analogies on Existential Angst

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...

In Book Eight of Confessions , St. Augustine recounts how, in a state of deep inner turmoil, he “heard from a nearby house a voice, as of a boy or girl, I know not which, chanting repeatedly, ‘Ta...

Just after leaving a training session on the ice in Detroit, Michigan, on January 6, 1994, Nancy Kerrigan was assaulted in the leg by a man wielding a telescopic baton. Television cameras captured the...

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer describes a surprising dynamic that sometimes occurs in the life of a Christian: believing so strongly in a loving God that one cannot fathom th...

The Land of What-Ifs is a tempting place to dwell. It is also a dangerous place to be. And chances are, if you flipped to this page, you’re stepping foot into its territory. Before you even pull the c...

More enslaving than our occupations, however, are our preoccupations. To be pre-occupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there. This is worrying in the more specific sense of the w...

What causes anxiety? I offer this list so you can engage in an exercise… genetic predispositions parenting (overprotective, overcontrollers, inconsistent responders) early childhood experiences tha...

Anxiety and fear are cousins but not twins. Fear sees a threat. Anxiety imagines one. Fear screams, Get out! Anxiety ponders, What if? Fear results in fight or flight. Anxiety creates doom and gloo...

In a popular essay for the online magazine Aeon, Nabeelah Jaffer elaborates on a theme found in the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s work, that is the connection between loneliness and terror: ‘Loneliness...

In his book, Running Scared, Pychologist Edward Welch illustrates how the fear of an event is often worse than the event itself. To demonstrate this, he provides two examples of people whose lives are...

Martin Heidegger said that being is presence. Whatever else this means, it suggests that in some way presence is a basic property of simply being. Everything that exists has presence by virtue of its ...

But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re waiting in the grocery store aisle for two minutes. We listen to podcasts on our commute. We lea...

In a surprisingly honest confession, the millennial writer Veronica Rae Saron shared this interesting fact in her 2016 article for Medium: Conversation after conversation, it has become more and mor...

I ask people to anonymously write their worries on sticky notes. We post them to a wall and look at them together. Participants are often surprised by the raw honesty of what is shared and the private...

At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused...

It was true, I had always realized it—I hadn’t any “right” to exist at all. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe. I could feel nothing to myself but an inconsequential ...

As Europe plunged ever deeper into a second world war, the British poet W.H. Auden composed a poem (“September 1, 1939”) that peels back our human tendency to cover up all fear and uncertainty with se...

George Herbert Mead, an influential early 20th-century sociologist, coined the term “generalized other” to describe the vague group we consider when shaping our actions. How often do we behave a certa...

The character Quentin from Henry Miller’s Play, After the Fall explains a life without God: For many years I looked at life like a case at law. It was a series of proofs. When you’re young you prove ...

Anxiety feels like a weight. It has been described as the feeling of tripping—the “moment where you don’t know whether you are going to catch yourself is how you feel all day long.” Or “when you tap y...

Writer Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938), after years of seeking happiness, articulated his gloomy assessment of life: The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being ...

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...

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...

Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death. That is natural and normal, a proper reaction to the Last Enemy. Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the ...

Sometimes it is helpful to see what life looks like on the other side of faith, that is, for those who believe that God does not exist. Bertrand Russell, the renowned philosopher and avowed atheist, h...

In an article entitled, What the New Atheists Don’t See , the British author Theodore Dalrymple shares his honest struggles with atheism. The subtitle of his article is fascinating, “To regret re...

All day long, all of us are framing and reframing our lives. We talk about the memory of our adorable but sexist grandpa. We label ourselves as movie critics or introverts or justice-lovers. We say th...

Frustration is something that does not exist—except within the self. It translates my world to me through the filter of my own need to control it. Frustration becomes the space we put between ourselve...

In a letter to his son, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is...

Awesome stuff never satisfies. Nothing in the entire physical, created world can give rest, peace, identity, meaning, purpose, or lasting contentment to your awe-craving heart. Looking to stuff to sat...