studies on Escape

‘Space’ means an area of freedom, without coercion or accountability, free of pressures and void of authority. Space may be imagined as week-end, holiday, a vacation, and is characterised by a kind of...

What’s the difference between avoiding pain and seeking appropriate comfort? I have a friend who says, “The first episode of my favorite TV show is soothing. But if I’m watching the fifth episode in a...

Of the seventy-three psalms that are linked to David’s story, thirteen refer to specific incidents in his life. These references pull into focused clarity various parts of the story of this person who...

The maze It is rare to escape a maze on the first attempt. And when we are stuck in a maze, we can’t escape by following the same path that got us lost. We escape a maze by trying new routes. We don’t...

Many years ago a great Arctic explorer started on an expedition to the North Pole. After two long years in the lonely northland, he wrote a short message, tied it under the wing of a carrier pigeon, a...

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...

Recently I was watching a children’s television show on YouTube with my kids, when the host asked, “What is the meaning of Life?” His response was typical: “I don’t know,” but what he said next made m...

When legendary magician Harry Houdini came into a town to do his show, he often went to the local jail, gathering a crowd of people along the way. To get buzz going about his upcoming performance, he ...

When Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico with under 700 men, the indigenous population numbered about five million, a ratio of about 7,500 to 1. Rather than keep his lines of escape open, Cortés made the r...

An ancient story goes like this: A slave travels with his master to Baghdad. Early one morning, while milling through the marketplace, the slave sees Death in human form. Death gives him a threatening...

In his play No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre gives his own vision of hell. Two women and a man, doomed to perdition, enter a room that seems to threaten no torment. But they are sentenced to remain together ...

Bruce had served as the most successful CEO in the history of Alaska Airlines. In less than ten years on the job, he matured the company from an obscure, regional carrier to the nationwide brand it is...

On October 13, 2010, Luis Urzua emerged into the open air after 69 days trapped over 2,000 ft underground (300 ft deeper than the height of the tallest building in the US). Luis, the shift supervisor,...

Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to li...

Some stories, however, have been handed down to us. For some, we were not yet cognizant, and for others, we weren’t even born when experiences, memories, and stories affected our family and communitie...

Hugh Latimer was the Bishop of Worcester, England during the reign of King Henry VIII. On one occasion he preached a sermon that offended the king, who sat in the audience. The king commanded Latimer ...

Have you ever sung "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"? African American spirituals are among the great treasures of American worship. They are born out of the tragic (and, let's b...

Have you heard the old spiritual “Down to the River to Pray” or “The Good Old Way”? It is most famous in popular culture because of Alison Kraus’s version of the song recorded for the movie O Broth...

Peter Greave (1910-1977) was a British national who endured a challenging and tumultuous life, which took a severe turn in 1939 when he contracted leprosy while stationed in India, also his birthplace...

A particularly brutal set of slave owners we recently encountered in South Asia held more than twenty slaves in a rice mill. They and their thugs beat the slaves, sexually assaulted the women, even do...

If you are looking for a story that illustrates humanity's deep-seeded need for relationships, you could do far worse than the 2000 film, Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks. The protagonist, Chuck No...

The ancient Greek word for actor was hypocritēs (ὑποκρῐτής), which, at first, only implied someone who explained or interpreted something. But by New Testament times, it was more negative. It suggest...

According to the groundbreaking book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, his research tells us that cravings drive our “habit loops.” Some of us crave escape or relaxation through the habit of a g...

Brad Haugh still remembers the sound of his heartbeat. It thundered in his chest. Two hundred beats a minute. With a fire behind him and a ridge ahead of him, this smoke jumper needed every pulse of p...

The ways that social structures and institutions systematically work against the interest of people of color is called institutional racism. Institutional racism and historic racism are not unrelated ...

The Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler was famous for beginning counseling sessions with new clients by asking, “What is your earliest memory?” No matter how his patient replied, Adler responded, “And...

If we’re not careful, we might mistake the meaning of Jesus’s ascension. It sounds kind of like a retirement send-off—like Jesus finishes his work and sits down to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but t...

Tennis superstar Andre Agassi was only nineteen years old when he starred in a television commercial for Canon cameras. The spot featured him in all sorts of eye-grabbing poses, a spectacle on display...

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 ...

The neighborhood bar is possible the best counterfeit there is to the fellowship Christ wants to give his church. It’s an imitation, dispensing liquor instead of grace, escape rather than reality, but...