PThU News
- Stewardship as a buoy for the landJan van der Stoep, team member of the Soil project and endowed professor of Christian philosophy at WUR, described the concept of stewardship as a buoy that helped him in the 1980s to establish a better connection with the land. Can stewardship still, in 2026, serve as a buoy for the land? A diverse group of participants reflected on this question during a working conference on the subject on 25 February.
- History of Black Christianity in the Netherlands proves to be centuries oldBlack Christians in the Netherlands are not a modern migrant phenomenon, but were already part of the church in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is shown by the unexpected historical discovery of more than one hundred baptism records of Black Christians from that period. To investigate this discovery further, the Church and Slavery project has been awarded an additional grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
- Farewell Prof Heleen Zorgdrager: From Paramaribo to PokrovskWhat is the state of gender and sexuality in interaction with structural violence and political, ideological, and theological power? How do I work with the term gender, and what do I mean by political theology? These questions lay at the foundation of the farewell address delivered yesterday by Prof. Dr. Heleen Zorgdrager during the dies natalis of the PThU. She presented a proposal for a liberating political theology with explicit attention to gender.
- White space and the hidden meaning of biblical texts Much like in poetry, the meaning of biblical texts depends on the form in which words are arranged. How a text was originally structured, grouped into units using paragraphs and indents, decides how it should be interpreted. In biblical texts, those “empty spaces” point to a very ancient understanding of the text that bible translators should take into account. Or so Jürgen Gruhler will be arguing when he defends his dissertation on the Book of Daniel this afternoon.
