The Ecumenical Movement: An Anthology of Key Texts and Voices

You had your own key, an empty house from three to six, and nobody on earth knew exactly where you were.

Nobody called it a parenting philosophy. It was arithmetic. Both parents worked, after-school care barely existed, and the family solution was to hand a nine-year-old the front door of the household plus a note on the counter about the trash cans. What happened in that gap is one of the strangest facts about growing up in the seventies and eighties, and almost nobody has ever sat down and made a proper list of it.

Here is the list. 101 numbered entries, ten sections, written for the person who lived every single one of them.

What's inside:

- The key on the shoelace, worn under your shirt, patted for all day like a wallet

- The walk home with no grown-up, on a route that had nothing to do with distance

- Checking every room, including behind the shower curtain, before the coat came off

- Streetlights, the only curfew anybody actually enforced

- The stove rule, which was different in every house and broken in all of them

- The blacktop playground, the metal slide, and the purple ink of the ditto machine

- Saturday morning, being the remote control, and waiting an entire year for one holiday special

- Frozen dinners with compartments, the prize at the bottom of the box, macaroni cooked by a fourth grader

- The cord stretched around the doorway, the busy signal, the click of the other extension

- The way back of the station wagon, and the arm thrown across the front seat at a red light

- The paper route, the bottle deposit, and the first paycheck with your name spelled wrong

- One finger on pause, waiting all night for the radio to play the song

Plus the last twenty minutes before six, when the house had to be returned to the exact condition in which it was found.

Where the honest answer is that we were lucky rather than indestructible, this book says so out loud. The joke lands on we know better now, never on it never did us any harm, and nobody younger gets sneered at anywhere in it.

Perfect for: a birthday with a zero on the end, a retirement party, a Christmas stocking, Father's Day, Mother's Day, and any sibling who will read three entries out loud before you have finished unwrapping the next present.

Included in this exhaustive collection of documents from the twentieth-century ecumenical movement are significant passages from the most widely influential texts produced by assemblies, conferences, and studies of the World Council of Churches and similar bodies, covering the three broad areas of historic concern within modern ecumenism: faith and order, life and work, and mission and evangelism.Designed as a resource for courses in ecumenism in theological seminaries and faculties of religion, the volume can also serve as a use reference guide.