relationships on Isolation

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...

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...

The ancient Greek word for intimate fellowship is koinonia. In the church, we can suffer from what might be called koinonitus: fellowship turned in on itself; cliques and enclaves and tight-knit group...

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...

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...

It takes time to build and sustain healthy relationships. Time pressures can erode the quality of relationships and create fragmentation and isolation.

Today friendship has fallen on hard times. Few men have good friends, much less deep friendships. Individualism, autonomy, privatization, and isolation are culturally cachet, but deep, devoted, vulner...

In I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me , John Ortberg uses an interesting analogy for an aspect of our relationships. In 2015, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner announced the Starshot Initiati...

James Nelson describes sexuality as the central clue to what God is up to in the world. While this might seem a little over the top, when you think about it, sexuality factors integrally in our relati...

I sit in a bright-lit June meadow at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. It is early afternoon, and I have been here since morning in what can only be described as an uneasy sol...

No relationship, however deep and intimate, can ever fully take our loneliness from us.

I have always wanted to be me without making it difficult for you to be you.

Maleness and femaleness is the fundamental way we carry our relational design. Interestingly, the English word sexuality comes from the Latin word sexus, which means “being divided, cut off, separated...

If I am not for myself who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?

If you never left your home and avoided all interaction with other people, you couldn’t be characterized as a loving person. Instead, you might even be unloving because of your lack of concern for oth...

Hospitality does not entail helping another so much as immersing oneself in a new reality, entering into a new relationship with one who before was unknown or unappreciated. The nothing of “being with...

There are some men and some women in whose company we are always at our best. While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or speak ungenerous words. Their mere presence is elevation, purification, s...

No person has ever walked our earth and been free from the pains of loneliness. Rich and poor, wise and ignorant, faith-filled and agnostic, healthy and unhealthy have all alike had to face and strugg...

For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Sea of Galilee to be a lake and classifies other fresh or mostly fresh water locations together under the same banner. The poin...

A recent book, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times , says that private family life is no longer, as historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch named it, “a haven in a heartless wo...

For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Sea of Galilee to be a lake and classifies other fresh or mostly fresh water locations together under the same banner. The poin...

I think it is interesting that God designed people to need other people. We see those cigarette advertisements with the rugged cowboy riding around alone on a horse, and we think that is strength, whe...

But the peace which is shalom is not merely the absence of hostility, not merely being in right relationship. Shalom at its highest is enjoyment in one’s relationships…A nation may be at peace with al...

One of the ways we punish ourselves for not being more or better or thinner or stronger is by trying to squeeze ourselves—force ourselves, even—into all kinds of ill-fitting relationships. With other ...

In 1970 John Perkins, an African American pastor and community organizer who lived on “the black side” of rural Mendenhall, Mississippi, was nearly beaten to death by white state police officers. The ...

If you’ve ever watched a war movie, or a film that takes place in the military, you’re likely to have encountered a specific scene, in which a subordinate will have something to tell a senior officer ...

What's friendship, when all's done, but the giving and taking of wounds

Being free means “being free for the other, because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.