Literature & Arts

Featured Articles

• Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim: Onder de oppervlakte van een rimpelloos mensbeeld (Icarus 1998/cvkoers 2000)
• A. den Doolaard: Honger, dorst en duizeling - in de voetsporen van A. den Doolaard en Jacques Balmat (Icarus, 1993)
• Boeli van Leeuwen: 'God is er voor de aarde.' Een interview met Boeli van Leeuwen (Icarus, 1996)
• Boeli van Leeuwen: Zoekend naar de Vader. De genadeloze romans van Boeli van Leeuwen (Nederlands Dagblad, 1997)
• Edvard Munch: De verbeelding van de angst (Icarus, 1998)
• Salman Rushdie en het westers-seculiere onbegrip voor religie (on The Ground Beneath Her Feet) (Nederlands Dagblad, 1999)
• Salman Rushdie bevecht de leegte met verbeelding (on Fury / Woede) (Nederlands Dagblad, 2001)
• J.J. Slauerhoff - Poète maudit tussen wal en schip (Icarus)
• J.J. Slauerhoff - Een Caribische reis met Slauerhoff (Icarus)
• Rolf Weijburg - l'Afrique Periferique

Intro

Over the last years I have discovered that I need the arts - music, paintings, literature, cinema - as much as I need hiking in the mountains, or studying my Bible for that matter. I need to breathe its beauty, its evocative capacities, its mind-provoking perspectives, as much as I need to breathe fresh mountain air or the fragrance of the forest, or to be nourished by the Word of God.
Arts, the outdoors, dwelling on the Word of God - it all touches on life as God intended life to be (or how he made me), rejoicing in his creative being, meeting him, being filled with the breath of God, his Spirit.

Arts & Icarus

So propably I will be posting a blog on music, arts, literature or movies every now and then, or just share something I came across that touched me (or hit me). I might retrieve some articles I wrote ages ago, for instance in Icarus (1993-1999), reckless magazine on arts, literature, philosophy and the Christian faith, that we started as a bunch of friends and fellow-students at the school for journalism (after previous magazines, 1989-1992). In the same years I was involved with literary magazines Woordwerk and Liter. We also published our own poems and short stories, and some of us got their collections of poems, or their novels, actually published - like Hilbrand Rozema, Rick de Gier, Menno van der Beek, and Rien van den Berg. I published three novels of my own.

Movies & Blik op oneindig

I might retrieve some reviews of movies, too, that I wrote as a film critic for cvkoers, from 1999 on. When I was chief editor of cvkoers, I initiated a Christian website on movies together with philosopher Bart Cusveller, Blik op oneindig (later also Nederlands Dagblad and Katholiek Nieuwsblad joined in). We had movie nights, too, and launched a book series on film criticism from a Christian perspective, publishing books like Blik achter de schermen. Licht en duisternis in speelfims by Jeffrey Overstreet (translation of Through a Screen Darkly), De Matrix Code. Sciencefictionfilms als spiegel van de technologische cultuur by Bart Cusveller, Maarten Verkerk and Marc de Vries, and Het betoverde land achter het filmdoek by Bart Cusveller (ed.).