Interviews

WESTEN MUNTAIN NEVER ASPIRED to become an artist. "Smart people," she jokes, "take one look at a career in the visual arts and run the other way!" Ever since Westen picked up the French horn in fifth grade, she thought she would become a musician.

Helping others. That theme runs throughout the life and work of Christian Science practitioner and teacher ABIGAIL MACKAY.

Actor ROBERT DUVALL talks about faith, the power of film to inspire—and how he wouldn't be able to live without Christian Science. Spend any time at all with Robert Duvall and you'll learn that Christian Science shaped him growing up and continues to shape him today.

SHE COMES BY HER LANGUAGES EASILY . An early childhood in Geneva, Switzerland, meant CHRISTIANE WEST LITTLE spoke French.

Start it at once. The Cause demands it.

"My life started out pretty mediocre," Ron Ballard told me when we e–mailed each other recently. "I was an average kind of person.

Check Google Maps and you'll see that Claygate, in the county of Surrey, England, lies some 15 miles southwest of London—"at about 7. 30 on a clock" as Christian Science practitioner and teacher described it when I called her recently.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, there is nothing foreign, but thinking makes it so. To Bruce Fitzwater, there are no actual foreign cultures or languages, only those that we've not yet attempted to understand.

FOR 120 YEARS, READING ROOMS have presented Christian Science to their communities and sold products produced or distributed by The Christian Science Publishing Society. Today, there are about 1,500 of these rooms in more than 70 countries, most in the United States.

WHEN I TALKED RECENTLY WITH Christian Science practitioner and teacher BARBARA FIFE, I found it hard to imagine that this inspiring—and inspired—healer at one point in her life doubted that God even exists. Or as she tells it, "I remember thinking that if God did exist, He couldn't possibly know or care about me.