September 1, 2014
The longest human chain in history was formed across the Baltics just twenty five years ago last week as a moral protest against the illegal occupation by the Soviet Union of these lands. It stretched from the north of Estonia across Latvia to the south of Lithuania. In Riga a few days ago, where I […]
August 25, 2014
The parade of Ukrainian hostages by pro-Russian separatists through the streets of Donetsk over the weekend is the kind of ‘humiliating and degrading treatment’ the Geneva Convention was signed 150 years ago last Friday to prevent. The convention – officially the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in […]
August 18, 2014
Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, a seemingly innocent event took place on the border of Hungary and Austria which catalysed the downfall of the Berlin Wall. Alongside the centennial commemorations of World War One we wrote about last week, we should also reflect on the remarkable events of late 1989. I have shared this story before. […]
August 11, 2014
This month we entered a four-year season of remembrance and commemoration. Through a barrage of television documentaries and newspaper articles, we will be reminded of the battles of World War One: Verdun, the Somme, Ypres, Gallipoli, Jutland and many more. We will soon re-live the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the birth of the Soviet […]
August 4, 2014
Christians have often suspected human rights to be the product of humanistic Enlightenment thinkers devising ways to sideline the Church and religion in the public square. With abortion, euthanasia and even infanticide being claimed as human rights today, many Christians remain apprehensive about the very concept. Yet that is not the full story, as […]
July 28, 2014
The world watched on as Holland mourned this past week. Four days in a row, the same somber ceremony was performed at Eindhoven Airport, as coffin after coffin was respectfully unloaded from the Hercules aircraft into scores of waiting hearses. The unprecedented kilometre-long convoy speeding down the motorway toward Hilversum was followed by thousands on […]
July 21, 2014
The Great Partnership between science and faith that we wrote about last week could be illustrated equally from the story of Edinburgh as from that of Cambridge. On our recent Celtic Heritage Tour, Paul James-Griffiths introduced this theme to us on our walk down the Royal Mile from Edinburgh Castle towards the Holyrood Palace. As […]
July 16, 2014
The day before the caravan of the Tour de France swept through Cambridge last week followed by millions around the world, our small Celtic Heritage Tour group slipped unnoticed in and out of the famous university city. While the main focus of our tour had been on the impact of the gospel brought by Celtic […]
July 7, 2014
Remember that childhood joke about the story of the three wells: ‘Well, well, well’? Well, here’s a story about three wells we visited on our Celtic Heritage Tour through Ireland and Britain, reminding us of the significance of wells both physically and spiritually in ages past. Today we take running water for granted. City water […]
June 30, 2014
The Book of Kells, on permanent display in the Trinity College Library in Dublin, weaves the strands of Coptic, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Roman Christian traditions together into a tapestry depicting a dynamic, creative, artistic, life-affirming, creation-loving, relational and Christ-centred movement with much to teach us still today. Starting our Celtic Heritage Tour in Dublin, to […]
June 23, 2014
This weekend was the summer solstice. So now the days start to shorten and the nights lengthen– in the northern hemisphere at least. In pre-modern times, Europeans were far more conscious of the rhythms of the seasons than in our modern, industrialised, secular times. The church calendar marked this cosmic milestone as the Feast of […]
June 16, 2014
Rotterdam, bombed mercilessly in May 1940 by Hitler’s Luftwaffe, is famous for its Zadkine sculpture depicting the city without a heart. However, a walk through the urban centre on Saturday overwhelmingly convinced a trans-confessional group of ‘fellow pilgrims’ that God was reshaping the church of the future and restoring a heart to the city. The […]
