character on Digital Age

Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who ca...

The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...

I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le...

The twenties are a time when one asks, What will I do with my life? What is it that I really want in exchange for my life’s labors? Most denied that the key desire of life was for material wealth; t...

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Jesus, as always, gets caught in the middle—along with a good number of his followers. Many people in America today were brought up in strict Christian homes and churches of one sort or another. There...

Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are.

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...

Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself....

Note: This was originally posted on February 15, 2017 on the Stirring Our Affections website. Does our working shape us? Depending on what you do, you might answer that readily in the affirmativ...

Good and evil increase at compound interest. That's why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance.

The word eccentric comes from a combination of the Greek terms ex (out of) and kentron (center). When combined, ekkentros means “out of center.” The term gained currency in the late Middle Ages, when ...

In March 1845, Henry David Thoreau received a letter from poet William Ellery Channing. “Build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive,” wrote Channing. “I see ...

The Law The ambiguous place of the law in Christian thought can be seen historically in battles between antinomians and legalists, each side finding New Testament support, and the present text would ...

What we know matters, but who we are matters more. Being rather than knowing requires showing up and letting ourselves be seen. It requires us to dare greatly, to be vulnerable.

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? "Hear O Israel..." The Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) commands the Israelites to love the Lord their God with heart, soul, and m...

Does reading the Bible really change us? Does it have the ability, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to shape and form our characters? That's what The Center for Bible Engagement wanted to fin...

Several years ago I saw a television show called Caught on Camera . It featured clips of people being secretly filmed doing all manner of horrific things, precisely because they thought they were...

For You [God] are infinite and never change. In You, ‘today’ never comes to an end: and yet our ‘today’ does come to an end in You, because time, as well as everything else, exists in You. If it did n...

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move ...

Preaching Commentary Summary of the Text As a child, I was attracted to the dark recesses of my neighborhood. I was drawn to the dim lit woods that were away from the din of the suburbia in which I...

The road to character often involves moments of moral crisis, confrontation, and recovery. When they were in a crucible moment, they suddenly had a greater ability to see their own nature. The everyda...

AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? "Hear O Israel..." The Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) commands the Israelites to love the Lord their God with h...

By failing to come to grips with how cultural dysfunctions deeply impact the health of the church, our leaders will continue to fail to discern an essential reality concerning the nature of change: Cu...

Summary of the Text As a child, I was attracted to the dark recesses of my neighborhood. I was drawn to the dim lit woods that were away from the din of the suburbia in which I was raised. I even rem...

Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an ...

Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in 'religion' mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.... When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making ...

We long to see our lives whole, 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. Lacking a vision of a l...