“My goal is to change the norms of illness etiquette so that, from the moment your friend confides her or his diagnosis, the two of you establish a policy of complete candor — that you articulate, ‘I want to be useful and supportive to you throughout this ordeal but I’m not always going to know the right thing to say or do. I won’t always be able to anticipate your needs or read your mood, so I hope you’ll give me a heads up on what’s helpful and what’s not. Would you promise to be honest with me?’”—Letty Cottin Pogrebin
[T]he Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Christian denomination save the Catholic Church, passed a resolution calling on its 16 million members to get involved, whether that meant taking in children themselves, donating to adoptive families, or supporting the hundreds of adoption ministries that were springing up around the country to raise money and spread the word. Neo-Pentecostal leader Lou Engle also called for mega-churches to take on the cause, which would give them “moral authority in this nation.”
The movement spawned numerous conferences and books built around the idea that adopting a needy child is a form of missionary work. “The ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians,” author Dan Cruver wrote in his 2011 book, Reclaiming Adoption, “is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel.” At an adoption summit hosted by the Christian Alliance for Orphans at Southern California’s Saddleback Church, pastor Rick Warren told followers, “What God does to us spiritually, he expects us to do to orphans physically: be born again and adopted.”
The film “A Place at the Table” opens our eyes to the crisis of food insecurity and malnutition in America. It releases on March 1st in theaters, on iTunes and On Demand everywhere.
Inspired by the film, Plum Organics, the leading provider of organic baby foods and toddler snacks, has developed a “Super Smoothie” product, created exclusively for donation to babies and toddlers across the US. It is an organic and nutritionally dense fruit, veggie, and grain blend, designed specifically to fulfill the nutritional deficits of babies and toddlers suffering from food insecurity.
Plum Organics will donate a “Super Smoothie” for every book or movie ticket purchased, or film downloaded over the film’s opening weekend.
The film “A Place at the Table” opens next weekend. If you buy a movie ticket, download the film, or buy the companion book during March 1-3, Plum Organics will donate a “Super Smoothie” nutritional pouch to a child in need. Do you part to end hunger in America!
Then there’s the US Postal System. For the first half century after its founding, its main function was to circulate newspapers to a national audience. Not that you couldn’t send letters, too, but the rates were much higher than for periodicals. In 1840, sending a letter from Boston to Richmond cost 25 cents a sheet, at a time when the average laborer made 75 cents a day…. That all changed in 1845, when Congress enacted the first in a series of laws that sharply reduced the cost of sending letters…. One dramatic effect of the cheaper postage was to allow Americans to keep in touch with one another in what was becoming the most mobile society on earth…. And, oh yes, they also sent valentines.
St. Valentine’s Day was an ancient European holiday. Back in England, people drew lots to divine their future mates and exchanged love poems and intricately folded pieces of paper called “puzzle purses,” the ancestors of the fortune-telling cootie-catchers that children still make today. But before the 1840s, puritan Americans almost completely disregarded the holiday, like the other saints’ days of the Old World. The drop in postal rates set off what contemporaries described as “Valentine mania.” By the late 1850s, Americans were buying 3 million ready-made valentines every year, paying anything from a penny to several hundred dollars for elaborate affairs adorned with gold rings or precious stones. People sent cards to numerous objects of their affection, often taking advantage of the possibilities for anonymity that the mail provided.
That was alarming to moralists who complained that the postal system in general promoted promiscuity, illicit assignations, and the distribution of pornography—and actually, they weren’t entirely wrong about any of that. But fully half of the valentine traffic consisted of comic or insulting cards that people sent anonymously to annoying neighbors or unpopular schoolmasters. By the time the craze tapered off a few decades later, people were sending each other cards for Christmas, Easter, and birthdays, as the greeting card became a fixture of American life.
