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 […]
February 17, 2020
For Christians raised in church traditions that rarely if ever ‘did politics’, like myself, the recent emergence of politicians claiming to defend Christianity can be very confusing. With few instruments of discernment in our toolbox, we are easily tempted to become ‘one-issue’ voters without understanding the bigger picture. Recently I was sent a link to […]
February 10, 2020
Friday will be Valentine’s Day again, February 14, the day dedicated to lovers. So how did the name of an early Christian martyr get linked with a day when websites and shop windows everywhere use that name to boost sales and make profits? What has it to do with romantic love, if anything? Several different […]
February 2, 2020
Tears flowed in an emotional parting with the pro-European Union members of the British delegation to the European Parliament on Wednesday. While Nigel Farage led his anti-EU party in a provocative Union Jack-waving farewell, a spontaneous rendition of Auld Lang Syne swelled across the circular assembly chamber: Should old acquaintance be forgot, and ne’er brought […]
January 27, 2020
The UEFA Champions League playoffs between the last sixteen teams don’t resume yet for another three weeks. And yet the high choral strains of the anthem familiar to any football fan resounded through the Upper Room salon in Amsterdam as we sketched a ‘bird’s eye view of the Old Testament’ in our Bible for Dummies […]
January 20, 2020
A Dublin economist was giving his take on Brexit on a documentary about Ireland I watched over the weekend. ‘We Irish have always been the underdog’, he said, ‘so we can sympathise with others more easily. We have always suffered from an inferiority complex.’ The British however had always been used to having the upper […]
January 13, 2020
When my youngest son introduced his wife-to-be to my 90-plus-year-old mother via skype, the first question was: ‘and what are you studying, dear?’ ‘Theology’, came the answer. ‘Oh, how boring!’ exclaimed my mother spontaneously. Mum was one for practice and experience rather than theory. For many of us, theology was the stuff of dry sermons, […]
