2012

KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Once there was a little Ugandan girl who loved school. The girl, who had been an orphan when she was younger, loved learning new things and making new friends and pretty well everything about it, especially the stories. Maybe she loved school all the more because of her years as an orphan, which started in a hospital in Mbarara, in western Uganda, where she was left abandoned when she was barely larger than a cat. There she was given all she ever owned, her name, Hannah.

We know little about them, these grandparents—if they came to babysit on Friday nights or if they maybe played checkers with the curly-haired, laughing boy while he grew in wisdom and stature.

... if America ever had greatness, if America ever was a modern republic to emulate, it’s largely because it’s been a nation united with rather different peoples and regions and perspectives.

The official charge is ignoring orders of a public official. But the real problem is words. Just words. You know, words can be enough. Too much, even, when they say this and that; when they’re relevant and lacerating; when they’re passed to others and speak more than anyone even realizes; when they speak truth that isn’t just truth to be understood, but that deeper truth that causes a lump in your throat because you know someone has experienced it with some amount of pain.

There’s the guilt and fear. There’s the drama and emotion. There’s the conformity and the teaching of “Us versus Them.” Of course, there is also that feeling that you’re not good enough, that you have to somehow work your way into God’s love. These are hallmarks of cults, dangerous but strangely appealing religious groups like […]

A fresher unwittingly gives her laptop to someone posing to be from UCU’s IT department. The computer is never returned. An Honours College resident has her laptop and i-Pad stolen through a broken window. A couple of nights later, a camera and money are lifted from the same residence. A pair of laptops are taken […]

We’re in the air again, my family and me and today’s newspaper. This time it’s the Daily Telegraph, dominated on Page 14 by a large ad for the latest iPad. Beside it, a smaller story on how one in four U.K. teachers wouldn’t send their own kids to the schools they teach in. And below, a brief about a Pediatrics Journal study that shows obese youth don’t think so well.

SANTA FE, N.M. I’m in America’s oldest state capital, in Café Olé, with a sandwich and drink and new hope to never become a moron. Here for some postgrad studies, I’m also enjoying a recent copy of America’s satirical news tabloid, The Onion. “Nation’s Morons March on Washington State,” is its banner headline. Thousands of morons, the Onion reports, recently marched in Washington State thinking they were actually in Washington, D.C.

Humble creativity will transform our culture for Christ.

So, my mother recently had brain surgery. Then it was the bum’s rush out of hospital. No need to wait, to monitor, to make sure. Keep ’em rolling. Free the bed. Such are the system’s pressures. What if something goes wrong back home? Call 911. This is what I was told.

So, in the beginning was the microchip. No, it was the iPad. No, no, it was Facebook. Really, this is what it was. For sure. Yes, in the beginning was Facebook. And Facebook was with God, and Facebook was God. And Facebook created the heavens and the earth. The earth was empty and formless and dark, and the spirit of Facebook hovered over its waters.

So what would Jesus say? I mean about this debate on T-shirts that bear his name, and freedom of expression and religious tolerance and these sort of very Canadian things. The opinions have arrived in a crazy roll, thanks to the Grade 12 Nova Scotian suspended, then returned, then pulled from his school by his father, all because of his bold T-shirt that says “Life is wasted without Jesus.”

Jeans and braided air land a university student in jail.

BERLIN – So Hitler was called to lurk among us. And never showed. Not even in Germany. This regarding Kony 2012, the strange and shrinking campaign that in its posters — now hung virtually nowhere — features Hitler idling behind warlord Joseph Kony and Osama bin Laden. The square-moustached megalomaniac has made a bigger splash online. On YouTube, an impersonator of the führer is enraged over the world’s apparent inaction against Kony. “Get my laptop,” he tells his generals, with English subtitles, in this satirical video with a million views.

KAMPALA, UGANDA – The times, they are a changin.’ Maybe. Sort of. Well, we live in hope, anyway. I think of it while on Skype with Walid al Saqaf. We’re talking to catch up, about Yemen and censorship and technology and other things. Walid is a Yemeni journalist who has been noted in this space in the past. We were colleagues in Sana’a while Walid was publisher and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Times. I worked at his side.