This Week Online: Lisa Miller, Henri Nouwen and the Lost Art of Penmanship

Lisa Miller's new book on Heaven comes out in two weeks, and were happy to have one of the first interviews with the author. Thanks to assistant editor Kerry Weber for leading this discussion of God and the afterlife with Miller, the religion editor at Newsweek.

Listen to Kerry's interview with Lisa Miller.

Henri Nouwen needs no introduction here. The prolific spiritual author was an occasional contributor to America, and this week--in conjunction with two new articles on retired clergy--we reprint Nouwen's article from 1980 on a spirituality of ministry.

Read "The Monk and the Cripple" by Henri Nouwen.

Finally, in our weekly video commentary, Peter Schineller, S.J., considers the ramifications of a keyboard culture in "The Lost Art of Penmanship."

Tim Reidy

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Gerelyn Hollingsworth

8 years 4 months ago

Agree about penmanship. A shame that it's lost. I'm always amazed at how people too young to have learned Palmer Method clutch their pens.

Those unable to read cursive writing will miss out on reading the old censuses, ships' manifests, passport applications, marriage license applications, death certificates, and draft registrations on Ancestry.com.

(Very touching to see a parent's signature on a document from decades ago.)

But even those of us who learned penmanship in the good old days cannot read old legal documents written in chancery hand.

Kate Gladstone

8 years 4 months ago

When the cellphone-obsessed generation wakes up to the need for handwriting they can always consider the handwriting instruction program that a software designer has produced as a cell-phone game (it works on the iPodTouch, the iPhone, and the forthcoming iPad) - Better Letters, which costs $2.99 from Apple's App Store on-line for cell-phone applications. If they can type well enough to have a fighting chance of entering a credit-card number, they can teach themselves handwriting from this "personal trainer in a pocket" even if their parents and teachers are neglecting this part of their education.