Author Archives for John Ng

Every people group has suffered racism in one form or another. This societal ubiquity doesn’t discriminate – people of all colors and religions, the educated and less educated, rich and poor, powerful and powerless are just as capable of bigotry. Racism is not always one direction – victims of racism can be racists themselves. Racism...

As the coronavirus pandemic gains devastating strides, sensible and anxious people impose self-isolation. Streets become vacuous. Businesses, large and small, shutter. Millions of laborers are laidoff. The New York Times calls it “the great empty.” Millions contract the virus; hundreds of thousands die. At this writing, in America alone, there are four-million people infected, 140,000...

Like many, I watched the recent anti-racial protests with consternation. My empathy mingles with dubiety. Although America (indeed, the world) is mired in a history of social injustice, freedom and equality have always been our bragging rights. And yet freedom and equality constrict the other. Aristotle says that our nature makes us unequal. Our individuality...

In her sunset years, on a sun-filled late morning, my wife is full of wonders. In wonder, she fixes her imagination to wander the credulous confluence with four different husbands. She reminisces those many long years with each in gladness, grief, grace, and grit. Her assured smile betrays an efficacy. This is how she remembers...

“The Nightingale,” not to be confused with a 2019 gratuitously violent movie of the same title, was China’s Academy Award entry for 2014 best foreign film. This gentle film is a collaboration of the French director and writer, Philippe Muyl, and a Chinese cast, with other international contributions. It is an elegy of post-modern vices...

Long ago, a Jewish widow mourned the deaths of her husband and two sons.*  Because of a famine, they had left Bethlehem of Judaea to settle in the land of Moab. The widow’s name was Naomi (pleasantness), but because of her afflictions she called herself Mara (bitterness). Her sons had taken Moabite wives. After her...

“Before We Go” has a familiar genre. A chance encounter between two strangers sparks a life-changing relationship. Sitting in Grand Central Station, Nick (Chris Evans, also the director) is a trumpeter practicing for an audition. He is also procrastinating in dropping by a party, knowing his ex-girlfriend will be there. He meets Brooke (Alice Eve),...

part 3   From Martin Luther to the Post-Modern Churches In the middle of the millennium, a crude, foul-mouth and tendentious German Augustinian monk took a hammer and nailed a parchment on the wooden door of his seminary. Scribbled on the parchment were 95 grievances, mainly his dyspepsia concerning the church’s sale of indulgences (They were...

part 2      From Mother Mary To the Church’s Great Schism  At the dawn of a new millennium, the Romans ruled the world as no other before or since. They also ruled Israel! The people of God once and again suffered the indignity of under another foreign power’s heavy boot. That infidel king had...

This muse is in three parts   part 1                           Pretext From the ancients to the moderns, the epochs of redemptive history seem to have an enigmatic pattern. For four millenniums, each transition follows a 500-year cycle. Heaven’s numinous decrees pierce the palls of earth...