worldview and perspective on Body and Soul

Father God–You invite us to come as a child to his/her daddy. You invite us to open our souls to You. You invite us to lay our desires before You. You are fond of us, Your children–so we come to You h...

Perhaps we look to a screen because it’s too painful to remember we are mortal. To sit in our limits and let them wash over us. To embrace this body, this moment in time, this feeling, or this place. ...

We all live between two worlds. We are planted here on earth while our hope is in heaven. We are given work to do in temporary soil that, we’re told, has the potential to spring up into unending fruit...

We all know that there are regions of the human spirit untrammeled by the world of physics. In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul...

God, our Father: Your love gives us more than we can ever hope for, and far beyond what we deserve. You clothe us in the righteousness of Christ. You give us dreams and visions of what we can become b...

In his now famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail , Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offers a scathing rebuke of his white clergy colleagues, whose inaction caused him much frustration: I have heard numero...

In his seminal work, the Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois describes the unique challenge to identity one faces being both Black and American. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-conscious...

Every soul belongs to God and exists by His pleasure. God being Who and What He is, and we being who and what we are, the only thinkable relation between us is one of full lordship on His part and com...

God of grace and truth—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Thank You. Thank You for being there even when we don’t feel it. Thank You for keeping Your eyes on us, even when we lose sight of You. Thank You f...

O God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Savior, the Prince of Peace: Give us grace to take to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions. Take away all hatred and prejudice...

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Structured Complaint The Psalmist organizes his complaint against God in three sections. The first two sections dramatize the complaint (vv. 1-11 and...

We all have blind spots. We all have flaws in our personalities, behavior, or work habits that we can’t see, and they block our performance and growth. But others can see them. If we permit them to gi...

In Thanks! I wrote that legendary investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton had posed the question, “How can we get six billion people around the world to practice gratitude?” Not long after Sir ...

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

The other enemy of the soul, meaninglessness…chokes out life with equal vigor. Meaninglessness woos us into spending our one shot at life on insignificant and trivial things. If we are not vigilant, w...

When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

Jesus was a whole human who had a head and a heart and a spirit. I forget that Jesus came to this earth, not as a brain in a Mason jar floating in formaldehyde, but as an embodied, incarnate, integral...

Spirituality is that place where the utterly intimate and the vastly infinite meet.

You and I were created for more than filling up our schedules with the self-satisfying pursuits of personal pleasure.

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?

If cosmic geography is culturally descriptive rather than revealed truth, it takes its place among many other biblical examples of culturally relative notions. For example, in the ancient world, peopl...

I prefer painting people’s eyes to cathedrals. For there is something in the eyes that is not in the cathedral, however solemn and imposing the latter may be — a human soul, be it that of a poor begga...

In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility o...

It is possible also to come at Christianity from a rather different point of view as well, seeing it as something not too difficult but too simple for us, too basic, something to be apprehended theref...

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...

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Seco...

The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.

Those not familiar with ancient Greek philosophy may be surprised to find deep resonance with the teachings of Jesus. When on trial for his life, the 70-year-old Socrates pugnaciously responded that,...

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.