Editorials

The usual picture of a nurse is somebody in a white uniform who unselfishly and skillfully takes care of the sick: on call at all hours of the day and night, and ready to help. One of the most important roles of a Christian Science nurse is actively to maintain an atmosphere in the sickroom that is conducive to healing.

When Christian Science first burst onto the scene, what people saw was a group of church members acting as though Christianity were making a massive practical difference in their lives. It must have been quite startling.

Last year I was traveling in a South American country only a few days before a national referendum was scheduled. Brightly colored banners were strung between lampposts.

Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people (Matt. 9:35).

We all have places of the heart, places where we return from time to time to reaffirm what brings us together, but even more, to look forward to new journeys, new discoveries, new challenges. For readers of the Journal, new or longtime, the pages of this magazine have been such a meeting place.

Roads , bridges, libraries, courts, laws and justice—sometimes it's as if we thought they were natural phenomena like grass and trees. For long stretches of time we may act as though these aspects of organized society are simply there.

The early Christian Church was a powerful force—so powerful that it literally changed the course of human history. Certainly the pundits and social observers of the first century a.

In the winter of 1914 during World War I, a brief, remarkable truce was initiated by soldiers in the trenches. In the darkness of Christmas Eve someone raised a Christmas tree above the parapet.

Waking to a dawn-chorus of birdsong, we can sometimes feel that the whole of nature is giving thanks to the creator. There is an irresistible uplift in this outpouring of praise.

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.