life on Social Class

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...

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

Cultural commentator Richard Sennett has claimed that the primary architectural emblem of contemporary life is the airport departure lounge.

Did you know that the history of the word “fellowship,” is, rather simply, a relationship among fellows? The idea of a fellowship being that two or more people have been bonded together in some signif...

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...

Societies the world around are currently in desperate straits trying to produce people who are merely capable of coping with their life on earth in a nondestructive manner.

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.

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...

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...

We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good l...

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 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...

There have been times, not least the time of the birth of Athenian democracy, when most of the people who thought and wrote about human wholeness concluded that no one could be a whole human being, no...

We probably got a bit too cocky about how well our lives were going. But after disability showed up in our family, we learned that life is not tame. It’s not here to align with our desires and plans. ...

Introduction Our text falls within a larger section (Luke 16) in which Jesus deals head-on with questions of money, specifically the need to choose God over mammon (the worship of money), in other wo...

Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...

Christians are unique citizens in society because, formed by the “upside-down” kingdom of God, they move out into the world as self-sacrificers rather than self-actualizers.

I grew up near Washington D.C. surrounded by politics…I helped with the campaign of a friend’s father as he ran for state office, watched our friendly county supervisor become a US congressman, and le...

All of us live inside of an economy of desire.

The good life is built with good relationships.

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

The search for the good life, which so often is defined in terms of “things” and the means to get as many “things” as possible, has turned into a dead end as more and more people have more and more.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—his last breath. (1897)

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...

Shakespeare was right—a person’s life is made up of many acts. As a book writer, though, I prefer to see these acts as chapters. If you look back on your life, you’ll likely see them too. There is the...

Human life in the western world today... is characterized by an enormously wide range of incompatible truth claims pertaining to human values, aspirations, norms, morality, and meaning— A hyperplurali...

Numerous modern thinkers have noted the spiritual nature of eating meals in community. I wonder if this is why “Sunday Brunch” is such a popular alternative to attending church services. The Orthodox ...

For a long time it seemed to me that real life was about to begin, but there was always some obstacle in the way. Something had to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be serv...

The kingdom is in everyday life with its ups and downs, and above all, in its insignificance. Such is where most people actually live their lives. The kingdom is thus readily accessible to everybody.

Any social science study will tell you relationships are key to happiness and well-being. But there’s more. Friendship isn’t just an elective in the course of life, it’s required. In my line of work I...