The Maasai posture toward "ultimate truths," then, may be less a sign of childish ignorance than of an elder's faith. In this light, epistemic humility is not a limitation but a source of strength—a means of resisting domination, deferring possession, and sustaining a more integrated relationship with the land, the self, and the divine.

The wilderness summons us into a knot of paradox. First, we must confront the desires that compelled us to depart in the first place. Second, we discover what is on the other side of our own disappearance. Finally, we find that the wilderness will always send us back, transformed. In joining perhaps the most ancient tradition of humankind, we take up the path of pilgrims of renewal.

It was a meeting years in the making. Down a slope from the eastern escarpment of the Great Rift Valley, a group of Kikuyu men gathered just inside the gate of Laikipia Nature Conservancy, a private conservation area that rolled north across rippling ridges and valleys towards the northern rangelands of Kenya. The boldest of these farmers reclined under an African olive tree or sat on polished thin benches or plastic jerrycans, while the more skeptical leaned warily against t

The missionary, therefore, has a strange opportunity to be truly found because they are perhaps the most truly lost.

I often thought of my father as I sped down dusty tracks. My motorcycle kicked up a haze that obscured the road behind me in a red cloud, and I would sometimes hum an old hymn to myself, the foam on the inside of my helmet amplifying my voice with a warm baritone resonance. I'd learned the hymns from my dad, and began riding too in part because of his old stories of bumping around the Kenyan bush in his days as a missionary veterinarian.

A brief reflection on my years in Laikipia. The laga  was boggy and damp but grazed down. Two good signs it was safe. The rain has a...

Reflections on learning the language of my home as an adult. June 2021. The many varieties of "expatriate" childhood with all their...

Written in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election of the United States. "All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite wailing...

If you are a Christian in America — look long and hard at this image. Look long and hard at the leader you (82% of Evangelicals, 58% of...

At Lukenya, a golden-copper vista of jumbled granite cliffs that glitters over Mombasa Highway just north of Machakos, Samson Mwangi...

“Nothing matters out here except being yourself and helping other people,” he said, in tears; the late afternoon sun cut a slanted light...

The Africa box is grey, brown streaks of mud encrusting the lower half. Our night-guard Patrick sometimes washes them off before my dad...

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For anyone growing up under Kilimanjaro, the inimitable snow-capped peak rising from the Kenyan and Tanzanian plains, there is a second...

The Great White Mountain. Kilima Njaro. Ol’doinyo’oibor. The Roof of Africa. No mountain captures the imagination quite like Africa’s...

Ranger Tom, in his camouflage and galoshes, is a native of Meru, the gorgeous green hills east of Mt. Kenya. He has worked for the Kenya...

In the West Nashville neighborhood known as the Nations, an abandoned grain silo looms over an area slowly subsumed by a renovating...

A quick note on traffic: I’m not sure how it’s possible, but there are both more vehicles and more pedestrians in Nairobi than anywhere...

I just spent 10 consecutive nights on Mt. Kenya, Kirinyaga, the heart and lifeblood of the country that’s inherited its name. Ascending...

[Originally published in Nashville Fit Magazine, Spring 2017] Somewhere deep in the Tennessee woods, budding green with spring life and...