culture on Intimacy

The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the pri­vate, and the emotional hold sway. Yet. . . that is ...

An Irish church once had a humorous yet insightful motto that gets at the heart of the pain that often accompanies our relationships: “To dwell above with those we love will certainly be glory. But to...

We are people of desire. We want things. We long for things. It is primal to our nature to yearn. As Saint Augustine reflected, “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing. . . . That is o...

Cultures like ours encourage us to consider all aspects of our lives in terms of self-interest. How do we cultivate a life marked by God’s love – a love that is always directed toward the needs of oth...

Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.

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...

You don’t need to look far today to notice that personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. A gym near where I live advertises itself with the slogan: “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You.” A new apartment com...

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...

Culture plays a direct and significant role in how we learn to see both our neighbors and ourselves. Culture shapes how and what we see, and how and what we see..

So it is that in most Western industrialized countries church and society have lost their identity, religion has become more and more a private affair, and morality has become secular. This process af...

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...

Following the biblical pattern, the church has always assumed that God can communicate spiritual truths to people through their imaginations, especially through dreams and visions. Church history is r...

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....

We live in a culture where image is everything and substance nothing. We live in a culture where a new beginning is far more attractive than a long follow-through. Images are important. Beginnings are...

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...

Edward T. Hall likened the effects of culture to an iceberg. Some aspects of a culture are overt, in clear view above the waterline, so to speak. But most are hidden deep below the surface, forming th...

Loving and grace-filled God, we confess that it is difficult to keep you first in our lives. There are so many urgent demands on us that we find it hard to focus ourselves on you. The culture around u...

It was a cold December weekend in Chicago, and I was excited. One of my best friends was getting married, and to top it off, he had asked me to officiate the wedding. I was honored by the invitation, ...

What makes an anxious society? We want to be different and stand out as unique without the presence of Jesus setting us apart.

As a missionary … it was always comforting to realize that I did not bring God along with my physical and cultural baggage to my new host country.

If we do not accept as good, God’s shaping of our person and life in our own culture, we will never be able to accept his work in the lives of others who are culturally different from us.

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...

No truth which human beings may articulate can ever be articulated in a culture-transcending way-but that does not mean that the truth thus articulated does not transcend culture.

Gracious God, we don’t live as Christ did. Although You give us specific instructions for an ordered way of life that stands out from the rest of the world, we settle for lukewarm Christianity. Our li...

And here’s a further complication: the church is not an entity outside of me. I do not stand on the outside looking in. I am as much part of the church as (in the words of Paul) a hand is a part of a ...

Jesus Prepares for Departure John 17 is part of a larger section of John’s gospel known as the farewell discourses (13:31-17:26), in which Jesus prepares for his imminent departure from earth after h...

In most cases, the existing church culture is from a former era that is only meaningful to those in the church, not those in the community.

Jesus Prepares for Departure John 17 is part of a larger section of John’s gospel known as the farewell discourses (13:31-17:26), in which Jesus prepares for his imminent departure from earth after h...

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...

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...