Editorials

At the head of an incredible string of railroad cars—open-slatted cars for produce and closed refrigerator cars and flatbed cars for industrial steel and low-slung coal cars with hoppers underneath— there is an engine. It may be we can fashion a metaphor from the hundred-or-more-boxcars-long freight train—a metaphor about progress.

Not long ago an editorial cartoon appeared in a West Coast newspaper that caricatured reliance on prayer for healing as little more than irrational faith overshadowed by the specter of death. It was a brutal statement and one that requires a healing response.

According to an account given in an 1897 issue of the Journal, a man who had been an invalid for years and was unable to walk without using canes was visiting Boston. The Christian Science Journal, February 1897, p.

We witness many things in life. Some are so packed with lessons that they go beyond what can be put into a few words.

Religious reformers have usually been convinced the ways of the world weren't right. From the Old Testament's Jeremiah to the eighteenth century's Jonathan Edwards to some of today's spiritually discerning clergy, they have told people—usually outspokenly—to forsake worldly ways and adopt spiritual and moral values.

There's an old blues ballad from Porgy and Bess that goes, "Summertime, an' the livin' is easy,/Fish are jumpin', an' the cotton is high.

I have a number of friends who have commented about how glad they are that their sons and daughters don't face the threat of war and the conflicts of social upheaval that they themselves did in the 1960s. And while there is plenty of upheaval in the 1980s, many grandparents are grateful that their grandchildren aren't beginning their adult lives during years of worldwide economic depression and war.

Over the past ten years or so, considerable attention has been given to a phenomenon called the near-death experience. Books have been written, psychological studies conducted, personal histories compiled.

The novelist and historian of Stalinist repression, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, refers in his Nobel prize speech to a Russian proverb: "One word of truth outweighs the world. "   Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

From the beginning of recorded history, mankind has searched after wisdom. In the book of Proverbs the writer paints a vivid portrait.