culture on being vs. doing

Historically the West has tended to throw its chief emphasis upon doing and the East upon being. . . . Were human nature perfect there would be no discrepancy between being and doing. The unfallen man...

Note from TPW: Kara Martin addresses life in the secular workplace, sharing insights to help you lead your congregations to understand their faith and work and also to bring the Kingdom into your o...

In an institutionalized church, the good has become the enemy of the best, and activity has choked out productivity.

The challenge each of these faced in their deconstruction—and what we may face—is walking the tightrope between becoming our own person and honoring our past. In The Homeless Mind , sociologist P...

Different Attitudes on Prayer This past Sunday was the first time I've been in worship at our local church in some time, and it was a wonderful service. The liturgy was inspiring, the praise musi...

In modern Western culture we place a high value on work, which is fine, but one of the philosophical assumptions that can come with such values is that we assume that we own what we earn or buy. From ...

Jesus is teaching us to stop loving things and using people and start using things and loving people.

When in conflict we should demonstrate that our public witness is more important than winning a political battle. This means that if our side has to do something unloving or corrupt to win, then it’s ...

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger...

[W]e cannot really solve the problem of our world’s injustices by merely giving a little more of our surplus to fight hunger. More deeply, we need to be freed from our reliance on material consumption...

Our culture invites us to experience everything! If we fail to take advantage of it all, we think we are missing out. But honestly, the web of invitations we are called to navigate is massive and c...

What this means is that culture, rather than being added on, so to speak, to a finished or virtually finished animal, was ingredient, and centrally ingredient, in the production of that animal itself....

Materialism is not fundamentally an economic problem, but a cultural one... a spiritual issue. It runs to the depths of our souls, and, for this reason, needs to be understood less in terms of budgets...

My suspicion is that we have simply lost our way. I suspect that our material longings are more largely formed by our culture than by the Christ and that our spending habits do not differ radically fr...

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 ...

Culture is what human beings make of the world, in both senses—the stuff we make from the raw material of nature, but also the meaning we make.

[Suffering] may be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries… it is the burden of living in a consumer culture where the individual looms lar...

The difference between collectivist and individualist cultures is not a surface value, such as “some people eat more rice than we do.” Individualism and collectivism describe two very different ways p...

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...

Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.

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...

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.

In 1989, the advertising world welcomed a new icon into the world. It was pink, it was furry, it wore sunglasses, and sported a drum-set. Can you picture him? It’s the Energizer bunny. Television scre...

We know in­stinctively that Christmas is more than shopping mall Santas, silver bells, and snow-flocked trees, but such things are so entangled with our impressions of Christmas that it’s hard to kn...

Culture shapes the way we order our life, interpret our experiences, and evaluate the behavior of other people.

The problem is not recognizing the importance of the individual. The problem is the glorification of the individual. When the individual self is glorified over the greater good of the community, right...

If you ever find yourself sympathizing with Charles Dickens’ character Ebenezer Scrooge regarding the commercialization of Christmas, you’re not alone—this has been a common complaint for quite some t...

A Western upbringing tends to stress questioning authority, which is always asking why, why, why.

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

A Notoriously Difficult Passage This passage includes one of the most iconic and quotable of Jesus’s interactions with his contemporary opponents. Jesus deftly steps out of a trap set for him by the ...