What Determines Happiness? Imagine a movie theater full of a hundred people. These hundred individuals represent the full continuum of happiness: Some are exceptionally happy, others less so, and ...
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 ...
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...
The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...
After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.” With its Latin roots, “across” and “...
The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet. . . that is ...
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...
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...
The actual word in the Greek—charaktér—originally was used in connection with tools designed for engraving. And character is indeed a tool that marks us—that in one sense cuts us, shapes us, and engra...
1 Corinthians 6:19-20, 1 Timothy 4:8, Matthew 6:25, 2 Corinthians 12:7-9, John 9:1-3, 1 Timothy 4:8
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...
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 this short excerpt, the author and priest Robert Farrar Capon describes just how intricate and beautiful one single part of God’s creation is, the chicken egg: Forget for the moment the fantastic...
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 their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...
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...
A 2014 study by Wendy Wood found that approximately 40% of people’s daily activities are performed out of habit. According to Wood, “an important characteristic of a habit is that it’s automatic…We fi...
1 Timothy 5:1-2 , Proverbs 20:29 , Titus 2:1-8 , Matthew 18:1-5, Psalm 71:17-18 , Exodus 20:12, 1 Peter 5:5
Merciful God, you have given us the gift of life. We confess the uncaring ways we have treated others. We have been impatient with those growing old. We have been inattentive to the curiosities of the...
1 Samuel 3:1-10, Ecclesiastes 12:1 , Proverbs 2:1-11, Mark 10:17-22 , 1 Timothy 4:12 , Psalm 119:9-11
I have been moved to a different course of action, however, inspired largely by my daily exposure to college students in a great university during the course of a preaching and teaching ministry that ...
Luke 1:46-55, Acts 9:, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, 2 Samuel 7:18-22, 1 Samuel 2:1-10, Luke 17:11-19, Psalm 100:4-5
Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning.
Habakkuk 2:5, James 3:16, Mark 8:36, Luke 12:15, Isaiah 57:20, 1 Timothy 6:9, 1 John 2:16
Restlessness keeps the pedal to the metal. To offer a suggestive analogy in this vein: several years ago there was a recall on some Toyota vehicles. Evidently the cars would be given to sudden and unc...
Proverbs 4:20-22, Mark 2:17, James 5:14-15, Psalm 103:2-3, Proverbs 3:7-8, 1 Timothy 4:8
I do not deny that medicine is a gift of God, nor do I refuse to acknowledge science in the skill of many physicians; but, take the best of them, how far are they from perfection? A sound regimen prod...
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...
Sometime in the last decade or so I started hearing the phrase “all that good stuff.” I think it happened first when I was ordering dinner at a restaurant. The waitress summarized the menu briefly, en...
O King of all people, Master of our lives, entering into your glory by your cross, to whom all authority is given, both in heaven and on earth: We acknowledge your sovereignty over every realm of life...
Isaiah 53:6, Luke 5:31-32, 1 John 4:10, Titus 3:5, Ephesians 2:4-5, 1 Timothy 1:15
Non-Christians seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity. No creature th...
Hebrews 12:5-11, Proverbs 3:11-12, Psalm 94:12, 1 Timothy 4:7-8, Philippians 3:12-14, Matthew 23:23-24, James 1:22-25, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27
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...
John Fiske, a Harvard scholar, once visited Herbert Spencer, regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of his time in England. During their conversation, Spencer asked about Mrs. Fiske and the chil...
2 Corinthians 9:6-8, Luke 21:1-4, James 1:17 , Proverbs 11:24-25 , Acts 20:35 , Malachi 3:10, 1 Timothy 6:17-19
Gracious God, we fail to give to others, when you have so generously given to us. We look for our maximum benefit and minimum sacrifice. We have forgotten where every good gift comes from – you. Holy ...