thought exercise on Myopia

Professional football players often get heated on the field, sometimes letting their emotions get the best of them when penalized by an official. Art Holst, a longtime NFL referee, recalls a Sunday ga...

In her compelling memoir Still Life , author Gillian Marchenko recounts her struggles with depression. In this excerpt, Marchenko describes one of the many paradoxes that come with depression: how ...

When my grandparents were in their eighties, their television developed a fault that made the screen permanently bright green. It was good for viewing garden shows or nature programs, but it was prett...

Our eyes are remarkable and accurate signs of our inner spiritual health. They narrow into slits when we hate, envy, and scheme. They open wide in wonder when we live in adoration and generosity. W...

On the effect of seeing for the first time after Cataract Surgery: The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves overwhelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do ...

James Elkins talks about how even the sense of sight is more complicated than we might believe: “Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where ...

In her engaging treatment, Teach us to Want , Jen Pollock Michel describes both the beauty and pain of seeing our own sinful nature: It is often true that once we are made to see, we don’t like w...

“If your eye causes you to sin…” is one of the boldest phrases from the mouth of Jesus, appearing three times in the gospels. Our eyes not only leads us into sinful behaviors, but also to take in sinf...

In Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she mentioned the work of Marius Von Senden who became curious about the effect it had on people who had been born blind to...

Vision is the ability to see God’s presence, to perceive God’s power, to focus on God’s plan In spite of the obstacles….Vision is the ability to see above and beyond the majority. Vision is perception...

By the way, I have terrible eyesight. When I don’t have my glasses on, I can see shapes and forms and colors, but not much else. And that’s sort of what I think it’s like to look at God without Jesus....

Self-deception . . . blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception ob...

In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World, Mike Cosper questions the desacralizing (removal of the holy) nature of secular life. Life is divested of mys...

Søren Kierkegaard told a parable about a rich man riding in a lighted carriage driven by a peasant who sat behind the horse in the cold and dark outside. Precisely because he sat near the artificial l...

Maybe this sounds silly, but go outside and look up. You cannot see yourself. All you see is a vast expanse of possibilities. Look down. You will see yourself and little else. This is true in life. Lo...

I own a pair of protective goggles and use them faithfully. I wear them when I’m cutting branches with my chainsaw or attacking weeds with my weed whacker. My goggles serve a crucial purpose: they pro...

A sign on a department store dressing room mirror: “Objects in mirror may appear bigger than they actually are.”

A Poem by Victor Hugo recounts an opportunity granted to Envy and Avarice to receive whatever they wished, on the condition that the other receive a double portion. Envy replied, “I wish to be blind i...

Again, human attention is a zero-sum game. At some point we must close all our screens and fall asleep—which makes sleep the enemy of digital spectacle makers (and sleep was named chief competitor by ...

Bestselling business author Simon Sinek gives a motivational speech called “Understand the Game,” where he mentions a study asking people if they would rather have a $400,000 house on a street where a...

Neuroimaging has shown that as we age, our cognitive center of gravity shifts from the imaginative right brain to the logical left brain. At some point, most of us top living out of imagination and st...

Helen Keller, the blind-and-deaf woman who made history by learning to overcome her disabilities, was once asked if there was anything worse than being blind. She answered, “Oh yes! There is something...

Many minorities actually try to change their appearance to look more light-skinned or white. Eliza Noh, assistant professor of Asian American studies at California State University of Fullerton descri...

I absolutely love Marvel movies. I’m talking about Thor, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Black Widow, Guardians of the Galaxy. All of them. In Ragnarok , Thor, the Norse god, played by the incredibly good-...

A student who had recently lost his sight was sent to the Seeing Eye Institute for the Blind in Morristown, New Jersey, for specialized training. Upon arrival, he was greeted by another young ma...

Some years ago I was doing a seven-part series of talks on the Seven Deadly Sins at a men’s breakfast. My wife, Kathy, told me, “I’ll bet that the week you deal with greed you will have your lowest at...

The human heart bends toward what the eye sees. Today’s image makers fling into the world's digital spectacles of sex, wealth, power, and popularity. Those images get inside us, shape us, and form...

Children have a tendency to say, “Look at me!” On the tricycle: “Look at me go!” On the trampoline: “Look at me bounce!” On the swing set: “Look at me swing!” Such behavior is acceptable for children....

Human spectacle making is like sorcery—an enchantment, a spell, the creation of an image that calls for a response from our inner longings. Idolatry is the original tele-vision, the bringing of a far-...

Sometime in 2007, a serpent of doubt slithered into my info paradise. I began to notice that the Net was exerting a much stronger and broader influence over me than my old stand-alone PC ever had. It ...