When cholera hit the small village of Scheveningen on the west coast of Holland in June 1832, it took everybody by surprise. It had been generally assumed that the deadly disease would come from the east. From India the pandemic had spread throughout Asia, reaching Russia, Poland, then Prussia…… Soldiers had fired their rifles to clear the air, ships had been quarantined, travellers had been stopped and questioned, all to no avail.

The first cases of cholera in the Netherlands were fierce...

The earliest Christian myths emerged in the melting pot of Gnostic Alexandria, not in orthodox Jerusalem, classical Athens or legalistic Rome. In this book, Tjeu van den Berk traces the sources of the Christian faith to the banks of the river Nile.

In terms of symbolism, the Christian religion is virtually identical to that of the ancient Egyptians. From the perspective of religious history, we can agree with the theologian Eugen Drewermann who described ‘ a complete dependence of Christia...

Who am I as a musician and how can I contribute to society?

It is the key question in this reflective handbook on Lifelong Learning in Music, in which Rineke Smilde reflects on today’s musicians’ emerging identity and its relationship with their professional performance. For many years she has been leading the research group Lifelong Learning in Music of Prince Claus Conservatoire (Hanze University Groningen), examining questions about the relationship between musicians and society. What ...

The emergence of so-called “mission congregations” around the turn of the century within the Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerken in the Netherlands (CGKN) confronted this denomination in a very direct way with the question of how to give shape to being a church in a missionary context.

This study aims at contributing to finding an answer to that question. It examines the missionary ecclesiological debate as it took place in the global missionary movement of the 20th century. This debate rev...