The Scriptorium Project Sticking to the Script in 2011   Dear Friends, Last fall I began the newsletter describing our Scriptorium Project with this sentence: "Necessity is the mother of invention, or in this case the engine of programmatic innovation." The necessity at the time was an economic one, forced on us all by the economic downturn. You'll be happy to know that the necessity I have in mind today is of a different kind. We would like to propose a slight alteration in the way we express our gratitude to our donors. We originally said we would be posting both the printable copies and audio recordings of the excerpts from the writing project on which I am now working to the special website we set up for our donors. As it turns out, however, the recording and audio editing has proven to be considerably time consuming, not to mention the fact that talking into a microphone in an empty room is a recipe for putting both the speaker and the listener to sleep.  So, both to relieve me from the tedium of having to listen to my own voice and to provide our donors with something more useful, we are suggesting the following changes to the Scriptorium Project: We will continue to post printable versions of the draft excerpts from the writing project on the "Friends of the Cornerstone Forum" website, and these will be accessible by those who donate at least $5 a month or $60 a year to our work. We will no longer post audio versions of these excerpts. As an alternative, drafted excerpts from the book-in-progress will be periodically printed in booklet form and mailed to our sustaining donors, those who contribute at least $25 a month or $300 a year. We will be actively soliciting the comments and questions that our donors might have about the materials we post to the website and send out to our sustaining donors. We hope that the response will justify more frequent and more lively split-screen video conversations between Randy Coleman-Riese, the Forum's executive director, and myself. We will post these videos to our website. In them, Randy will summarize and share as many as possible of the comments and questions our friends and donors have sent along, and I will respond and elaborate as best I can. I hope you will forgive me for suggesting these changes in the Scriptorium Project, but they will enable me to devote more of my time to the writing task itself. Whenever any new material is posted to the Friends of the Cornerstone Forum website, we will let our donors know by newsletter. We are, of course, grateful not only to those who support us financially, but to all our friends and colleagues, on whose friendship and prayers we depend. So, in addition to our efforts to express gratitude to our donors, we will continue to post materials from our audio archives to our weblog and to the streaming media page of our main website. Randy has just posted the latest excerpt from the Scriptorium draft here. Our sustaining donors may have just received -- or will soon receive -- a booklet containing this excerpt. As always, we thank you most sincerely for your friendship, your prayers and your generosity. Affectionately, Gil Bailie The Cornerstone Forum According to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, the coincidence of theology and anthropology constitutes "the truly most exciting part of Christian faith." The Cornerstone Forum is a product of that excitement and an effort to communicate it to others.