arts and culture on Apprehension

Heavenly Father, we confess that we are unable to do all the work that you wish for us to do. We are held back by our own desires and our own apprehensions. We know that you make us bearers of your im...

Editors Note: This is perhaps less a review as a jumping off part to articulate some thoughts I developed while reading The Minority Experience. For a full review of the title, a cursory google search...

The Gospel as such has no native country. He who goes out humbly with Christ in the world of all races will perpetually discover the multiple, but constant, relevance of what he takes. It takes a whol...

Taking a new step, uttering, a new word, is what people fear most.

Anxiety sparks when a perspective we value bumps into another perspective that challenges it in some way. If we find this new perspective to be unacceptable, that’s when our “Someone is wrong on the i...

Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity

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...

Materialism is the mother of anxiety.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determinin...

Part of the suspicion of desire undoubtedly has to do precisely with the fact that it threatens a rational, controlled, and protected understanding of a mature human being.

The source of our unease . . . becomes visible only when confronting the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which we initially adopt...

Avarice is fear sheathed in gold.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothi...

You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

Underneath our frantic pace is a question: Is this work I do good enough?

That there may be some who need coercion, who if given free rein would riot in selfish pleasure like unbridled beasts, is no doubt true, but one should show precisely by the fact that one knows how to...

I am more afraid of King Alcohol than of all the bullets of the enemy.

By definition, hurry sickness is “a behavior pattern characterized by continual rushing and anxiousness; an overwhelming and continual sense of urgency.”

Something deep within us is unsettled, and we want to appear to the world as better, more dignified, or more desirable—someone more beautiful or clever than the mope we see in the mirror.

A man named Jack was driving on a dark country road one night when he got a flat tire. He saw a cabin in the woods and began to walk towards it. He told himself that the person who answered the door w...

… I am deeply persuaded that materialism is not first a “thing” problem but an awe problem. We cannot control our lust for things because our capacity for awe has been kidnapped. We find it nearly imp...

It might be more accurate to say that the fear of cities, or the fear of of one another, or possibly the love of convenience has been the actual basis of much of our current perceptions about the city...

Another form of unholy unhurry that many of us have heard little about is acedia. Derived from the Greek a (for “not”) and keedos (meaning “to care”), acedia is ultimately a failure of love. It’s a pl...

It's uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

I developed a problem with authority. Any time that authority was what I interpreted as being unjust, I stood up to it, and that became my personality.

“It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture. . . . Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

Fear and restlessness kill more than do illnesses.