1 corinthians on Self-Knowledge

Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom: Enlighten by your Holy Spirit those who teach and those who learn, that, rejoicing in the knowledge of your truth, they may worship you and serve you from gen...

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

What we need to realize, however, is that there is no such thing as autonomous or “self-grounding” knowledge. All systems of interpretation and all claims to true knowledge are ultimately grounded out...

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.”

Friends, go now with this knowledge, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now we know in part, but then we will know fully, even as we have been fully known. But now faith, hope,...

The search for knowledge can go wrong, not as a result of individual, erroneous judgments or of mistakes creeping in at different points, but because of one single mistake at the beginning… Faith does...

In a journal entry by the Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the great existentialist philosopher describes the importance not simply of grasping the truth of the Christian faith, but having the tr...

Who, then, are we, we prideful late-twentieth-century creatures? Lord knows, we no longer think of ourselves as belonging to anyone or anything. We do not belong – we own; we possess. And that, to say...

Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.

Truth consists in the mind giving to things the importance they have in reality.

’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

The True Self is all about right relationship, not requirements. It’s not about being correct; it’s about being connected, which you always were—you just didn’t realize it.

In this short poem, the psychologist Daniel Goleman (the developer of the concept of Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.)) builds on the work of R. D. Laing’s “knots.” The poem is a helpful reminder that our...

If you understood Him, it would not be God.

Our selves are fashioned; we are adorned with histories that incline us to saunter, swagger, or shuffle. Given our histories, some of us move through the world with a cape; some of us don baggy sweate...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Relevant Background 1. The Purpose of Paul’s Letter Recall that 1 Corinthians is written to a local church with the purpose of reproof...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Relevant Background 1. The Purpose of Paul’s Letter   1 Corinthians is written to a local church with the purpose of reproof and cor...

To be fully known and fully loved is the most healing gift one human being can give another.

I have a lot to be humble about.

In her aptly title book, Being Wrong , Kathleen Schulz describes just how difficult it is to be wrong: A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the ti...

The last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned them dry as dust, who have...

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

Now faith is not just a cognitive affair: its being “sealed upon our hearts” is a matter of will and affect; it is a repair of the madness of the will that is at the heart of sin. Still, it is at leas...

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

All our experience with history should teach us, when we look back, how badly human wisdom is betrayed when it relies on itself

I think the most selfish, self-centered individual in this world is not an unsaved person. It's a Christian who accepts the salvation God offers freely and goes out and lives for himself.

The only humility that is really ours is not that which we try to show before God in prayer, but that which we carry with us in our daily conduct.

Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...

Beware you are not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.