August 11, 2014
This month we entered a four-year season of remembrance and commemoration. Through a barrage of television documentaries and newspaper articles, we will be reminded of the battles of World War One: Verdun, the Somme, Ypres, Gallipoli, Jutland and many more. We will soon re-live the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the birth of the Soviet […]
August 4, 2014
Christians have often suspected human rights to be the product of humanistic Enlightenment thinkers devising ways to sideline the Church and religion in the public square. With abortion, euthanasia and even infanticide being claimed as human rights today, many Christians remain apprehensive about the very concept. Yet that is not the full story, as […]
July 28, 2014
The world watched on as Holland mourned this past week. Four days in a row, the same somber ceremony was performed at Eindhoven Airport, as coffin after coffin was respectfully unloaded from the Hercules aircraft into scores of waiting hearses. The unprecedented kilometre-long convoy speeding down the motorway toward Hilversum was followed by thousands on […]
July 21, 2014
The Great Partnership between science and faith that we wrote about last week could be illustrated equally from the story of Edinburgh as from that of Cambridge. On our recent Celtic Heritage Tour, Paul James-Griffiths introduced this theme to us on our walk down the Royal Mile from Edinburgh Castle towards the Holyrood Palace. As […]
July 16, 2014
The day before the caravan of the Tour de France swept through Cambridge last week followed by millions around the world, our small Celtic Heritage Tour group slipped unnoticed in and out of the famous university city. While the main focus of our tour had been on the impact of the gospel brought by Celtic […]
July 7, 2014
Remember that childhood joke about the story of the three wells: ‘Well, well, well’? Well, here’s a story about three wells we visited on our Celtic Heritage Tour through Ireland and Britain, reminding us of the significance of wells both physically and spiritually in ages past. Today we take running water for granted. City water […]
June 30, 2014
The Book of Kells, on permanent display in the Trinity College Library in Dublin, weaves the strands of Coptic, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Roman Christian traditions together into a tapestry depicting a dynamic, creative, artistic, life-affirming, creation-loving, relational and Christ-centred movement with much to teach us still today. Starting our Celtic Heritage Tour in Dublin, to […]
June 23, 2014
This weekend was the summer solstice. So now the days start to shorten and the nights lengthen– in the northern hemisphere at least. In pre-modern times, Europeans were far more conscious of the rhythms of the seasons than in our modern, industrialised, secular times. The church calendar marked this cosmic milestone as the Feast of […]
June 16, 2014
Rotterdam, bombed mercilessly in May 1940 by Hitler’s Luftwaffe, is famous for its Zadkine sculpture depicting the city without a heart. However, a walk through the urban centre on Saturday overwhelmingly convinced a trans-confessional group of ‘fellow pilgrims’ that God was reshaping the church of the future and restoring a heart to the city. The […]
June 15, 2014
Today, Sunday June 15, is World Refugee Sunday. Or, if you prefer, next Sunday, June 22. Its a day to recall that 45 million people–the population of Spain–are forcibly displaced refugees in our world today. The Refugee Highway Partnership, in cooperation with the World Evangelical Alliance, promotes this day annually to encourage churches to pray […]
June 9, 2014
Stavanger, on Norway’s westernmost coastline, is the nation’s oil capital servicing the drilling rigs in the North Sea, making it the most expensive city in Norway, perhaps in the world. Before oil was discovered in the 1960’s, Stavanger was chiefly a herring port. Old Stavanger, today a picturesque township of white wooden houses and quaint […]
June 2, 2014
The loss of solidarity signalled by last week’s European election outcomes has prompted much concern and uncertainty concerning Europe’s future. Roy Searle of the Northumbria Community wrote in his blog that he woke up feeling depressed, downcast, demoralized and quite ashamed to be British: ‘To be a citizen of a country that gives the majority vote […]
