May 9, 2001

We sit on makeshift stools in the shade of a large yuyuga tree beside the workhouse, a typical farm structure with bamboo and mud walls and a tin roof. A few steps away in the stables, calves wait for their feeding. On the slope below, several dozen goats graze on the hillside. Further down, toward the Ulua River that winds north through the rugged Honduran mountains, children take sheep to pasture.

For 49 years, presidents, members of Congress and thousands of invited guests have met annually in Washington, D.C., over orange juice and muffins to petition God to rain bipartisan blessings down on the United States and its incumbant-elect. The National Prayer Breakfast, held in the immense ballroom of the Washington Hilton, is a “see and be seen” event for politicos, to say nothing of well-scrubbed religious folk.

From Culture Wars to Common Good: Religion and the American Family Debate, 2nd ed. by Don S. Browning, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Pamela D. Couture, K. Brynolf Lyon and Robert M. Franklin

Though media and church debates suggest that the most pressing sex-related issues today are homosexuality, sexual violence and abortion, the authors of this book argue that there is something more urgent: the crisis of the family. And mainline churches have been extraordinarily slow to respond to that crisis.

In his memoir Open Secrets, Richard Lischer tells of his search for a pastoral vocation in “New Cana,” a small town in southern Illinois.