friendship on Connection

Digital connections . . . may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.

There’s been a lot of talk about friendship because of Facebook and the internet. You can collect friends and “likes” and begin to feel pretty good about yourself, depending on how many you accumulate...

Our current cultural moment makes rich, life-giving friendships like the one David and Jonathan shared a challenge. We are connected like never before, yet isolated and lonely like never before. MIT p...

These days, a common trick people use to remember someone they’ve just met is to save their first name along with the place where they met them—like “Matt PTA,” for example. I recently realized I stil...

When I engaged with twenty-somethings, for example, who were just entering the adult years, I found them preoccupied with clarifying their identity. What kind of a man or woman am I becoming, they w...

Your well-being is more dramatically affected by the people you see every day, people who live within a few blocks of your house, people who live within a few miles, than it is by distant connections.

Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are

Everything significant starts with relationship. At the end of the day, your faith, your family, your work, and your leadership are all based on who you relate to and how you relate. Your life is moti...

Community is the fruit of charity and is expressed in friendship which brings forth and nourishes loyalty, trust, sincerity and mutual understanding. … Friendship in Christ not only favors the develop...

Friends are individuals who are relational assets and not liabilities. Friends are those whom God escorts into our environments because there is something they need to be for us in order to help us be...

One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.

The lectionary text for this week begins at 15:9, but as I shared last week, this text should be read as a part of a larger unit, which includes the lectionary text for last week (15:1-8). Context P...

All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every ma...

Again, the friendship which draws human beings together in a tender bond is sweet to us because out of many minds it forges a unity.

We need to admit the mind into Christian fellowship again. We need the mind disciplined in Christ, enlightened by faith, passionate for God and his creation, to be let loose in the world.

It’s been said home is the place where they have to let you in. While it’s a reach to say I’m friends with each of my family members, our relationships thrive because we share a mutual, understood res...

The lectionary text for this week begins at 15:9, but as I shared last week, this text should be read as a part of a larger unit, which includes the lectionary text for last week (15:1-8). Context ...

In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spiri...

He is your friend who pushes you nearer to God.

The best mirror is an old friend.

In each of my friends, there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity.

What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds

Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.

Friend. We use that word too loosely. Too flippantly. We use it too generously. And most damaging of all, we give the title to people who haven’t earned it. I recognize that using the word earn makes ...

When we moved up here to this neck of the woods and settled in on our farm, there was an old farmer who lived to the west of us and his older brother who lived to the east, and this is what we were to...

It would be impossible to overestimate the impact these meals must have had upon the poor and the sinners. By accepting them as friends and equals Jesus had taken away their shame, humiliation, and gu...

Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .

Context matters. According to the Terman Study, which followed one thousand study participants from childhood until their death, the people we surround ourselves with are who we become. We see those a...

[Friends are] God’s apology for relations.