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With U.S. funding, nongovernmental organizations have helped immunize millions of babies. Thanks to debt relief, most African children are in school, and in the last six years the number of people receiving HIV/AIDS medicines in developing countries has increased tenfold. Our country provides assistance through the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. But the world has changed dramatically since then. It's time for the U.S. to get smarter about how it delivers foreign aid.

The status quo on federal abortion funding leaves a lot to be desired, and not just for abortion-rights hardliners. Current law offers antiabortion citizens the peace of knowing that while abortion may be legal, at least their taxes aren't paying for it. In exchange for these clean hands, Americans get a system in which women who rely on the federal safety net for their health coverage don't have access to abortion, while women of greater means do. The Stupak Amendment to the House's health-insurance bill would make this inequality worse.

There may be no other feature of American life that contains as much bias toward extroversion as leadership. Since our leaders epitomize our cultural values, it is no surprise that Americans want their leaders to be extroverts. Psychologist and author Marti Olsen Laney cites a study that was repeated three times with the same findings: when asked if they would prefer their ideal leaders to be introverted or extroverted, both introverts and extroverts chose an extrovert as “their ideal self and ideal leader.”

Jean sits down with the rest of the committee members, and the meeting gets started. She's in her familiar light blue cashmere cardigan sweater, her reading glasses hanging from a thin black woven cord around her neck, her gray-streaked hair pulled back into an efficient bun. She is as proper as always. But tonight her face is completely blank, as if she doesn’t dare reveal anything. She says nothing. “What’s up with Jean?” I wonder.

A healing community in Nashville

Changes of mind aren’t superficial or easy things. Mine have usually come as forced exits from the comfort of myself to somewhere more painful.

A 2007 Kelton Research survey revealed that people know more about what goes into a Big Mac than they do about the Bible; they can name members of the Brady Bunch better than they can name the Ten Commandments. Twelve percent of adults think that Noah’s wife was Joan of Ark, and about half don’t know that the book of Isaiah is in the Old Testament. The situation might have comic possibilities for Jay Leno and other comedians, but for preachers working to craft a biblically based sermon, the situation is confounding. If parishioners can’t follow references to significant people, places or things in the Bible, they may miss or misunderstand the whole message.

Followers of the media furor about evolution and God imagine that they have to choose between Darwinian theory and belief in divine providence. The most vociferous current contestants in this debate are either atheistic supporters of evolutionary theory or Christian supporters of the riposte position known as intelligent design. I suggest that there is a way to avoid this false disjunction altogether. New discoveries about the phenomenon known to evolutionary theorists as cooperation give us fresh reasons to regard evolutionary theory and classic Christian theism as entirely compatible—indeed, richly and convincingly so.