ecclesiastes on Social Class

The picture shows cartoon villain Cruella de Vil, bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead, hands clutching the wheel of her infamous coupe, black-and-white hair waving wildly in the wind, oversi...

We say we turn to our phones when we’re “bored.” And we often find ourselves bored because we have become accustomed to a constant feed of connection, information, and entertainment. We are forever el...

“People say, “You must have been the class clown.” And I say, “No, I wasn’t. But I sat next to the class clown, and I studied him.”

Contentment makes much of little; greed makes little of much. Contentment is the poor man’s riches and desire the rich man’s poverty.

Life has become a smorgasbord with an endless array of dishes. And more important still, choice is no longer just a state of mind. Choice has become a value, a priority, a right. To be modern is to be...

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.

We probably got a bit too cocky about how well our lives were going. But after disability showed up in our family, we learned that life is not tame. It’s not here to align with our desires and plans. ...

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

USA Today published a report in 2014 that put a price tag on the American Dream: $130,000 a year, which includes a nice six-figure salary, luxury vacations, college savings, and retirement.

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.

The wonderful word master used to describe the person who is at the top of his or her craft, whatever the profession. It was a title that one could work toward and with some degree of confidence ascri...

For a long time it seemed to me that real life was about to begin, but there was always some obstacle in the way. Something had to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be serv...

Any social science study will tell you relationships are key to happiness and well-being. But there’s more. Friendship isn’t just an elective in the course of life, it’s required. In my line of work I...

Everything in our society seems to convey the message of “now!” It’s almost as if we’ve entered an era where we have sacrificed the processing of knowledge for the gathering of data.

The Pew Research Center study showed that millennials had far more negative views of their generation compared with Generation Xers, baby boomers or other age groups. More than half of millennials, 59...

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 Messy Middle In his classic work Transitions, author and professor William Bridges shares an excellent anecdote about life in crisis: it can happen at any time and in a myriad of ways. It also de...

To live well is to work well.

Laughter is definitely a social expression of emotion rather than a solitary activity. We may occasionally laugh on our own in front of an amusing comedy, but laughter is mostly a social affair. When ...

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’ve known a lot of people who have lived painful, tragic lives. When I was young, I assumed these people were abnormal. Their suffering was the exception that proved the rule that a well-lived life i...

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 ...

The pioneering work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has been popularized in recent years by the gamut of notable thinkers, including Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and, in this cas...

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, has made more money in a single day than Heller had earned fro...

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...

In one of the classic scenes from Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, the misfortunate young orphan, Oliver, is stuck in a workhouse, laboring for long hours and getting barely enough gruel to keep h...

...work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental...

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. On the near side of complexity is simplistic; on the far...

In 1963, the politician, ambassador, and one-time presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson addressed the students of Princeton University with a touch of humor. “I understand I am here to speak, and ...

Read any study on human satisfaction and you will see the paramount role of relationships with others. And yet, so many of us readily exchange friendship and community for success and achievement, onl...