Sunsets 
by Foy Valentine

"Whatsoever things are...lovely...think on these things" Philippians 4:8.

The sunsets were spectacular in East Texas where I lived as a boy. The house in which I was born and where I lived until I went away to college was happily situated, particularly so if a body had an interest in watching sunsets.

The lay of the land was just right. The place was on a gentle hill. There was a good-sized draw to the west. Beyond the draw there was a big, open field. Beyond the field was a clearing. The clearing then stretched westward for about a thousand miles. Hardly a tree to mar the view, as the saying went. The sun was at liberty to do its thing in the shank of the evening. About a hundred miles due west, the then smallish cities of Dallas and Fort Worth were producing just enough pollution in the vast western skies to aid and abet the evening sun in a profligate paintbrushing of the heavens.
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A Mountain Man's Lesson in Ethics 
by Hal Haralson

The knot Marshall McNeil and his wife had tied twenty-five years before had come unraveled.

He was embarrassed to tell me they were getting a divorce and looked down at his feet as he talked.

I guessed him to be about 55 years of age with no education beyond high school. His gnarled hands looked like those of a carpenter.
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Civil Religion
A Case Study Showing How Some Baptists Went Astray on the Separation of Church and State
By Richard V. Pierard

• What Is Civil Religion?

• Civil Religion and Religious Liberty
• The Christian Right, Politics, and Civil Religion 
• Endnotes
• Conclusion

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Overview of World Hunger 
By Marc J. Cohen and Jashinta D'Costa

• Hunger in Industrial Countries 
• Child Poverty Policies 
• Government can do much to reduce child poverty: 
• Countries in Transition 
• Hunger in Developing Countries 
• Africa
• Asia-Pacific
• Latin America and the Caribbean 
• Middle East and North Africa 
• The Faces of Hunger 
• Poverty
• Child Undernutrition 
• Micronutrient Malnutrition 
• Urbanization of Hunger 
• Hunger in Complex Emergencies
• Hunger Deaths
• Does the World Have Enough Food? 
• Conclusion
• Endnotes

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Updated Monday, November 26, 2001

Becoming the Kind of Person Who... The Church and the Formation of Character
by N. Larry Baker

• The Nature of Character 
• The Church's Concern for Character 
• Shaping the Church's Approach to Character Formation 
• The Roles of the Church and Minister in Character Formation
• Implications for the Life and Work of the Church and Minister
• Endnotes
• Conclusion

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Ethics From the Long View 
By William M. Tillman, Jr.

Remember!" Contrary to some readers' thought this was not said first by Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame. Rather, "remember" is one of the key words in the Old Testament. Though we do not typically think of it as such, memory is an ethical category. More than merely a platonic abstraction or a passive sense of holding things in reserve, memory should take on an extraordinarily active role in our lives.

We are assaulted day-by-day by those who would impose on us an ethical amnesia. With oversimplification and reductionism abounding, we are constrained and extruded toward an age of trivialization of perspective. Without the long view we can lose sight of those concerns of ultimacy.
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What Shall We Do with Norman?
(An Experiment in Communal Discernment) 
By Curtis W. Freeman

Norman was seventy-nine years old and lived alone. He normally kept to himself, but for most of his life he had been actively involved in his church. Norman never married, and he was not close to any of his family. His church family (as he liked to call them) was the only family Norman knew for many years. Norman was always eccentric and usually a little on the cranky side, but it was the faithfulness to his friends that was perhaps Norman's most enduring and endearing quality.

Norman always enjoyed an active life. He tried to play golf, walk, or jog everyday. One Saturday afternoon while jogging he collapsed in cardiac arrest. By the time the paramedics arrived and stabilized him, he had suffered ischemia from the prolonged CPR. He was taken to the emergency room at a large public hospital where it was determined that he did not meet the criteria of total brain death, and therefore he was not "really dead." Although the neurological damage of his cerebral hemisphere had been sufficient to cause the cessation of its function, his brain stem was still intact.
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