As of July 19, 2024, I have moved to Substack, where you can find all my new blog items, along with other content. Reviews and other published work will continue to be posted in “Articles.” Please visit my Substack here.

Learning to Cope in a ‘Trauma Society’
Meet Saw Thet Tun. As a student in 1988, he was involved in the pro-democracy movement. A few years later, the authorities caught up with him. Now, look at his right eye. Looks normal, right? But it's useless. He lost all its vision during the nineteen years he spent as a political prisoner of the dreaded SLORC/SPDC military regimes. Saw Thet Tun didn’t explain exactly how he lost the eye when ...

Jack Sproule: Spirit of the Trickster
My recent book, The Trial of Pope Benedict: Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican’s Assault on Reason, Compassion, and Human Dignity (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013), was dedicated to Father Jack Sproule, a priest who served in the Vancouver Island diocese while I was growing up. The following essay I wrote about Jack appears in the winter edition of the Island Catholic News…. ********** On March 13, 2013, the day Jorge Bergoglio ...

The Best of Burma: A Reader’s List
Since Lune and I arrived in Myanmar in September, a few people have asked me what they should read about this fascinating country. In no particular order, and with some comments included, I’ve compiled a selection from the books I’ve read. For a general historical view, one of my favourites is River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma (2006) by historian Thant Myint-U, erudite grandson of former UN Secretary-General ...

A Pox on Both Their Houses
YANGON—To borrow from a favourite line by Captain Willard in “Apocalypse Now,” sometimes the bullshit piles up so fast in Thailand that you need wings to stay above it. The “bullshit” in this case—as in the 2008 and 2010 rounds of political gridlock in the kingdom—is the braying and sloganeering of both “red shirt” and “yellow shirt” sides in a series of anti-government demonstrations and pro-government pushback rallies that ...

Yangon Diary: The Ghosts of Atrocities Past
YANGON—For countries emerging from lengthy periods of totalitarian rule, one measure of good democratic health is the extent to which government is willing to acknowledge historic wrongs. The more public and visible the gesture, the thinking goes, the faster the country and its citizens can come to terms with the dark legacies of violence and oppression. This can be as simple and understated as a bronze plaque at the scene ...

Rereading Orwell: The Burden of Circumstance
A few days ago, I started re-reading George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. Every so often it’s good to revisit authors who’ve had a profound influence on one’s own writing, and my fiftieth birthday seemed like the right moment to dip back into Orwell, who has always been a touchstone. Like some kindly old professor, the champion of anti-totalitarianism mostly hovers in the background of my mental library ...

Yangon Diary: Bomb Blasts a Dark Omen
YANGON—On Tuesday morning, I received a message from a friend in Vancouver I had just wished a happy birthday. “Thanks Dan,” she said, “I hope you’re having a blast in Yangon.” I winced at the unintended irony: my friend had no way of knowing that Yangon had just been shaken by a series of bomb blasts. Minutes before receiving her note, I learned that another bomb had exploded just before ...

“Bling Bishop” Faces Day of Reckoning
For the Joseph Ratzinger legacy file, here’s some fun news out of Berlin: a Roman Catholic prelate appointed by Pope Benedict is on the hot seat after reports that he approved renovations for his residence amounting to €31 million (US $42 million), and that a state prosecutor in Hamburg has charged him with lying in a legal case. Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, 53, evidently has a very high opinion of his ...

The Elephant in Myanmar’s Room
YANGON—Last week, Myanmar was officially handed the chairmanship of the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a one-year term that begins on January 1. Myanmar waited longer than any other member state for this honour—the first seventeen years of its membership, to be precise. There are those who would argue that it should have waited even longer, given the slow pace of reform under the former military dictatorship. Still ...

Yangon Diaries III – The Post-Dictatorship Newsroom
YANGON—The independent newspaper I’m working for is located in a six-storey low-rise just two blocks from our apartment. The English edition is on the fifth floor, where foreign staffers enjoy an air-conditioned room while local reporters and translators share a long, two-sided bank of open cubicles in the main hallway. The locals use decrepit PCs that seem ready for the dust heap—but at least they have computers. It was only after ...

Pope Francis: Numero Uno Paradigm-Buster
Earlier this year when I signed the book deal for The Trial of Pope Benedict, I was convinced that this would be the end of all my writing about popes—and the Roman Catholic Church, for that matter. The book was intended as a kind of closure: my one and only statement about an institution I had no intention of returning to, much less thinking about on a daily basis, and ...

Yangon Diaries II: Take a Pill
YANGON--A few nights ago, I didn’t sleep very well. When I began to shiver, Lune checked my forehead and wrapped an extra blanket around me. He said I had a fever. The next morning, I woke up with a low-grade headache. “This is it,” I thought, my Woody Allen-ish hypochondria going into overdrive. “Cerebral malaria. Encephalitis. Dengue. Or that other thing you get from mosquitoes. I’m a goner for sure, ...