May 25

A car accident is a car accident?

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Last Thursday 19 May 2016 was held an expert-meeting of the Theology after Gulag research group (ThaG-group). Main coordinator was Dr Katja Tolstaja of INaSEC: the Institute for the Academic Study of Eastern Christianity at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.of INaSEC: The ThaG-group is interreligious and multidisciplinary, and aims at understanding the experience of communist totalitarianism from religious, sociological, historical (and son on) perspectives. Continue reading →

Mar 30

Oekraïnereferendum

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Verhef het Oekraïnereferendum van 6 april 2016  boven GeenPeil. Een ‘ja’-stem is een stem voor een betere toekomst voor Oekraïne. Een ‘nee’-stem een knieval voor Russische propaganda, bodemloze angst en emotie. Een brede, losse coalitie van gelovigen, maatschappelijke activisten en zakenwereld maakt zich breed voor een breuk met het communistische verleden. Die verdient onze steun. Lees hier de kerkelijk geëngageerde stemmen.

Aug 05

Catholic Social Teaching in Eastern Europe and Self-Secularisation

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On 29 May 2015 Frans Hoppenbrouwers of Communicantes discussed the fate of Catholic Social Teaching in Eastern Europe at the Dutch Centrum voor de Sociale Leer van de Katholieke Kerk (CSLK). Follow this link for the text in English: “Catholic Social Teaching in Eastern Europe. Faith and Action as Types of Self-Secularisation in the Context of the One Europe ”.

Jul 02

Communicantes Newsletter 2015/1

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Please, read our Communicantes Newsletter 2015/1 with a short description of our main activities in the first half of 2015.
Highlights were:
– our mini-conference ‘The Churches and the war in Ukraine. What do the Churches contribute to peace and reconciliation?’ on 4 April 2015
– a meeting of Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic religious sisters from the Netherlands and Eastern Europe who put on boxing gloves at a five day ecumenical meeting in the Netherlands (1/5 June 2015).

Jun 10

Meeting of religious sisters from Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions “Secluded Life in an Open, Ecumenical Perspective”

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@Communicantes we are looking back to an interesting and inspiring meeting between religious sisters from Eastern Europe and from the Netherlands.* We discussed the sources, inspiration, difficulties, rewards and future of religious life with input from different parts of Europe and from different religious traditions: Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. For pictures, see Facebook.
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Apr 28

Reconciliation in Ukraine

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At the conference “Ukrainian Reconciliation Projects and the Future of Europe”, 21/22 April in Kiev, Frans Hoppenbrouwers of Communicantes remembered how he visited the Stepan Bandera Historical Memorial Museum in Kalush in 2003 (see picture). The then recently opened museum had been financed by German millionaire and newspaper editor Gerhard Frey, who was the founder of the right-wing Deutsche Volksunion (DVU). The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Bishop Sofron Mudry of Ivano-Frankivsk added his Church’s approval by attending the 1997 ceremony of laying the foundation stone. Several years ago, the DVU was disbanded and is now – o tempora, o mores – part of the pro-Putin Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD).
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