Features
Praying for Sarah: When death is a blessing
Recently, I prayed for someone to die. She wasn’t an enemy. She was the beloved teenage daughter of two exceptionally fine church friends. Sarah’s frail body, once so vivacious and spry, was failing, fading away—sucked of its verve and substance by a fierce internal rapacious monster: Ewing’s sarcoma, bone cancer.
Paved with good intentions: The politics of national service
Last January President Bush announced that he was building on “a magnificent, courageous and compassionate response to terrorism” with the creation of the USA Freedom Corps, an initiative that combines the AmeriCorps, Senior Corps and Peace Corps. Then he added a new organization, the Citizens Corps, which will focus on prevention of and emergency response to terrorism. The president is calling on Americans to support him by giving at least two years or 4,000 hours of service in their lifetimes.
Napoleon's return
In a charming fantasia on how the last years of Napoleon's life might have gone, The Emperor's New Clothes—an adaptation of Simon Leys's novella The Death of Napoleon—features a Bonaparte who plots a daring escape from St. Helena. He plants a double, a sailor named Eugene Lenormand, in his place while he steals back to Paris to reclaim his power. Both figures are played with brio by Ian Holm.
A future in crime?
Despite its state-of-the-art computer graphics and eye-catching special effects, Minority Report is basically a chase movie built on a question—one that Charles Dickens explored in A Christmas Carol. Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge asks the visiting spirits if his foretold future of loneliness and gloom is how things "will" be, or how they "might" be. In Dickens, the answer is that Scrooge can change the late-night prophecy.
Voices
Miroslav Volf
The three Rs of urban mission: The New Song Community of Baltimore
When I visited a Baltimore neighborhood called Sandtown in 1997, my most vivid impression was that of disturbing, jarring contrast. I remember a whole neighborhood of abandoned houses—each one an oversized skull, with empty darkness peering out of its broken doors and windows and mocking the life that had abandoned it. In the midst of these ruins, however, there was a street teeming with life. Houses had been repaired and painted with bright colors, neighbors were chatting, children were playing in the street.