Columns

Our need to pray

Mar 28, 2018

Unless you somehow have a foot outside of your culture, the culture will swallow you whole.
Resurrection: Freeing God from ‘captivity’ for a new life, a new world

Mar 28, 2018

God refused to be held ‘captive’ any longer by human agency and the Holy Spirit was unleashed across the world.
The ups and downs of faith

Mar 23, 2018

The poet, Rumi, suggests that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, then not, and then know again.
As the Church grapples with the role of women, Mary Magdalene refuses to be silenced

Mar 23, 2018

As the Church wrestles with the role of women in its ranks, a new film on Mary Magdalene by Garth Davis is hitting the screens around the world.
The passing of a good shepherd

Mar 16, 2018

He led us well, nothing too daring, nothing reactionary, just good, steady, charitable leadership that helped us, among other things, be more pastorally sensitive, more ecumenical, less self-absorbed, less clerical, more open to lay involvement, and more sensitive to the place of women. He kept things steady but inching forward, even while properly honoring the past.
Another look at what Jesus may have looked like — and does it matter?

Mar 16, 2018

Traditional artistic depictions of Jesus tend to show him as tall, fair skinned, with long flowing hair, perhaps penetrating light-coloured eyes. Similar depictions may have been seen in movies about Jesus until recent times.
Our ache for earthly immortality

Mar 09, 2018

We share the world with more than seven and a half billion people and each of us has the irrepressible, innate sense that we are special and uniquely destined.
Despite strong GDP growth, underweight stunted children in our midst

Mar 09, 2018

About two decades ago, at a press conference after a food security conference in Penang, I asked the then Health Minister about some statistics that I had come across that showed that a quarter of children in Malaysia were underweight.
Celibacy revisited

Feb 28, 2018

Writing in the first person is always a risk, but the subject matter of this column is best done, I feel, through personal testimony.
Sharing and caring – and a question of land ownership

Feb 28, 2018

There are so many ways to be human, but all too often our own modern and mainly urban societies are used as the yardstick for what is universally human.