People can be cruel. Let's face it. You innocently stumble upon a complete strangers blog, offer a genuinely flavoured racist slur and call them a name when they respond a little too defensively, and before you know it they are calling you "a Troll". Ow, that hurts, people. But what if it's true? What if all these years you have been innocently Trolling on the internet and you just didn't know? Well as a public [...]
Meet Marci. Marci has a problem. 10.15am From the moment she recovers from the second round of playing Snooze on her Nokia 6510i, Marci has one sole focus in mind. "Not to be confused with the Nokia 6510!", she always responds with a slight giggle when people ask her what model she has, and she mouths those soundless words again as she throws on last nights clothes and heads to the bathroom for a 76 [...]
This is a much longer extract from the book 'Blood Brothers' by Elias Chacour, which i do encourage everyone to read. Both as a glimpse into the Israel/Palestine history and situation, but also as a much deeper journey of faith and wrestling with ideas of God and kingdom. This passage it helps to have read the rest of the book to understand the full story of, but a brief background is that Abu Mouhib is [...]
[i wrote this post a week ago because i wanted to get permission from Ray's wife Rhian before posting it, but am glad to be able to share it now] UGH, Cancer. i woke up this morning to the news that an insanely gifted man i had befriended on the Twitterer had succumbed to the brain tumour that had taken him hostage, and died a few days ago. His wife Rhian, had just shared the news [...]
This short extract from 'Blood Brothers: The Dramatic Story of a Palestinian Christian Working for Peace in Israel' really jumped out at me and i think speaks for itself: It was during our final spring days at Saint Sulpice that my kindly mentor, Father Longère, touched a deeply resonant note, like a voice out of eternity. I had come to value his wisdom, his remarkable way of challenging us, spurring us to deeper thought on [...]
As you all know by now, Pearls Before Swine is my favourite comic strip and if you ever have some time to enrich, you can take a look at a whole bunch of the cartoons i have shared over here. And usually he is just random or clever or biting cynically silly fun, but every now and then he draws a strip which makes you stop and go, "Wo!" and maybe even think for a [...]
Here is Erik [with a K] reading Sea Fever by John Masefield recommended by Steve Heineman: What poem would you love to hear Erik [with a K] read next? Leave your reply in the comments and if you enjoyed this, please SHARE it with your people [For the first ever Erik with a K poem, click here]
More people have cellphones than they do toilets. A startling fact according to a recent study made by the U.N. is that out of the world’s estimated 7 billion people, 6 billion have access to mobile phones, while only 4.5 billion have access to working toilets. This is a deeply disturbing fact, although that was back in 2013 and so hopefully we have moved on a lot from then. What is a far less serious misfortune is that very [...]
A couple of weeks ago we had our Spaghetti conversation about race, location and boundary, which you can catch up on over here. Our friend Babs, was one of the guests who joined us and she had this reflection to add: A conversation about where you live becomes a conversation about your life, and in South Africa, becomes a picture of what the past means to different people and how it affects how we live [...]
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? ...No! It's Jonty! And with one scoop of the ball and full-on dive into the stumps, Imzamam Ul Haq was run out and Jonty Rhodes changed cricket fielding. For. Ever. Until that point i had kinda watched cricket a little bit and tried to pick a guy - Richard Snell - to be my guy. But to me it was this weird, alien confusing beast that kept getting [...]