In 2016, Fletcher Lowe emailed me out of the blue. He wanted to meet Episcopalians who were going to be at the 2016 Faith and Work Summit in Dallas, and a chain of emails had led him to me and Will Messenger at the Theology of Work Project. (Will and I are both Episcopal priests, as was Fletcher.) We exchanged…
Schmiesing, Kevin. Merchants and Ministers: A History of Businesspeople and Clergy in the United States. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. 248 pp. $105.00. The story this book tells will be unfamiliar to many readers. The role of business in the development of American history is a contested one, and robber barons and Wall Street tycoons often feature as villains. This…
Earlier this summer, I joined the launch team for Jeff Haanen’s An Uncommon Guide to Retirement with the goal of getting a review out to you all on this blog as part of the book’s launch. Unfortunately I then broke my nose, which is not a recommended productivity technique – so now I am late to the party. Sorry, Jeff! If you…
On any list of my favorite authors, Dorothy Sayers is near the top. I’ve been a fan, especially of Lord Peter and Harriet Vane, for years. I still remember walking into a used book store Before the Internet to see if they had any more copies of her mysteries. When I told the proprietor what I was searching for, he…
It’s my annual posting of my favorite song about Christ’s first advent, his second advent, and the transformation of our work now and always. Sing along!
Usually on this blog we try to spread the love around, with a variety of posts in any one week—from interviews to book reviews to op-eds to reprints of cool stuff you might have missed elsewhere. If you get our posts by email (and if you don’t, you should) you may have noticed that I broke that rule this week,…
If there’s any Bible portion that gets overused in the faith and work movement more than Genesis 1-2, it might be 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “ For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” It even rears its head outside the movement in political debates. It seems right, then, that the…
Second in a series. Not all that long ago, as I was preparing sets of sermon notes for the Theology of Work Project, it dawned on me how many faith and work sermons there were on Genesis 1-2 and Revelation 21-22. I think the movement’s claim that preachers have tended to ignore these topics in the past is true. And it…
A few weeks ago, I reported in on my failure to attend #Acton U and to blog about talks there which centered around the book Work: Theological Foundations and Practical Implications. While I can’t go back in time and travel to Grand Rapids for the conviviality and thoughtful reflection and beautiful views of the river and amazing quantity of men in…
A while ago, I checked in with you with a dispatch from a growing genre of books: let’s call it the postwork genre. As I put it there in describing the genre, It’s the contention of many in the faith and work movement that the best way to fulfill God’s plan for the world is for everyone to work, or…
The Green Room 