Interviews

The garden that was once her childhood playground is today what one might call Anne-Françoise Bouffé’s “prayground. ” She grew up in Clamart, just a few miles outside Paris, France.

During her college years, JUDY WOLFF witnessed a dramatic Christian Science healing of her mother from the late stages of a lung disease that had afflicted her intermittently since childhood. That healing inspired Judy to better know and serve God.

Quiet walks in the English countryside. Reading (most recently, a book about Jesus—in French).

Jim Thurman’s lifelong love of photography reaches far back to a Florida middle school. There he joined a camera club, and with the help of his Kodak Pony 828, he trained his eye on anything that moved.

It wasn’t an easy leap. After four years as a professional accountant with Texas & Northern Railway Company, Georgia Bulloch made the decision to be a stay-at-home mom.

“I can’t begin to tell you how many times I was on my knees asking, ‘Father, what is your plan for your beloved child?’ ” —says Diane Marrapodi about the recent years she spent taking care of her parents. A trained Christian Science nurse before becoming a Christian Science practitioner and teacher, Diane offers a special perspective on caring for people who might find themselves at the threshold of passing on from human experience.

Long before cellphones, PAM DEBOLT pumped a dime into the pay phone at her high school in Stockton, California, and called her mom between classes. The two were close, so checking in a couple of times a week fell into an easy rhythm.

He had a corporate job, with a long commute to and from Chicago’s Loop, and plenty of satisfying church and other volunteer work on the weekends. But Ron Mangelsdorf had one over-arching desire: “to keep my thought open to any way in which I could serve God.

When I called Al Carnesciali recently, the first thing I asked him was, “Where are you?”  I knew he was in California, but not where exactly. And Al said, “I’m in San Juan Capistrano, a couple of miles from the ocean.

September 2010.  Spring is in the air—in Australia, that is—and daffodils, bluebells, and peach blossoms color the landscape outside Beverley Beddoes-Mills’s home in the Blue Mountains overlooking Sydney.