Columns

  • Praying the Psalms

    May 22, 2021

    This is a new column for our local theologians and biblical scholars to share their thoughts.

  • A saint for our time

    May 22, 2021

    The saints of old, no doubt, had their own struggles in trying to will the one thing, to healthily channel their wild energies and give themselves over to God.

  • Rich kids growing up without money – or understanding

    May 17, 2021

    We aren’t all born equal, set equally into the same starting blocks, have equally gifted or abusive childhoods, are allotted equally the same opportunities for education and growth, and then are parceled out equally the same measure of accidents, illness, and tragedy in life.

  • There’s something ‘fishy’ about the Gospels

    May 08, 2021

    Ever since COVID reached our shores, I have been taking morning strolls at a casuarina-lined seafront promenade a couple of miles away from our home in Penang.

  • Praying the Psalms

    May 08, 2021

    This is a new column for our local theologians and biblical scholars to share their thoughts.

  • The eyes of love

    May 08, 2021

    When we feel love deeply or passionately, then perhaps (like Thomas Merton describing a mystical vision he had on a street corner) we can awake more from our dream of separateness and our illusion of difference and see the secret beauty and depth of other people’s hearts.

  • The promptings of the Spirit

    May 01, 2021

    There were moments in the recent campaign to save Convent Bukit Nanas when some people might have wrung their hands in despair. Here we go again, many would have thought.

  • Our heart is stronger than our wounds

    May 01, 2021

    As Christians, we don’t have to save ourselves, don’t have to get our lives right all on our own. Indeed, nobody ever does.

  • Overcoming the destructive forces of greed

    Apr 24, 2021

    The great Bengali poet, writer, philosopher and social reformer, Rabindranath Tagore, visited Penang and the rest of then-Malaya several times in the early 20th Century, while on longer journeys to East Asia.

  • The origin of our conflicts and differences

    Apr 24, 2021

    In Greek mythology, the supreme god, Dionysus, was intact, containing all the scattered pieces of divinity that took particular incarnations in various gods, goddesses and human persons. Inside Dionysus, the intact god, there was harmony, everything fitted together, but everywhere else various pieces of divinity wrestled and sparred with each other, forever in tension and power struggles.