Features
Trade disagreement: The inequalities of NAFTA
In the Democratic presidential primaries NAFTA became a dirty word. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama vied to out-diss the trade agreement and gain the votes of disenchanted (and often unemployed) workers in blue-collar parts of the country.
What about Rose? Tying international aid to U.S. abortion policy: Tying international aid to U.S. abortion policy
Regretfully yours: Leaving perfection to God
My wife, a teacher of philosophy at a Catholic university, likes to begin introductory ethics courses with a hypothetical question. If you were to live to be 80, what would you like to be able to say about yourself? Her students, who are mostly Catholics and Lutherans—and often practicing ones—sometimes impress her with sensitive responses about virtue and character. But in the last few years she has noticed that more and more of them answer that they want to be able to say that they have no regrets, that they wouldn’t do anything differently.
Economics for disciples: An alternative investment plan
Public Enemies
Halfway through Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, about the time I should have been engrossed in the tommy-guns-a-blazin’ battle between bad guy John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and good guy Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), I found myself staring at the beautiful overcoat Dillinger was wearing, the hip sunglasses he had on and the way Purvis’s stylish hat was nattily cocked upon his head.
Voices
Suzanne Guthrie
Seedtime and harvest: Nothing is independent
I hold three mottled white-and-burgundy beans in the palm my hand. The beans are named Jacob’s Cattle for the “striped, speckled and spotted” goats that Jacob bred to thwart Laban’s devious whims in the book of Genesis. The jar of shiny seeds will provide hearty, delicious winter meals. The plumpest of them supply next year’s crop.
My husband and I live on an organic farm with Episcopal nuns. After five decades of teaching in the two schools they founded, the Community of the Holy Spirit embraced a prophetic call to respond to the environmental crisis.
Philip Jenkins
Nations at risk: Fertile ground for persecution
It’s the world’s least desirable club: the league of failed and failing states. Every year, the Fund for Peace presents its list of the world’s shakiest political entities. Qualifications for entry into the club include such factors as demographic crisis, economic decline and bloody intergroup conflict. A failed state is one that loses control of large parts of its territory and fails to provide rudimentary public services. State agencies become in effect criminal organizations, allied with gangs and terrorist factions in bloody battles over state property and natural resources.
Books
Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm
BookMarks
After faith
Forgiveness: Following Jesus into Radical Loving
Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America
Departments
A closer look: Images of faith
War zone: What's the strategy in Afghanistan?
Seedtime and harvest: Nothing is independent
Nations at risk: Fertile ground for persecution
News
Century Marks
Books to change lives: Hakim Hopkins was in juvenile detention when his mother sent him a copy of the classic Native Son, by Richard Wright. Reading the book changed Hopkins’s life and gave him a vocation: he runs an independent bookstore in inner-city Philadelphia with the name Black & Nobel (playing off the names of both Barnes & Noble and the Nobel Prize). A banner outside his store advertises, “We ship to prisons.” One customer who purchases books for her father in prison reported that he reads the books she sends him real fast—though he wasn’t a reader when he was out on the street.