September 2, 2002
We Europeans sometimes suffer from a Euro-centricism which can blind us to global realities. This is not new. When Marco Polo returned from his momentous Silk Road travels to China in the thirteenth century, people simply didn’t believe his reports of a sophisticated civilization outside of Europe. This blindness led to one of the great […]
August 26, 2002
Only the small sign, ‘Menno’s Fermanje’, distinguished the house from others in the street. Three simple windows and a door. Modest living quarters in the front, and a high roof over the rear section for the farm animals. A typical Friesian village farmhouse, just a few doors down from the towering pre-Reformation church around which […]
August 19, 2002
Millions of Europeans have just returned to the office after summer vacations spent somewhere close to ‘nature’. If that ‘somewhere’ was in Central Europe, that ‘nature’ got a wee bit out of hand last week. This in shrill contrast to the idyllic setting of the thatched-roof cottage where Romkje and I are spending a few […]
August 12, 2002
The Thirteenth of August is a special day in the Moravian calendar. On this date, exactly 275 years ago this year, the members of the Herrnhut community experienced a pentecostal outpouring in the small Lutheran church in the nearby village of Berthelsdorf, Germany. On that Wednesday in 1727, their leader and patron, Count von Zinzendorf, […]
August 5, 2002
Headlines in De Telegraaf last week screamed with bold, underlined letters: “Half city youth of foreign origin“. The opening paragraph explained that more than half of all children under the age of fifteen in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague was from foreign extraction, and that the proportion would increase in the coming years. Fear […]
July 29, 2002
Britain last week was in the grip of ‘Big Brother’ television – judging from the tabloid headlines and opportunistic books I saw on sale in the railway stations and airports, passing through on a quick visit. Until recent years, the term ‘Big Brother’ conjured up George Orwell’s famous novel. ‘1984’ was a futuristic scenario of […]
July 22, 2002
Phrases such as ‘good and evil’, ‘moral standards’ and ‘norms and values’ are sprinkled throughout the financial pages of the newspapers these days. The headline in the economic section of one of Holland’s leading papers this weekend read: “Capitalism has gone beyond good and evil”. Bookkeeping scandals in big business have provoked a great discussion […]
July 15, 2002
I was leafing through a book on ‘chaos theory’ in a library once, and discovered one of those yellow ‘post-it’-stickers marking a page in the middle. Scribbled on the sticker was: “Come back later – mind is beginning to boggle”. (‘Chaos theory’ is about the interconnectedness of everything, so that when a butterfly flaps its […]
July 8, 2002
Fold a map of Russia in two and right in the crease you’ll find Krasnoyarsk, deep in the heart of Siberia. From Holland, it is as far to the east as Chicago is to the west – six time zones away. Russia is truly huge! The very name Siberia conjures up images of gulags, isolation, […]
July 1, 2002
An amazing story about a town in Switzerland has come to my attention relating to Coptic Christianity. Two weeks ago, I wrote about Coptic influence on Europe. I referred to St Maurice as a “messenger to Switzerland where today a town bears his name”. Tom Bloomer wrote to suggest that St. Maurice was more than […]
June 24, 2002
Last week we described a trip out into Egypt’s western desert and discovered oases of spiritual life that inspired many dramatic conversions and transformations. We were left with the question, what was it about fourth century Coptic spirituality that was so attractive to our spiritual forefathers in Europe? Frankly, some of these early monks’ attempts […]
June 17, 2002
The giant pyramids faded away behind us as we headed out into Egypt’s western desert. Before us, huge advertising hoardings lined the four-lane highway from Cairo to Alexandria, signs of the all-pervasive globalisation. No signs however prepared us for the discovery we were soon to make about the surprising streams of spiritual life that had […]
