September 2019 Issue

Have you ever had that one teacher who had such a positive impact that you carried the lessons from her or him forward for years to come? I certainly did.

On Good Friday of 2018, the bottom fell out of my world when my husband, Bill, learned he had late-stage abdominal cancer. We’d been doctoring the previous nine months for a variety of symptoms—chiefly insomnia and an unsteady gait.

Earlier this summer, I took a plane from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta to go on a pilgrimage around the Gulf Coast and deep into southern Texas to the border of Mexico. It was a five-day road trip put together by my friend Lisa Sharon Harper and her organization, FreedomRoad.us. The purpose was to look at the intersection of theology and economics in the deep history of the American South.

Four years ago, Rebecca DeBurger, a college freshman, sat in her Common Ground class at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio, “surrounded by all new faces, each asking the same question: ‘What is the point of this class?’” Unlike many of her classmates, it didn’t take her long to figure it out.

By his own description, Efrain Hernandez was “a terror” growing up in a single-parent home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of New York City. He did what he wanted to do and drifted into selling drugs to have some money in his pocket. Eventually, Hernandez was arrested and spent 18 months in prison.

The Lion King  In time for the 25th anniversary of the original animated film, Disney returns to Africa for The Lion King, a magnificent CGI remake about Simba (voiced by JD McCrary and, later, Donald Glover), a lion cub born to be king.