life on Millenials

In March 2009, we received the results from the widest religious survey conducted in the United States, the ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) study. There is much to gain from this repor...

I have been moved to a different course of action, however, inspired largely by my daily exposure to college students in a great university during the course of a preaching and teaching ministry that ...

Most alarming is the absence of peace among our youth. Research from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is showing an epidemic of mental health problems among eighteen- to twenty-four-year...

The twenties are a time when one asks, What will I do with my life? What is it that I really want in exchange for my life’s labors? Most denied that the key desire of life was for material wealth; t...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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 ...

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 ...

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

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...

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...

The great irony of our time is that even as we are living longer, we are thinking shorter.

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 ...

Last week I spoke to a retreat of pastors and other church leaders who are working on innovative ways to help their congregants understand and live their vocation in the world. The retreat was part of...

Growing older is not upsetting; being perceived as old is.

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...

Westerners have a complicated relationship with money. We don’t like it when wealthy people receive special treatment or look down on the rest of us as riffraff. But many (can we say most?) of us aspi...

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...

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...

Who, then, are we, we prideful late-twentieth-century creatures? Lord knows, we no longer think of ourselves as belonging to anyone or anything. We do not belong – we own; we possess. And that, to say...

What’s Really Going On With Your Older Adults When It Comes to Faith and Church? Would you like to know what’s really going on with the older adults in your church? What they’re thinking and feeling...

The last ten years, Americans have reported a steady decline in overall life satisfaction, despite the fact that average income per capita increased by 5.5 percent. We got richer, but became less happ...

People who think they are better than other people haven’t taken the time to hear the stories of the people they think they are better than.

There are people who do not live their present life; it is as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other life, but not this one. And while they do this, time goes by an...

An estimated half of people aged 75 and over live alone—about two million people across England—with many saying they can go days, even weeks, with no social interaction at all.

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...

About 2 out of 3 American adults who regularly attend church or other religious services say they go for their kids.

Let’s begin with a few foundational facts: The number of people age 65 and older in the United States has grown rapidly over most of the 20th century, from 3.1 million in 1900 to 54 million in 2019...