May 23, 2016
The smiling face of the extreme-right presidential candidate, Norbert Hofer, here and there embellished with swastikas on his forehead, beamed out from posters all over Vienna as I drove through the city this weekend. Austrian voters who went to the polls yesterday to decide whether they wanted a populist president from the Freedom Party or […]
May 16, 2016
Christians in Europe must rise above narrow horizons of national interest, seek the international common good and urge fellow citizens to do likewise, argued Dr Jonathan Chaplin last weekend at the State of Europe Forum in Amsterdam. ‘We reject the secularist liberal assumption of the primacy of individual self-interest in national politics,’ the Englishman declared, […]
May 9, 2016
Liberation Day was celebrated on various days across Europe this past week to commemorate the end of the last World War. The official slogan here in the Netherlands was: ‘Pass freedom on!’ The irony seemed to go unnoticed that this celebration came just four weeks after the Dutch voted (well, most of those who bothered […]
May 2, 2016
As the Apostle Paul travelled around the Mediterranean and wrote his pastoral letters to fledgling churches in Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae and Philippi, he fed his readers a vision of inclusion and universality, transcending the many ethnicities of those joining the People of the Way. To the multi-cultural Corinthians on the isthmus between the Peloponnese […]
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 […]
