job on Conflict

There's a humorous, apocryphal story about a man standing by a river. On the opposite bank, a woman calls out, "How do I get to the other side of the river?" The man replies, "YOU A...

John Chrysostom, the eloquent Church Father, had incurred the wrath of the Byzantine (aka Roman) Emperor Arcadius. Enraged, the emperor consulted his counselors on how to punish the powerful preacher....

A Sopping Wet Week in the Lectionary Today’s readings are thoroughly wet. In Job, God is master of the sea, Psalm 107 concerns mariners in the storm, Paul is a little drier, but still gets shipwrecke...

In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its...

God uses our identity crises to reveal who we are and who he is. Sometimes these crises come out of nowhere. Something devastating happens. Someone close to us dies. We are diagnosed, or someone we kn...

One of my favorite sayings is, no matter how difficult it is to hear, “Reality is always your friend.”

All our experience with history should teach us, when we look back, how badly human wisdom is betrayed when it relies on itself

The root of our English term doubt has to do with duplicity. It is being divided or doubled up in our thinking. But this isn’t a matter of simply being confused or unable to make up our mind or ...

Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken.

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. ...

Part of the spirit dies a little each time it’s asked to carry more than its weight in terror, violence, and betrayal.

When John Stuart Mill—the influential philosopher and political economist—arrived at Thomas Carlyle's door that evening, his face drained of color, bearing the devastating news that the manuscript...

If the Book of Job reaches across two and a half millennia to teach anything to men and women who consider themselves normal, decent human beings, it is this: Human beings are sure to wander in ignora...

In a poignant tribute written after his son’s passing in a climbing accident, Nicholas Wolterstorff reflects: When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer he...

Who cannot relate in the digital age to the irony of being overconnected and lonely all at once? Yet Chief Justice John Roberts, speaking at his son’s middle school graduation, exhorted the young grad...

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.

Uncontrolled temper is soon dissipated on others. Resentment, bitterness, and self-pity build up inside our hearts and eat away at our spiritual lives like a slowly spreading cancer.

Divine Creator, your ways are above our ways. No matter how hard we try, you will always confound us. Too often we try to reduce you into something we can fully comprehend, or something we can control...

Kate Bowler is a gifted scholar and writer who, as a young wife and mom, was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer—kept going six months at a time thanks to immunotherapy. She writes honestly about how ...

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

A few days ago I met with a young couple. Their toddler was injured in a car accident. When I visited them in the hospital, the child was on life support. As we stood outside the ICU and spoke, I saw,...

In C. S. Lewis’ classic work Mere Christianity , the English apologist compares God’s use of adversity to walking a dog on a leash. When the dog wraps its leash around a pole and tries to move fo...

An individual doesn’t get cancer, a family does.

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 ...

In her memoir, Confessions of a Good Christian Girl, Tammy describes the internal turmoil she experienced trying to be a good, rule-following Christian who had unexpectedly built an entire life arou...

A doctor, an engineer, and a politician were arguing as to which profession was older. “Well,” argued the doctor, “without a physician mankind could not have survived, so I am sure that mine is the ol...

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 ...

Forgive us, O God, when we limit you – When we remake you in our image, When we claim our causes as your own, When we box you in, And explain you away, And in our attempts at understanding, whittle aw...