March 28, 2016
Yesterday, twenty years ago, seven Trappist monks were kidnapped by Islamist terrorists from their monastery in Algeria and held as hostage for two months. On May 24, 1996, the terrorists announced that they had ‘slit the throats’ of their hostages. Sixteen hundred years ago, the fourth-century church father Jerome lamented the previous twenty years of […]
March 21, 2016
Henri Nouwen once spent an afternoon in the Augustiner Museum in Freiburg, meditating on a fourteenth-century wooden sculpture of Christus auf Palmesel (Christ on palm-donkey). It was, he wrote, one of the most moving Christ figures he knew. Made to be pulled on a cart in the Palm Sunday procession, the sculpture came originally from […]
March 14, 2016
The words ‘brew’ and ‘pray’ don’t really mix for people from my church background. Yet this past weekend, as honorarium for speaking at a open monastery day in the southern Netherlands, I was included in a ‘Brew and Pray’ day, mixing two centuries-old Benedictine traditions. Perhaps it was God’s humour that a Baptist Kiwi should […]
March 7, 2016
Freedom is one of our stated European values. We all want freedom. Yet ever since Plato, thinkers have realised how paradoxical ‘freedom’ actually is. For freedom–meaning the absence of constraining control–allows bullies to enslave the meek, thus destroying freedom. We need to take freedom seriously. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warns that freedom leads to licence, which […]
February 29, 2016
Five hundred years ago this week, a book destined to catalyse the reshaping of Europe came off the press in Basel. It was a bomb with a short fuse. The publication of this Greek-Latin New Testament was the crowning work of the great Renaissance scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam. For many today, the name Erasmus represents […]
February 22, 2016
So, David Cameron has got a deal of sorts. He now has to convince his British electorate to vote to stay in the EU. Looking at the big picture, there can only be one winner from a Br(itish)exit: Vladimir Putin. That fact alone should be enough to inform the British how to vote. Putin has […]
February 15, 2016
The first question many ask when trying to understand a Jerome Bosch painting is, what sort of mind-bending drugs did they have in the late 15th-century? What unleashed this boundless imagination and surrealistic fantasy that inspired artists like Brueghel, Goya and Dali? Last week an appointment in the southern Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch –Den Bosch–happened […]
February 8, 2016
Everyone is for sustainability. What ‘motherhood’ was for an earlier generation, ‘sustainability’ is for now. It’s a given. Except maybe for marital relationships. There we leave ourselves a little latitude. After all, what if it doesn’t work out? Let’s experiment first. Try a few partners. Test our compatibility. Maybe marriage contracts should be for a […]
February 1, 2016
Facing the possibility of a ‘Brexit’, the Brits–the least European of all the EU members–are launching some necessary and constructive initiatives to discuss the future of Europe. Necessary, because of the seriousness of the current economic and migration crises, heightened by threats of terrorism, and the possible knock-on effects of a British exit. Recent polls […]
January 25, 2016
More than twenty years had passed since I last talked with an old journalist colleague. Last week we skyped for over an hour catching up with each other and talking about the spiritual state of Europe. Andy Butcher, now a free-lancer based in Florida, worked with YWAM in Amsterdam in the eighties and early nineties. […]
January 18, 2016
Next time at church, take a look around the congregation and ask yourself, what untold stories are behind all these faces? Imagine putting all those stories together in a book of journeys, so that your whole fellowship can truly get to know each other and grow in awareness of being a community of pilgrims. This […]
January 11, 2016
The start of a new year is a good time to reflect on why things aren’t worse in our world. While we can list all the tragedies and horrors of the past year and wonder how bad this year will be, perhaps we should ask why more things don’t go wrong in our world. After […]
