| Spring 2010 | Volume 25, Number 2 | Findings Magazine |
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From the Dean The Health of Our Children |
The Health of Our Children
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They come in multiple heights, widths, hues, and shapes. They live in deserts and on mountains, inside brick houses and cardboard shacks, near rivers and airports and factories and swamps. Their names are Chris, Naida, Ethan, Ranjit, Li Mei, Jennifer, Pilar, Tanisha. They arrive on earth programmed to play, eat, weep, laugh, and grow. Some do these things more readily than others, and some cannot do them at all. Most harbor hopes, fears, questions, appetites, fantasies, dreams, and desires we cannot begin to fathom. Each is a complex machine, miraculous in its ability to accommodate a world where love and compassion are often in short supply, and basic needs too frequently go unmet. They are our precious resource and grave responsibility—a measure, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, of our moral worth as a society—and in their stories we are reminded of the children we all were once upon a time. |