thought exercise on Humanity

I am convinced that the scourge of our scientific and technological age is depersonalization. There is a heartbeat pulsating at the center of the universe, giving life and meaning to everything, but o...

One discovery was a time-released revelation to me. On my way to classes each week, I had been passing Emerson Hall, the building that houses the philosophy department at Harvard. The enormous inscrip...

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , Thomas Kelly describes the inward reality that governs the course of history: Out in front of us is the drama of men and of nations, seethi...

In the blockbuster 2017 Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 , the protagonist Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) meets his absentee father, Ego (Kurt Russell) who turns out to be an alien, a "Cel...

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks tells a true story in one of his books about peacemaking in what is arguably one of the world's most difficult places to achieve it: the Middle East. One evening in the early ...

How does the theme of glory that predominates in Epiphany fit with the large amount of space devoted to the Sermon on the Mount during the season? It all depends on what one means by glory. The “g...

Many people these days feel an absence in their lives, expressed as an acute desire for “something more,” a spiritual home, a community of faith. But when they try to read the Bible they end up throwi...

On August 20 and September 5, 1977, two spacecraft named Voyager were launched. Eventually leaving the solar system and heading into deep space, they represented a revolutionary and promising breakthr...

Some skeptics today speak about “evolving” from a primitive condition, but the Bible (Romans 1:18-32) sadly portrays a  descent  rather than an ascent. The result has been given the theological term “...

What’s in a name? The history of the human race is in names. Our objective friends do not understand that, since they move in a world of objects which can be counted and numbered. They reduce the grea...

In her engaging work, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes the nature of The Lord’s Prayer: To borrow from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lord’s Prayer is our “yes to God’s earth.” The Lor...

Modern man is “a bleak business…To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and ...

There’s a somewhat naïve belief among some that, in general, most people are inherently good. While many Christians may not fully embrace John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (which I believe is ...

In this beautiful poem by the English Divine John Donne, our nature as both redeemed and still sinful is eloquently described: We think that Paradise and Calvary, Christ’s Cross and Adam’s Tree, ...

It seems to me… that if it is possible … for human beings to choose to live more and more out of tune with the divine intention, to reflect the image of God less and less, there is nothing to stop the...

For most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched. Some political scien...

Have you ever been told that you’re like someone else, someone you admire and respect, someone you’d love to be like? I had that experience many times while growing up. My family and I were members of...

Have you ever found yourself reading the Bible and you came across a scene that is horrific, filled with awful violence or scheming swindlers or ethical blunders, and you find yourself unsure what to ...

Few voices captured the brutal reality of enslavement as powerfully as Sojourner Truth. Truth endured profound mistreatment and indignities as an enslaved woman. A severe beating left her reliant on a...

For years, Bible scholars have danced around the matter by saying slavery in Rome was far different from slavery in the first few centuries of American history. No doubt their observations carry a mea...

The journalist Andrew Sullivan has some strong words of advice for the modern church,  If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, p...

This story of Thomas Merton’s dramatic vocational change is illustrative of the life that Jesus offers us. For many of us, we assume discipleship means becoming less “us” and more like “Jesus”. But if...

This illustration can work well as communicators demonstrate how God made us to be unique with the purpose of living into our own unique personalities: Rick Burgess and Bill “Bubba” Bussey host the ...

[The] Puritans made good use of the Latin phrase omnis vita gustu ducitur -every life is led along by its tastes. They knew that each creature is piloted by an inner yearning for its favorite food. E...

Nahum Sarna writes in Understanding Genesis: Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between the mythological and the Israelite conceptions more striking and more illuminating than in their respective descr...

In Genesis 1–2, God makes a home for his people. From the primeval wilderness and wasteland God begets beauty and form, building the grand house called Earth. God’s creative acts are not simply intend...

Desire haunts us. In its deepest sense, it is a God-given dimension of human identity. As such, desire is what powers all human spirituality. Yet at the same time, spirituality in Christianity and in ...

By stating that Jesus is “born of woman”—this Mary (as both St. Matthew and St. Luke attest)—St. Paul insists that Jesus is most emphatically human, the “firstborn of all creation. That this Mary is a...

Most of us are aware of various persecutions that took place during the first few centuries of the church’s existence. One particularly brutal local persecution took place during the reign of Nero, wh...

What is the matter with us is a question as old as time. Many philosophers and prophets believe they have an answer, but so too does holy scripture. According to the Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolt...