“If you really wanted to help, you’d up and move to Africa.” It was a few minutes after I’d just spoken at a college chapel and a particularly fired-up student was trying to convince his classmates to resist child sponsorship in favor of a more radical and, in his mind, more holistic response to the … Read More
“Sometimes, God gives us glimpses into the enormity of the work at hand, not to increase our capacity to do a larger work or more work but so that the work we can do becomes more vital and less optional. We are compelled to do the work we can do because we cannot do all … Read More
I ran into a friend recently whom I haven’t seen in a while. And at first, I didn’t recognize him. Some of that had to do with the time between meetings. But more of it had to do with context. The last time I saw him was in California in the Sierra Nevada foothills. This … Read More
In the book Prayer: 40 Days of Practice, I take a swing at unpacking the word “spiritual;” not an effort to redefine the word for all users, but an effort to expand its application to meet my own experience and expectation. I do so by way of a kind of allegory; one in which a … Read More
A few weeks ago, I was in a contraption with a few folks my age and older who were voicing concerns about all the “information” kids get online. During that conversation, statistics were thrown around about how much data we’re subject to. Apparently, every person creates something like 1.7 MB of data every second, which amounted … Read More
I’ve come to pretty fundamentally believe that some things cannot (and should not) be discussed outside of personal experience. That might sound odd coming from someone with a relatively traditional education in western philosophy. But… here I am. One of the keenest examples of that is gun violence. The way I see it: despite the … Read More
I have mentioned Caroline McIntyre‘s book “caring for words in a culture of lies“ many times over the course of this podcast’s five years. It was, upon first read, a formative and grounding resource; it continues to be. In part because I have historically had a tendency to talk too much, putting too many words … Read More
The way I hear it used, the word “celebrity” almost always comes with a tinge of disdain. In fact, I was recently interviewing a band about their relatively wild public success and used the word “celebrity” to ask a question about how it felt to have the kind of influence they’d garnered. Boy oh boy … Read More
I actually never watched the Batchelor. And that’s not a thing I say with pride or any sense of superiority. I honestly just don’t watch a lot of TV and haven’t since I was about 12, when shows like “The A-Team” and “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” took up space on the probably 20 networks … Read More
Stephen Pressfield calls it “Resistance.” A number of religious traditions call it “sin.” But regardless of the name folks apply to it, it seems to me that we generally share, cross-culturally and throughout history, a sense and a lament that things don’t work out perfectly; that things fall apart and that plans don’t always go … Read More
