February 26, 2022
Mr Putin’s messianic pretensions as saviour of Russian civilisation have deep religious and historical roots. Yet our western secular world tends to filter out religion and pre-Enlightenment history as irrelevant. Hence our surprise at the Hitleresque attack this week, reminiscent of the Nazi occupation of Sudetenland in 1938, or the blitzkrieg on Rotterdam in May […]
February 19, 2022
Bans on conversion therapy are being passed feverishly in countries around the world following a United Nations directive against the ‘inherently degrading and discriminatory’ practice. Canada, France, Germany and twenty-eight of the United States of America have passed bans, with Britain and the Netherlands in process against such therapy. According to the UN, it ‘inflict[s] […]
February 12, 2022
Politics, as everybody ‘knows’, is a dirty business. No place for Christians, so the argument goes. Or should we say that’s the very reason why Christians should be involved? This week in Brussels, Romkje and I have been coaching young aspiring politicians as part of a programme of the European Christian Political Movement wrestling with […]
February 5, 2022
No one these days dares speak against sustainability. After all, who’d want Greta Thunberg to get on their case? Unless, of course, we’re talking about relationships. For here we touch on one of society’s big hypocrisies. Our governments and industries spend billions on promoting the sustainability of natural resources and environment. But who’s investing in […]
January 29, 2022
No-one knows what Vladimir Putin is going to do next on the Ukrainian border – including perhaps Putin himself. Having made such sweeping demands for western concessions, he cannot easily simply back out of the confrontation he has created without losing face. Options include a ‘peace-keeping’ mission taking over the Donbas area, and/or the strip […]
January 22, 2022
On a family visit last week, I was taken to the city which a thousand years ago was Europe’s (some say the world’s) largest and most cultured. Not Rome, nor London, nor Paris – but Cordoba, in southern Spain. With an estimated population of 450,000 at the turn of the millennium, the city boasted […]
January 15, 2022
When Henry Vyner-Brooks proposed a double biography about two ‘Fathers of Europe’, his publishers were not convinced it would work. Although they had previously published his Renaissance novels, they balked at his plan to present a ‘set of binoculars with which to observe the drama of western civilisation’. After all, the names and stories of […]
January 10, 2022
Reflections with family and friends on the highs and lows of the past year over the past days were enriched by a story shared in a friend’s Christmas newsletter. After a church service, a young lad was intrigued by the organ console with its maze of stops, pedals and keyboards. When the organist asked him […]
December 18, 2021
The story is irrepressible – despite all efforts to eradicate religion from the ‘winter holiday season’; undeterred by the shrill claims of the ‘New Atheists’ (remember them?) that religion was the root of all evil ; and regardless of the bastardisation of St Nicolas into the crassly commercial Santa Claus. Once again this December, the […]
December 11, 2021
Imagine a world without love: where might is right, money trumps justice, indifference cancels out compassion, and cruelty offers entertainment; a world shaped by the realpolitik of Machiavelli or the nihilism of Nietzsche. Some leading intellectuals fear we are headed towards such a world as the memory of Christian values fades. Public figures including Niall […]
December 4, 2021
Strange, isn’t it, that the death of an old man in southern Turkey nearly 1700 years ago should stir so much anticipation and excitement among European children in 2021? This Monday, December 6, is the Feast of St Nicolas, the day the saint died in Myra, Turkey, in AD 343. For Dutch children, the big […]
November 27, 2021
The COVID pandemic and climate change highlighted at COP26 are forcing global business leaders radically to rethink their key role in healing the world. At the Economics of Mutuality Forum held at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam this week, former Dutch premier Jan Peter Balkenende told business leaders and management experts present that only healed […]
