April 25, 2016
The flowers still lay all over the Maelbeek metro entrance in Brussels last week as my colleague and I made our way to the hotel around the corner for consultations on European issues, including the terrorist challenge to social cohesion. The metro station reopens today, but life has not yet returned to normal, whatever that […]
April 18, 2016
France has become the latest and biggest European country so far to adopt the ‘Nordic Model’ of combating prostitution by criminalising clients rather than prostitutes. While the controversial legislation took over two years to pass through parliament, the final vote earlier this month was overwhelmingly in favour: 64 for, 12 against, 11 abstentions. Next to […]
April 11, 2016
To my Ukrainian friends, With a sense of sadness and shame I offer apologies for the slap in the face you received from many Dutch voters in our referendum here last week. As the photo above portrays, you turned out massively in support of a new beginning for your country just two years ago. You […]
April 4, 2016
This week in the Netherlands we vote on the endorsement of the Ukraine-EU association agreement. Unfortunately, this is not just a Dutch matter. The sole and cynical purpose of the initiators of this referendum is to destroy the European Union. If the vote is negative–and polls suggest it will be–that has implications for Ukrainians first, […]
March 28, 2016
Yesterday, twenty years ago, seven Trappist monks were kidnapped by Islamist terrorists from their monastery in Algeria and held as hostage for two months. On May 24, 1996, the terrorists announced that they had ‘slit the throats’ of their hostages. Sixteen hundred years ago, the fourth-century church father Jerome lamented the previous twenty years of […]
March 21, 2016
Henri Nouwen once spent an afternoon in the Augustiner Museum in Freiburg, meditating on a fourteenth-century wooden sculpture of Christus auf Palmesel (Christ on palm-donkey). It was, he wrote, one of the most moving Christ figures he knew. Made to be pulled on a cart in the Palm Sunday procession, the sculpture came originally from […]
March 14, 2016
The words ‘brew’ and ‘pray’ don’t really mix for people from my church background. Yet this past weekend, as honorarium for speaking at a open monastery day in the southern Netherlands, I was included in a ‘Brew and Pray’ day, mixing two centuries-old Benedictine traditions. Perhaps it was God’s humour that a Baptist Kiwi should […]
March 7, 2016
Freedom is one of our stated European values. We all want freedom. Yet ever since Plato, thinkers have realised how paradoxical ‘freedom’ actually is. For freedom–meaning the absence of constraining control–allows bullies to enslave the meek, thus destroying freedom. We need to take freedom seriously. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warns that freedom leads to licence, which […]
February 29, 2016
Five hundred years ago this week, a book destined to catalyse the reshaping of Europe came off the press in Basel. It was a bomb with a short fuse. The publication of this Greek-Latin New Testament was the crowning work of the great Renaissance scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam. For many today, the name Erasmus represents […]
February 22, 2016
So, David Cameron has got a deal of sorts. He now has to convince his British electorate to vote to stay in the EU. Looking at the big picture, there can only be one winner from a Br(itish)exit: Vladimir Putin. That fact alone should be enough to inform the British how to vote. Putin has […]
February 15, 2016
The first question many ask when trying to understand a Jerome Bosch painting is, what sort of mind-bending drugs did they have in the late 15th-century? What unleashed this boundless imagination and surrealistic fantasy that inspired artists like Brueghel, Goya and Dali? Last week an appointment in the southern Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch –Den Bosch–happened […]
February 8, 2016
Everyone is for sustainability. What ‘motherhood’ was for an earlier generation, ‘sustainability’ is for now. It’s a given. Except maybe for marital relationships. There we leave ourselves a little latitude. After all, what if it doesn’t work out? Let’s experiment first. Try a few partners. Test our compatibility. Maybe marriage contracts should be for a […]
