appearances on Teenagers

The Texas-based pastor Matt Chandler spent a decade working with teenagers, and during that time, he realized how a specific change takes place between sixth graders and ninth graders. As Chandler say...

The flower of youth never appears more beautiful than when it bends toward the sun of righteousness.

After surveying an incredibly diverse cross section of college students across America, Donna Freitas found “the most pressing social media issues students face: the importance of appearing happy”—and...

Max Lucado shares a funny story about a phone app that was supposed to be able to guess your age. It worked by taking a picture of a person’s face and then spitting out a supposedly accurate result. L...

Many minorities actually try to change their appearance to look more light-skinned or white. Eliza Noh, assistant professor of Asian American studies at California State University of Fullerton descri...

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?

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

Two decades after I worked with the airmen, I read a fascinating article, “The Quasimodo Complex,” in The British Journal of Plastic Surgery, Two physicians reported in 1967 on a landmark study of e...

The author Oscar Wilde once remarked that by the age of forty everyone has the face they deserve. This is a truly profound, if painful, truth. But it really applies to the “within” expressed by the fa...

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.

One Ash Wednesday a decade ago, when I was new to Anglicanism, I knelt at a rail as Fr. Thomas, my priest, smeared a black cross on each forehead. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall ret...

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

Back in 1958, a baby boy was born into the Lane family. The father, a man named Robert, chose to name his boy Winner. How could the young man fell to succeed with a name like Winner Lane? Several yea...

How do we tell ourselves apart from what we wear, in the end?

Performance-enhancing drugs are a major problem in the sporting world. Cycling, baseball, weightlifting, football—athletes at the highest levels need something to put them over the top or keep them in...

For thousands of years human beings have communicated with one another first in the language of dress. Long before I am near enough to talk to you on the street, in a meeting, or at a party, you annou...

Things Are Different: You never know the story By the cover of the book. You can’t tell what a dinner’s like By simply looking at the cook. It’s something everybody needs to know Way down deep inside ...

Chan eil breth le nochd; beairteach cridhe dh’fhaodadh a bhith fo bochd còta. Do not judge by appearances; a rich heart may be under a poor coat.

I was shy by nature, and rendered worse in that respect by a consciousness of my own ugliness. I am certain that nothing so much influences the development of a man as his exterior—though the exterior...

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.

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?

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

No physical appearance is worth not eating pasta for.

AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Gospel for a Jewish Community Matthew’s Gospel presents a favorable view of the Jewish Law and its traditions. In...

“But to appear happy when I am so miserable — Oh! who can require it?”

The world has enough women who know how to do their hair. It needs women who know how to do hard and holy things.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Watches, cars, and Christians can all look chromed and shiny. But watches don't tick, cars don't go, and Christians don't make a difference without insides. For a Christian, that's the...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Gospel for a Jewish Community Matthew’s Gospel presents a favorable view of the Jewish Law and its traditions. In contrast to Luke...