Muhammed Ali served as a role model to many young people during his boxing career. When one student had the opportunity to question Ali, he asked him whether he should continue his studies in college ...
Spirit of the Living God—Fall afresh on us this day. Spirit of God present and powerful, Spirit of God fruitful and faithful, Spirit of God filling and fulfilling us as children of the Father and foll...
I’ll never forget sitting in the guidance counselor’s office my freshman year in high school in the Lehigh Valley area between Philadelphia and Allentown, where I grew up. The purpose of our meeting w...
Worthy goals are generally motivated by something deeper than success. In her conversations with Nobel laureates, [researcher Xiaodong D.] Lin said she has found that “they all have insatiable passion...
Most of the heroes in the Bible had what we would think of as secular vocations. Isaac developed real estate, Jacob was a rancher, and Joseph was a government official (in charge of agriculture, the e...
O God, you are indeed worthy of our praise and worship. Yet we turn away and worship other gods. We find ourselves at the altar of our careers, our financial security, our self-image, our status. We t...
Hebrews 11:39-40, Jeremiah 1:5, Philippians 3:14, Galatians 6:9, Matthew 25:21
In his landmark work, Habits of the Heart, the sociologist Robert Bellah describes thee distinct orientations people take with respect to their work. The first orientation is to see your work as a job...
By the time they have turned eighteen, most Americans will have moved at least twice. Most thirty-year-olds will have moved six times. By the end of our lives, most of us will have pushed that number ...
The huge assumption of our social context is that work is bad and leisure is good. Our only hope for a transformed vision for vocation, work and career, and for navigating the transitions of life, is ...
Contemporary society assumes that we make a choice: one member of a household will be the “homemaker” and the other the “breadwinner” (i.e., in the marketplace generating income to sustain the home). ...
The American Baseball player Moe Berg was more than just a great catcher. Berg had received graduate degrees from Princeton University and the Sorbonne in Paris, knew several languages and later serve...
This past week I have been at a reunion with college friends (this is the main reason I missed last week's update). It's been significant for a number of reasons. I hope to unpack a few other ...
Psalm 127:1, Matthew 25:23, Luke 16:10, Ecclesiastes 9:10, Proverbs 22:29, 1 Corinthians 3:13-14, Galatians 6:7
An elderly master carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer of his plans to leave the house building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife enjoying his extended family. He w...
The American Golfer George Archer had a relatively successful career on the PGA tour, winning thirteen PGA tournaments, including the 1969 Masters. As he drew closer to retiring from the sport, he was...
I mentioned last week that I spent time recently with friends from college, and this group loves asking deep questions about life and faith. During our time together, we had some assigned reading by...
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...
The US Golfer George Archer had a relatively successful career on the PGA tour, winning won thirteen tournaments, including the 1969 Masters. As he drew closer to retiring from the sport, he wasn’t ex...
A few weeks ago I brought up the topic of vocation , or calling . Right around that time, Frederick Buechner, whose work I had included in that post, passed away at the age of 96. His works have ...
A Theological Giant's Final Word Walter Brueggemann’s passing on June 5, 2025 leaves a void in biblical scholarship that will last a very long time. He was still writing books and essays at age 9...
Note: This was originally posted on 2/6/20 at Workship.com.au. A couple of weeks ago on Facebook, Nathan Campbell from Living Church in Brisbane explained that he was going to be preaching on...
Until recently, most Americans didn’t know that women were pivotal to the NASA space program as far back as the 1950s. Their names and accomplishments were lost to the common history we grew up studyi...
I might not be the best person to be writing this. After an eleven-year career in business in my twenties and early thirties, I’ve been an ordained pastor now for nearly twenty-seven years. There are...
In one generation, the place of Christianity within culture dramatically shifted as we experienced what theologians and sociologists of religion call the “death of Christendom.” Christendom isn’t Chri...
Dr. Joseph Hartounian, a former professor at McCormick Theological Seminary, came to America from Armenia. One day a well-meaning friend said to him, “Your name is difficult to pronounce and difficult...
If you were lucky enough to watch the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, you probably remember swimmer Michael Phelps bursting onto the international scene. Phelps won six medals in those ga...
How much does a world-class violinist make? Well, that depends on how he markets himself. Have you ever heard of Joshua Bell? He’s one of the finest classical musicians in the world. He plays to pac...
I had been in Iraq for about two months when I heard about an officer conducting an impromptu habit modification program in Kufa, a small city ninety miles south of the capital. He was an army major w...
We individualists generally belong to what anthropologists term low-context cultures. That means that when we communicate, we assume a low level of shared information. We therefore assume it is good c...
Regarding the average human’s awareness of their own culture, career anthropologist Darrell Whiteman has said that “it is scarcely a fish who would discover water.” This is a reliable statement. Human...
Despite a widely shared belief that faith should inform ethical decisions at work, a mere 18 of 230 respondents had ever consulted a pastor for advice about a work-related matter. Of these, six were ...