life on planet earth on Distortion

Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in u...

Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.

One of the most dangerous driving situations is when it is raining at night. Not only are the streets slippery and visibility obscured by water on the windshield, but wet streets can reflect light fro...

Loving and gracious God, we admit to You that we have distorted Your Word. Too often we pick and choose which part of Your Word to proclaim. Shying away from Your call to give all who we are, we only ...

E-mail is the great scourge of modem communication. It facilitates the passing on of simple information, yet it forces complex matters to be presented In a fashion that makes what is difficult appear ...

Think of an ancient icon of Christ. Imagine that a thousand-year-old Christ Pantocrator painted on a wooden panel is discovered in some forgotten monastery. The image of Christ is there, but it’s cove...

Perhaps no statistic reminds us more graphically of the distortion of power in our world than this: there are twenty-one million slaves in the world today. They labor as brick makers, coffee harvester...

One day I was teaching on Capitol Hill and at the end of the afternoon one of my colleagues asked me if I knew a particular woman. I said that I did and he told me that she had been found murdered in ...

Christianity Does Not Reject the Body The “spirit-good / body-bad” dualism that often passes for Christianity is actually an ancient gnostic error called “Manichaeism,” and it couldn’t be further from...

Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spoken languag...

Distracted from distraction by distraction

We delude ourselves into believing that if we can just get everything done, if we can only tie up all the loose ends, if we can even once get ahead of the crush, we will prove our worth and establish ...

Distraction, at least the dangerous kind I’m referring to, is shifting our attention from something of greater importance to something of lesser importance. Our fundamental and most dangerous problem ...

Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth.

Our propensity to deceive ourselves about our place and purpose makes it so very difficult to see the truth of our lives, to understand the meaning of our moment in history and our responsibility to i...

Dissonance theory predicts that we will eventually (and conveniently) forget good arguments made by opponents just as we forget silly arguments we made ourselves. . . . It’s motivated by our need to b...

An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.

We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horrible destructive caricature of that image—destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenn...

Disturb us, O Lord, when We are too pleased with ourselves, When our dreams have come true Because we dreamed too little, When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore. Disturb us, O...

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

Doubts are suppressed by groups... But remember that the internal incentives that shape how the group perceives risks and rewards may be very different from the reality of the risks and rewards in the...

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is pos...

The greatest of all illusions is the illusion of familiarity.

In His book When Narcissism Comes to Church, Chuck DeGroat describes a common tool employed on social media, gaslighting: Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that draws its name from a 1938 Bri...

The objects of the present life fill the human eye with a false magnification because of their immediacy.

Self-deception is a major part of what defeats spiritual formation in Christ. In self-deception the individual or group refuses to acknowledge factors in their life of which they are dimly conscious. ...

One of the ways we punish ourselves for not being more or better or thinner or stronger is by trying to squeeze ourselves—force ourselves, even—into all kinds of ill-fitting relationships. With other ...

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 ...

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.