The most problematic person to be honest with is primarily ourselves. Particularly when we align our sense of self-worth to what we do for our daily bread. What we do for a “living” is often the first question we are asked by strangers and acquaintances. It’s how this culture defines our value to the world. […]
Tag Archives: materialism
18
Jul
Jul
I live in a culture that deifies what our senses can see while disparaging what our senses cannot see. I live in a culture that devours generosity to satiate our vociferous appetite for self while discounting a sense of shared community. I live in a culture that diminishes kindness and denigrates love. God is love. […]
16
May
May
The modern world has deconstructed every social institution, disassembled the cosmos and disarmed the world of any meaning. Reducing the human experience to a succession of stimuli to serve a soulless system. Science is sacred, the sacred is scorned and humans are suffering. As a culture and a country, we our spiritually sick, mentally maladjusted […]
09
May
May
My professional life was all about people, procedures and producing profits. Unlike the vast majority of men who came before me, I was neither a farmer or shepherd, priest or solider. Instead, my daily bread was earned as a member of the modern age managerial class. A vocation birthed in post-industrial America when humans no […]
11
Apr
Apr
I am Gen Xer (born 1965–1980). One of many life labels that’s been assigned to me. A moniker that describes something about me, without being unique to me like being born in the United States. What is distinctive when talking about my generation, is that we are the last analog generation. While some sociologists and […]
07
Feb
Feb
This journey to realize and claim our birthright as children of God only begins when we ask why. When we question the world. When our heart whispers to our head because intuitively it knows that something is very, very wrong within God’s good world.
Weekly Reflections
The Myth of Divided Loyalties, the Lies We Tell Ourselves and the Suck of Politics
10
Jan
Jan
In 1963, three years before I was born and two years after the US sent its first combat troops into Vietnam, CS Lewis would write, “The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.” More than sixty years later, his words […]
20
Dec
Dec
I used to love Christmas and the things that surrounded it. The luminous lights, the December decorations, and of course the tasty treats. Remembering a time before the Internet when you couldn’t buy peppermint bark in July and when Santa’s wasn’t competing with scary witches. Our years in America are no longer marked by the […]
08
Nov
Nov
When I was sixteen going on seventeen, our church youth group learned about the Appalachia Service Project (ASP), a Christian nonprofit ministry focused on the “eradication of substandard housing in Central Appalachia.” Growing up, I was aware that there were families who didn’t have the same standard of living we did, but participating in ASP […]
04
Oct
Oct
As I began to write about my story, I realized not only my deep devotion to the material world but the lies that I believed to sustain my faith in stuff. Lies that sustain the modern world, particularly in the west. Lies that have always deceived us.