Compared to our personality traits, character traits are more malleable. Our personalities can only be managed (or tamed, some might say). Our characters can be shaped, although this isn’t easy and ha...
In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.
Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...
The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...
I am among the minority of people who are hardwired (genetic science now demonstrates this) to loathe cilantro. I can’t stand it. I call it the adolescent of herbs: notice me, notice me, NOTICE ME! To...
In her book Confessions of a Beginning Theologian , Elouise Renich Fraser discusses how crucial it has been to listen to her body throughout her personal and theological growth. My body, once...
In this short excerpt, the scholar and Anglican clergyman N.T. Wright discusses the famous “weight of glory” passage in 2 Cornthians 4:17: For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an ...
Ephesians 5:1-2, Philippians 2:12-13, 2 Corinthians 3:18, 1 Corinthians 11:1, 1 Peter 2:21-23, John 13:15
My father was an artist. He had a black leather sketchbook filled with cartoons and doodles. As a boy I was enthralled by his drawings and wondered how I could learn to draw like him. I began by traci...
The first and best illustration of the effect upon personality of death is found in Jesus Christ. After his reappearance from the grave, he is unaltered in character, tone of thought, and fundamental ...
Mark 2:17, Luke 15:1-2, Luke 19:1-10, Matthew 11:28-30, Romans 5:8, 2 Corinthians 5:18-20
But it wasn’t just his new message that made Jesus irresistible. It was Jesus himself. People who were nothing like him liked him. And Jesus liked people who were nothing like him. Jesus invited unbel...
The most striking feature of the teaching of Jesus is that he was constantly talking about himself. It is true that he spoke much about the fatherhood of God and the kingdom of God. But then he added ...
1 Corinthians 1:25, Matthew 16:24-25, Luke 10:33-36, Mark 12:41-43, Matthew 5:38-39
If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, mind your own business, and Jesus says, there is no such thing as your own business. The w...
Matthew 5:5, Luke 14:11, Matthew 8:null, Luke 6:null, Mark 3:14, Matthew 16:18, 1 Peter 5:5-6
I don’t like to be meek. I like to be in control. I like to be right, independent, strong, organized, able to handle whatever happens to me, viewed positively by people and on top of my emotions. I a...
The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress. There is something in us that is no...
How are vices and virtues distinguished? How is a vice different from sin?…Although most references to the lists of seven use “vice” and “sin” in a roughly synonymous way, distinguishing the two turns...
Your desire for more of God than you have right now, your longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation than you have experienced so far is the truest thing about you. You ...
We cannot be true Christians without being original. Nothing gives us personality like prayer. Nothing makes man so original. To be creative, we must live with the Creator. Prayer places man in direct...
The soul can also manifest physical symptoms of need. I like to think of it this way: Just like my stomach growls when I’m hungry for physical food, my spirit tends to growl when I’m in need of spirit...
Ancient Lens What’s the historical context? Background Structure This Psalm of David is unique. “It is the only hymn in the Old Testament composed completely as a direct address to God.” [1] It e...
The Necessity of Memory Memory—or, more actively, remembering , plays an all-important role in our lives. Our culture likes us to focus on the now, "looking forward rather than looking back&q...
Something I’ve noticed over time is that, while we Protestants try to live “ sola scriptura (by scripture alone) ,” a large number of traditions have crept into our theology and praxis over time. One ...
Christians in America must come to terms with how institutional racism has infected us. Few white persons in twenty-first-century America see themselves as racist. (Even fewer Asian, Latino, or Africa...
In fractal geometry, there is a complex set of numbers that produces an infinitely intricate shape when plotted on a plane. It’s called a Mandelbrot set, after the founder of fractal geometry, Benoit ...
In the wilderness, life is stripped of distractions. It is quiet. The topography demands discipline, simplicity, and fierce attention. Solitude in the wilderness makes irrelevant all the people-pleasi...
In the wilderness, life is stripped of distractions. It is quiet. The topography demands discipline, simplicity, and fierce attention. Solitude in the wilderness makes irrelevant all the people-pleasi...
As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene . . . . No one can read the Gospels without feeling the ac...
Years ago, visiting one of the London prisons, I heard a statement made by one of the prisoners that impressed me very much. He said to me, ‘You do not know what a relief it is to be found out.’ We di...
The Christian life depends the single personality from the collective, not by isolating him but by giving him the status of an organ in the mystical body.