May 26, 2008
Before sailing around the shoreline of Holland’s old Zuider Zee with my three sons last week, I packed a suitably nautical book in my kit called ‘The Plimsoll Sensation’, in case we got becalmed. The book had caught my eye in a shop several months ago. I had often cited the story of Samuel Plimsoll […]
May 19, 2008
Not only in Stockholm and Amsterdam, but also in London, thousands of Christians have taken church out onto the streets over Pentecost with festive presentations of the message of Jesus. Totally independent of the events we reported over the last two weeks, the London Pentecost Festival saw a dazzling array of over a hundred events […]
May 12, 2008
Christians in Amsterdam this year are grasping Pentecost as an occasion to reach out across cultural and religious borders, as they seek the welfare of the city. Under the motto ‘Get the Spirit’, they have initiated a nine-day city-wide festival of music and art, dance and debate, encounters and excursions, barbeques and workbees, concerts and […]
May 5, 2008
Sweden doesn’t usually make headlines for its spirituality. But on Saturday records were broken when 15,000 Christians formed the largest crowd ever to fill the Kungsträdgården (King’s Garden) in the centre of Stockholm, the nation’s capital, in a multi-cultural Jesus Manifestation. Churches from across the Christian spectrum–Orthodox and Catholic, Lutheran and Baptist, through to […]
April 28, 2008
Maybe it does sounds pretentious. But the calling of those who name Jesus as Lord is nothing less than to help shape the future. We are not simply to let the future happen, fatalistically shrugging our shoulders and mumbling about God’s sovereignty. Yes, God is sovereign. But that doesn’t put him in the same category […]
April 21, 2008
How bleak is Europe’s future? Can Christianity survive today’s challenges? Will Europe’s cities soon be re-populated by Muslim immigrants? Will her cathedrals be replaced by mega-mosques? Or will Europe simply implode from moral failure? Last week we wrote about the two-week Heritage Trip, my wife and I host each year, starting in Amsterdam (June 28), and finishing in Geneva […]
April 14, 2008
If you have never visited Prague, you owe it to yourself. If you have, you will want to return. So why not this summer? Prague is a vital link in the story of the making of Europe, and thus in our Heritage Trip this July. Of course, there are so many ‘vital links’ to Europe’s […]
April 7, 2008
You don’t have to be a believer to recognise the unique role of the Bible in shaping Europe. Arch-atheist Richard Dawkins freely admits that ‘without knowledge of Christianity and the Bible, you just can’t understand European history’. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in a marked departure from his predecessors, talks openly about ‘France’s essentially Christian roots’. […]
March 31, 2008
Around the fireside over the weekend, several of us gathered to discuss one of the oldest questions in the book: why do bad things happen to good people? The immediate occasion for this discussion was the tragic death in Africa over Easter of almost-20-year-old Eva, which I wrote about last week. Each of us know […]
March 24, 2008
Midnight has just passed and Easter Morning was still at its darkest. The phone rang, stirring me out of deep slumber. The voice on the other end told me they had tragic news. Close colleagues had just heard that their almost-20-year-old daughter had been killed in a car accident that day in Africa. Eva (see […]
March 17, 2008
Palm Sunday, Como, Italy: We had arranged to meet our friends at the Piazza Duomo at 10am. But on arrival, we discovered that we were not the only ones gathering around the great marble cathedral at that hour. Crowds of the faithful were converging on the central square of the northern Italian city, famous for […]
March 3, 2008
Our planet has been wrongly named. That was the opinion of a science reporter I once read in a German airline magazine. And flying across the mighty Pacific and then the North Atlantic on a 12,000 kilometre trip back to Europe, I have to agree! The vast majority of this trip has been over water. […]
