For A Change articles from December 1998

For A Change archives from December 1998

Limits of science.
December 1, 1998... Our growing understanding of the forces of nature, and how to harness them, seems to have placed within our grasp almost anything that the human mind can conceive. Near instantaneous visual communication across the globe; computers operated by...

One life to live: voting for the disadvantaged.
December 1, 1998... When a journalist asked former US President Jimmy Carter what drove him, he replied, `I feel I have one life to live. I feel God wants me to do the best I can with it.' The journalist then asked Carter how he knew God's will and Carter...

Out of the shadowland.
December 1, 1998... Niels Christian Hvidt is a 29-year-old Danish PhD-student of theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and writes a weekly column in the Danish national press. He communicated with For A Change from an internet cafe in Paris. ...

Map of the Qur'an.
December 1, 1998... `Muslims do not have the same personal relationship with God that you encounter within the Christian faith,' says Jomilla Youssef, a Swiss woman with a generous laugh, who converted to the Muslim faith some 30 years ago and now lives in...

Lotus power.
December 1, 1998... Philip Cooper, site-manager in an Australia-wide engineering firm, became a Tibetan Buddhist six years ago. We talk in a Buddhist temple in Canberra surrounded by tangkas, shrines and ornaments. The all-pervasive image is the lotus flower....

Art of listening.
December 1, 1998... The exquisite products of the Glass Workshop at the Canberra School of Art constantly receive prizes at exhibitions around the world because of their exceptional technical and artistic quality. Why? `Because the students are very good and...

Irreverence at the World Bank.
December 1, 1998... The World Bank is often criticized for approaching development in purely monetary terms. But even within this Temple of Mammon there are people who try to see their work in a spiritual dimension. For the past 20 years a group of World Bank...

Igniting the spark: John Bond is an MRA worker in Canberra, Australia, and a member of the National Sorry Day Committee.
December 1, 1998... My life has been shaped by my certainty that the force behind the universe--which I call God--loves his creation and, astounding though the idea is, loves even an insignificant speck like me. And he wants me to spread that love. When I try to...

Biking for BESO (British Executive Service Overseas).
December 1, 1998... `From an idea as crazy as that, somebody ought to benefit,' I told my husband Brian when he announced that he wanted to cycle the length of Britain from Land's End to John O'Groats for his 70th birthday. Unbeknown to me, the idea had been...

Giving Bologna's immigrants a voice.
December 1, 1998... A journalist and a businessman are combining forces to try to improve the lot of immigrants in their city of Bologna, Italy. Claudio Bacilieri works for the regional newspaper Emilia-Romagna News. His friend Pier Luigi Grazia is director of...

This time next year.
December 1, 1998... The villagers of Wickersley, on the outskirts of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, are planning the party of the century for New Year's Eve 1999. But they are determined that when the bonfire and the fireworks fizzle out, they'll also have...

Bright side of Black Monday: Sophia Swire gave up a high-flying career in the City of London for the sake of illiterate children in Asia.
December 1, 1998... Sophia Swire is never likely to forget that Friday in October 1987 when stock markets began to go into free fall. It was just before Black Monday. At the time she was a merchant banker with Kleinwort Benson in London, fresh out of university...

Skiing in Malta: Josephine and Bjorn Ole Austad, from Malta and Norway, met in Brazil, have worked in Norway and now live in Malta.
December 1, 1998... Josephine and Bjorn Ole Austad, from Malta and Norway, met in Brazil, have worked in Norway and now live in Malta. Their marriage presents challenges, they write--but many of them have nothing to do with cultural difference. In the Sixties...

Four faiths under one roof: women of four different religions live and work together in Jyoti Kanetkar's home in Pune, India.
December 1, 1998... When Vijaya came to us, she was a beautiful young bride, aged about 18, who had been beaten by her mother-in-law and sister-in-law for the misfortune of losing her first son. We took her into our household as a daily maid. She stayed, and went...

Incubating enterprise in the Black Country: Michael Smith reports on an initiative to create jobs in one of Britain's unemployment blackspots.
December 1, 1998... The Black Country: the very name conjures up images of the smokestacks of Britain's industrial revolution. On an overcast autumnal morning recently, the overall impression was grey rather than black. The occasional tall chimney still belches...

Jung, according to van der Post: Jean Brown eavesdrops on a relationship between two `large souls' - and comes home to herself.
December 1, 1998... Some 20 years ago, when I first read Jung and the story of our time (*), it detonated a series of life-changing explosions deep in the recesses of my imagination. Author Laurens van der Post had long been a favourite of mine. In this book, he...

Cork or bussed.
December 1, 1998... My Norwegian friend and I leave Cape Clear, an island off the southwest tip of Ireland, at midday. Just outside the harbour, the mailboat pauses to fish a life-jacket, left over from the regatta the day before, out of the sea. Fortunately there...

`So you are the one who destroyed my village'.
December 1, 1998... Mammo Wudneh, now a noted journalist and President of the Ethiopian Writers' Association, was just four years old when fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia just before the Second World War. One day the Italian Air Force bombed and strafed his...

Canadians launch Jubilee 2000 initiative.
December 1, 1998... Canada's churches recently kicked off their response to a worldwide campaign to lift the poorest countries out of their debt abyss. They held a series of workshops, forums and events on Parliament Hill in Ottawa to mark the launching of the...