stories on Thoughtlesness

In his book The Allure of Gentleness , Dallas Willard includes a thought-provoking excerpt from Richard Robinson, a prominent atheist thinker from the mid-20th century. In his work An Atheist’...

Anti-Intellectualism has been a problem in the church for some time now. Consider the words of the 17th century English clergyman Joseph Glanvill, who had this to say about the role of reason in faith...

A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur was listening to a CD of a series of messages I had given on the Beatitudes. When he came to meekness, he told me, he skipped over it. He wasn’t interested in b...

In The Phantom Tollbooth , there is a special kind of food called “subtraction stew.” Produced by a mathemagician, this stew makes you hungrier after you’ve eaten it. Our three main characters don’t ...

In his novel, The Pale King , David Foster Wallace discusses the issue of boredom, or, as he puts it, dullness: . . . Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where ph...

The mind in all its intricate beauty can be a place of great anguish. Thoughts can both grip us for the good and plague us for that which is not. In Dickens’ Christmas novella, The Chimes, he describe...

My friend Joi told me that when she was growing up, her parents invented a ploy to keep her from talking all of the time. They told her that people are allowed only so many words in one lifetime, and ...

Most who know anything at all about the Oxbridge professor C. S. Lewis know that he wrote two books on pain and sorrow. One is more an apologetic on the nature of suffering, The Problem of Pain, and a...

Joy’s trick is to supply  Dry lips with what can cool and slake,  Leaving them dumbstruck also with an  ache Nothing can satisfy.

A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act li...

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

In March 1845, Henry David Thoreau received a letter from poet William Ellery Channing. “Build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive,” wrote Channing. “I see ...

Charles Babbage (1792-1871) was a British mathematician and inventor known for his enjoyment of talking. At one particular dinner, Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish polymath was going on and on about the v...

In his book of sermons titled The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner mentions two qualities of childlikeness. First, children have no fixed preconceptions of reality. If someone tells them that ...

I sit in a bright-lit June meadow at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. It is early afternoon, and I have been here since morning in what can only be described as an uneasy sol...

Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria, one of the principal cities of the ancient world, once traveled to the monastic colony at Skete in the Egyptian desert. The younger monks were distressed that thei...

In his novel, The Pale King , David Foster Wallace discusses the issue of boredom, or, as he puts it, dullness: . . . Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrase...

When J. K. Rowling created the Harry Potter universe, she naturally drew on her own experiences to flesh it out. This is true even for such alarming creatures as ‘dementors’. These are soulless beings...

Psalm 101:3: “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless.” The term here—worthless—is a compound, literally: without profit. It is “the quality of being useless, good for nothing.” Pg.11...

Winston Churchill once sent a dessert pudding back to the kitchen because “it lacked a theme.” I don’t want my life to be like Winston’s pudding.

I was watching the old Dick Van Dyke Show recently, and he was at a party filled with pseudo intellectuals. Dick got trapped into a one-sided conversation with a self-absorbed philosophy professor. On...

In Lancelot , one of Walker Percy’s final novels, the narrator reflects on his own struggle with idleness and addiction to entertainment. In a poignant scene set outside his Mississippi mansion, ...

Leo Tolstoy, the great writer, famously renounced his inherited wealth and chose to live as an ascetic and hermit in his later years. One of his disciples, a writer named Chertkov, was a wealthy arist...

There are two moments that matter. One is when you know that your one and only life is absolutely valuable and alive. The other is when you know your life, as presently lived, is entirely pointless an...

Jesus is clear that it is dangerous to close one’s ears, eyes, and heart to the leadings of the Holy Spirit. In The Magician’s Nephew , a novel from C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series, Narnia i...

In his prose and poetry, David Whyte shares what David Brooks refers to as “emotional joy” in his book, While not necessarily unique to the Christian, this type of joy has the ability to draw us towar...

Addiction isn’t just measured in time spent connected to screens but also in how it dulls our spiritual sensibilities. We use social media to blunt the edges of overwhelm, to find something to thrill ...

Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever bea...

The monks at a remote monastery deep in the woods followed a rigid vow of silence. Their vow could only be broken once a year—on Christmas—by one monk. That monk could speak only one sentence. One Chr...

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 ...