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The Westminster Handbook to Women in American Religious History offers clear, concise and detailed information of individuals, organizations and events whose contributions influenced the landscape of American Religion. The late Susan Hill Lindley and co-editor Eleanor J. Stebner teamed with an expansive group of contributing authors to create this affordable and accessible reference work. Its inclusion of notable work of women from an array of fields, give this book the depth and detail that make this a useful resource for…

The distance between life and death, which often seems as wide as the Pacific, can become as slim as a doorway. On Tuesday, March 23, 2010, our third daughter, Miriah, came into the world. Whidbey General Hospital was her birthplace. The hospital is tucked quietly among the rocky beaches of the Puget Sound and the shadows of the Olympic Mountains on Whidbey Island. Like many hospitals, ours is one addition after another connected by a winding maze of hallways. A…

Sioux Center, Iowa is a small agricultural community in northwest Iowa where food production is central to economic and cultural life. Drive around Sioux Center and it becomes obvious that corn, soybeans, hogs, and cattle production dominate the farming scene. Industrial mechanized farming is a way of life in this area, which makes having a conversation about organic food, factory farms, and high fructose corn syrup complicated. Not only has the political polarization of the food issue erected barriers that…

In the preface of her new book of poems, her seventh, Jeanne Murray Walker asks "Why read poetry?" and answers: poetry has given us "solace for thousands of years," as well as "entertained and nurtured" us. She describes her own poems as "tracks" that she followed "into the dark" that has fallen and separated us from each other since 9/11. She invites the reader to listen to "the human voice talking" in them as the poems lead us toward "the…

I still have the handmade birthday card my fifth grade teacher gave me—an enormous piece of folded yellow construction paper with a big orange bookworm (wearing a festive birthday hat, naturally) drawn on the front. Somehow that flimsy relic of thirty years ago survived the many moves of my childhood and found a snug home at the bottom of the cedar box a great-uncle made me as a repository for my "treasures." Perhaps it's no surprise I safeguarded it so…

Every Sunday night I repeat the same dumb little joke. I say to my wife, "Hey hon, guess what I have to do tomorrow." She obliges with, "I don't know, what?" And then I say, "I have to make another sermon." Ha ha! I think it was David H. C. Reid who said that Sundays come at a preacher like telegraph poles through a train window. I know a Presbyterian minister who recently became a senior pastor, after having been…