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 […]
September 16, 2019
The sixth in a series on the spiritual revolution behind the fall of communism thirty years ago: Perhaps the greatest, most unexpected event of the 20th century was the non-violent fall of the Soviet Empire. How did that happen? Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and last leader of that empire, readily admitted that it would have […]
September 9, 2019
The fifth in a series on the spiritual revolution behind the fall of communism thirty years ago: Over the last six weeks of 1989, the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia saw the non-violent transition of power from one-party rule to a democratic parliamentary republic. It culminated in the surreal presidential installation of dissident […]
