worldview and perspective on Images

“If your eye causes you to sin…” is one of the boldest phrases from the mouth of Jesus, appearing three times in the gospels. Our eyes not only leads us into sinful behaviors, but also to take in sinf...

In this excerpt by the Roman historian Tacitus, we get insight into the Jewish faith from an ancient, extra-Biblical account. We also see how the Israelites took the first commandment seriously: The...

Being made in God’s image is also about God’s purposes in the world (God through us). In order to understand how image is connected with purpose, we need to understand a common practice in the ancient...

Martin Lindstrom observes: When people viewed images associated with the strong brands-the iPods, the Harley-Davidson, the Ferrari, and others-their -their brains registered the exact same patterns of...

For Calvin, the creation reflects its Creator at every point. Image after images flashed in front of our eyes, as Calvin attempts to convey the multiplicity of ways in which the creation witnesses to ...

Among HIV patients better immune functioning is found among those who have an image of God that is more compassionate and loving than those who have images of God as more judgmental and punitive…Chang...

Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cru...

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

Updated for 2026. January 19, 2026 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day— the only U.S. national holiday commemorating a pastor. Under his leadership, non-violent civil rights advocacy achieved leaps f...

The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...

Please forgive us, O Lord, for we often forget how powerful you are. You are the potentate of time, yet we think we rule our lives. We are sorry for creating images of you that are smaller than realit...

Despite all we know about shame, containing it, let alone disposing of it, is a bit like grasping for mercury: the more pressure you use to seize it, the more evasive it becomes . . . It is ubiquitous...

Ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images, and concepts of success and worth.”

One of my friends developed a PowerPoint presentation with a set of “dueling fish” images to illustrate this point. In the first image, a believer puts a Jesus fish on his car. Then his atheist neighb...

In the age of the spectacle, image is our identity, and our identity is unavoidably molded by our media.

Imagination “completes the picture” by transcending the actual memories and provable facts.

Have you ever noticed that we often see ourselves, specifically our bodies, our facial features differently? In 2013 the soap company Dove decided to explore this phenomenon by hiring an FBI-trained f...

All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

One looks for an image of man, attempting in a world increasingly dehumanized to realize himself as a man—to act like a responsible moral being, not to drift like a mere thing.

I remember taking my youngest son to one of the national art galleries in Washington, DC. As we made our approach, I was so excited about what we were going to see. He was decidedly unexcited. But I j...

On the effect of seeing for the first time after Cataract Surgery: The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves overwhelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do ...

Shut your eyes and see.

Heavenly Father, We confess that we are not always able to see your handiwork in the people and things around us. We do not always see your image in our neighbors, and we do not always see your creat...

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

My friend and colleague Keas Keasler, who teaches a class on spiritual formation, recently asked the class to close their eyes and picture God. After a few moments he had them open their eyes and, if ...

It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.

I am abashed, solitary, helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me. But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pur...

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are-or as we’re conditioned to see it…we must look at the lens through which we see the world, as well as the world we se and that the lens itself shapes how ...

We should exercise that far higher privilege which appertains to Christians, of having “the mind of Christ;” and then the two worlds, visible and invisible, will become familiar to us even as they wer...