Word: gifts
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...PLAN So what would a plan for universal national service look like? It would be voluntary, not mandatory. Americans don't like to be told what they have to do; many have argued that requiring service drains the gift of its virtue. It would be based on carrots, not sticks - "doing well by doing good," as Benjamin Franklin, the true father of civic engagement, put it. So here is a 10-point plan for universal national service. The ideas here are a mixture of suggestions already made, revised versions of other proposals and a few new wrinkles...
...world of wonders; for Paul Theroux, as for his model in these stories, Paul Bowles, travel can often be about dissolution, a slow and irresistible unraveling. In The Elephanta Suite, a set of brilliantly evocative and propulsive novellas, he shows us how India, with its furious intensities, its gift for confrontation and its quirky mix of dusty British terms ("jocundity") and the latest American ambitions, might be made for him and his ironic pen. He also reminds us that few travelers can pick up a place with such casual vividness, see Indian script "like washing hanging on a clothesline...
...atheists and doubters will agree. Both Kolodiejchuk and Martin assume that Teresa's inability to perceive Christ in her life did not mean he wasn't there. In fact, they see his absence as part of the divine gift that enabled her to do great work. But to the U.S.'s increasingly assertive cadre of atheists, that argument will seem absurd. They will see the book's Teresa more like the woman in the archetypal country-and-western song who holds a torch for her husband 30 years after he left to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned...
...holy are no less prone than the rest of us to misjudge the workings of history - or, if you will, of God's providence. Teresa considered the perceived absence of God in her life as her most shameful secret but eventually learned that it could be seen as a gift abetting her calling. If her worries about publicizing it also turn out to be misplaced - if a book of hasty, troubled notes turns out to ease the spiritual road of thousands of fellow believers, there would be no shame in having been wrong - but happily, even wonderfully wrong - twice...
That's good, since the job of an ANA soldier is one of the most dangerous in Afghanistan. The dark khaki camouflage uniform, a gift from the U.S. government, may as well be a beacon for insurgent attacks. Several hundred ANA forces have died in combat since 2003, and a Taliban directive has decreed that ANA soldiers are infidels for their affiliation with the foreign forces. Insurgents prefer to target Afghan forces rather than NATO, knowing that the poorly prepared troops rarely drive armored vehicles and that they lack sufficient retaliatory firepower to mount a counteroffensive. The rising military death...