signsoflifebooks.com

Coffee producers should be able to make a living wage and conscientious U.S. customers should be willing to pay a few cents more for their daily mocha to assure that. These are the premises behind the concept of fair-trade coffee. Signs of Life has always offered some excellent fair-trade products, and according to a recent Seattle Times article, the trend is rapidly expanding to the mainstream coffee market. That’s a good thing, right?

Well, perhaps not. Cato Institute senior fellow Brink Lindsey says the economics of fair-trade are not that simple. Summarizing his paper Grounds for Complaint: ‘Fair trade’ and the coffee crisis, Lindsey writes: “However well intentioned, interventionist schemes to lift prices above market levels ignore . . . market realities. Accordingly, they are doomed to end in failure—or to offer cures that are worse than the disease. There are constructive measures that can help to ease the plight of struggling coffee farmers, but they consist of efforts to improve the market’s performance—not block it or demonize it.”

What are your favorite novels and movies? If you had to limit your picks to 5 of each, which would you choose? World Magazine asked this of several of their senior staff plus Christian leaders around the country. We find in the resulting lists lots of books that we love, and lots of books that we’ve grown to love since being motivated by the lists to read them. Here are three examples.

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, appears on several peoples’ lists. This is the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning story of an old rural Iowa pastor writing for his young son his “begats”, or the story of his forebears. There’s so much we’d like our children to know, so much that we must tell them, even though we fear that many lessons are only learned by experience and not from second-hand parental wisdom. Robinson tells those stories with skill and tenderness.

We weren’t familiar with the works of Walker Percy, but his Thanatos Syndrome made it onto several lists. Since then we’ve enjoyed his Second Coming, a delightfully crafted story that follows the path of a young woman moving from schizophrenia to sanity; and a rich and powerful middle-aged man who is going insane. Their paths cross somewhere in the middle as she helps him find love and God.

Cormac McCarthy is admired by several of the people surveyed, so we decided to give him a try. All the Pretty Horses is a coming of age story about 16-year-old cowboy John Grady Cole who leaves his post-WWII Texas home to discover life breaking wild horses on a hacienda in Mexico. McCarthy won the National Book Award for his exuberant if Faulknerian prose and for the stark dignity of his characters.

It’s a fascinating list, and we’ve only scratched the surface of the books. Under the film favorites you’ll find hilareous juxtapositions such as one person who loves both The Princess Bride and Hotel Rwanda, and another whose favorites include both Sense and Sensibility as well as Black Hawk Down.

The African Children’s Choir performs at special events and concerts throughout the world, raising the profile of the African child as ambassadors for all children in Africa who have become orphans because of the AIDS pandemic.

The group will give a concert at Lawrence’s Free Methodist Church on Sunday, Nov. 5th at 6:00 pm. Many of the children in the Choir have lost one or both parents to poverty or disease, yet their message is one of hope and joy as they spotlight the plight of children in Africa.

You can catch all the exuberance of their music on their CD Windows on the World. Funds raised from this CD build and staff schools that provide food, shelter and education for orphans in various parts of Africa.

We recently learned something interesting about one of our suppliers. Good News Publishers, who puts out the English Standard Version Bible under its Crossways imprint, is a not-for-profit corporation. They are currently promoting the ESV by offering a special edition of the paperback New Testament for just 50 cents each. That means for a buck, I can give one to each of my friends

We’ve got a ton of them on hand, so come in and check it out.