culture on Productivity

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

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 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...

From drugs and alcohol to TV and workaholism, we are increasingly a society that fulfills T.S. Eliot’s description of a people “distracted by distraction.” There is hardly a public menace we can name ...

We are taught, often by the tone of voice of the media and the politicians rather than by explicit argument, to bow down before…progress. It is unstoppable. Who wants to be left behind, to be behind t...

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 ...

Culture is what we make of the world. Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else.

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...

The first phrase, “be fruitful and multiply,” means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, “subdue the earth,” means to harness t...

We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.

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....

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...

Gracious God, in six days you created all things. On the seventh day you finished your work by resting. You also blessed and hallowed the seventh day, setting it aside as a day of rest. Teach me, Lord...

God made wheat. We make bread! God made grapes. We make wine. Wheat is good. Bread is very good! Grapes are good, but wine—that is very good.

To reach people we must appreciate and adapt to their culture, but we must also challenge and confront it. This is based on the biblical teaching that all cultures have God's grace and natural rev...

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 ...

Culture is like gravity. We never talk about it, except in physics classes. We don’t include gravity in our weekly planning processes. No one gets up thinking about how gravity will affect their day. ...

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...

We live in a culture that is obsessed with the right to have what we want.

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

[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...

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...

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

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...

More often than not, park-it-at-the-door thinking [about religious faith] has less to do with hostility to faith than with the avoidance of risk, for many employer’s fear that any hint of religion is ...

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...

Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.

There Are No Ordinary Things J. R. R. Tolkien tells a short story about an ordinary fellow who just wants to finish a painting. Over time, he is constantly distracted by the requests of his neighbors...

A group of fourth-graders at a Christian school was given an assignment to draw what they would like to do if Jesus spent a day with them. After working diligently on their pictures, one little girl a...