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MAY 2006: ESSAY by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches This statement was ratified by the 24th General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, meeting in Accra, Ghana, 30 July-13 August 2004. After introductory points tracing the development of its concern on the topic at hand, the Council declared the following as "a decision of faith commitment." Reading the Signs of the Times 5. We have heard that creation continues to groan, in bondage, waiting for its liberation…

JULY 2006 What to Do About Wal-Mart? by Todd Steen and Steve VanderVeen Even though eight in ten Americans shop at Wal-Mart, it is one of America's most reviled retailers. According to a recent Zogby International poll (26 December 2005), fifty-six percent of Americans agree that "Wal- Mart is bad for America." Christians as a group seem similarly conflicted about the chain, as their actions range from an active embrace of it through casual use to concerted opposition. So what…

The institutions of marriage and family have been badly damaged in the last century. But commonly accepted definition of the problem--that "revolutions," corrupt values, grand ideas, or different ways of thinking have undermined the family--fails. The error is slight and subtle: this explanation simply has cause and effect reversed. The sexual revolution, rising rates of divorce, promiscuity, and out-of-wedlock births are the results, not the cause, of the breakdown of the family. Family institutions as we once knew them were…

MAY 2006 Vespers I see my mother's heart its chambers pumping rhythmically once more. She watches, too, as the sonographer sends short inaudible waves through her skin. They return an image of atria opening to welcome oxygenated blood, cone-shaped echoes of movement in black and white. The last heart I'd seen pumping through sound waves belonged to a child cradled in my uterine walls. I remember the cool transducer sliding in slick gel across my taut belly, systolic and diastolic…

"Tyrone Guthrie must be mad." So whispered the English theater kingdom when, in 1963, the esteemed sweet prince of the London stage founded a theater in, of all places, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA! Guthrie's decision eleven years earlier to become the first-ever artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario had already called his sanity into question. That this boondocks in North America shared the name of Shakespeare's birthplace prevented Guthrie's benefactors from permanently committing him to a nunnery for…