Recent Columns
Hey, let’s lock the fun out of school!
There was a time when a neighbourhood school was more than a place you simply went for classes and drudgery, when it was more than a place of fear. My own boyhood experience was that we kids would go to school after hours and on weekends to – imagine – play, say, baseball on a […]
Read More Midnight in Paris
There was Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, of course. We biked through the heart of Paris on Day One, four hours in the morning, anther four in the evening, enough to give the kids a few blisters before we finally got back to our Montmartre flat just past midnight. That was […]
Read More Dear Mr. Millard – Letter 3 – If you ever want forgiveness, everything you have isn’t enough
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 […]
Read More A strange forgiveness
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.”
Read More Betrayed by a kiss. Saviour of the world.
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 […]
Read More Dear Mr. Millard – Letter 2 – Have you seen the road to hell?
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 […]
Read More Dear Mr. Dellen Millard – Letter 1- Let me share something about evil
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 […]
Read More Why I support a longer school day
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 […]
Read More God’s not dead. He’s living inside my son.
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, […]
Read More Forgiving our fathers. And mothers. (What a load.)
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, […]
Read More Dear student who’s cheating: You’re rotting inside out
(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
Read More Hey Little Jeannie. You’ve got so much love. (And I’m a better man for it.)
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, […]
Read More The joy of singleness. (Or … Ahhh, the single life. No vomit bag today)
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 […]
Read More On mini-skirts and Love (is our highest calling)
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 […]
Read More Let’s talk about sex. (And fear and politics and phoney religion too)
“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 […]
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