May 12, 2014
The evening before had been a rich but sobering experience in the grandeur of Athen’s Old Parliament Building. Eighty participants from over twenty European nations mingled with local Greeks under the stately chandeliers for the opening event of the State of Europe Forum. A panel of activists helping refugees, migrants, Roma and impoverished Greeks shared […]
May 5, 2014
Much of the story of Europe can be told in terms of one book and two splits. The book is the Bible, which has influenced European life and culture far more profoundly than any other book or cultural source. The two splits happened in the eleventh and sixteenth centuries respectively. In western Europe, we are […]
April 28, 2014
Imagine if nearly two out of three of the young people you knew had virtually no prospect of ever getting a job. Imagine if the students you knew–your friends or relatives–couldn’t get any qualifications because the university was closed for the foreseeable future due to staff strikes. Imagine if you began hearing more and more […]
April 21, 2014
Last week, Russian, American, Ukrainian and European Union officials met in Geneva to seek a resolution for the Ukrainian crisis. To everyone’s surprise, a consensus was reached which gave hope for further de-escalation and a way forward. I happened to be passing through Geneva myself the evening before and the day after, en route to […]
April 14, 2014
At the movies these days, we often have to wear special glasses to experience the 3D effect of the action, without which we are robbed of the ‘full picture’. Today’s biblically-illiterate generation of Europeans are similarly robbed of the ‘full picture’ by having grown up learning to look at the world through secular lenses. Such […]
April 7, 2014
Tomorrow evening in the Chapel of the Resurrection in Brussels, a panel of speakers will address the topic of Robert Schuman’s dream and the future of Europe. The most challenging part of the evening–the future–has been given to me to attempt to address. Perhaps the organisers reasoned that fools rush in where angels fear to […]
March 31, 2014
The news is not so reassuring this week. Russian troops along the Ukrainian border threaten invasion. Extreme rightists in France make great gains in municipal elections. And the latest UN report predicts the impact of global warming to be ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible’. Time to pull in our heads and pretend all this is […]
March 24, 2014
‘Forget about the world being flat. Forget technology as the great democratizer. Forget the niceties of international law. Territory and the bonds of blood that go with it are central to what makes us human.’ So Robert Kaplan responds in this week’s TIME magazine to the disbelief and disorientation among western leaders about Russia’s heavy-handed […]
March 16, 2014
A stone’s throw from the apartment where we stayed during a conference last week in the heart of the beautiful French city of Lyon was a street once ominously called Rue Maudicte, ‘street of the accursed’. Since renamed, this was the street where a wealthy merchant named Peter Waldo had lived in the twelfth century […]
March 10, 2014
Clearing out some drawers last week I came across a couple of old maps of the Crimea picked up on various visits to the peninsular over the past two decades. On one visit, I arrived in Simferopol after 19 hours on a Soviet-era train from Rostov-on-Don in Russia. Yalta was my destination, which I finally […]
March 3, 2014
Rain drizzled all across Athens today as I stood on Mars Hill somewhere near the spot where Paul delivered his famous sermon recorded by Luke in Acts chapter 17. Like a giant lump of volcanic pumice, Mars Hill is a rough-surfaced rocky outcrop in the shadow of the Acropolis. Here Ares, the god of war, […]
February 24, 2014
The sun was setting on the little French town of Toulouges, near where the Pyrénées meet the Mediterranean coast, when my Dutch host jumped up and exclaimed, ‘Let me show you something before it gets dark!’ Hastily putting on our coats, we stepped out into the cool dusk air and set out towards the town […]
