personal development on Being a Good Neighbor

[I]f we have compassion without capacity, we have human frustration. If we have capacity without compassion, we have human alienation. If we have compassion and capacity, we have human transformation....

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? Autobiographies Have you ever thought about writing your autobiography? It would be a little like reliving your life, at least in miniscule. As a write...

Christian morality has fallen on hard times these days. No one seems to believe in it, least of all Christians. Even the word “morality” is dropping out of our vocabulary—and I do mean the vocabulary ...

What if the solution to our society’s biggest issues has been right under our noses for the past two thousand years? When Jesus was asked to reduce everything in the Bible into one command he said: Lo...

Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will present...

Heavenly Father, we confess that we too often center our lives around ourselves and our immediate needs, and that this blinds us from being aware of the needs of our neighbors. Help us to know our tru...

Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.

Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.

You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.

Community is the fruit of charity and is expressed in friendship which brings forth and nourishes loyalty, trust, sincerity and mutual understanding. … Friendship in Christ not only favors the develop...

Like the Good Samaritan, may we not be ashamed of touching the wounds of those who suffer, but try to heal them with concrete acts of love.

Tracy Autler’s life changed in a very unexpected way on Thanksgiving Day, 1993. Tracy was a single mother, living in an apartment in a rough neighborhood, she was doing her best to raise a three-year ...

If you never left your home and avoided all interaction with other people, you couldn’t be characterized as a loving person. Instead, you might even be unloving because of your lack of concern for oth...

Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart,” said the apostle Paul, “as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” (Colossians 3:23) ...[H]ow you do anything is how you’ll do everything. Dr. ...

The success of every culture hinges not on big points of morality—there will always be issues like abortion or school prayer over which people differ—but on smaller values, like being considerate of o...

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

What is kindness, then? What sort of behavior do we have in mind when we say that someone has been kind to us or to others? I think the essence of kindness is being thoughtful for others more than for...

When I get on stage, my first goal is not to show my expertise, but on the contrary, to give a bit of happiness, of joy, of cheerfulness. I am firmly convinced that in order to sing well, you must lov...

Tracy Autler’s life changed in a very unexpected way on Thanksgiving Day, 1993. Tracy was a single mother, living in an apartment in a rough neighborhood, she was doing her best to raise a three-year ...

In recent years, I (Smith) have been leading a study called the “Science of Generosity Initiative” at the University of Notre Dame, in which I (Davidson) have been deeply involved. In that study, we h...

Gardening, besides being a practical, life-nurturing task, is also always a spiritual activity. In it people attempt to make visible and tasty what is good, beautiful, and even holy. Every act of gard...

Here is my grid for how I think of what to say when given the platform by a friend out of trust – a friend who is not following Jesus: I want to honor the friendship by doing exactly what he’s asked ...

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.

There can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

The story is told of a little girl who prayed, “Lord, make the bad people good and the good people nice.”

We didn’t have a lot of rules [at the food pantry at St. Gregory, an Episcopal congregation in San Francisco]. You could be a drunk or junkie, but you couldn’t volunteer if you were high. You couldn’t...

Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.