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From the Christian Science Monitor:

WASHINGTON — When Salvadoran immigrant Vilma Norberta needs a pound of ground beef, she drops by her local Giant supermarket in northern Virginia. But when she wants some tamarind fruit to make a refreshing beverage on a summer evening, Ms. Norberta heads to a local bodega, one of the hundreds of small Latino markets that dot the suburbs of Washington. … But Norberta's shopping options for her favorite native products could soon expand. Increasingly, large supermarket chains are pushing aside the apples and bananas to make room for exotic products such as tomatillos (compact green tomatolike vegetables in papery husks) and jicama (large brownish tubers covered with spiky hair) as they aim to attract the growing Hispanic middle class.

• It may not be a matter of doctrine, exactly, but this Dutch Calvinist was raised with a faith in savings—an affinity for deals or discounts on consumer goods as a matter of thrift as well as stewardship. But a reflection at ByFaithOnline.com (the Presbyterian Church in America's online magazine) challenges the credo that "the lowest price always represents the best purchase." After a lengthy preamble about the necessity of discerning questions of social justice, Denis Haack challenges Christians to examine the economic practices of Wal-Mart, which "has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year." This, he says, causes "makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas." And it raises the question for conscientious Christians: "is it possible for low prices to come at too high a cost in social justice?" Article
  Related:Small towns and free trade, from Comment
• Cover stories about society in Time and Newsweek are always a little dubious. Is it objectively true, as Newsweek wrote in a recent cover story about saying no to your kids, that "the struggle to set limits has never been tougher" and that "a growing number of psychologists, educators and parents" are worried about it (especially since, as Newsweek says, childhood consumption has been a problem since the late 1980s)—or did Newsweek just decide to sit down and write about it? Either way, the story is a good reminder of the effect of raising children who get whatever they want. "Kids who've been given too much too soon grow up to be adults who have difficulty coping with life's disappointments," the article says. "They have a distorted sense of entitlement that gets in the way of success both in the workplace and in relationships." Says one psychologist: "The risk of overindulgence is self-centeredness and self-absorption, and that's a mental-health risk." Article/Summary
  From B&C: Tweens, teens, and conspicuous consumption
• Johann Wilhelm Wilms was ''one of the most important musicians in the Netherlands" at the turn of the 19th century, but his legacy was crippled by one small fact: Wilms "was a near contemporary of Beethoven, a circumstance that amounts, in music histories, to living on the far side of the moon," says the New York Times . He was born two years after Beethoven, and wrote his Symphony in D minor one year before Beethoven wrote his immortal Ninth. But just because Wilms was overshadowed doesn't mean his music is unworthy of our memory, says the Times' James Oestreich. In Wilms' Sixth and Seventh symphonies, Oestreich says, "an ebullient and engaging musical personality springs to life." The music is "self-confident and strong: a little Haydnesque, a little Schubertian and, yes, a little Beethovenian but with a character of its own." It gets Oestreich wondering, "might there be other similarly worthy composers who worked squarely in the shadow of Beethoven?" Preview*

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