Ebola Bundibugyo again: a lens for seeing and caring about Congo
Sixteen days ago, a puzzling cluster of severe illness and death in eastern DRC was finally attributed to the Bundibugyo ebolavirus. The same Ebola variant that killed Dr. Jonah 19 years ago, one of...
View ArticleRedeeming Ebola: 19 years later, hope continues
In the Fall of 2007, nearly 20 years ago now, a brand new strain of Ebola virus crossed from the Ituri forest into the people of Bundibugyo. Our dear friend and medical colleague Dr. Jonah Kule, who...
View ArticleHands capped, hands clapping
I've been, literally, hand-capped for about 5 of the last 7 months. Two broken wrists, the first one old-fashioned casted and the second one requiring a surgical plate and screws, then a thumb tendon...
View ArticleProstest as lament; locating our story in God's
Like many Americans who are people of faith, we've been pondering a Biblical framework in which the current story fits the big story of God's arc from "in the beginning" Gen 1 to "all things new" Rev...
View ArticleEpiphany, an ongoing season of eyes wide open
'Til the season, of . . . epiphany, which has somehow come to mean a very individual big-idea insight, rather than a conspicuous manifestation of a reality. So in deference to the original meaning of...
View ArticleBundiNutrition: Aid that Works
Following the Star . . . This season's Christmas story brings into focus the vulnerability of becoming a baby in a marginal place of poverty. Like Jesus' family, many of our neighbors in Bundibugyo and...
View ArticleConstruction and Comfort: Isaiah's call to attend Advent 2025
One more week of normal work until the week of Christmas brings us close to the end of 2025. Light is fading on our WV farm as we brace for plummeting temperatures and a winter storm watch today....
View ArticleGratitude and Grief (again): Thanksgiving 2025 edition
Gratitude and grief were key words for us over the past few years, starting with my near-death accident and moving through dwindling team and stolen resources and personal betrayals. And we’ve...
View ArticleHe shall be like a tree: Happy Birthday to Scott
The most important person in my life is turning 65 on Wednesday. First of all I am thankful he’s reaching that milestone. As we grew up, “65” was considered the legitimate end of a working life, the...
View ArticleAll Hallow's . . on saints, eves, death, and leaves
Death, the universal experience least discussed. A metric of development might be how adeptly the average person in the area can avoid this reality. In our 30+ years in Africa we went to more burials...
View ArticleParadoxes of progress and partitions: cancer, politics, complexity and hope
Because of cancer, our life in 2025 took an abrupt turn. A turn that cost us deeply: our home, community, much of our day to day job and purpose, our view of the future, our normal life. One of the...
View ArticleTurning Tables for Justice
Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and...
View ArticleCheerfully searching for the path to resist evil, cancer, bombs . . .
Are we all reeling from the whiplashing events and press releases of the week, and wondering how to respond when God's name is invoked? Trying to sort out how to live with wars and graduations, cancer...
View ArticleOrdinary Cancer Time
Monday I opened my lectionary app as I do every morning, to “ordinary time.” Two thousand years of tradition have knit patterns of reading through Scripture, and remembering history, to the calendar....
View ArticleHappy or Alarmed: Mother's Day 2025
Everyone had a mother, so it's really the only universally experienced relationship. And both mothers themselves and the holiday today can conjure either gratitude or grief, or most likely some of...
View ArticleWe noticed a recent login from a new location
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View ArticlePresence is the only promise
Upheaval pictures our life and many others in 2025: it carries the image of quaking earth, of erupting lava, of crashing wave and upturned boat. Forces far beyond our control, on scales of impact...
View ArticleRadiating peace into reality
Six treatments down, 22 to go in the first course of external beam radiation therapy (then another 28 in the second). Daily Scott has to be precisely positioned on a table of technology, scans...
View ArticleWaving palms, turning tables, and a reversal narrative of more radiation than...
SundayAn artist depicts miraculous research in the radiation oncology clinicJesus, palms, and donkey: reversing expectationsIn a day of presence, voice, and handwriting (no printing let alone radio, no...
View ArticleThe Buckhannon River, and the River of Life
John 7:37 On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. 38 He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of...
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