April 23 2001

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

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 ...