personal development on Classism

O God of the ages, you have created each of us uniquely. We each have so much that makes us interesting and unique! Yet at times, even against our own wishes, we find ourselves falling prey to the -is...

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.

At a recent gathering of seminary professors, one teacher reported that at his school the most damaging charge one student can lodge against another is that the person is being “judgmental.” He found ...

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

In the fall of 2009, I was invited to go on a month-long speaking tour throughout Africa. During the trip, a CEO from South Africa named Salim took me to Soweto, a township just outside of Johannesbur...

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Such an intellectualist model of the human person-one that reduces us to mere intellect-assumes that learning (and hence discipleship) is primarily a matter of depositing ideas and beliefs into mind-c...

A college professor met his new class on the first day of school. He stood before the students and gave a nice introduction to the class and about himself. Upon completion of his monologue, he looked...

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

Materialism is not fundamentally an economic problem, but a cultural one... a spiritual issue. It runs to the depths of our souls, and, for this reason, needs to be understood less in terms of budgets...

One of the real problems in modern life is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.

We probably got a bit too cocky about how well our lives were going. But after disability showed up in our family, we learned that life is not tame. It’s not here to align with our desires and plans. ...

If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about, it is about us. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That means we MUST ...

The problem is not recognizing the importance of the individual. The problem is the glorification of the individual. When the individual self is glorified over the greater good of the community, right...

Martin Luther King, responding to criticism from Southern White Pastors with respect to Civil Rights Activism: Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to s...

Too many people hear the word capacity and assume it’s a limitation. They assume their capacity is set—especially if they’re beyond a certain age. People give up on the idea that their capacity or the...

What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.

“I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”

Sometimes in the West, we assume we have more options available to us, or, we assume more options=better experiences. I recently heard a true story of an American overseas in Italy who tried ordering ...

While American society is rich in goods, it is extremely time-poor. Many societies in the two-thirds world, by contrast, are poor in material possessions, by our standards, but they are rich in time. ...

The person striving for superiority is “always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinion of others ​and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgm...

While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically, these disciplines an...

You know there is a problem with the education system when you realize that out of the 3 R’s only one begins with an R.

Failures are divided into two classes — those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and failures. . . . I divide the world into learners and nonlearners.

If you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources...

When did the topic of justice become important to you?” Gideon Strauss posed that question to two dozen people crammed into our living room one fall evening in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Some of us wer...

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.