worldview and perspective on Activities

The more you engage in meaningful activities, the more likely you are to experience discomfort.

Wake up! Get out of bed! Feel the sunlight on your face! Feel God’s bright glory has risen for you. But the earth is dark. Everywhere we look there is selfishness sin, greed, death, destruction. You ...

We long to see our lives whole and to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Are we really living...

There Are No Ordinary Things J. R. R. Tolkien tells a short story about an ordinary fellow who just wants to finish a painting. Over time, he is constantly distracted by the requests of his neighbors...

Mythology by its nature seeks to explain how the world works and how it came to work that way, and therefore includes a culture’s “theory of origins.” We sometimes label certain literature as “myth” b...

In comparison to other societies, Americans and other North Atlantic peoples are naturalistic. Non-Western peoples are frequently concerned about the activities of supernatural beings . . . The wide-r...

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...

We are handicapped in the white church. If I preached Jesus’ first sermon (Luke 4:14–30) and gave it the social emphasis that He gave, our church has no vehicle for doing anything about the problem. P...

An excellent way to test people’s values is to observe what we do when we don’t have to do anything, how we spend our leisure time, how we spend our extra money.

When a person is confused and things refuse to fit together, she sometimes announces a need to get out of noise and turbulence, to get away from all the hassle and “get my head together.” When she suc...

Lord Almighty, you have given us a purpose in life. You have gifted us with abilities and passions. Sometimes we choose to live according to that purpose you have designed for us. Other times we live ...

Your religion is what you do with your solitude

For all our time and attention, no matter how carefully we curate our stuff or how much we might enjoy ourselves along the way, we’re all merely stocking and staging someone else’s opportunity for bar...

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

We often get into ruts, on treadmills, caught up in patterns and habits that aren't useful. We don't stop to ask, what can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially bein...

I was invited to visit a friend who was very sick. He was a man about fifty-three years old who had lived a very active, useful, faithful, creative life. Actually, he was a social activist who had car...

...work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental...

I have a little game I play when traveling. I regularly hear strangers meeting strangers, and usually within thirty seconds to a minute one asks the other, “What do you do?” Well, when someone asks me...

We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our li...

Some of us are interested in religious studies because we are interested in people. People do religious things; they symbolize and ritualize their lives and desire to be in a community. What piqued my...

We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good l...

When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

The fact that our works are done in the service of God is not enough, by itself, to prevent us from losing our interior life if we let them devour all our time and all our strength. Work is good and n...

Whatever you can do with a clean conscience, you can do to the glory of God. No work is so menial that it cannot be rendered as worship.

I remember playing a game as a child in which we would bend one knee and grab our foot behind us and then try to race—limping, stumbling and falling over as we struggled across the grass toward a fini...

Differences simply act as a yarn of curiosity unraveling until we get to the other side.

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 ...

This is what Jesus does. Jesus makes life better. Jesus brings the better wine. He takes empty religion and ritual, and brings it to life for everyday people. He takes what many deem holy (like the wa...

I've seen far too many Christians who are more than willing to travel halfway around the world to volunteer for a week in an orphanage, but who cannot bring themselves to take the personal risk of...

The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.