October 14, 2023
The horrific outburst of violence between the Hamas and Israel this week is a challenge to all followers of Jesus not to resort to knee-jerk responses: on the one hand, of blind support for everything Israel does and, on the other, blanket condemnation and fear of all Muslims in general. Much of the world rightly […]
October 7, 2023
Alex was killed in action on the eastern frontline this week in Ukraine. He had attended the last Discipleship Training School in Kyiv before the Russian invasion. Alex was engaged to marry YWAM staff member Milana and planned to join staff himself after his military service. News of his death came during a staff retreat […]
September 30, 2023
Politicians, diplomats and intercessors from the Nordic and Baltic nations gathered in Helsinki for a prayer breakfast near the Finnish parliament on Friday morning this week. They were following in a tradition linking prayer and politics which dates back seventy years to the inaugural Presidential Prayer Breakfast with President Eisenhower in Washington, DC, and […]
September 23, 2023
Getting older confronts us with questions we tend to ignore when young, healthy and active. Questions about how God can allow us and our loved ones to suffer; about why he doesn’t always answer our prayers for healing; about why, if he is all-loving and all-knowing and all-powerful, he doesn’t just step in to clean […]
September 16, 2023
Early this week I tagged along with a group of thirty Dutch visitors to Brussels on a walking tour of the European sector led by two experienced Dutch journalists, Bert and Tijn. For most of those I talked with in the group, Brussels was a fairly unfamiliar city. For widely different reasons, they had responded […]
September 10, 2023
Remember how it was just three short years ago, as globally we were reeling from the shock of a pandemic unlike anything in living memory? Remember the deserted streets and squares, when you could sneak an early morning walk through surreal cityscapes (see my photo of an empty Amsterdam central above)? Or the queues where […]
September 2, 2023
A Catholic friend used to tell me how handy it was to be a Catholic because when you needed a parking place you could pray to St Christopher. Or when you had lost something you called on St Antony of Padua. In times of fear, St Michael the Archangel was the one to beseech, or […]
August 27, 2023
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” One of the trends of change in European society today is that freedom of conscience, of expression and of religion is being trumped by laws against ‘hate speech’ and ‘discrimination’. Equality […]
August 12, 2023
Weekly Word resumes in two weeks, on Saturday 26 August, after the Summer School for European Studies.
August 5, 2023
Rembrandt’s dramatic painting of Jesus and his disciples caught in a storm on the Sea of Galilee in a Dutch fishing boat contextualised the gospel story for his seventeenth-century viewers. Still in his mid-twenties when he painted this, his only seascape, soon after moving to Amsterdam from Leiden, Rembrandt depicted fear and desperation in the […]
July 29, 2023
Winding its way through the streets of ‘the most liberal city in the world’, the rainbow-bedecked tram spreads its message in big letters along the roofline: ‘You are included’. Celebrating two weeks of street parades, canal processions, park festivities, concerts, dinners and open air cinemas, Queer and Pride Amsterdam 2023 this year is going to […]
July 22, 2023
A dinner-table conversation this week turned to the question of whether it is correct to talk about ‘the Ukraine’ or just ‘Ukraine’. That seemingly-innocent three-letter definite article – ‘the’ – upsets a lot of Ukrainians when Westerners unwittingly add it before the name of their country. For good reason. It represents a view of their […]
