Articles

I came out of university believing that countries like mine were diseased. They call it developing country syndrome, in which government corruption and mismanagement weaken the institutions needed to build a strong and stable society.

I was a teenager doing summer volunteer work with children in the inner city. One day, cleaning up after a busy day, I referred to the children as "underprivileged.

On the quiet Stockholm side street of Eriksbergsgatan, located near an area of town otherwise known for its lively social scene—fine restaurants, upscale shopping, and Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre—is what seems like an endless row of early20th-century stone buildings. The first time I walked along this street, about two and a half years ago, I was headed to building number 10, where I knew I'd find First Church of Christ, Scientist—or as the sign that welcomed me in Swedish said, "Forsta Kristi Vetenskaparkyrkan.

BECAUSE of war in my homeland of Angola, my family and I fled in 1961 to what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. We lived there for more than 25 years.

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Park City, Utah, is well known as a ski town, but you're more likely to encounter high school senior Ryan Hart on an indoor soccer field than on a snowy mountain face. Ryan, who has three downhill skiing resorts practically in his backyard, loves to hit the slopes — when time permits.

My secretary was in tears when I left for another job. She said she'd never had a kinder boss.

For me, the quintessential Bobby story goes something like this: I was in college and had just had one of those typical teenage arguments with my parents. They didn't approve of the way I was spending the money I'd earned and thought my interest in clothes indicated that I might be becoming too materialistic.

No, they aren't beauty parlors run by the Biblical patriarch. Rather, they are informal, grassroots, interfaith gatherings where people of different faiths—or no faith—can talk about Abraham as one figure who is shared by Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and use his life as a way of building up trust and communication among them.

Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land through the Five Books of Moses "Considering that the international language of travel has changed so frequently in the last 2,500 years — Greek, Latin, French, English, American English — and that the stories of the Bible have not changed at all, one could argue that for much of the Western world, those stories form a collective language. Certainly in the Middle East today, with so much suspicion and hostility, a common interest in the Bible can be an immediate source of kinship, much stronger than nationality, denomination, age, or wealth" (p.