james on Reputation

Arthur Conan Doyle, the ingenious creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, once found great humor in a practical joke he played on 12 famous friends. Each of these men was virtuous and highly respect...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith provides an important analogy about the importance of spiritually preparing ourselves for the adversity and challenges that come with su...

One of the great lies humans have been told is that if we gain enough power and influence, we can be remembered and make a lasting impact. In his short poem Ozymandias , Percy Bysshe Shelley highligh...

If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.

Sometimes moments of forgiveness and friendship come from unexpected places. In 2018, the comedian Pete Davidson appeared on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live (SNL). Davidson made a ...

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

Self-righteousness is a sense of moral superiority that appoints us as prosecutor of other people’s sinfulness. We relate to others as if we are incapable of the sins they commit. Self-righteousness w...

If we lack money and power, we can still feel successful if we have the respect of our peers. As a young minister without wealth or power, I loved being called “Reverend.” It was an ego trip for me wh...

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while.

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

The word resilience derives from the Latin term resilire , which means “to recoil or rebound,” and made its debut in the English language in 1627. The first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary...

Stop being so sure that you are always right, and others wrong. Don't trust your own opinion, when you find it contrary to that of older men, and especially to that of your own parents. Age gives ...

A possession ought to belong to the possessor, not the possessor to the possession.

The Golden Result is a corollary to the Golden Rule, which calls us to do to others as we would have them do to us. The Golden Result says that people will usually treat us as we treat them. If we bla...

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

Researchers at the University of London concluded that “a substantial majority of individuals believe themselves to be morally superior to the average person” and that this illusion of ours is “unique...

’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

With vainglory, we crave notice of our achievements with pride, we take full credit for the progress we have made and do not think that God has been involved at all, let alone been our indispensible h...

Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity. Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.

People can say one thing and do something totally different. You see the darkness that is often hidden from polite society. The thing that you see is a widespread insecurity. I think people put on a f...

Many years ago a senior executive of the then Standard Oil Company made a wrong decision that cost the company more than $2 million. John D. Rockefeller was then running the firm. On the day the news ...

Dr. Bob Reccord tells the story of a major move that was set to take place inside the halls of a Fortune 500 company. It was unheard of, but the company was ready to promote a 38-year-old from vice pr...

Faith is nothing else than trust in the divine mercy promised in Christ…. This trust in the goodwill or mercy of God first calms our hearts and then inflames us to give thanks to God for his mercy so ...

Who, then, are we, we prideful late-twentieth-century creatures? Lord knows, we no longer think of ourselves as belonging to anyone or anything. We do not belong – we own; we possess. And that, to say...

Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson points out our blind-spots with respect to pride: We rarely think of ourselves as proud. I...

Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...

Justice is for those who deserve it; mercy is for those who don't.

A person who suffers bitterly when slighted or insulted should recognize from this that he still harbors the ancient serpent in his breast. If he quietly endures the insult or responds with great humi...