Recent Columns

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?

Government education is a sham but top students are heroes.

There are various things horribly wrong in blaming Mbale health workers for the much-publicised maternal death of Cecilia Nambooze.

Yes, it can be tricky for a Christian to navigate a mainstream newsroom. And it can be tricky for a serious journalist to always fit in with imperfect faith communities.

Old age is not for wimps. We approach it, even from a distance, with trepidation. It’s like your second childhood.

Hamilton’s Dr. Jean Chamberlain Froese was invited to speak at a venerable institution.