Author: Mark A. Staples
Photographers: John Kahler, Mark A. Staples, Keith Clemens, Fran Held
Neighbors Revisited: A church journalist’s life lessons learned from people of other cultures
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Neighbors Revisited: A church journalist’s life lessons learned from people of other cultures describes the author’s life lessons learned from people of other cultures during travels to six countries in Africa and Asia from 1981 to 1985. The six nations visited in Africa are South Africa (including visiting Soweto illegally during apartheid), Namibia, and Zimbabwe immediately after independence, and in Asia the Philippines, Papua New Guinea (10 years after attaining independence) and Northern Sumatra in Indonesia where the author celebrated Easter in ways he could not have imagined. The countries visited were on assignment for The Lutheran, magazine of the Lutheran Church in America, a national periodical with about 500,000 readers. The life lessons learned happened in places readers in the United States may not have visited. Two of those places featured stories of people striving to establish new democracies after enduring colonialism.
The author encountered many holy surprises along the way as people of faith welcomed a stranger in ways that changed the author’s life. Of particular value was discovering how believers in cultures unfamiliar to the author observed their Christian faith in extremely trying times. The author believes those lessons and experiences, though decades old, have relevance to U.S. readers today in challenging times of our own where Americans for a variety of reasons have sometimes been isolated from other cultures and who themselves are dealing with questions of democracy in a highly polarized time.
