The mythologies of the digital age center around the idea that waiting is keeping you from obtaining what you want and holding you back from living a more fulfilling and productive life.
1 Samuel 3:9-10, Exodus 19:9, 1 Kings 19:11-12, John 10:27, Revelation 3:20, Psalm 46:10
Last year I joined the growing ranks of people who have made the return to music on vinyl. There is much debate in my family as to whether I’m a hipster or will soon be eating dinner at 4 p.m. and wea...
Raising kids today is more complicated than it was when I was a kid. Parents feel out of control, hopelessly overmatched by the deluge of devices. And we can’t even count on one another to back us up....
Here is the heart of the paradox: Technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. But it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who ca...
The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...
If there is one word that sums up how many of us feel about technology and family life, it’s Help! Parents know we need help. We love the way devices make our lives easier amid the stress and busy...
Our family is radical, but we are definitely not Amish—although we love to eat the fruit, vegetables, meat, and cheese produced by our Amish neighbors forty miles away in Lancaster County, Pennsylvani...
Earlier this week I led a workshop for a national gathering of pastors. My subject, as you might guess, was church ministry with people in the third third of life. My workshop was entitled, “Unlocking...
Isaiah 40:8, Hebrews 13:8, James 1:17, Matthew 24:35, Colossians 2:8
A YouTube video from the Today Show in 1994 shows Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric asking each other “What is the Internet?” and debating if the “@” symbol means “at” or “about.” The world is very diffe...
Now, technology is everywhere. I don’t mean just glowing screens and digital devices; I mean the whole apparatus of “easy everywhere” that has come into existence in just over the span of one human li...
As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to ...
As we become more intentional about living according to our deepest desires, it becomes increasingly important to notice the effects of technology on our mind, our soul and our relationships. The ...
Deconstruction isn’t a trendy thing to do, but it is a trend that is happening at scale in our country and passing from person to person. Anecdotally, when I look up various hashtags on TikTok, th...
Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...
Exodus 18:13–27, Ecclesiastes 2:22–23 , Isaiah 40:28–31 , Luke 10:38–42, Matthew 11:28–30, Psalm 127:1–2
The picture shows cartoon villain Cruella de Vil, bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead, hands clutching the wheel of her infamous coupe, black-and-white hair waving wildly in the wind, oversi...
Philippians 4:8, Romans 12:2, Luke 21:34, Psalm 46:10, Matthew 6:22-23
In the 1990s, political scientists began to study what they called the “CNN Effect.” Breathless, twenty-four-hour media coverage makes it considerably harder for politicians and CEOs to be anything bu...
What will be remembered about the twenty-first century…is the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life and into cities. We will end this century as a wholly urban s...
Looking into his life and out to the wider world, Kenneth Gergen writes about The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, arguing that “social saturation brings with it a general lo...
In a knowledge-based economy, the way we make ourselves seen and even validated is through more work. Busyness shows us that we’re valuable, contributing members to society. So whether we can’t stop c...
Matthew 6:31-34, Luke 10:41-42, Philippians 4::6-7, Ecclesiastes 12:13, Proverbs 3:5-6
Life has become a smorgasbord with an endless array of dishes. And more important still, choice is no longer just a state of mind. Choice has become a value, a priority, a right. To be modern is to be...
The big issue . . . is not whether one applauds or disapproves of the growth of consumerism. The central issue is that consumerism is now a fact of life.”11
Earlier this month Michelle Yeoh won the Best Actress Academy Award for her work in the film Everything Everywhere All at Once . In her moving acceptance speech, she said, “For all the little boys an...
In this excerpt, author David Zahl challenges the common belief that religion is “in decline.” He argues that while Westerners, particularly younger generations, may be distancing themselves from the ...
Genesis 1:26-27 , Exodus 33:11-23 , Isaiah 43:1-4, John 10:1-15 , Luke 7:36-50, Psalm 139:1-6, 13-16
I am convinced that the scourge of our scientific and technological age is depersonalization. There is a heartbeat pulsating at the center of the universe, giving life and meaning to everything, but o...
Genesis 4:6-7 , Ecclesiastes 2:10-11, Daniel 3:16-18, Romans 12:1-2 , Luke 9:23-24 , Psalm 73:25-26
Modern man is a bleak business. To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and ...
So the work of the devil is everywhere, but no one knows where to find him. We live in the most brutal century [20th] in human history, but instead of stepping forward to take credit, he has rendered ...
Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional ...
Galatians 5:13, John 8:36, Isaiah 30:1, Proverbs 14:12, Genesis 3:6-7
Modern man is “a bleak business…To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and ...