Recent Columns

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.

It’s nearing Easter and I’m at a cemetery on the ocean. It reminds me how fine it is to be irreligious and irreverent and have a healthy toast while doing it.

Information can misinform and divide our world as much as it can inform and bring it together.

LONDON — The world is getting faster. And stranger. Have you noticed? This is what I know. I think. I mean, sometimes it’s hard to know what we know. Take Joseph Kony. He’s someone who, thanks to social media, you likely know. I’m betting you know Kony is that Ugandan warlord with a strangely genteel face, that he’s abducted thousands of Ugandan boys and stole their souls when he made them into so-called soldiers.

Cultural relativism can blind us to warped thinking and behaviour.

Muslims and Christians are, in fact, more similar than we often imagine.

(Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 24, 2011) KAMPALA, UGANDA — It’s late at night at the Ugandan-Kenyan border and a little Ugandan boy is about to disappear forever. Moses Kaloulou, all of seven years old, is crying hysterically. Not that he knows what’s going to happen, that he’ll likely soon die at the hands, and knife blade, of a witch doctor. All he knows is that it’s late — about midnight now — and very dark, and that some hours ago he was taken by strange men.

So it is Christmas, a good time to give thanks for the past year, especially for our children.

(Christian Week – December 2011) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Remember Kienan Hebert, the three-year-old in one of Canada’s biggest feel-good stories of 2011? Kienan was abducted from his B.C. home and later returned by, of all people, his abductor. Twitter and Facebook lit up. Christians proclaimed God is alive and well and listening to prayer. One wrote the Toronto Star online: “To those who aren’t aware that God answers prayer, I show you the return of Kienan Hebert. Now if we prayed on an ongoing basis for the protection of children and for those disturbed in mind and spirit, abductions like this would rarely occur.”

If you drive away one good student or one good faculty or one good missionary today, how many will come tomorrow?