conversation on Meals

At a dinner party, [The Scottish playwright George Bernard] Shaw sat next to a young man who proved to be a bore of historic proportions. After suffering through a seemingly interminable monologue, Sh...

Tradition has it that Jennie Jerome, who would eventually become Winston Churchill’s mother, once had dinner with the British politician William Gladstone. She left the meal thinking Gladstone was the...

Don’t all these little tweets, these little sips of online connection, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

Our bodies, created in the image of the Triune God, have much to teach us about the virtues of conversation. The human body is a wondrous symphony of diverse parts: 206 bones and over 600 muscles, con...

Have you ever been in a store checkout line and you’re in a hurry and the person in front of you starts gabbing with the cashier? You’ve got a cart full of groceries, the ice cream’s going to melt, yo...

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.

The living human community that language creates involves living human bodies. We need to talk together, speaker and hearer here, now. We know that. We feel it. We feel the absence of it. Speech conne...

With my friends, it’s either no conversation or conversation about what’s going on, on your phone.

Introverts move a little slower, speak a little less, and rest a little more.

In I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me , John Ortberg uses an interesting analogy for an aspect of our relationships. In 2015, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner announced the Starshot Initiati...

Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...

WORDS. We think words, hear words, speak words, sing words, write words, and read words—all the time. Every day. What do words have to do with Christianity? Almost everything. At every stage in redemp...

There's no greater lifestyle and no greater happiness than that of having a continual conversation with God.

A book can teach you, a conversation can assure you, a poem can seduce you, a genius can inspire you, but only you can save yourself.

We had talk enough, but no conversation.

We email, Facebook, tweet and text with people who are going to spend eternity in either heaven or hell. Our lives are too short to waste on mere temporal conversations when massive eternal realities ...

I was watching the old Dick Van Dyke Show recently, and he was at a party filled with pseudo intellectuals. Dick got trapped into a one-sided conversation with a self-absorbed philosophy professor. On...

He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World , Mike Cosper shares a short vignette about the comedian Louis C.K.* Louis CK tells fans he meets in pu...

It is impossible for a believer, no matter what his experience, to keep right with God if he will not take the trouble to spend time with God. Spend plenty of time with him; let other things go, but d...

A businessman moved over slightly as a young man crowded into the airplane seat next to him. As they both fastened their seat belts, the businessman good-naturedly asked whether the young man was trav...

It remains wonderful that mere puffs of wind should allow men to discover what they think and feel, to share their attitudes and plans, to anticipate the future and learn from the past, and to create ...

E.M. Forster, an early 20th-century novelist, remains widely read across the world. Beyond his talent for writing significant books, short stories, and plays, he was renowned for being an exceptional ...

Susan Pinker, the social science columnist for the Wall Street Journal, gave a TED talk in 2017 titled, “ The Secret to Living Longer May Be Your Social Life .” In her research she discovered that the...

As a college student, I was returning to school one year on a Greyhound bus. One of the other passengers was a middle-aged man who seemed to be making the rounds, engaging various people in quiet conv...

The exiled Niccolo Machiavelli actually changed into his best clothes to enter into his nightly reading conversation with the ancients.

Maltbie D. Babcock, author of This Is My Father’s World and a Presbyterian pastor in Brooklyn, introduced a free pew system in his church, upsetting a wealthy woman who found strangers in her us...

Follow the Rule of Holes: If you’re in one, stop digging.