Loren Paulsson

Everybody else worked on dairy farms. There were three guys from the Hutterian Bretheren commune. They spoke English and German. The other three were Latinos. By after noon the first day, I was adopted by the Latino side of the room and spent breaks trying to help unravel English and Spanish veterinary terms as my classmates absorbed what the trainers' were saying. Select Sires gave out English and Spanish reference material but conducted the class in English. Still, it wasn't until I taught English language learners—and renewed my study of Spanish—that I started to appreciate how another language can change a life story.  Those are the stories Tom Miller collected and edited in “How I LearnedEnglish.” Congressman Jose Serrano remembers learning English first from Frank Sinatra records. Author and essayist Richard Rodriguez describes the dichotomy between the “private” Spanish his family spoke during his childhood and the “public” English his parents spoke to strangers. When t...

Plutarco Elias Calles, 31 October 1924 (National Photo Company, Library of Congress) “In order for Christians to show forth the New Man they must demonstrate a positive practice and exhibit a caring Christian community in the group and care beyond the Christian group. But showing forth the New Man also means a standing against the law of the state which would destroy the very things Christians should produce in society. The civil disobedience forced upon them by the tyranny of the state is an essential part of being the New Man, because to obey would destroy both what Christians should be and also what they should be producing in society.” When Francis Schaeffer wrote “A Christian Manifesto” in 1981, he contrasted the Christian idea of fallen humans redeemed and remade with the Marxist idea of a new humanity produced by economic revolution. But his argument for the possibility of civil disobedience—and his idea of religious freedom for all religions—he traced from a Christian belief th...