Editorials

It is always inspiring to get fresh light from our prayerful study of familiar Bible passages. In The New English Bible we read Jesus' words "If you dwell within the revelation I have brought, you are indeed my disciples; you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

If you think of the great conversions in Christian history—the kind of transformation in a person's life that actually went far enough to make a significant impact on the world—perhaps it is the Apostle Paul who first comes to mind. There are few accounts more dramatic than Paul's experience along the Damascus road.

A recent headline caught my attention. It read, "Fighting the images graven in men's minds.

Reliance upon prayer for healing is difficult for many people to accept. And even though the number of people who have been healed through prayer in Christian Science over the past one hundred and twenty-two years must now be in the millions, as much controversy surrounds this phenomenon today as it did in the early Christian Church.

Jeffrey is three years old, and Emily, his playmate, is four and a half. They've discovered our house in the course of expanding their neighborhood world.

There are few more glorious sights than a field that is ripe for harvest. Harvesting entails hard work, as anyone who lives on a farm knows, but it is also a time of joyous fruition—the culmination of one's labor.

Someone once observed that we spend 50 percent of our time thinking about what others are doing and 50 percent doing what others are thinking. There's probably a certain kind of accuracy to this adage.

Someone who was on the verge of being executed wasn't, because Jesus mediated the legal dispute. A man who had been ostracized from his community because of some terrible malady was restored to health by Jesus and then told to return home.

Recent investigations by geneticists have produced an intriguing theory: that the ancestry of modern humans can be scientifically traced back to one specific woman. With a touch of irony, the geneticists have decided to give her a rather well-known name.

Once in a while you may see the phrase unexpectedly in a news-magazine, when the writer is desperate for a way to make his prose more lively. But probably for many people animal magnetism remains a topic from another century.