Harold Myra (who joined CT as president and publisher in 1975) has written a moving memoir about foster care and transracial adoption. When Harold was a child, his parents took in two foster brothers. The Myra family invested themselves in these boys, who were emotionally and physically challenged. Eventually the foster-care system ripped these boys from this nurturing atmosphere—with tragic results. Decades later, Harold and his wife Jeanette got involved in the foster-care system, and they opened the door once again to both tragedy and healing.
Harold’s book, Surprised by Children (Zondervan, 2001), is also about race and racism in America. As Harold and Jeanette started adopting black children, they learned how visceral opposition could be, yet experienced support from most African Americans they met. As they tried to integrate their children into the lives of their largely white Anglo suburb, they began to sense how their dark-skinned children would experience American society. What had been an important issue for Harold as a journalist became intensely personal.
If Harold Myra’s book is very personal, Stan Guthrie’s is highly informative. Before he became CT’s associate news editor last November, Stan spent ten years on the missions beat. Missions in the Third Millennium: 21 Key Trends for the 21st Century (Paternoster, 2000) was released in December, just in time for the Urbana Student Missions Convention as well as for the real turn of the millennium.
As an editor working on two missions publications, Stan saw a lot of technical literature on the effects of global cultural change on mission methods and philosophy. He also saw a lot of popular literature that was as short on substance as it was long on enthusiasm. Unfortunately, there was little available for the discerning reader who wanted to be informed but had neither time for the technical literature nor taste for the hustle. The book reports on important issues like persecution and religious liberty, it encourages mission work by indigenous churches, and it pokes holes in some of the myths associated with the ad2000 plans and the 10/40 window.
Other CT staff have been busy writing books as well.
Most CT readers will already know about Wendy Zoba’s Columbine-related Day of Reckoning (Brazos, 2001), which was excerpted in our last issue. Tim Stafford continues to write historical novels based on social reform movements. The most recent deals with Prohibition (The Law of Love, Nelson). Tony Carnes has edited New York Glory, a collection of essays on religious communities in New York City (New York University, 2001). And John Wilson continues to edit Harper’s Best Christian Writing series. Perhaps the CT author best known for his book writing is Philip Yancey, whose Reaching for the Invisible God (Zondervan, 2000) placed first in this year’s CT Book Awards in the spirituality category (see p. 82). Kudos, Philip, for your award. And congratulations to all our book-writing staff on their publications.
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