May 15, 2021
I learnt a new word this week: agnotology, the study of the deliberate propagation of ignorance. Agnotology comes from the Greek work agnosis, meaning ‘not knowing’ or ‘ignorance’, and ontology, which deals with the nature of being. The word was coined 25 years ago by researchers who discovered a secret memo revealing the tactics of […]
May 8, 2021
Tomorrow is Europe Day, May 9, a day to reflect on belonging to the diverse European family. It is a day both celebrated and ignored in different European nations. To trace the story of this day, we go to a village called Caux, a thousand metres high in the Swiss mountains overlooking Lake Geneva and […]
May 1, 2021
This coming week European countries will commemorate the end of World War Two in different ways. The Netherlands, for example, will hold solemn ceremonies across the nation on Tuesday, May 4, to remember those who lost their lives. In Amsterdam, the king and queen – without the usual public crowd – will lay wreaths on […]
April 24, 2021
A generation ago, Corrie ten Boom was one of the most famous women in the Christian world. Last week, 15 April, would have been her 129th birthday. It was also the day she passed away in 1983 after five silent years in a coma, her 91st birthday. This week her Dutch publisher Uitgeverij Gideon reported […]
April 17, 2021
Three politicians, a Frenchman, a German and an Italian, walked into a monastery chapel, knelt at the altar and began to pray fervently for the future of Europe. This may sound like the beginning of a joke, but the three men had never been so earnest in all their lives. Exactly seventy years ago today, […]
April 10, 2021
Yesterday I sent out the weekly word with a request for help with post-graduate research I am presently engaged in on evangelical attitudes towards the European Union, and the factors that have shaped them. The email address I gave for those willing to help was incorrect. (I am having complicated problems with my email account […]
What does theology begin to look like when taken out of the ‘gathered church’ by the ‘sent church’ into the public square: the neighbourhood, the boardroom, the newsroom, the courtroom, the living room, the hospital ward, the studio, the cinema, the town hall and the street demonstration? Theology for the public square is called public […]
April 3, 2021
This second easter of the Covid-19 pandemic is a good time to ask ourselves what good God might bring out of this global tragedy. And the story of the German town of Oberammergau is a good place to start. The Passion story is a tragedy ending in the unforeseen and the unexpected, in surprise and […]
March 27, 2021
We are experimenting with sending Weekly Word on Saturday mornings to give you more leisure time to read it. Suspicion and mistrust towards government has been aggravated across Europe by a pandemic with no clear end in sight. Anger towards authorities has fueled riots in various locations, triggered by a range of events. Some churches […]
March 22, 2021
Walking home through Amsterdam’s historic centre on Saturday evening, my wife and I encountered the strange sight of green lights where previously red lights had indicated prostitutes at work. Had something changed during our three-month absence from the city? We knew that the Covid-19 lockdown had forced brothels to close down exactly a year ago, […]
March 15, 2021
Last Friday, almost exactly a year after the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic, my wife and I boarded a plane in Auckland to return to Europe after three months in the abnormally corona-free environment of New Zealand. Our arrival back in Amsterdam – after passing through three eerily-quiet airports – […]
March 8, 2021
What is it that makes ‘evangelicals’ so susceptible to conspiracy theories? This question has occupied many recent articles in the international press, usually about the state of the church in America. Yet also in the Netherlands this week, similar discussion has been triggered by the appearance on doorsteps nationwide of five million copies of a […]
