relationships and community on Human Development

Robert Lupton offers insight into the complexities of human impoverishment, reminding us that in spite of our best intentions sometimes our philanthropic efforts can yield unintended consequences: “Wh...

I am convinced that the scourge of our scientific and technological age is depersonalization. There is a heartbeat pulsating at the center of the universe, giving life and meaning to everything, but o...

I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of Go...

Once when my daughter was six and my son was two, my mother-in-law noticed my daughter holding a favorite toy just out of my son’s standing reach, and she gently scolded her for teasing him that way. ...

Human sexuality includes more than hormones, organs, and orgasms; it runs through the psychic and spiritual ranges of our lives. We experience our sexuality on the spiritual level as a yearning for an...

In 1938 a group of researchers from Harvard University set out to answer the question of what habits led to a fulfilling life. They chose a group of 268 men who for the next seventy-five years were st...

What is the solution? I once asked the former head of a major Christian relief and development organization what he had learned in his decades of experience in the field of poverty alleviation. …he sa...

The normal course of day-to-day human interactions locks us into patterns of feeling, thought, and action that are geared to a world set against God. Nothing but solitude can allow the development of ...

The human being is defined through otherness. It is a being whose identity emerges only in relation to other beings, God, the animals and the rest of creation.

This is the beautiful community that Herman Bavinck gets at when he writes, The image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being, however richly gifted that human bein...

The drug problems in the U.S. demonstrate this pattern: by heightening powers of perception, chemical stimulants open up a new world to a generation that has never learned to appreciate fully the worl...

The original sin of racism in America began with a deeply flawed and demonic notion that shaped this nations development. Bad science claimed that black bodies were biologically deficient, then extrap...

The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Take the cul-de-sac, for example, which is my metaphor for the world of suburban monotony and triviality that so many Western Christians find themselves trapped in. The literal cul-de-sac (i.e., a dea...

Weeping is perhaps the most human and universal of all relief measures.

The living human community that language creates involves living human bodies. We need to talk together, speaker and hearer here, now. We know that. We feel it. We feel the absence of it. Speech conne...

The deep truth is that our human suffering need not be an obstacle to the joy and peace we so desire, but can become, instead, the means to it.

For the beauty of human love Brother, sister, parent, child. Friends on earth and friends above, For all gentle thoughts and mild; Lord of all, to thee we raise, This, our hymn of grateful praise...

It is human to err, it is devilish to remain willfully in error.

To err is human; to admit it, superhuman.

In the composition of the human frame there is a good deal of inflammable matter, however dormant it may lie for a time, and…when the torch is put to it, that which is within you must burst into blaze...

Before my mentor, Dallas Willard, passed over to glory, I asked him what he thought about the rapid rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. He said, “It is a wonderful thing, but my fear i...

What makes people happy? People have sought the answer to this question for thousands of years, but in the past two decades there has been an explosion of scientific research on this topic. In his pre...

The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the pri­vate, and the emotional hold sway. Yet. . . that is ...

The movie The Intern did not win any Academy Awards, which is hardly surprising. Punchy blockbuster comedies rarely receive Hollywood’s highest honors. But its message is nevertheless award wort...

I will never forget the witness of an Episcopal priest named Tom Minifie several years ago in St. Luke’s Church in Seattle, Washington. He spotted a high-profile couple sitting in the last pew with th...

There’s a difference between good judgment and living in judgment. The trick is to use lots of the first and to go a little lighter on the second.

So, how are you feeling?  It’s not a trick question. But it’s more complicated than it sounds. We’re always feeling something, usually more than one thing at a time. Our emotions are a continuous ...

Judgment and joy don’t go well together – no, judgment leads to grumbling. I’m sure you’ve met people in your life who are hard to please – maybe even your parents, or your boss. People for whom n...

The South African politician Nic Diederichs—a prominent leader during the apartheid era—once made a rather provocative observation: God, he said, dislikes deadly uniformity. I hate to admit that I lik...