thoughts on Human Judgment

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.

My thought it is a wanton ranger,  It skips away;  I fear 'twill bring my soul in danger  On Judgment Day...

Modern knowledge involves breaking things down into component parts. As philosopher Michel Foucault argues in The Birth of the Clinic, nowhere is this more disturbingly clear than in modern medicine, ...

Jesus was a whole human who had a head and a heart and a spirit. I forget that Jesus came to this earth, not as a brain in a Mason jar floating in formaldehyde, but as an embodied, incarnate, integral...

O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all ...

Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, to o...

Psychologists have estimated that we have anywhere between twelve thousand and sixty thousand thoughts a day. The majority of those—as high as 80 percent—are thought to be negative: obsessing about mi...

Many of us tend to be passive with our thoughts and feelings. We treat them like they rule us, like they are in charge of us, and not the other way around. We forget that our thoughts and feelings are...

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

A worldview is as indispensable for thinking as an atmosphere is for breathing. You can’t think in an intellectual vacuum any more than you can breathe without a physical atmosphere. Most of the time,...

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don't bite everybody.

Leader: Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord, and he will have mercy on h...

Social scientists define procrastination as “delaying a task for a maladaptively long time,” and it bedevils almost all of us. One study found that more than 70 percent of university students procrast...

In recent years, an entire discipline of modern psychology has developed called cognitive behavioral therapy. This breakthrough teaching reveals that many problems, from eating disorders to relational...

Leader: The Lord searches us and knows us. God discerns our thoughts and is acquainted with all our ways. People: Even the darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day, for darknes...

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

The pyschologist Carl Rogers, a person who would know quite well the interior lives of others, has this to say of our inmost thoughts: I have most invariably found that the very feeling which has see...

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Lord and God, you know what we are about to say in prayer, you know what we ought to say, and even what we need to say but cannot. Our sins trouble us, though they don’t trouble us as much as they sho...

Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. . ....

Eternal God, in whom we live and move and have our being, whose face is hidden from us by our sins, and whose mercy we forget in the blindness of our hearts: Cleanse us from all our offenses, and del...

Did you know that more has been discovered about our minds in the last twenty years than in all the time before that? Did you know that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of visits to primary care physicia...

Preaching Commentary A Psalm with a Thesis Statement Some psalms begin with a thesis statement, which is quite a gift to the reader. This is true of Psalm 139:  God knows the psalmist because God m...

Lord God, we acknowledge that your Word is full of living power. It is sharper than the sharpest knife, cutting deep into our innermost thoughts and desires. Your Word exposes us for what we really ar...

Our lives are always moving in the direction of our strongest thoughts. What we think shapes who we are.

A Psalm with a Thesis Statement Some psalms begin with a thesis statement, which is quite a gift to the reader. This is true of Psalm 139:  God knows the psalmist because God made him, and God even k...

When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embeddin...

Eternal and Glorious God, Your grace calls us toward growth and service in You. Yet today we acknowledge the many times we have forgotten Your mercy and rejected Your love. Forgive us when we sin agai...

Core beliefs can be hard to change because they’ve generally been with us for a long time, and we assume that they’re true. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to changing our core beliefs is that they are s...