection of rights.” 

    If we genuinely want to be a self-governing people under the regime of responsible government, I can think of no better way of celebrating Canada 150 by than rereading and thinking about what the Fathers of Confederation can teach us about our regime But responsible government is predicated upon pol...

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  • Violence Ever With Us

    University of Lethbridge political theorist John von Heyking reads in Saint Augustine the stark warning that the violent will always bear it away among broken human beings. The good news? That’s the start of peace.

    As deficient as the political societies are that human beings organize themselves into, and as monumentally difficult (if not impossible) it is for human beings to get control of the instruments of violence, Augustine did acknowledge that the small differences among regimes (small in comparison to t...

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  • Government by Talking

    F.H. Buckley's book on the necessity of government by conviviality

    The same concentration of power has been going on in Canada and Great Britain, but the Canadian system of Westminster government is better equipped to check executive power than is the U.S Our Westminster parliamentary system protects liberty better because responsible government gives members of th...

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  • Faith and Festivity

    John Von Heyking traces the classical roots of the Calgary Stampede and finds that even Muslims celebrating Ramadan are treated fairly at the fair

    Moreover, the Calgary Stampede is, in important respects, something rarely found in modern civilization: a civic festival, or a festival of the civil religion of a specific area, namely Calgary and southern Alberta Cross and Archibald McLean (the so-called Big Four), inaugurated the first Calgary St...

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  • Politics, Judgment & Last Things

    What Prof. John von Heyking would say if these were his last words

    All these great texts operate under the kind of insight Søren Kierkegaard offers when he states in Works of Love: "Alas, many think that judgment is something reserved for the far side of the grave, and so it is also, but they forget that judgment is much closer than that, that it is taking place at...

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  • Friendship is the Form of Politics

    Why loneliness is always part of tyranny.

    Friendship as the form of politics is predicated on three Aristotelian insights: 1) the highest kind of friendship, virtue friendship, is a practice whose moral goal transcends politics; 2) a citizenry unpractised in virtue friendship is incapable of habitually practising justice, and therefore, of ...

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