politics
With snow on the ground, I missed it the first time I walked across it. The snow melted – and there it was: a line in the tiles and in the history of Sarajevo, capital city of Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H) in the Balkans. Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures Although there is a common culture and language (to…
READ MOREMore than 1100 children were killed during the Siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996. The city remembers the children in a couple of ways. Late one afternoon I trudged through the snow down Marshall Tito St from Pigeon Square for almost 2kms to find this memorial beside the road. It is a typical war…
READ MOREThe other night it was Brooklyn, an emotionally-charged movie about an Irish lass immigrating to the USA. After a long day I love relaxing with a movie with Barby, just the two of us. Midway through this movie, however, I glimpsed a notification on my phone. Billy Graham had died. I told Barby. Barely a minute…
READ MOREEarlier this month, the phrase ‘fake news’ was named by the Collins Dictionary as its Word of the Year in 2017. [Dictionaries are clearly specialists in words, not numbers – because ‘fake news’ is actually two words, not one!]. They define the phrase as ‘false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of reporting.’ Two months ago,…
READ MOREA ‘new history of the world’ is what the subtitle asserts. The title? The Silk Roads. Peter Frankopan’s point is intentionally plural. There were roads, not a single road. Along these roads, eastwards and westwards, flowed ideas and products. Those that controlled these roads, controlled history. It has always been this way. The Table of Contents is…
READ MORE“Are you saying that Assad is NOT the biggest problem in Syria?” “Yes, I am.” “WOW.” So I took up her book and read. I’m still thinking about it! The book almost needs to carry a ‘WARNING: READERS’ ADVISORY’. It is not for the weak-minded (or the faint-hearted). I heard Elizabeth Kendal speak at a…
READ MORESixty-two. It was an impressive effort. Once I finished William Dalrymple’s White Mughals I turned to the Glossary and gave Barby the test. A bit of Hindustani here. A bit of Urdu and Persian over there. A lot of Koranic-Mosque terminology everywhere. But out of almost 140 words, she got 62 correct. Very impressive, don’t you…
READ MOREWhile this horrid nativism has been sweeping around the world like a stinky tide, I have been finding solace in a book. John Julius Norwich’s The Great Cities of History (and there is a ‘coffee table’ version, which would make a late, great Christmas gift!). 341 pages. 70 cities. That is less than five pages for each city.…
READ MOREIt always used to be one of the wonders of the (democratic) world. Not any more. As Election Day dawns here in India, my mind goes back thirty-five years to when I was a student in Chicago (yes – go, those Cubbies!). In those days I marveled at the way politics worked in the USA.…
READ MOREIt is the story of the greatest military failure for any colonial power in the nineteenth century. … a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed it, or…
READ MOREAbout Me
the art of unpacking
After a childhood in India, a theological training in the USA and a pastoral ministry in Southland (New Zealand), I spent twenty years in theological education in New Zealand — first at Laidlaw College and then at Carey Baptist College, where I served as principal. In 2009 I began working with Langham Partnership and since 2013 I have been the Programme Director (Langham Preaching). Through it all I've cherished the experience of the 'gracious hand of God upon me' and I've relished the opportunity to 'unpack', or exegete, all that I encounter in my walk through life with Jesus.