At midnight on May 21, I fell to the floor screaming when I learned that Krista Hunt Ausland, my best friend for 24 years, had plunged to her death in a bus accident in Bolivia.
Columns
Joe Nangle 9-01-1998
Put aside the Holy Scriptures for a while and read God's first revelation—nature itself. Such was the advice offered some years ago by a profound, Christian thinker.
James McGinnis, Anne Marie Hansen 9-01-1998
Jesus' words as he wept over Jerusalem are probably more compelling today than ever: "If this day you only knew the ways that make for peace..." (Luke 19:42).
Vincent Romano, Matt Schroeder, Neera Singh 7-01-1998
Young people are the keystones of any culture. Youthful energy is needed to get work done in society. We provide new ideas, physical labor, laughter, the human connection to the future and the world community, and the push for reform and change in society.
So, in the United States, why are teen-agers considered nuisances? Why do we have one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world? Why are we spending $267 billion on the military to train youth to kill, and $42 billion on all other education? How can our government claim to provide security when its priorities place young people near the bottom of an expendable pile?
This past January, 17 young adults of many faiths and nationalities came together at Kirkridge retreat center in Pennsylvania for Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Peacemaker Training Institute (PTI), a weeklong nonviolence training program to engage youth in exploring activism.
Our training provided us with the space to get to know other equally passionate young people. At Kirkridge, we met students who have started their own campus groups to address some of the root causes of violence and insecurity: poverty, homophobia, hunger, human rights abuses, and their college’s investments in the military. They have founded their own peer mediation programs, support groups for rape victims, magazines, and peace and justice radio shows.
Jim Wallis 7-01-1998
Sojourners Community
It was both a blessing and an opportunity to meet Dorothy Day. Sojourners was just in its beginnings, and the founder of the Catholic Worker was nearing the end of her life. We spent some time together on a few occasions, once to interview her for the magazine (December 1976). Dorothy, characteristically, had tough and probing questions for me, but was also very affirming and encouraging of what we were trying to do. Perhaps she felt some connection to a group of young Christians who were trying to start both a magazine and a community among the poor, just as she had done. I even remember the fond description of Sojourners by her co-workers in New York as "a Protestant Catholic Worker"!
In one of those conversations with Dorothy, I enthusiastically described our vision of Christian community. She listened pensively, but her eyes betrayed a certain skepticism. "I thought we were creating a community too," she sort of sighed, "but the Catholic Worker turned out to be more of a school." Over the years many people came to the Catholic Worker, but most of them eventually left to go on to other things. While the list of those who passed through the Catholic Worker is quite impressive, few stayed and I sensed that Dorothy missed many of them.
Well, it’s been more than two decades since that conversation with Dorothy and, now, I would have to say the same thing about Sojourners. Literally hundreds and hundreds of community members, interns, and worshipers have come and gone, most to lives and work very consistent with Sojourners’ vision. Like Dorothy, I once hoped and even expected that most people would stay; but it wasn’t to be. Now we are like a dispersed community, a Diaspora, scattered across the country and around the world.
Joyce Hollyday 7-01-1998
Once upon a time, I lived on a farm in the mountains of western North Carolina. I had a garden...of sorts. The tomato vines were attacked by some pest or plague and produced exactly one tomato (which, after calculating the cost of the plants, frames, lime, and fertiliizer, was worth about $26). The only things that thrived were my raspberry bushes. I returned home one afternoon, however, to find the goat happily chomping on the last remnant of them. "I can’t grow anything," I said out loud to myself. Then I walked inside and discovered two toadstools growing in the bathroom.
It was damp in western North Carolina. If mildew were a cash crop, I would have been rich the three years I lived there. But abundance came to me in other forms. Friendship. Grace. Hospitality. I rediscovered things I had lost sight of in my last years living with Sojourners Community: the blessings of extended meals and late-into-the-night conversation with friends; the expectant unfolding of the seasons; the mysteries of nature’s bounty.
My closest companion was Savannah, a golden retriever I invited in when I knew I wouldn’t be returning to Sojourners. As I was letting go of a way of life that had spanned 15 years, and was sorely in need of some unconditional love, Savannah arrived with all the grand exuberance and abundant affection of a 7-week-old puppy. She reintroduced me to delight. She lavished me with "gifts" she found and reveled in every day and season, bounding joyfully with equal grace through deep snowdrifts or a pasture bursting with bright yellow buttercups.
Susan Gushue 7-01-1998
When we made the decision to take our older two children out of public school, my husband and I felt it was the only real choice we had. After years in a successful public Montessori program, their current public school was getting the best of them. They kept their discoveries to themselves (and these discoveries happened out of sight), and they invariably came home tired, hungry, and unsatisfied.
My son Charles, 12, is an avid reader who enjoys music and dance. But school seemed to interfere with his real learning. Instead of actively engaging him, it was just something he had to cope with. My daughter, Helen, 9, enjoyed her friends at school but when it came to learning it seemed that she was mainly just killing time. Or worse. (When a broken and desperate Washington, D.C. school system felt the pressure to improve student test scores, my daughter found herself in a windowless classroom memorizing the 20s times tables. This did not help her learn anything, least of all math.)
Our twin 6-year-old girls were doing fine in their D.C. Montessori program, but in the case of our two older children, we felt intervention was necessary.
Home schooling was a big step for us. I had never taken on such an important task. I quickly discovered that I would be more of an "unschooler," since my children—like all children, I believe—have a strong desire to learn and do not necessarily need a school curriculum to do it. We decided not to replace schoolwork with home-school work, although we did develop some regular structures for learning. Several other home-schooling families join us at different times for weekly math lessons, units on geography, a writing class, and a reading discussion group.
Joe Nangle 7-01-1998
Some days ago I received an unexpected call from Lima, Peru. A brother Franciscan there told me that Olga Valencia had died and, knowing of my friendship with her, he had attended the funeral. The news brought a flood of memories.
It's hard to pinpoint my first encounter with Olga. Surely it had to do with some request of hers for help—work, food, a handout. For she was the quintessential Third World mother, continually asking, begging, cajoling those of us in positions of privilege for charity on her own behalf and that of her numerous offspring. I must confess that in those early years she struck me as a whining, bothersome, pestering person, whom I tended to dispatch as quickly as possible.
One day her oldest child, 9-year-old Jose, was killed by a hit-and-run driver. It took Olga four days to bury him, and I walked alongside her during those terrible hours. From a halting investigation of the accident, to a still more halting autopsy in the city morgue, to a funeral director who wanted his money up front, to dealing with the accused driver—everything stood in the way of Olga's burying little Jose with dignity.
In the end, out of desperate necessity (no embalming in Peru) this mother, her husband, and I took Jose's body to the paupers' graveyard and buried him there. Then I drove them home, sat with them for a while, and left them to pick up once again the threads of their miserable existence. That day forever changed my relationship with Olga, and in some ways forever changed me.
Ed Spivey Jr. 7-01-1998
Jury duty is one of those responsibilities of citizenship that reminds us that the American justice system is the best in the world. It also reminds us that, if at all possible, we never want to have anything to do with the American justice system. Not ever.
If you’re not a law-abiding citizen when you first report for jury duty, by the end of the day you definitely are. You never want to go back there again, in any capacity. It’s like prison, only without the exercise yard. By the end of my two days I was scratching a crude calendar into the back of the seat in front of me. I wanted to speak to an attorney. I wanted my rights read to me. I wanted to yell "GUARD!!" but that would have interrupted the catatonia of the other 200 people trapped in a room with no windows and 12 ceiling-mounted TVs.
As we waited to be called to trial, we were apparently being tested by having to watch something called Regis and Kathie Lee. I have heard of this program. I have also heard that there are people who watch this of their own free will. But here in this large room there was no choice, no escaping this Regis and Kathie Lee person (or perhaps it was two separate people).
"Come on Steve. Take your shirt off. Let’s see the kind of hunk that stars on General Hospital!" [frenzied screams from audience]
I glance up. Maybe the people in the TV audience are themselves waiting for a jury assignment, except they’re in a more creative city that teaches pity and compassion to its jurors by making them watch celebrities.
Ed Spivey Jr. 5-01-1998
Our cover feature points out the importance of rituals that young men need to prepare them for responsible adulthood, not including the time your mother made you wear a bow tie for Dress-Up Day a
Jim Wallis 5-01-1998
Religious persecution. It’s becoming a hot topic, with a protest against it gathering strong momentum around the world. It’s about time.
Joe Nangle 5-01-1998
Once in a while you get to see people assimilate a value from a different culture. It’s an enriching experience for everyone concerned.
Pam Fickenscher 5-01-1998
"What do you do?" It's taken me about nine months to come up with a short answer for that question.
Jim Wallis 3-01-1998
In the first stage of the White House sex scandal, the media was obsessed with how allegations of sexual misconduct and possible cover-up against Bill Clinton might bring down his presidency.
William R. L. Haley 3-01-1998
A small group of twentysomethings can change the world. A generation of them can reclaim the cities of America for the kingdom of God. This is our calling.
Joe Nangle 3-01-1998
The drama that unfolded in the arrest and court proceedings of Theodore Kaczynski deserves serious, even prayerful, reflection. In part it focuses our attention on that most basic of all communi
Joyce Hollyday 3-01-1998
room of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission burst open. The
parents of Amy Biehl walk in, surrounded by reporters,
microphones, and cameras.
Ed Spivey Jr. 3-01-1998
It's February and so far you haven't kept a single New Year's resolution, have you? Not even the one about setting aside a special time to write in your journal.