relationships and community on Renting

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while.

Richness in the Slapstick I don’t know about you, but when I think of insightful, theologically rich content on Christmas , I don’t naturally start with blockbuster films. And no, I’m not referring ...

Lessons Learned in Quarantine and Beyond Do you remember that first Sunday when you stayed cloistered in your home with the immediate family, when you exchanged your dapper church clothes for a pair ...

Kevin Blue has spent much of his ministry career serving the poor in inner-city Los Angeles. In this excerpt he describes working with a war vet named Clarence: Richard, Tim, Caroline and Ellen move...

So if we want to get the church right, we have to learn to see it as a salad in a bowl, made the Right Way of course. For a good salad is a fellowship of different tastes, all mixed together with the ...

The tension between autonomy and intimacy is most clearly evidenced in the trend toward cohabitation. Today, between 50 and 70 percent of American couples are cohabiting before or instead of marrying....

We fixed up the house and swapped it for another house and then another and then another. During the first ten years we were married, we moved six times. It was like being in the witness protection pr...

The essence of building is letting dwell.

Perhaps there is no object more desired than a house in America. Meghan Daum writes in her hilarious and poignant book Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, “There is no object of desire qui...

The ways that social structures and institutions systematically work against the interest of people of color is called institutional racism. Institutional racism and historic racism are not unrelated ...

There is no object of desire quite like a house. Few things . . . are capable of eliciting such urgent, even painful, yearning.

The idea of a modest dwelling all our own, isolated from the problems of other people, has been our reigning metaphor of the good life for a long time. It must now be seen for what it really is: an an...

To inhabit a place is to dwell there in a practised way, in a way which relies upon certain regular, trusted, habits of behaviour. Our prevailing, individualistic frame of mind has led us to forget th...

Hospitality without a home (a place) is an oxymoron

Martin has just received his brand new driver’s license. The family trots out to the driveway and climbs in the car, where he is going to take them for a ride for the first time. Dad immediately heads...

A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to for...

A lack of generosity refuses to acknowledge that your assets are not really yours, but God's.

What’s the difference between an employee and a partner? In one word — ownership. One of my first jobs was as a barista at this place called Coffee People. It was the anti-Starbucks of the late ’90s. ...

An elderly master carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer of his plans to leave the house building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife enjoying his extended family. He w...

One burden of homelessness is this: you’re always a stranger, counting on someone’s good graces.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

In his classic monologue, comedian George Carlin riffed on the mountain of stuff we compile. His assertion is that a “house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” So when you get right down to ...

Entering a place that is new to us, or seeing a familiar place anew, we move from part to part, simultaneously perceiving individual persons and things and discovering their relationships, so that, wi...

Constantly choose rather to want less, than to have more.

[A Neighborhood is] the place where you live and sleep—it could be your block or the square mile where you live. It may or may not have a name.

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

Mortgage is a French word. It’s a combination of two Old French words, mort meaning “death” and gage meaning “pledge.” Yep, signing a mortgage means you are signing a death pledge. It was named this a...

[A good host treats his guest so] that everything that is so well arranged at his host’s has not cost him, the host, any effort at all but has come about of itself.”

The world is the house where mortals dwell.

Possessions are not God’s blessing and goodness, but the opportunities of service which he entrusts to us.