I have a sister who is very ill. Actually I have three sisters, but this story is about “Deanie,” the second of four girls, the sister who is only 18 months younger than I. If this doesn’t sound like one of my blogs about the Middle East, hang on. In the end everything is connected. […]
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On what do you base your hope for Lebanon? At Elon University a student from Lebanon asked me this excellent question. I did not do a great job of answering, though I did say that the Lebanese people are amazingly resilient. They are survivors. They have an uncanny ability to get around a problem without […]
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One day last week the Lebanese woke up to new traffic laws, supported by a media and law-enforcement campaign. This news, which may seem to be the least important of the week’s headlines, has inspired me to write about traffic. In fact no other factor of life in Beirut is more complex or emotional or […]
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Her name was Sonya Aharonian. Many people knew her in Beirut as one of the finest piano teachers available, and, by some streak of luck, we who were new in the country had engaged her to teach our nine-year-old son. All we knew was that we dropped him at her house in West Beirut, ran […]
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Early in 1975 one of my sons was standing at a municipal bus stop on the Corniche, waiting for a bus to take him home to our area, called Musaitbeh, after a long day at school—the American Community School of Beirut. Beside him on the curb a Lebanese youth also waited. The two of them […]
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In my book there is a story called “John and Elena.” Elena was a pretty young Lebanese woman, a friend of ours. John was an American Marine from Minnesota. The two of them were the poignant center of my account of an event that shook both Lebanon and America and has not ended even yet. […]
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Jim Clancy was in Beirut the other day. This is the same Jim Clancy who lived in a hotel in East Beirut back in the 1980s during the civil war in Lebanon. He was a CNN correspondent then, a good one. In fact, he just recently retired from CNN, and he was in Lebanon to […]
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Invited to be present as a small book club met to discuss “In Borrowed Houses,” I answered some question by explaining that in Lebanon all the big political leaders had their own militias. The group could easily see that this created a ready-made civil war situation, and this caused a few people to feel immediately […]
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Two months ago I posted a blog called, “A Propitious Moment.” (You can see it on this page.) In that article I named six things I really want for our world, things I believe in enough to take a stand and sacrifice for. At the end I asked readers to comment, stating their own wishes. […]
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I am sharing with you an English translation of a poem written for and published in a tract from the Egyptian Bible Society. It will help readers see the heart of our Christian comrades in Egypt. Two rows of men walked the shore of the sea, On a day when the world’s tears would run […]
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