ecclesiastes on Ideals

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.

The church fathers consistently acknowledged the beauty and goodness of desire (e.g., Augustine, above), but they were not naive to the potential for desire to be bent by sin. They knew that our longi...

We long to see our lives whole, to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Lacking a vision of a l...

The mystery of perfection as an aspect of beauty is its transcendence. It points to a glory beyond itself. I knew that when I held my children, I didn’t simply cradle flesh and blood. I held a living ...

Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional ...

I would later learn that these are two characteristics of beauty: it never stays, and it never fully satisfies.

If this world was made by a triune God, a being of community, then relationships of love are what life is really all about.

There are many people who will always want to return to the time when America was great. But was there ever a time when America was a wonderful place for everyone? As I saw on a Facebook meme recently...

Indeed, there comes a time in the life of every believer and of every church where a voice inside us simply asks, Now what? After we have been introduced to Jesus and have found peace with God through...

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living...

The search for the good life, which so often is defined in terms of “things” and the means to get as many “things” as possible, has turned into a dead end as more and more people have more and more.

Be less concerned with what you have than with what you are.

If the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the . . . unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar...

Everything significant starts with relationship. At the end of the day, your faith, your family, your work, and your leadership are all based on who you relate to and how you relate. Your life is moti...

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

I lust after recognition, I am desperate to win all the little merit badges and trinkets of my profession, and I am of less real use in this world than any good cleaning lady.

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.

There are many people who will always want to return to the time when America was great. But was there ever a time when America was a wonderful place for everyone? As I saw on a Facebook meme recently...

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 ...

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Goodness is beauty in the best estate.

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

Andrew Carnegie rose to become among the world's richest individuals through his steel empire. In the midst of this acquisition of massive wealth at just thirty-three years old—Carnegie conducted ...

In her thought-provoking book, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the tension in listening to our deepest desires: some of them these desires are integral to our identity, but they a...

The soul’s infinite capacity to desire is the mirror image of God’s infinite capacity to give. . . . The unlimited need of the soul matches the unlimited grace of God.

There are two tragedies in lie. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundred’s soon hit; This hi...