Ownership

One day, a father bought his little boy some French fries. The father, doing what any dad would do, reaches over and moves to take one of the fries off of his kid’s plate. The little boy screams, slap...

Introduction  Luke 16:1-13 isn’t an easy parable to preach on. It looks for all the world like Jesus is commending a guy who’s basically a dishonest rascal. You will sometimes see interpreters tying ...

Lord God of Heaven and Earth, You revealed Your only-begotten Son to every nation by the light of a star. Bless this house and all who inhabit it. Allow us to find it a shelter of peace and health. Ma...

Introduction  Luke 16:1-13 isn’t an easy parable to preach on. It looks for all the world like Jesus is commending a guy who’s basically a dishonest rascal. You will sometimes see interpreters tying ...

James 5:16 invites us to confess our sins so that we might be healed. Let us go before our Creator in humility and confession. Lord Almighty, we come to you in humility today. We have sought security...

Almighty God, whose loving hand has given us all that we possess: Grant us grace that we may honor you with our wealth and belongings, and, remembering the account which we must one day give, may be f...

The ways that social structures and institutions systematically work against the interest of people of color is called institutional racism. Institutional racism and historic racism are not unrelated ...

If anything, there appears to be an inverse relationship between our growing obsession with the home as a totem object and the disintegration of families that has become the chief social phenomenon of...

The idea of a modest dwelling all our own, isolated from the problems of other people, has been our reigning metaphor of the good life for a long time. It must now be seen for what it really is: an an...

The world asks, "What does a man own?" Christ asks, "How does he use it?"

What’s the difference between an employee and a partner? In one word — ownership. One of my first jobs was as a barista at this place called Coffee People. It was the anti-Starbucks of the late ’90s. ...

Perhaps there is no object more desired than a house in America. Meghan Daum writes in her hilarious and poignant book Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, “There is no object of desire qui...

We fixed up the house and swapped it for another house and then another and then another. During the first ten years we were married, we moved six times. It was like being in the witness protection pr...

Before Seattle resident Edith Macefield died at age eighty-six in 2008, she refused to sell her house to developers for the $1 million they had purportedly offered. Macefield wanted to die at home. Se...

In modern Western culture we place a high value on work, which is fine, but one of the philosophical assumptions that can come with such values is that we assume that we own what we earn or buy. From ...

“A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees belongs to the Lord; it is holy to the Lord,” reads Leviticus 27:30. It may come as something of a surprise bu...

A distraught man furiously rode his horse up to John Wesley, shouting, “Mr. Wesley, Mr. Wesley, something terrible has happened. Your house has burned to the ground!” Weighing the news for a moment, W...

In his classic monologue, comedian George Carlin riffed on the mountain of stuff we compile. His assertion is that a “house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” So when you get right down to ...

The biblical theology of creation is a negation of theories of private” property and “public” property, our theories of individual ownership and collective or governmental ownership. The biblical view...

I love old homes. I’m always drawn to them. The character, the drama, the history. The possibility they possess in a different way than a new build does. Often when referring to older homes, people sa...

A traveler, between flights at an airport, went to a lounge and bought a small package of cookies. Then she sat down and began reading a newspaper. Gradually, she became aware of a rustling noise. Fro...

Human ownership is an illusion. How can creatures that die own anything? No matter what you temporarily lay claim to or control, one this is certain: In one hundred years, you will no longer own it.

If you own something you cannot give away, then you don’t own it, it owns you.

There is no object of desire quite like a house. Few things . . . are capable of eliciting such urgent, even painful, yearning.