Enjoy these lovely links to samples of some my favorite—or just most recent—reporting and writing:

• Losing Naïvité While Advocating for Afghans on Capitol Hill (Anthrow Circus, 27 June 2022): Since last August, when Kabul fell to the Taliban, my team and I have been laboring alongside Afghans whose lives overnight became a lot more precarious thanks to the takeover of their country by a regime promising it had turned over a new leaf. Each day since has shown this regime’s words to be empty. But empty words aren’t the territory of only that new (again) government. …
• Clashing Conceptions of Statehood Mean Civilians Suffer (Anthrow Circus, 7 March 2022): Hours after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, Douglas Webber, emeritus professor of political science and a Europe specialist at the prestigious business school INSEAD, framed the conflict starkly. “It’s really a decisive turning point we’re looking at here, and for me certainly I think that it’s the most dangerous moment in international politics if not since the end of World War II, at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.” …
• Why Is Slavery Missing from French Novels? (Anthrow Circus, 19 April 2021): American and British participation in the enslavement of humans is fairly well-documented in films, books, plays, and other cultural and artistic creations in English. But these artistic products don’t tend to regularly implicate France. Thinking this was a function of the language gap and knowing fictional stories in historically accurate settings to be an engaging way to learn history, I assumed I’d easily find French novels that would recount French slave trade history the way English ones do. …
• As French Senate Tightens Church Controls, Christian Advocates Avoid Fear (Christianity Today, 15 April 2021): Protestants strongly disagree with separatism law’s anti-terrorism approach, but eschew a victim mentality in defending religious freedom. (Version française)
• Hundreds of Churches Threatened by France’s Plan to End Muslim Separatism (Christianity Today, 9 February 2021): I didn’t write this article, but I reported for it, doing in-depth interviews in French with four of the article’s primary sources.
• Listen as Myanmar Speaks (Anthrow Circus, 8 February 2021): Rather than recreate these media outlets’ work, we are giving this story the Anthrow Circus treatment: sharing the voice of a regular citizen who can give us context for the large-scale geopolitical reports. “Sandra” spoke with our editor on Friday morning, February 5. Days earlier, on Monday, the military detained Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning de facto leader and head of the National League for Democracy party, and other civilian leaders and called for a new election.
• Dispatch from a Pandemic: Pau, France (Another Chicago Magazine, 10 May 2020): A small, bent man with a cane approached, so I said “Bonjour.” Mostly, if people reply at all, it’s just a polite bonjour in return. But when we’d nearly passed each other, this man piped up. It was the mountains that provided our conversational pass. The man uttered a beautiful phrase that I wish I could repeat verbatim in all its melodic French glory. But our conversation continued before I could make note of his exact words. “As long as I come see the mountains, I’m okay,” was the idea their poetry expressed. …
• Contextualizing France’s Yellow Vests Protests (Culture Keeper, 4 January 2019): …In this posting from Culture Keeper, we’ve paired photos from the Yellow Vests protests in Paris and in Pau with some French voices who guide us into an exploration, far from exhaustive though it is, of the present context in which the Yellow Vests protests have been taking place. …
• Sometimes Diplomacy Is Soft and Quiet (Culture Keeper, 20 November 2018): Participating in these formal yet informal ceremonial events that most American and French people will never know are happening, in contrast to the words and tweets exchanged between our presidents, one is struck by the easy down-to-earthness of it all, while also sensing that these exchanges taking place in the shadow of the Pyrénées, and photographed only by the local newspaper, matter. …
• A Moons and Houses and Hope Travelogue (Culture Keeper, 19 December 2016): We entered Bosnia by road as night fell. A full moon rose and threw a spotlight down on houses scattered like carcasses through the countryside. So very many carcasses. Empty inside, roofless, with charred stone walls marking a former existence. Silent, somber, haunting, poetic testimony to tragedy. What exactly had happened here? Suddenly it all mattered. …
• Driving Through the Balkans, a Rocky Road (Washington Post, 25 June 2015): Despite scenic views, charming dinners and welcoming hosts, we found traces of tragedy in burned-out houses, ethnic segregation and a pervasive sense of melancholy. The five countries we passed through were like beloved grandparents with war stories to tell. …
• We Are Still Charlie (Society of Professional Journalists’ Journalism and the World blog, 3 May 2015): For most of the day, the crew members outnumbered the handfuls of spectators who paused in their wanderings along the wide boulevard that is a center of all that happens in Aix. But for Bernard Beka, a veteran war reporter who organized the event in partnership with Reporters Without Borders, if even just eight people listened and were touched by what they heard, then that would suffice. …
• Releasing Fear, Embracing God (The Well, 8 December 2015): I come by fear honestly. It’s embedded in my genes, not the best gift among the other better heritages that live down the lines of my family. I first climbed deeply into the pit of fear when I was about 13 years old. I was dragged down there initially by some thyroid hormones that were out of whack, but I wasn’t released from the prison just by correcting the hormone levels. Fear had gained a foothold and wasn’t quick to relinquish it. …
• The Word Became Flesh (The Washington Institute’s Missio blog, 24 December 2013): A lover of words and their sounds, I discovered, a few months into my studies, that there were certain French words that resisted taking up residence in the new dictionary in my head. Upon further inspection, I realized this was because my new dictionary was fighting them off, unwilling to accept entries from words whose sounds I don’t find pleasing, while it eagerly welcomed the words whose beauty I prefer over their English counterpart. …
• Standing with Zambia: Spark Ventures (North Park University’s North Parker magazine, Summer 2013): Overwhelmed by the needs he observed while working alongside Mumba and his wife, Margaret, at their orphanage and school—initiatives that began in the early 2000s when the Mumbas responded to needs in their church—he asked Mumba, “What do you need?” Johnson was already anticipating the answer would be money. Instead, Mumba said they needed partners to stand alongside them until they could stand on their own. …
• Help that Heals (Prism Magazine, March/April 2011): When I landed in Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo, for a brief visit in late 2007 after a period of horrible fighting and massacres in the region, UN cargo planes were the only others parked on the tarmac. Blue-hatted soldiers lounged against their roadside tanks as we traveled from the airport to the missionary pilot’s home. …