Still in service

Compassion profiles | A Midwestern political junkie; a Ph.D. from Buffalo; a first-generation American born in East L.A. Three very different personalities traveled different roads to the same calling: community-based poverty-fighting. While some pundits have written off “compassionate conservatism” as a new and failed GOP slogan, William Schambra, Amy Sherman, and Rudy Carrasco show that effective compassion is actually, as Schambra puts it, “the historical recovery of some very old ideas”—and that no matter which party controls 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Christians will continue to reach the needy on Main Street | Lynn Vincent

Born in East L.A.

Boarded up and condemned by the city, a barrio-style neighborhood store sits at the corner of West Howard and Navarro Avenue in Pasadena, Calif. Well, one-third of a store, anyway. In May, the second story and one wing burned to cinders in an accidental blaze, leaving a grungy little store-stump of sorts. That was a few weeks after gangsta rapper Ice Cube and a hip-hop posse thumped out of town (having used the store in a music video) and a few months before a tagging crew beat a kid with a baseball bat for having painted out their graffiti with his own.

But such drama is relatively rare on Navarro these days, in part because of the guy who hangs out across the street from the store.