March 31, 2014
The news is not so reassuring this week. Russian troops along the Ukrainian border threaten invasion. Extreme rightists in France make great gains in municipal elections. And the latest UN report predicts the impact of global warming to be ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible’. Time to pull in our heads and pretend all this is […]
March 24, 2014
‘Forget about the world being flat. Forget technology as the great democratizer. Forget the niceties of international law. Territory and the bonds of blood that go with it are central to what makes us human.’ So Robert Kaplan responds in this week’s TIME magazine to the disbelief and disorientation among western leaders about Russia’s heavy-handed […]
March 16, 2014
A stone’s throw from the apartment where we stayed during a conference last week in the heart of the beautiful French city of Lyon was a street once ominously called Rue Maudicte, ‘street of the accursed’. Since renamed, this was the street where a wealthy merchant named Peter Waldo had lived in the twelfth century […]
March 10, 2014
Clearing out some drawers last week I came across a couple of old maps of the Crimea picked up on various visits to the peninsular over the past two decades. On one visit, I arrived in Simferopol after 19 hours on a Soviet-era train from Rostov-on-Don in Russia. Yalta was my destination, which I finally […]
March 3, 2014
Rain drizzled all across Athens today as I stood on Mars Hill somewhere near the spot where Paul delivered his famous sermon recorded by Luke in Acts chapter 17. Like a giant lump of volcanic pumice, Mars Hill is a rough-surfaced rocky outcrop in the shadow of the Acropolis. Here Ares, the god of war, […]
February 24, 2014
The sun was setting on the little French town of Toulouges, near where the Pyrénées meet the Mediterranean coast, when my Dutch host jumped up and exclaimed, ‘Let me show you something before it gets dark!’ Hastily putting on our coats, we stepped out into the cool dusk air and set out towards the town […]
February 17, 2014
Not only did missionaries play a midwife role in the birth of the nation of New Zealand, as I wrote in last week’s WW; they also midwifed the rise and spread of democracy around the world, according to a persuasive 26-page article, Missionary roots of liberal democracy, published by the American Political Science Review. . […]
February 10, 2014
A high Celtic stone cross marks the spot in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands where Christian mission in the last land on earth to be populated by humans began two hundred years ago. The sermon preached on Christmas Day in 1814 to a large crowd of Maori was the start of a process that led […]
February 3, 2014
A sea-change is taking place in the way Europeans view prostitution. In an almost too-good-to-be-true-report, the European Parliament announced it will vote later this month on criminalising clients rather than the sex workers. Perhaps even more surprising is the news that the French parliament, led by Women's Rights Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem (see photo) already voted […]
January 27, 2014
Today, Monday January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day to remember the victims of the genocide that resulted in the annihilation of six million Jews. For 69 years ago today, Soviet troops entering Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland were met by a ghostly gaggle of survivors, the ‘lucky’ ones left behind after 60,000 […]
January 20, 2014
Okay, so you’d love to be with us here in New Zealand right now enjoying the southern hemisphere summer. Well, if it’s any comfort, we are experiencing the tail-end of a cyclone that ripped across the Pacific Island of Tonga last week. Today it’s grey, rainy and cooler. As a second-best option, let me suggest […]
January 13, 2014
After flying for a day and a half from Europe, you may think you have reached the ends of the earth when you land in Auckland: ‘New Zealand, the world’s last bus stop’. But no, the journey hasn’t finished yet. For lying 60 kilometres off the coast from Auckland you can see on a clear […]
