Overshadowed by the refugee crisis since the summer, Ukraine was back in the headlines last week. The Dutch Safety Board presented the long-awaited conclusions of its 15-month investigation into the Flight MH17 crash on 17 July last year: the Malaysian…
“We need to get there first to show love or others will manipulate them into extremism.” The speaker was a tall, short-cropped Swede pleading with Christian leaders, gathered from thirty European countries near Stuttgart in Germany last week, to engage…
This week I learnt a new Russian word: Maskirovka. Derived from the word masquerade, it literally means ‘something masked’; a strategy of deceit, like the Trojan horse. It has a long tradition in Russian military history and it seems to…
Sometimes we need to be shocked out of our comfort zone. Jesus could see that the smug legal expert questioning him needed some shock therapy. After correctly answering Jesus' question about what was written in the Law concerning inheriting eternal…
Edvard Munch’s iconic image, The Scream, painted in four different versions from 1893 to 1910, took on deeper meaning for me this week. A very close friend, Albert Hoekstra, was drowned in Sri Lanka while swimming in the sea after…
