December 9, 2019
A short walk from where I live opposite Amsterdam’s Central Station brings you to numerous locations associated with the slave trade between West Africa and the West Indies, Brazil and Surinam. Amsterdam city was itself co-owner of Surinam, and meetings of the Society of Surinam deciding the fate of many thousands of slaves took place […]
December 2, 2019
Can Europe be awakened, revived or saved? Or is the ‘post-Christian’ continent, the former heart of Christendom, doomed to be overrun by Moslems and ‘barbarians’, following Turkey and North Africa? The latter is feared by many swayed by populist voices in the political arena predicting Europe’s demise through migration. Others however believe the end of […]
November 25, 2019
Bold and enticing, the innovative Helsinki Central Library is a ‘city living room’ for young and old, families and students, teens and grandparents with infants, hanging out together in contented ambience. In the Finnish capital for the State of Europe Forum, I spent a rewarding afternoon on Friday reading in Book Heaven on the top […]
November 18, 2019
Is Europe really on the edge? President Macron seems to think so. He recently warned his fellow European leaders that NATO was ‘brain dead’, and if they continued to bury their heads in the sand, Europe (read ‘EU’) would become less and less significant. Europe, in his strong and outspoken opinion, needed to become much […]
November 11, 2019
The last of a series about the spiritual revolution behind the collapse of communism 30 years ago. A decade after the annus mirabilis of 1989, which saw the Marxist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe collapse like a house of cards, the Czech President Vaclav Havel invited key leaders of that era to Prague Castle […]
November 4, 2019
The thirteenth in a series about the spiritual revolution behind the fall of communism thirty years ago. Few readers under forty years of age will remember the sense of shock and amazement that spread across western and central Europe exactly thirty years ago this week, as television screens carried direct reports of the Berlin Wall […]
October 28, 2019
The twelfth in a series on the spiritual revolution behind the fall of communism thirty years ago. The celebration in 1988 of the millennium of Christianity in the Soviet Union was a major catalyst precipitating the end of both communism and the empire. In 988, the Grand Prince of Kiev, Vladimir the Great, converted to […]
October 21, 2019
The eleventh in a series on the spiritual revolution behind the fall of communism thirty years ago. The end of dictator Nicolae Ceauçescu and his wife Elena began in late 1989 when a Reformed pastor and his congregation stood openly against government abuse of human rights. Ceauçescu ruled Romania for 24 years, from 1965 to […]
October 14, 2019
The tenth in a series on the spiritual revolution behind the fall of communism thirty years ago. ‘A singing revolution’, starting in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as early as 1987, eventually led to the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. Reminiscent of Jehoshapath’s choir leading the army of Judah into […]
October 7, 2019
The ninth in a series on the spiritual revolution behind the fall of communism thirty years ago. Thirty years ago this week, a remarkable event took place in the eastern Germany city of Leipzig, inspiring millions to take to the streets across the country and to tear down the Berlin Wall exactly one month later. […]
September 30, 2019
The eighth in a series on the spiritual revolution behind the fall of communism thirty years ago: Exactly when the first crosses appeared on the Kryžių Kalnas–or the Hill of Crosses–in northern Lithuania, no-one really knows. Not far from the Latvian border, hundreds of thousands of crosses of all shapes and sizes cover this small […]
September 23, 2019
The seventh in a series on the spiritual revolution behind the fall of communism thirty years ago: Two years after Pope John Paul II had celebrated mass with hundreds of thousands of his fellow Poles on Victory Square in Warsaw, I found myself in Poland’s capital to address a student conference. It was May Day […]
