arts and culture on Open Minds

Our Lord—Today we have given You praise and thanks for who You are and what You’ve done for us. Now, we also give You our needs—for we are not self-sufficient. We need You! We pray for those dear to u...

ALL SINGING: (America the Beautiful, first verse) O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grac...

Dear Heavenly Father, we lower our heads before you and we confess that we have too often forgotten that we are yours. Sometimes we carry on our lives as if there was no God and we fall short of being...

It takes fresh experiences, surroundings, and inputs for us to see familiar shadows in a new light.

O God, too often we turn to You when we have no other place to go, but your arms are always open wide. Forgive us for using you as our last resort when you ought to be our first. We confess that you h...

Prayer of Adoration Living and present Lord: You often surprise us, coming when we least expect it; or, You simply fold back the curtain to show us You’ve been there all along to give us hope and to ...

Pastor: O wise and wonderful God, in our quick temper and selfish pride, we have not followed your example—you are slow to anger, abounding in love, and show steadfast faithfulness to your children. ...

Lord, you whose Son did pray that all your children might be one, we come with repentance for the sin of useless division and for the secret vice of pride. We beg forgiveness for harsh judgment, for p...

Lord: In our times of weakness and our hours of need, Yours is the strength that enables us to carry on, Yours the shoulder we rest our heads upon. When our load is heavy and too much to bear, Yours a...

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

Our natural tendency is to watch the world from behind the windows of [our] cultural home and to act as if people from other countries, ethnicities, or categories have something special about them, . ...

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.

A large part of the problem is that we’ve lost much of our ability to think deeply. We’ve forgotten the art of deep and focused mind-management. We want things fast, quick, now. We often don’t want to...

As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons.

One way to learn the mind of the Creator is to study His creation. We must pay God the compliment of studying His work of art and this should apply to all realms of human thought. A refusal to use our...

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

I once heard the missionary author Elisabeth Elliot tell of accompanying the Auca woman Dayuma from her jungle home in Ecuador to New York City. As they walked the streets, Elliot explained cars, fire...

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

The condition of an enlightened mind is a surrendered heart.

The key for successful personal relationships and ministry is to understand and accept others as having a viewpoint as worthy of consideration as our own.

I believe we all need to reframe our stories, at least parts of them, in order to heal, to discard lies, to move from partial truths to richer, fuller explanations, to see our lives as God sees them.

A contemplative politics entails a two-part movement, one that parallels Thoreau’s injunction to be wary of trivia and devoted to eternal truths. The first involves an askesis, a kind of self-discipli...

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough....

One of the areas often missed in a lot of Christian apologetics is the social setting in which a person encounters the gospel. For example, it is far easier to espouse "rational arguments" f...

Gracious God, forgive us for when we fail to recognize the destructive power of mental illness. Every day we are surrounded by people with real emotional and mental difficulties that we ignore. We con...

Like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our...

Unfortunately, the world has taken some of the greatest minds God has given us and locked them up in cages. Most very brilliant or creative people seem strange to ordinary people. Geniuses are almost ...