This article first appeared in New View magazine #107 April-June 2023 People born in the middle of a century, like me (1952), tend to look back to the beginning of the century, the time of their grandparents’ youth, as well as to the end of the century, the time of their own maturity and old age and also of their own grandchildren. As someone interested in history since childhood, this has always been true for me. As a 12 year old already I had become fascinated with the First World War, was aware of the dangers of nuclear war and also...
read moreThis article was first published in The Present Age magazine Vol. 5 No. 11, July 2020 If we contemplate the number 23, we can recall that the most famous Psalm in the Bible – Psalm 23 – speaks of man’s confidence in his trust in God’s support. The Koran was revealed to Mohammed over a period of 23 years. Biologists will tell us that normal human sex cells have 23 chromosomes, and astronomers will remind us that the earth is tilted at an angle of about 23 degrees to the Sun (actually 23.5). Without that tilting at 23 degrees, the...
read moreThis article was first published in New View magazine Winter Issue 94 Winter Jan – March 2020 To form any judgments about a phenomenon in contemporary events we can keep in mind three elements – the context of the event (awareness of how the event relates to the past), wakefulness (awareness of what’s going on now in relation to the event) and insight (understanding how the event relates to what seems to be approaching us from the future). With these in mind, let us consider two recent contemporary events: NATO’s celebration of its...
read moreThis article was first published in New View magazine Issue 92 July-Sept. 2019 Chester, a city in the northwest of England on the border with Wales and some 17 miles from Liverpool, was the largest base of the Roman army in Britannia during the Roman occupation. The name Chester comes from the Latin castrum, which means fortified military base, camp or fortress. The city, which the Romans called Deva Victrix, was founded by the Roman Army in 79 AD, 46 years after the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. That was also the year of the...
read moreThis article was first published in New View magazine (Issue 90, Jan-Mar 2019) Brexit is not only an economic and political issue; it is also a spiritual issue, a cultural issue of our time, because the EU is a construct that contradicts the essential spiritual impulses of the modern age, which began in the 15th century. Britain, for good and ill, has played a major role in shaping this modern age, in which, according to Rudolf Steiner, the British people and the other English-speaking peoples who proceeded from them play a vanguard...
read moreThis article was first published in New View magazine Issue 84 Summer 2017 One of the major features of human development over the past 100 years has been the relationship between nationalism and what is variously called ‘internationalism’, ‘supranationalism’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’. First, the difference between these latter three terms should be clarified. Internationalism simply organises cooperative relations between nation states while recognising that the basic unit remains the nation state. The League of Nations, founded in...
read moreThoughts on 1914 in relation to Scottish Independence and the Future of Britain This article first appeared in New View magazine Issue 72 July-Sept 2014 2014, a year rich in historical resonance: D-Day in Normandy 1944, seventy years ago; a hundred years on from the birth of Dylan Thomas in 1914; the deaths of Franz Ferdinand and his dear wife Sophie in Sarajevo that same year; the defeat of King Edward II of England at the Battle of Bannockburn by Robert the Bruce in 1314, which saved Scottish independence for nearly 400 years. Yet Scotland...
read more2010: Humanity’s Choice as Foreseen by Rudolf Steiner – Richard C. Cook.com http://www.richardccook.com/2010/08/04/2010-humanitys-choice-as-foreseen-by-rudolf-steiner/ Agentur Für Alternativen (German threefolding site) http://www.afa-berlin.com/ Anthroposophical Reflections on Basic Income http://www.bepress.com/bis/vol2/iss2/art6/ Associative Economics (C. Houghton-Budd, UK) http://www.associative-economics.com/ A Threefold Exercise for the Attainment of Social Faculties – Jörgen...
read more© Terry Boardman September 1997 The recent death of Diana, Princess of Wales has led many in the media to claim that ‘a quiet revolution’ has been taking place in Britain, and that Diana was a symbol of this. We now have a chance to consider Britain’s identity, they say, where we want to go as a people in the 21st century, and they reflect on how we are becoming more...
read more© Terry Boardman This article first appeared in the German magazine Info3 (Feb. 2000 issue) under the title “Für eine “biodynamische” Ökonomie” (For a Biodynamic Economy) An interesting article appeared in “The Independent” of 6th December, written by Andreas Whittam-Smith. He was the first editor of the paper when it first came out in the 80s. The article was titled: “Mr Schroder [sic], it’s not the British, but you who has let the euro down.” Under the picture...
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