arts and culture on Jealousy

God and Father of all, in your love you made all the nations of the world to be a family, and your Son taught us to love one another. Yet our world is riven apart with prejudice, arrogance, and pride....

Syndrome (formerly called Incrediboy) in the film The lncredibles is one example of envy’s futility and the envier’s inferiority, which together secure the inevitable lack of success in besting one’s ...

Holy God, we come to You confessing that we never have enough. We are never satisfied with what You have given us. We look at others with envy and we want more, even when our homes are overflowing wit...

Prayer of Confession All: Certainly God is good to his people, to those pure in heart, but as for me, I nearly stumbled; I nearly lost my sure footing. I struggle with envy as I look at the those in ...

May we be no one’s enemy, and may we be the friend of all that is eternal and abides with Christ. May we never quarrel with those nearest us; and if we do, may we be reconciled quickly. May we love,...

Gracious God–Giver of all good gifts: We praise You. You give us the wonder of creation and You give us life. We praise You, Father. You give us forgiveness of our sins with salvation and eternal life...

The Celebrant and People together, all kneeling Most holy and merciful Father: We confess to you and to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinne...

Comparison is the thief of joy.

So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, our friendships, our loves, our commitments, our duties, our bodies and our sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things wh...

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

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.

Everybody is somebody, but nobody wants to be themselves.

The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.

Insecurity is a funny thing. It makes us into someone we’re not as a way to cope with someone we used to be. For me, it started at home. Growing up, my dad had been critical of my mother’s weight, and...

The exhausting manipulation and control it takes to protect an identity based on circumstances will crush our hearts and hide the best of who we are behind a wall of insecurity.

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while.

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

When we keep purchasing, keep consuming, and keep envying and coveting, we are pining for what the objects represent: peace, ease, meaning, beauty, stability, adventure, knowledge, renown, connection,...

It is characteristic of those who are evil to judge others as evil. Unable to acknowledge their own imperfections, they must explain away their flaws by blaming others.

Avarice is fear sheathed in gold.

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...

A taste of righteousness can be easily perverted into an overweening sense of self-righteousness and judgmentalism.

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.

But disdain – even mere lack – of intelligence, of thought, of knowledge, proves itself to be capable of as great a pride, and of as great a lovelessness or hatred, as does the greatest scholarship or...

Jesus warns us against our self-righteousness in the most dire terms. (He uses the word hell a lot more often than most of us are comfortable with.) He’s quite aware that while we humans have seemingl...

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.

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...

Most Holy Lord, we speak with eloquence, but have no love. We speak truth to power, pontificate, and smugly consider our knowledge superior to others, but display little to no charity. We give sacrifi...

Perfection....it functions as a form of myopia, a preoccupation with self-image that can stunt emotional growth.

Materialism is the mother of anxiety.