Matthew 6:19-21, 1 Timothy 6:6-8, Proverbs 23:4-5, Ecclesiastes 5:10, Luke 12:15
USA Today published a report in 2014 that put a price tag on the American Dream: $130,000 a year, which includes a nice six-figure salary, luxury vacations, college savings, and retirement.
There are many people who will always want to return to the time when America was great. But was there ever a time when America was a wonderful place for everyone? As I saw on a Facebook meme recently...
Luke 15:11-32, Matthew 18:22-35, Luke 16:19-31, Matthew 13:3-8, Matthew 20:1-16, Matthew 13:24-33, Matthew 13:44-50, Mark 4:26-29
The thrust of the parables is to subvert the distorted myths in which people live their lives. To understand what we mean by “living in a myth” just think of a couple of our own contemporary myths. Ta...
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...
On July 4, 1965, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia titled “The American Dream.” He said, the whole concept of the imago Dei, . . . is the...
First and foremost, work is not about economic exchange, financial remuneration, or a pathway to the American Dream, but about God-honoring human creativity and contribution. Our work, whatever it is,...
Matthew 5:9, James 2:8, Proverbs 21:3, Romans 12:21, Isaiah 1:17, Galatians 3:28
Most of us in the United States know the famous “I have a Dream” speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the 1963 March on Washington. On a sweltering, humid day in the n...
In the homes of America [or any other nation] are born the children of America, and from them go out into American life American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them, and...
American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for t...
The myth of progress has deep roots in contemporary Western culture, and some of those roots are Christian…This utopian dream is in fact a parody of the Christian vision. The kingdom of God and the ki...
To illustrate how the racial oppression of previous generations has benefited European Americans, we can look at the fate of Native Americans. When Europeans arrived in North America, Indians owned al...
I’ll never forget sitting in the guidance counselor’s office my freshman year in high school in the Lehigh Valley area between Philadelphia and Allentown, where I grew up. The purpose of our meeting w...
While I was sitting at a stoplight a few blocks from my [Emerson’s] home in Minneapolis, reflecting on the recent rash of drive-by shootings in the area, three African-American teens clad in the urban...
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...
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...
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all themselves. But in fact they are invariably the benefici...
The challenge each of these faced in their deconstruction—and what we may face—is walking the tightrope between becoming our own person and honoring our past. In The Homeless Mind , sociologist P...
I want to give my kids the world, but I also want them to appreciate everything, to succeed, to be good people, to enjoy life. This is my most important role. If I fail at this, I fail at everything.
He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
Colossians 3:23-24, Galatians 6:9-10, Philippians 2:4, Matthew 5:16, Proverbs 31:8-9, James 1:27
Brandon and Faith Lee, who started Bird and Branch Coffee, are what faithful witnesses look like. When they sat down across from my wife and me, they had a dream to start a coffee shop that would serv...
To some degree we all get what we want. Maybe not all we want but what we most deeply desire ends up finding its way to us. If you are skeptical about this, try writing down one desire each day for a ...
If anything, there appears to be an inverse relationship between our growing obsession with the home as a totem object and the disintegration of families that has become the chief social phenomenon of...
In their book Passing the Plate (Oxford, 2008), Christian Smith and Michael Emerson introduce the phrase “discretionary obligation” as a way to understand the typical American Christian’s approach to ...
[A] rock-star preaches capitalism. Wow. Sometimes I hear myself and I just can’t believe it. But commerce is real. . . . Aid is just a stopgap. Commerce—entrepreneurial capitalism—takes more people ou...
In his book, The Joy Model, former management consultant Jeff Spafadora describes the moment that lead him to change careers: One spring break Michelle and I took the kids to Disney World. My mom an...
To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.
Modern Language Version Almighty God, who has given us this good land for our heritage: We humbly ask that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of your favor and glad to do your will. Bles...
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 ...