September 3, 2012
The name Sir Ludwig Guttmann meant nothing to me until a few days ago. While on holiday in Ireland last week, I heard the amazing story of the man behind the Paralympic Games. This is a story everyone should hear while the current games are being held. Hence this weekly word, a week earlier than […]
August 13, 2012
Amidst a blaze of fireworks at midnight last night in London, the Olympic Games were declared ended and the flame was doused. Now its Rio’s turn in four year’s time. But when the Roman emperor Theodosius declared the Games over in 393, it took another 1600 years for the flame to be relit. Theodosius II, […]
August 6, 2012
The world watched as the fastest man on the planet crossed himself, pointed to heaven, crouched into his start position and then sprinted the second-fastest 100-metre dash in history… on a Sunday. Throughout the Games the sound track from Chariots of Fire has resounded through the various Olympic venues, a reminder of the story of […]
July 30, 2012
Four years ago, as the Chinese handed over the Olympic flag to the British, I wondered how those islanders could ever match the spell-binding display of artistic precision and mass choreography which opened the Beijing Games. On Friday evening we witnessed Britain’s answer: humour, history, helicopters, hospital beds and–of all things–hymns! Christian hymns! Firstly, William […]
July 23, 2012
Europe’s Summer of Sport enters its third phase this week. The London Olympics follow hard on the heels of the Tour de France, which jumped the gun even before the European Football Championships final. Meanwhile, sport will not distract Europe’s Muslims from observing their most important religious season of the year, While millions of Europeans […]
July 16, 2012
Last week, at the Caux Conference Centre high above Montreux overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland, a former prime minister of Australia and two Aboriginal spokespersons shared about the healing power of public apology. Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia, presented a public apology at the opening of parliament in 2008 to the ‘stolen generations’ […]
July 9, 2012
Prague, one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, was the powder keg for a most ugly phase of the continent’s history, the Thirty Years War. That conflagration which spread across much of Central and Western Europe began with a bizarre event in 1618 called the ‘defenestration’, when city nobles threw two imperial envoys out of the […]
July 2, 2012
We’re off again on our search for Europe’s soul on the Heritage Tour. From seven nations, we have started our discovery trip seeking clues as to what gave Europe her DNA, and how the inhabitants of the western peninsula of Eurasia created western civilisation. Our starting point has been the Dutch city of Utrecht, in […]
June 25, 2012
In our globalised world, where ‘everyone is now everywhere’, tensions over religion, worldview and ideology threaten the future of civilisation and make the emergence of a civil public square essential. This threat prompted Dr Os Guinness and Profesosr Thomas Schirrmacher to launch the Global Charter of Conscience last week in the European Parliament building in […]
June 18, 2012
This coming Wednesday night, at nine minutes past eleven, our planet will begin to tilt in the opposite direction, moving the northern hemisphere away from the sun. For us in Europe, this is the summer solstice. Down under, it is the winter solstice. In Scandinavia and the Baltics, this event has been celebrated traditionally since […]
June 11, 2012
Modern economics has become a zombie, a body detached from the soul which gave it life, argues Tomas Sedlácek, former economic advisor to Vaclav Havel. A zombie works efficiently, he explains, but without compassion, tenderness or understanding. The result is a hard, inhuman and eventually self-devouring and devastating system. Dr Sedlácek was speaking last week […]
June 4, 2012
Last weekend in Zwolle, a short drive from my home in Holland, an ambitious programme was presented in several historic church buildings across the inner city to explore the relevance of the Modern Devotion movement of the 15th century for our postmodern times. Zwolle’s most famous son is Thomas a Kempis, collator of The Imitation […]
