1 corinthians from 1 timothy 4

When Martin Luther discovered that some had begun calling the first Protestants “Lutherans,” he strongly objected. It is funny to think that some 500 years later, many are still known by his name: ...

While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically, these disciplines an...

In The Seven Storey Mountain , Thomas Merton describes his life of sin and his eventual turning to God in his early years. He despised and ridiculed the word virtue, which had come to mean “prudery p...

In his classic fictional work on spiritual warfare, The Screwtape Letters , C. S. Lewis imagined a senior demon (Screwtape) corresponding with one of his protégés (his nephew Wormwood) as the latte...

My transition into my 40’s came with the obligatory hip surgery. The only way to stop the cycle of hip pain was to literally carve out some bone. Those parts had to be removed. But recovering my funct...

Interestingly enough, even secular research indicates that exercise and spirituality go hand in hand. “A biological mechanism is at work,” says William C. Bushell, a Massachusetts Institute of Technol...

In his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, author Bill Bryson details the complexity within the human body: No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the ...

God is the author of the physical world, and in his wisdom, he designed physical realities to convey spiritual mysteries. “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God,” as C. S. Lewis insist...

Christianity Does Not Reject the Body The “spirit-good / body-bad” dualism that often passes for Christianity is actually an ancient gnostic error called “Manichaeism,” and it couldn’t be further from...

Think of your own experiences as a human being: your body is not just a “shell” in which you dwell. Your body is not just a body. Your body is not just any body. Your body is somebody—you! Through the...

I wasn’t raised in a Christian family. I only entered the “Christian bubble” of a Southern Baptist youth group in junior high, where I pledged myself to abstinence before marriage at a True Love Waits...

In recent decades, many Christians have tried to make sense of the tension between our bodies and spirits by swinging to the opposite pole. Instead of saying, “The body doesn’t matter,” they have said...

My wife was grading a science test at home that she had given to her elementary-school class and was reading some of the results to me. The subject was “The Human Body,” and the first question was: “N...

Surprisingly enough, it was in the process of staying faithful to the spiritual journey that I first began to face my profound ambivalence about life in a body. At the ripe old age of thirty, I could ...

Judaism has a prayer called the Asher Yatzar that is often recited after using the bathroom, a prayer grounded in the very real needs of our bodies. At first, some of us might blush over the idea of G...

Christians are often accused of two wrong-headed views of the body. One is that we ignore the body in favor of a disembodied, spirits-floating-on-clouds spirituality. The other is that we are obsessed...