August 16, 2025
The disturbing spectre of two self-styled ‘strongmen’ meeting in Alaska to discuss the fate of Ukraine suggests they both want to turn the clock back to the pre-1848 world order. Trump and Putin seem to want to pull the world back toward a pre-1848 style of governance when constitutions were seen as dangerous concessions to […]
August 9, 2025
We humans are wired for the future. As Alexander Pope’s immortal line puts it: ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast’. Which resonates with Ecclesiastes 3:11: God has ‘set eternity in the human heart.’ We long for what we were made for: a world without pain, a reality without injustice, relationships without betrayal, creation without […]
August 2, 2025
Ukraine’s Struggle for Historical Sovereignty History is not merely a record of the past—it is a battleground of meaning. For Ukraine, the struggle over historical truth is more than academic. It is existential. Memory itself is a contested space—one where empires fight to control not only borders, but narratives. Where Stalin rewrote Ukraine’s past to […]
July 25, 2025
(The third in a series of four addressing the persistent Russian efforts to hijack Ukraine’s history.) If the Holodomor—the engineered famine of 1932–33—was Stalin’s attempt to break Ukraine’s body, then his campaign against Ukrainian culture, faith, and language was a calculated effort to annihilate its spirit. The deliberate, systematic erasure of a people’s soul was […]
July 20, 2025
(WeeklyWord extra: the second in a series of four on Ukraine’s hijacked history) By any measure, the Holodomor stands among the most horrifying atrocities of the 20th century. From 1932 to 1933, a man-made famine orchestrated by Stalin’s Soviet regime killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians. It was not the result of drought […]
July 19, 2025
Escalated Russian aggression ‘emboldened by the silence and inaction of powerful global actors’, prompted leaders of Ukrainian faith networks to make ‘a desperate cry’ for support and solidarity to faith network leaders of churches and organisations in Europe and beyond during a Global Interfaith online meeting on Thursday*. Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant voices echoed the […]
July 12, 2025
In war, the first casualty is truth. Nowhere is this more evident than in the long and brutal campaign waged by Moscow—not only against Ukraine’s sovereignty but against its very identity. Over the next four Weekly Words, we will examine how Ukraine’s story has been hijacked and manipulated into myths and narratives invented in Moscow. […]
July 5, 2025
How do you explain to children, as the wailing of sirens tell them to rush into the metro stations night after terrifying night, filled with anxiety and fear, why the Russian president is escalating his attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine? Or why the American president this week ordered a halt to the transfer of […]
June 28, 2025
This week’s NATO summit was celebrated as a success by the Dutch authorities – the 5 per cent defence spending target was agreed on (for ten years from now!), the Article 5 commitment to collective defence was reaffirmed, and you-know-who’s ego was left intact. But what was not achieved? No new substantive action of economic […]
June 21, 2025
How did secularisation unfold in a Europe that, at the time of the Reformation, seemed so thoroughly Christian—whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox? Amsterdam’s transformation from a bastion of Reformed faith in the 17th century to a cradle of secular modernity in the 18th is one major trajectory of that shift. And one worth tracing for […]
June 14, 2025
This weekend, the Geloof in Mokum series explores Amsterdam’s so-called ‘Golden Age’—a time when faith played a central role in making the city the world’s leader in the 17th century. Spoiler: faith influenced virtually everything. Amsterdam’s rise was rooted in the Reformational worldview embraced during the Alteratie on May 26, 1578. That day, the city’s […]
June 7, 2025
Church leaders from around the world gathered in Amsterdam this week to commemorate 500 years of their Free Church tradition, which began as a persecuted minority but has grown into the largest stream within Protestant Christianity today. The starting point of this movement was not Amsterdam, but rather a little town called Zollikon just outside […]
