May 11, 2020
‘Birth’ was commemorated in diverse ways this weekend. Yesterday, Mothers Day, we honoured those who birthed us with flowers, cards, gifts and skyped messages of appreciation. Saturday was Europe Day, the 70th anniversary of the event which birthed the movement for European unity and peace, recognised in Brussels but only patchily across the 27 member […]
May 4, 2020
This week, Europeans celebrate the end of the Second World War seventy-five years ago in different ways. For some, like the British and the Russians, it is celebrated as victory. For others, as liberation by the Dutch, Belgians and the French. Yet for others, it marked the sad trading of one occupier for another – […]
April 27, 2020
At 10 am today, citizens of The Netherlands will stand on balconies, at windows and in gardens across the nation to sing together the mysterious words of the first verse of the world’s oldest national anthem, the Wilhelmus. For this is Koningsdag, King’s Day, the birthday of King Willem Alexander, when traditionally the Dutch create […]
April 20, 2020
One of the ‘good’ things about our current crisis, I read this week, is that we’ve stopped worrying about climate change. We now worry about how to survive house arrest with kids and spouses. How to prevent (grand)mother from dying in fearful isolation in her nursing home. How to keep up the home schooling routine. […]
April 13, 2020
Governments around the world are hoping special apps will help trace Covid-19 contacts and thus contain the spread of the virus. Meanwhile, the following four ‘apps’ I often talk about, to suggest how God has been at work in the European story, can perhaps have special meaning for us this Easter. Firstly, the ‘God’s will’ […]
April 6, 2020
Yesterday was a different sort of Palm Sunday with church doors closed all over the world. No children paraded into church with palm branches, for example, despite creative efforts no doubt made to celebrate online. With more time than usual to reflect, let’s consider an often-overlooked aspect of Holy Week which offers a timely lesson […]
March 30, 2020
Belshazzar’s feast was a great display of wealth, power and hedonism with his wives and concubines entertaining a thousand guests using the golden and silver utensils from the temple in Jerusalem. Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the wall. Summoned to explain the riddle of the writing on the wall, […]
March 23, 2020
Our lives, plans and dreams have been interrupted in just a few days – personally, nationally and globally. Our State of Europe Forum in Zagreb is cancelled (and on top of everything, a serious earthquake there yesterday!) Formula One, European football championships, global summits, Brexit, probably even the Olympic Games… all disrupted. We wonder, can […]
March 16, 2020
How the world can change in just a few days! As the seriousness of the global situation began to sink in towards the end of last week, more and more governments announced increasingly stringent measures to fight the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Schools, restaurants, museums, churches, concerts and conferences have been closed, cancelled or […]
March 9, 2020
A week after Tom Holland’s talk about ‘the Light that shone in the darkness’ in Amsterdam’s de Balie culture centre, Ivan Krastev spoke on the same podium about his book ‘The Light that Failed’, co-authored with American Stephen Holmes. The Englishman’s ‘Light’ was the light of Christ from John chapter one, the revolutionary movement which […]
March 2, 2020
You could have been forgiven for thinking it was a church service Sunday last week. The evening opened with words from the first few verses of the Gospel of John chapter one being projected on a large screen and read out by an actress: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with […]
February 24, 2020
The Bible has been the single greatest source of inspiration in the development of western art, right up to modern times (as we discussed last week in our Bible for Dummies series in the Upper Room in Amsterdam). Lack of knowledge of the Bible’s characters, themes and stories therefore impoverishes culture and education, robbing art […]
