The Forming of a Memory Before we truly remember anything, it starts as an experience. It is a moment when our senses (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch) interact with the world around us. Those ...
Genesis 37:50 , Exodus 3:4, 1 Samuel 16:, John 8:1-11, Romans 2:2, Psalm 139:13-16
Author David Seamands once wrote, “Children are the best recorders but the worst interpreters.” I remember a lot about being a kid. I remember colors and moments, arguments and smells… Though my me...
The atheist author Richard Dawkins, who wrote, “The universe, at the bottom, has no design, no purpose, no evil, and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor care...
I remember playing a game as a child in which we would bend one knee and grab our foot behind us and then try to race—limping, stumbling and falling over as we struggled across the grass toward a fini...
The drug problems in the U.S. demonstrate this pattern: by heightening powers of perception, chemical stimulants open up a new world to a generation that has never learned to appreciate fully the worl...
Genesis 1:3-5, Exodus 10:21-23, Isaiah 50:10, John 8:12, Mark 13:35-37, Psalm 121:5-6
In the midst of an experiment to become more attuned to darkness, author and pastor Barbara Brown Taylor decided to spend time outside as dark sets in: According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, eve...
Genesis 32:22-32, Exodus 33:18-23 , 1 Samuel 1:9-20, Psalm 42:1-2, Mark 10:46-52, John 4:7-26
We are people of desire. We want things. We long for things. It is primal to our nature to yearn. As Saint Augustine reflected, “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing. . . . That is o...
Genesis 1:27-28, Genesis 29:20, Song of Solomon 2:16-17 , 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 , Ephesians 5:25-32 , Psalm 63:1-5
The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck was convinced that buried in our explicit pursuit of sex is an implicit pursuit of God. He noted that sex is likely to be the closest that most people ever come to ...
Genesis 18:10-14 , Isaiah 7:14 , Exodus 4:1-5, Psalm 139:13-16 , Luke 1:26-38, John 20:24-29, Matthew 1:22-25
To a twentieth-century mind the notion of a virgin birth is intrinsically and preposterously inconceivable. If a woman claims–such claims are made from time to time–to have become pregnant without sex...
Breathing is one of the few body processes that can be regulated both consciously and unconsciously. We cannot intentionally lower our heart rate or willfully regulate our blood pressure, but we can c...
It was Saint Thomas Aquinas who coined the Latin phrase anima forma corporis , which means “the soul is the form of the body.” The soul, as I said previously, is defined as the first principle of...
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...
If the phrase “theology of the body” seems odd, perhaps it’s because we haven’t taken the reality of the incarnation as seriously as Scripture does. There’s nothing surprising about looking to the hum...
Exodus 35:30-35, Genesis 41:14-39 , Proverbs 8:22-31 , Matthew 14:28-31, Luke 10:38-42 , Psalm 1:1-3
The truly inventive state of mind approaches the plane of consciousness you’d hope to attain if you were driving down an icy highway and skidded into the path of an oncoming truck ... concentration is...
Scientist John Haldane once proposed to the English priest Ronald Knox that, given the vast number of planets in the universe, the emergence of life by sheer chance was inevitable. Knox responded with...
The robbing of our lives occurs when the core story of who we are—created as “very good” (Gen 1:31) and never downgraded, and “beloved” of God (1 Jn 3:2)—is taken through specific memories and twisted...
Proverbs 4:23, Genesis 4:3–7, Ezekiel 36:26 , Luke 6:43-45 , Matthew 15:18-19, Psalm 51:10
When the Bible uses the term heart , it means the causal core of your personhood. The heart is your directional system. The heart is your steering wheel. Your behavior isn’t caused by the situati...
Genesis 1:26-27 , Exodus 33:11-23 , Isaiah 43:1-4, John 10:1-15 , Luke 7:36-50, Psalm 139:1-6, 13-16
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...
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...
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...
Genesis 2:7, 1 Kings 19:4-8 , Ecclesiastes 12:7 , Matthew 11:28-30, 3 John 1:2, Psalm 43:5, Psalm 42:5
The soul can be difficult to define. The great theologian Karl Barth confessed, “We shall search the Old and New Testaments in vain for a theory of the relation between the soul and body.” Your soul i...
Genesis 2:18-25, Ruth 1:16-18, 1 Kings 19:9-13 , Psalm 27:4, John 20:24-29, Luke 24:13-35
If I asked you the same question I asked my patient Aaron—“What do you want?”—and you could for a moment put aside the predictable anxiety that comes with it, I’m confident that at some point in your ...
God formed us in his image — a glorious thought! — but we all participate in the abandonment of that original identity…Does that mean that your precious little child is a dirty rotten sinner, as some ...
Of the medieval church’s many intellectual leaders, none has had more influence than the philosophical theologian Thomas Aquinas. He was born to a noble family near Naples, Italy, and joined the Domin...
Nonverbal communication can make a huge difference in how a question is received. Only 7 percent of what we say is conveyed through words, 38 percent through vocal element (tone), and the remainder th...
Your decisions . . . along with your responses to other people’s decisions, which are also your decisions...are about the only thing you can control in life, which means your decisions are how you con...
Genesis 2:9, Colossians 3:2, Matthew 13:1-17, Matthew 13:16-17
Years ago, my family and I visited Sequoia National Park in California. The highlight of this trip was seeing the Giant Sequoia redwoods, after which the park is named. These trees are awe-inspiring, ...
Following the biblical pattern, the church has always assumed that God can communicate spiritual truths to people through their imaginations, especially through dreams and visions. Church history is r...