Recent Columns

Before you read today’s post, please set aside a few minutes to view this remarkable link. It’s on the war (and it is a war) of maternal death in places like sub-Saharan Africa. Then take a few minutes to read the rest of this post, and, if you’re inclined, you’ll need a minute or two […]

I’m back in Africa. But let’s go back just a few days. Hey, there’s a guy balancing four wine glasses, full, on top of each other, on his head. Everyone laughs. And cheers. That is one enormous and flat head. This, on an old cobblestone road in front of the Hotel Sultana, an otherwise non-descript […]

We were sitting around the couch the other evening and Liz, all 12 years of her, like she was pulling it out the empty space around her, said the sort of thing that can linger in a room a lifetime. “You know,” she said. “World War II was just awful.” I suspect she meant that […]

(Christian Courier, October 12, 2015) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ They’re out there, people who’d say that they don’t believe in hell any more than they believe in heaven, but you can never be sure what anyone really thinks about these sorts of questions because you can hardly expect anyone to be honest with you when they don’t know how to be honest with themselves. Your neighbour might say that it’s nothing but malarkey – heaven, hell, God, the devil, the entire lot of it (this is the 21st century, after all) – but he’d tell you that he doesn’t believe in gravity, yet his disbelief doesn’t run so deep that he’d actually step off a tall building.

It was early, today, morning coffee at the kids’ school, and I missed most of it because work (WORK!) got in the way, and by the time I was explaining to the mother across the table from me that WORK! was pressing because I was preparing to give a public address back in Canada, it […]

(The Hamilton Spectator, Saturday, September 26, 2015) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ Our dog, Zak, is a fine-looking German shepherd with a deep bark and a good name. (I mean, if your name is all you can ever fully own, surely that's true for dogs too.) He's wary of strangers and, I suspect, would give his life if called to. He has a funny relationship with his food, never uses his doghouse, (preferring our back door), and loves rolling in the morning dew.

So, the boy arrived home from the school this week wearing his swimsuit. He had lost his shorts. And those other shorts, also. Yes, those other shorts. The conversation went like this. “How was your day at school, son?” “I lost my shorts.” “Oh.” “And my underwear too.” “That’s great Jon.” The swimsuit my son […]

It’s Saturday morning in Africa and some of us, jet-lagged, are sleeping in. At least to the extent that’s possible around here. Hannah opens the front door and yells out, “It’s time for breakfast!” She’s yelling to her brother, who is with his best friend, a boy from school who, last night, had his first […]

It’s the other evening and, as we often do, we’re playing soccer on our front lawn – the dog watching, along with the cats, along with African birds in the 40-foot palms. The boy, naturally, likes to show off by putting the ball in the big net in the most creative and dramatic ways he […]

So, after some months in our Canadian home, we’re back in Africa. The commute over the Atlantic was non-eventful with the exception of two notes. One is the passing of Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and so-called “poet-laureate of medicine,” a man rich in words and spirit, both. I saw the report on the BBC somewhere […]

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, August 29, 2015) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ If you were a lion you’d have little in common with any little girl, unless it’s the summer of 2015 when you could both die horrible deaths on the other side of the ocean and people on this side would know.

I’m at the Y and it’s the news on TV and the story that will still take some time to play itself out, the one of Alison Parker and Adam Ward, the two slain journalists from Virginia, the story that has shocked, at least to the extent that anyone can be shocked anymore. Not that […]

A cross can be quite something, that is wearing a cross as a symbol of one’s love and devotion to the God-Man who hung on one 2000 years ago, and, in doing so, changed the course of history. And yet. + What I didn’t tell you recently, when I told you how my 10-year-old son […]

(Christian Week - August 2015) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ The ring that my wife put on my finger on the day that we married stayed there for some years until the sorry day it flew off while my arm was in mid-upstroke in an Ontario lake.

I’m at the neighbour’s getting instructions on how to feed their two dogs, how to change the, uh, diaper, of the one, and this sort of thing. “Where are you going?” “Bobcaygeon.” “Ah, that’s where Jean and I met. Sort of. Through a photo, actually.” Yes, a photo. (You’d think we dated in the Arab […]