by James Copple Baseball is part of the warp and woof for most children raised in the suburbs of America in the 1950s and ‘60s. And as I watched the Washington Nationals upset the Houston Astros in Game 7 of the 2019 World Series to win the championship title, the memories and thrill of it […]

by James E. Copple In 1960, I was 10 years old and living in the Ruskin Heights suburb of Kansas City, an idyllic community occupied mostly by veterans of World War II and Korea. The houses were all the same, with public parks and well-lit streets, and the neighborhood kids would gather on long summer […]

By James E Copple It seemed like big trouble at the time, but a battle about bologna sandwiches ended up being the foundation of a legacy I cherish. I was in fourth grade, and we were scratch-farmers living in Lee’s Summit, a Missouri suburb of Kansas City. We had a few horses, four pigs, about […]

By James E. Copple As Kenya Airways made its descent into Nairobi, the rising sun colored the eastern sky bright orange. Enveloped in morning fog, the beauty of sun-on-clouds painted an endless, boundless horizon — it’s a continent so rich in diversity and history, and I am thankful this place has been part of my […]

By James E. Copple “I met a guy” is right up there with “I know a guy,” a phrase defined by the Urban Dictionary as: “An excuse when you would rather not explain how you acquired something.” I just got off the phone with a community organizer in Chicago, and community organizers in Chicago “know […]

By James E. Copple I have no idea what kind of patriot quarterback Colin Kaepernick might be, but we know he believes this country has taken a wrong turn on race-relations and that justice-for-all is elusive. Remember that mantra from the ‘60s and ‘70s: My country – love it or leave it? It was the […]

By James E. Copple   Where are the men? Gender-violence and human-trafficking are issues caused mostly by men but challenged mostly by women. There is a conspicuous silence and lack of interest on the part of Muslim men, government leaders (mostly men) and by men in general. Recent attention to the kidnapping of 276 Nigerian […]

By James E. Copple Human-trafficking lives in the shadows of our global urban centers.  “Shadows.” That’s her word, and she is a 15-year-old Eritrean girl sold by her parents and trafficked via container-truck to Nairobi, where she lives in a small shack. And hers isn’t an uncommon story in East Africa, where famine and drought […]

There is a poverty in Swaziland that is difficult to describe and it is a poverty unlike I have seen anywhere else in Africa.  It is largely rural, pastoral and dots the countryside of a thousand hills.  Today, I was with The Luke Commission, a mobile hospital – some would call  it a clinic – […]