A blogger became so exasperated with my criticism of the Christian Church; he decided to launch what would be the definitive counter-attack. “Femi Aribisala,” he declared triumphantly, “is not a Christian!” When I thought about this, I concluded that, using the same logic, the prophets of Israel were not Israelites.

Everybody prays; we pray in times of trouble, when there’s danger and when we really desire something! It’s almost second nature to pray! Praying means we agree that there is a higher power and we believe it can help us! We can tear down every imaginable stronghold with prayer but not all prayers are answered and that in itself could be a stronghold! No one is to blame as even students of theology hardly have the incontrovertible method of prayer but I have found that science and prayer are extremely compatible.

In fact, the delegates went further: they wanted a secession clause inserted in the new constitution that might be generated from the conference. But something remarkable happened after the governor of the region, Hassan Usman Katsina, came around: the delegates left hurriedly for the North their home base, and the conference was adjourned.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article captioned ‘This beauty that makes me sad’. It was centred around my experience on a cruise where I touched on the beauty of nature and our inability as a country to harness and use nature for the common good. It was an article that led to comments on twits, blogs and emails. A friend and reader described it as ‘your soliloquy on the sea’. It was an apt description; why didn’t I think of it?

A lot of issues keep cropping up over the pres-ence of the dreaded Ebola disease in Nigeria since that miscreant, Patrick Sawyer, brought it here from Liberia. What one finds rather disturbing is the fact that his trip into the country was deliberate.

Marriage is a formal union of man and woman, but each letter of the word “M-A-R-R-I-A-G-E”, does have some significance and together bring to fore the character of marriage.

IN a week free of the usual news of violence, it is not out of place to look at other national matters of great importance. This does not exclude funny comments, howbeit uncharitable, on political events.

My dear friend, Henry Abebe, who quietly passed away a few days ago in an Abuja hospital after a bout of ill health, is being buried today.

WE resumed National Conference last Monday, to be confronted with huge tomes of publications that were reports of the conference. We then got the unrealistic time line of two days to read these reports and by Wednesday, to adopt these as the finale of the work that we did over the previous four months. The standout volume was the third, which was titled “DRAFT CONSTITUTION”. Now, that volume was to threaten the outcome of the National Conference, because it proved to be the most controversial documentary outcome of the Conference. The roots of that controversy, on the one hand had been sown even before the Conference and it actually reflected the conflicting views of the different sides in the contestation for Nigeria. There was a tendency, which was basically Southern, which believed that there was the need for a new constitution as a replacement for the 1999 Constitution, often derisorily described as a military-imposed document that was not reflective of the aspirations of the Nigerian people.

IN this part of the world, until recently, there was no scientific explanation for death because all deaths, including those from fatal accidents, were attributed to witchcraft.