loneliness on Isolation

Whether young or old, Americans are feeling more isolated. According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, about half of Americans have weekly interactions with their neighbors, which means ...

Administrators of one of the largest hospitals in America cite loneliness as a major reason for overcrowded emergency rooms. Parkland Hospital of Dallas, Texas, made this startling discovery as they w...

In this excerpt from Jay Y. Kim’s book, Analog Church , the author shares about an experience at a local restaurant after being convicted of his own smartphone use at home, keeping him from being p...

In his book The DNA of Relationships counselor Gary Smalley argues from countless hours of research and observation alongside the wisdom of the Bible that we are hardwired for relationship. This i...

If you are looking for a story that illustrates humanity's deep-seeded need for relationships, you could do far worse than the 2000 film, Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks. The protagonist, Chuck No...

Researchers have found that more than half a million people in Japan stay at home for at least six months at a time without having any contact with the outside world.

Pain is the most individualizing thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization comes only when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer...

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.

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...

Harvard Professor Robert Putnam once lamented that Americans were “bowling alone;” increasingly, we’re also eating alone, as nobody is home for dinner.

Some Christians try to go to heaven alone, in solitude. But believers are not compared to bears or lions or other animals that wander alone. Those who belong to Christ are sheep in this respect, that ...

A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”

Sometimes we become so lonely, we'll do whatever we can to have some social interaction. Vulgar and with a quick wit, Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was a significant short-story writer and social cri...

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...

I was listening to a lecture on friendship to prepare this sermon and the speaker used the movie The Bride of Frankenstein as an illustration. Now, for this to work, you have to put the movie Young...

Lord of families, tribes, peoples, nations and all the world: it’s for freedom You’ve set us free from sin, guilt, and judgment; free to do what is right and just, what is compassionate, gracious and ...

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.

We live in a death-denying world that seems determined to develop technologies that will enable us to get out of life alive. Yet the more we strive to be free of death the more we are shaped by the de...

Reflection The television series Alone follows ten individuals who are left to fend for themselves and by themselves in the wilderness. Now, these aren’t everyday individuals plucked from Main St...

Context to Chapter 19 If you are following the semi-continuous lectionary you may have read the context for this passage in church last week. However, if you are following one of the more traditional...

Context to Chapter 19 Before this passage in 1 Kings, Elijah has just challenged (and massacred) the prophets of Baal. He has fled into the wilderness to escape the wrath of Queen Jezebel and is now ...

Solitude is an opportunity to interrupt this cycle by turning off the noise and stimulation of our lives so that we can hear our loneliness and our longing calling us deeper into the only relationship...

[Alienation is] “the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent.

The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door; On her divine majority, Obtrude no more.

The greatest dis-ease facing humanity right now is our profound and painful sense of disconnection.

Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.

“Man has a horror of aloneness, and of all kinds of aloneness, moral aloneness is the most terrible.”

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his o...

In a popular essay for the online magazine Aeon, Nabeelah Jaffer elaborates on a theme found in the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s work, that is the connection between loneliness and terror: ‘Loneliness...

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”