arts and culture on Drifting

Perhaps the most intense place to experience drifting is commonly known as the EAC, the East Australian Current. If you’ve ever seen the Disney Pixar film Finding Nemo, you’ve been exposed to the EAC,...

In 1882—seven years before his descent into madness—Friedrich Nietzsche published a parable called The Madman . In the parable, a madman comes into a village on a bright, sunny morning holding al...

In North America, the fastest-growing segment of the population, categorized according to religious affiliation, are the “nones,” meaning those who are done with formal religious affiliation. This inc...

A strong church once inscribed these words on an archway leading to the churchyard. Over time, two things happened: the church lost its passion for Jesus and His gospel, and ivy began to grow on the a...

Robinson's Winsome Faith I’ve been reading Marilynne Robinson's novels and essays for some time now. Of her fiction, I’ve read Gilead , reflections of a retired minister written for his ...

Did you see the “Smiling Selfie in Auschwitz”? An American teenager touring Auschwitz stirred up a firestorm of criticism when she posted a picture of herself smiling amid a concentration camp (and ev...

Distracted from distraction by distraction

We are hyperliving, skimming along on the surface of life.

One winter break in college, I was spending some time at a friend's house. This friend's father had recently purchased a Ford Model T and he was excited to take me for a spin. Now, If you’ve n...

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.

If identity is fluid, then to remain still is to die—or worse, to become irrelevant—and so we never cease our frantic movement in the direction we hope, and pray, is forward..

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...

Cars have allowed us to spread out our living patterns significantly. Historically, cities have had a natural limit set by how far people could comfortably walk from place to place. Then, with the dev...

Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.

Never in history has distance meant less. . . . Figuratively we “use up” places and dispose of them much in the same way we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the...

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be...

The practices of solitude, silence and listening to God started to slow me down and enabled me to focus my attention more and more on coming to Jesus and following him rather than talking about Jesus ...

From drugs and alcohol to TV and workaholism, we are increasingly a society that fulfills T.S. Eliot’s description of a people “distracted by distraction.” There is hardly a public menace we can name ...

Unless we can discover ways of staying afloat amidst the surging torrents of information, we may end up drowning in them.

Editor’s Note: This story is often told as a true story, when in fact it is probably fictitious. Nevertheless, there is a significant illustrative point: sometimes the things we fear most may in fact ...

It is a sprinting, squirting, shoving age.

I see my past drinking as a behavioral problem, a learned response to dealing (or not dealing) with emotional pain and stress. Once I achieved the excavation of my wounds, I no longer lived with the s...

We spend the equivalent of seven forty-hour work weeks on average in our cars in America. We pick up takeout or have it delivered—all to save time, which seems to move ever faster, eluding capture. We...

My mentor is José Rojas. He was a spiritual adviser for two US presidents. On one of our first phone conversations, he said to me, “What if you’ll actually get to where you want to be quicker by slowi...

It's uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

Americans, given the choice between civilizing their cities thorugh public works, and using the car to escape the demands of civility, chose the car.

In her book Invitation to Retreat , Ruth Haley Barton shares some of the many insights she has had since she began intentionally taking intentional retreats to re-connect with God and her own des...

Differences simply act as a yarn of curiosity unraveling until we get to the other side.

I should have learned by now that life never settles down for long.