Recent Columns

Even on this side of Easter, forgiveness is no easy thing. Christ said so much during a beachside breakfast with his friends on a lake not long after the remarkable events of Easter weekend. He did this during that rather poignant exchange with Peter, that friend of urgency and largeness who, just days earlier, while […]

The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, April 20, 2014 KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Forgive and forget is how the old saying goes, but you and I both know that it’s not worth spit, that we’ll never forget certain crimes committed against us, maybe even imagined crimes like those in a recent dream of mine. It was a nightmare with Africans carrying machetes. I looked out my window. The university grounds where I live was crawling with the killers. “We won’t kill anyone,” one said. He looked at me through a window of a bedroom where my 10-year-old daughter lay sleeping. “We’ll just cut your arm off.”

Judas, giver of history’s best-known kiss, has always had a bad rap. While Judas was a very capable individual – he was picked to be the treasurer of Christ’s preaching and healing and wandering and laughing troupe for a reason – we know that he was more interested in skimming the coffers and in other […]

My relationship with my own father has mellowed much over the years. This is what marriage and children and grandchildren and an ocean of separation can do. (I think you know I live in Africa most of the year, the genesis of which is for another conversation at another time.) But there was a time […]

We don’t give much thought to the devil these days – we’re well beyond all that. The best you might get is a funny t-shirt that says ‘The devil made me do it’ with, say, a picture of a naïve but guilty looking figure beside another with a pitchfork and red leotards. But what if […]

It’s dinner time and once again the kids just HAVE to talk about sex, which is quite remarkable considering the only Miley Cyrus they watch is from the days when she was a fully-clothed Hannah Montana who kept her tongue to herself. Of course, the best way to end any kids’ sex talk is to […]

She’s an astronaut, a space walker, a scientist of scientists, way up there in the cosmos, first floating free for some time, just on a tether, then, after some drama, getting into a tiny space capsule, into her driver’s seat of sorts. She is bright and pretty and has a one in ten million view of creation, […]

If there is one thing I’ve learned about fatherhood since the condition fell on me (like a piano out of a 4th-floor window) it’s that today’s fathers are perfect. Always. Yep. Every day. Sunup to sundown. And because today’s fathers, and mothers too, are perfect, they should be given great honour. I tell my kids this in subtle ways. For instance, […]

(The UCU Standard - Monday, March 31, 2014) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It’s a new day, a good day, a day when you’ll be tested. Yes, it’s time for another exam and you, dear UCU student, are out of bed, finished your breakfast and walking with a confident smile. This is why today is such a fine day: you know the answers, every one of them. Because you know the questions too. Nobody is suspecting that you’re a cheater because you know the game and you play it with skill

The truth is that if it wasn’t for My Bride, I’d be living on some deserted island hunting wild boar and eating coconuts and running around a fire as crazy as the Mad Hatter. But she rescued me from that life some time ago and brought me to Yemen. (YEMEN! of all places.) And now, […]

My daughter vomited on the way to school yesterday morning. This, of course, is the sort of thing that makes any parent’s heart go pitter-patter, thump-thump, yes, one of the golden moments of any dad’s day. In our family, on what is a rather onerous school-run every weekday morning, vomiting, in fact, is sort of shared […]

The newspaper, one of Uganda’s national dailies, is open on my desk. “What are you reading?” asks Liz. “A story about a new law.” I don’t elaborate. The story says Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni may soon meet with U.S. scientists on the matter of homosexuality and its causes. Museveni signed Uganda’s new draconian anti-gay law recently after […]

“Hey, let’s talk about sex!” I said. I couldn’t help it. It was at the dinner table yesterday evening and Mom wasn’t there and it just sort of tumbled out.  You know, like “Hey, pass the carrots, will ya?” Now, sure, I know my kids are sort of young. But I’ve already had some pretty […]

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, March 15, 2014) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦Fear is a strange thing, which is why it’s so hard to look into the eyes of another human being that you’re about to gas or bomb or, in the case of Uganda’s gays, throw to the lions. This is also why President Yoweri Museveni recently refused to meet with Uganda’s gay community – there were repeated requests – before signing Uganda’s infamous anti-gay law. The new law means even touching with the intent of a homosexual act – try to prove or disprove this one – will get you seven years. Short of jail, a life-sentence for a single homosexual act, there’s obviously also a new chill on the street here.

Once there was a dad who, every morning on the way to school, would pray for safety on the road. He was in a foreign country and the driving was the most dangerous part. Sometimes he’d even pray at other times of the day, ‘God, just keep me alive in this place for the sake […]