The Anti-Manichaeist

I leave Ukraine tomorrow and will arrive in the US on Sunday evening after a night in Frankfurt, Germany. I was busy helping to test interpreters and working with a vacation bible school in rural Ukraine these past two weeks and despite some setbacks I did enjoy my time. I think I enjoyed […]

I’ve been reading, Understanding Third World Politics, a book that Christian musician Steve Camp should read before he starts to speak out on int’l politics…In its chapter on political instability and revolution it discusses the importance of political cultures for political stability.
Political culture is usually defined as the way people evaluate and judge political acts […]

Ukrainians need to learn habits of more effective political activism on the smaller stuff. This is natural for a country where they have had no experience with real democracy for a long time and the weight of having others do everything for you from Communism is still present.
Last week, right after my […]

It doesn’t take that many days to “see” Kyev, but I would not trade for the world the feeling of what it was like last night to sit up on the hill overlooking the Maidan as the sun was setting. We just sat silently and reflected on the event that had happened. For […]

(thank God!)I received a letter from Jim Wallis about the One campaign to cancel debt among the highly indebted really poor countries. I signed the petition and would encourage others to do so too. But I was kind of disturbed by a paragraph in Wallis’ letter.
At heart, I am a 19th-century evangelical; I […]

I unfortunately temporarily(and perhaps permanently) misplaced my glasses when I was in Pridniprosky this weekend. I was going to wrestle some of the local youth and took off my glasses and then got going on some other games and did not put them back on and later that night I could not find them, […]

Its becoming apparent from my interviews that something very special was happening spiritually during the Orange Revolution, particularly in epicenters like the Mydan. Ukrainians started smiling when they saw each other, something that they normally do not do. The feelings of patriotism swelled and are evincing themselves in little ways, like picking up […]