Welcome

OUR FIRST TINY CONDO in Boston started off modestly, to say the least—with peeling paint, cramped kitchen, and a dark, parking-garage view. But it fit our budget in an inflated real estate market.

JOY. GROWTH.

Shortly After Christmas this year, my wife and I returned from a few days away to learn that a clerk in a convenience store just a few blocks from where we live was robbed and shot dead. The search for the suspect is still under way as of this writing.

IT'S CALLED AN ELEVATOR SPEECH. How do you explain to someone you've just met something vitally important to you—a business plan, maybe an idea for a book or website, or the organization you work for and its mission—in the few moments of an elevator ride? Over the roughly nine months that I've been with the Journal, an elevator speech has been gestating.

MOST OF US have thrown ourselves into championing "a" worthy cause or two—sometimes several causes at a time. Like cleaning up city government, advocating for the underresourced, caring for battered women and children, defending the environment, advancing world peace.

How silently, how silently,      The wondrous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts      The blessings of His heaven. SO MANY PEOPLE  are familiar with those words by Phillips Brooks.

MOVING FROM A MATERIAL TO A MORE SPIRITUALLY BASED CONCEPT of science or theology or medicine is state-of-the-art gift giving, in this lead-up to the approaching holidays. Moving from the impositions of material beliefs into the soaring sense of spiritual being—into the study and practice of the Science of Christianity—brings relief from fear, illness, poverty, addiction, feelings of dissatisfaction and discouragement.

YOU NEEDN'T BOTHER CHECKING to see what the world's largest Internet search engine (whose name shall not be used as a verb in this column) has to say when you search the terms science and love. For this daily Internet user, the first several links I saw brought to mind Mary Baker Eddy's pungent phrase "the tangled barbarisms of learning.

"BEING THERE" has taken on new meaning in a Web-connected world. Distance and remoteness are disappearing as barriers to community, at least for those who have internet access.

THANKS TO SPACE TRAVELERS AND THEIR CAMERAS, the human family has a remarkable conception of earth unknown to the ancients—call it the tiny blue planet phenomenon. Photos like the one on our cover evoke a variety of responses, from awe to nurturing love to a feeling of smallness.