arts and culture on Complacency

James 5:16 invites us to confess our sins so that we might be healed. Let us go before our Creator in humility and confession. Lord Almighty, we come to you in humility today. We have sought security...

Prayer of Adoration Lord – You are good …and Your goodness knows no bounds. When we were lost, You sought us out, found us and brought us home. When we were alone, You came near to us, and You gave ...

Almighty God, you love us, but we do not love you fully. You call, but we do not always listen. We often walk away from neighbors in need, wrapped in our own concerns. We often condone evil, hatred, w...

In 1965 Billy Graham wrote a bestselling book titled World on Fire. In it, he wrote, “Mr. Average Man is comfortable in his complacency and as unconcerned as a silverfish ensconced in a carton of disc...

“The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.”

It's uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

The incessant witless repetition of advertisers' moron-fodder has become so much a part of life that, if we are not careful, we forget to be insulted by it.

An obsession with righteousness (leading invariably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition.

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was mean...

We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy...

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

[Suffering] may be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries… it is the burden of living in a consumer culture where the individual looms lar...

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , written almost a hundred years ago, Thomas Kelly describes the true heart of the problem related to the complexity of our lives: Let me fir...

Our culture often suggests that we are “entitled” to a long, fulfilling life, and if that doesn’t happen, there must be someone to sue, someone to blame. When the word “cancer” is spoken, looking to t...

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult...

Our lives are characterized by too much of a good thing—too much to eat, to buy, to watch and to do, excess at every turn.

We live in a culture that is obsessed with the right to have what we want.

We are complicit and we do not even realize it, O Holy God. Every day we participate in systems of idolatry, and we promote the captivity of a nation to gods. We have bought the subtle lies of our cul...

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...

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson describes what has become a reality of modern-day life-scandals happen every day, and no-one...

There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pa...

As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come wi...

Unfortunately, the reality is that we tolerate being less than we are called to be. Pride is not the ultimate sin; forgetfulness of our origin and destiny is, in fact, the ultimate tragedy.

The truth, however, is that when we say yes to invitations that keep us compulsively busy, we may be exhibiting a lazy ambivalence that actually keeps us distracted from the invitations that matter mo...

My devotion to niceness has won me a lot of acceptance and praise, but it has also inhibited my courage, fed my self-righteousness, encouraged my inauthenticity, and produced in me a flimsy sweetness ...

Aren’t you like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don’t you often hope: “May this book, idea, course, trip, jo...

Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day.

My temptation is to tackle everything at once, or nothing at all.

Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simpl...