exodus on Personality

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...

Peter Ustinov, the British actor, director, and playwright, once received an indignant letter from the headmaster of his son’s school. The letter complained that his son frequently disrupted lessons b...

It was late October 1991. The crew of the fishing boat Andrea Gail , out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, had taken the vessel five hundred miles out into the Atlantic. A cold front moving along the...

Christian character is not an act but a process, not a sudden creation but a development. It grows and bears fruit like a tree; it requires patient care and unwearied cultivation.

There was a time when adults were neatly categorized into one of two groups: you were either neurotic or psychotic. Psychotic meant that you were out of touch with reality and afraid; neurotic meant t...

We cannot be true Christians without being original. Nothing gives us personality like prayer. Nothing makes man so original. To be creative, we must live with the Creator. Prayer places man in direct...

Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, of building a personality beyond its normal limitations.

Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th...

Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th...

Preaching Commentary A Notoriously Difficult Passage This passage includes one of the most iconic and quotable of Jesus’s interactions with his contemporary opponents. Jesus deftly steps out of a t...

Introduction Leaning Toward the Light What does it mean to lean towards the light of Christ? What does it mean to be open to the work of God? For the Pharisee in Jesus’ time, the answer was clear: y...

AIM Commentary Introduction Leaning Toward the Light What does it mean to lean towards the light of Christ? What does it mean to be open to the work of God? For the Pharisee in Jesus’ time, the an...

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas. Especially strong thinking powers (...

Historically the West has tended to throw its chief emphasis upon doing and the East upon being. . . . Were human nature perfect there would be no discrepancy between being and doing. The unfallen man...

Robert Lupton offers insight into the complexities of human impoverishment, reminding us that in spite of our best intentions sometimes our philanthropic efforts can yield unintended consequences: “Wh...

Resilience is not something that can be mustered in a moment of “rising to the occasion.” It is formed over a long period before the crisis of testing so that it can continue the transformation during...

Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values.

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.

All images are necessarily partial.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by d...

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

It’s not just what you eat that matters, it’s what eats you. You can have all the right macrobiotics and organic food, but if your body is filled with resentment, worry, fear, lust, guilt, anger, bitt...

“Would I rather be feared or loved? That’s easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

The problem is not recognizing the importance of the individual. The problem is the glorification of the individual. When the individual self is glorified over the greater good of the community, right...

Any manifestation that reveals Jesus’ true identity occurs because the power of God is at work upon the eyes, ears, and hearts of the recipients

Human flourishing is first and foremost a flourishing of relationships—our relationship with God and with others. But human flourishing is also a product of fruitful work that reflects our God who wor...

Who we are is deeper than where we find ourselves in this moment. And Jesus illuminates that deeper identity.

“Empathy” literally means “in-feeling”—it is to project myself into another person’s feelings so that I begin to understand what it is like to have his experiences. If I want to gain empathy for a nei...

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

I am convinced that the scourge of our scientific and technological age is depersonalization. There is a heartbeat pulsating at the center of the universe, giving life and meaning to everything, but o...