January 3, 2026
The New Year is an occasion to reflect and make resolutions – to search our souls, and ask ourselves if we are on the right path. Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance offers a quiet visual parable for this moment. In his new book about the Dutch master which I cited last week, Andrew Graham-Dixon […]
December 27, 2025
My Christmas reading has offered a surprising perspective of hope for Ukraine from a new book about the 17th century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer lived, worked and painted in the newly liberated Dutch Republic after an eighty-year struggle for sovereignty, cultural freedom and national identity against Spanish imperial rule. Andrew Graham-Dixon’s book describes in […]
December 20, 2025
Beyond the sentimental glitz, music and food, Christmas can be very unsettling. Now for the fourth time since Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, we are celebrating the Word of God becoming flesh as angels proclaimed peace on earth. So where is the peace? The idea of ‘immensity-confined’ in a human infant is itself mind-boggling and […]
December 13, 2025
‘Without justice’, wrote Augustine in City of God, ‘what are kingdoms but great bands of criminals?’ Recently the Vatican representative to the United Nations, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, reminded the General Assembly with these ancient words from the church father, adding that ‘no individual or group, regardless of his or her status, should claim the authority […]
December 6, 2025
Two sharply contrasting views of Europe surfaced this week, one from Washington, the other from Brussels. These two visions imply very different futures for Europe. And for the world. Both claim to defend values. Yet they arise from fundamentally different imaginations of what Europe is and what Europe ought to be. One was the US […]
November 29, 2025
Amsterdam’s Light Festival lit up the city’s canals this week with works by artists from around the world. One thought-provoking light-sculpture took on particular relevance with world affairs this past week. A neon sign flashed on and off to reveal the phrases ‘All the light you see is from the past’ and ‘All you see […]
November 22, 2025
The White House ultimatum to Ukraine to accept the Kremlin-dictated capitulation plan or lose essential American support is the most shameful proposal from an American president since the Yalta Agreement between Stalin and Roosevelt which doomed millions of Central and Eastern Europeans to Soviet subjection. It will send shivers of foreboding through the Baltic states […]
November 15, 2025
Faith communities and religious organisations in an Amsterdam district contribute significantly to the welfare of individuals, families and communities in ways beyond the scope of government departments. Representatives of the Amsterdam Southeast district council heard this week that local faith communities had offered services worth over €7.65 million in social impact value last year. On […]
November 8, 2025
One of history’s most dramatic encounters between spiritual and military power is depicted in this fresco in the Vatican by the Renaissance artist Raphael under commission. In 452 AD, the Roman Emperor Valentinian III sent Pope Leo I to negotiate with Attila the Hun near Mantua in northern Italy. Great panic was gripping Rome as […]
November 1, 2025
How should followers of Jesus respond in a time of political turmoil and cultural fragmentation, when the loudest voices often drown out the wisest? Last night I reflected on this question with a group of young professionals in Brussels. We began with the ancient words of the prophet Micah: “What does the Lord require of […]
October 25, 2025
Eighty years ago, in 1945, the delegates who gathered in San Francisco to sign the Charter of the United Nations shared an understanding that peace rests on justice, human dignity, and shared responsibility. Out of the devastation of the Second World War had come a yearning for moral renewal and a framework for peace. The […]
October 18, 2025
Back in the 1960s, the era of Beatles and the Stones, the sexual revolution, moon-landings and dwindling church-attendance, religion was assumed to be definitely on the way out. ‘As society advances in modernity, religion retreats and becomes increasingly hollow’. So went the secularisation theory. ‘[By] the twenty-first century, religious believers are likely to be found […]
