Some of us are interested in religious studies because we are interested in people. People do religious things; they symbolize and ritualize their lives and desire to be in a community. What piqued my...
Retail therapy gives us the thrill of the hunt and a hit of dopamine (the love hormone) as we anticipate a purchase, but it cannot feed our hungers. We know this. But we return each time, hoping it wi...
Mark 10:13-16, Luke 19:1-10, Matthew 9:10-13, John 15:15, Mark 5:35-43
A group of fourth-graders at a Christian school was given an assignment to draw what they would like to do if Jesus spent a day with them. After working diligently on their pictures, one little girl a...
Psalm 23:3, James 4:13-15, Isaiah 55:8-9, Psalm 127:1, Proverbs 16:9
One of my small joys in life is grocery shopping. Ever since our kids were old enough to sit up, they fawned over the grocery carts that looked like little cars. Those carts are to grocery shopping wh...
Conversion in the U.S. seems to mean we’ve exchanged some of our shopping at Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and Borders for the Christian Bookstore down the street. We’ve taken our lack of purchasing control ...
The more I use stuff to fill up my hungers, the more distance I put between God and myself. And as I continue to fill up my infinite hungers with finite things (when I run through the Starbucks drive-...
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...
My instructor in Sabbath-keeping was not a professor or spiritual director, but a foreman at the East Chicago Inland Steel plant named Mike Paddock. His wife was the treasurer of the tiny congregation...
Genesis 2:1-3, Exodus 20:8-11, Deuteronomy 5:12-15, Mark 2:27-28, Matthew 12:8, Luke 6:5
For the most part, contemporary Christians pay little attention to the Sabbath. We more or less know that the day came to reflect, in U.S. culture, the most stringent disciplinary faith of the Puritan...
You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out ...
I was teaching an English class in a high-rise apartment complex full of low-income families in Minneapolis—mostly immigrant and refugees from East Africa. The tenants’ association paid for me to come...
Now today, with increased opportunity for personal-data collection via technology, target marketing has allowed sellers to become even more effective. No longer do they know just our age, gender, and...
In this satirical excerpt from How to be a Perfect Christian by the Babylon Bee, the point becomes clear that our often-consumeristic approach to church leaves much to be desired: You want to be a p...
Your body knows about schedules. It gets used to those times of day when it says, Feed me right now. I’m hungry, and those times of night when it says, Get me to bed. I’m exhausted. Your body will spe...
The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven’t budged. That’s why more people—liberated by prosperity...
I learned a long time ago that if I hustle fast enough, the emptiness will never catch up with me. First I outran it by traveling and dancing and drinking two-for-one whiskey sours at Calypso on State...
I recently attended an event sponsored by Compassion International, the International Child Sponsorship Organization. The event was called “Stepping into My Shoes”. The purpose being to show children ...
Have you ever been in a store checkout line and you’re in a hurry and the person in front of you starts gabbing with the cashier? You’ve got a cart full of groceries, the ice cream’s going to melt, yo...
For all our time and attention, no matter how carefully we curate our stuff or how much we might enjoy ourselves along the way, we’re all merely stocking and staging someone else’s opportunity for bar...
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,...
I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfac...
1 Timothy 6:6-8, Proverbs 15:16, Matthew 6:19-21, Philippians 4:11-13, John 6:
The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, “Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can...
In this context (Matthew 6)…storing up treasures focuses particularly on the compassionate use of material resources to meet others’ physical and spiritual needs, in keeping with the priorities of God...
I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.