Things you need to do soon: Read Katelyn Beaty’s excellent article, “The Faith-Work Gap for Professional Women,” at Christianity Today. She references a new Barna survey which notes “that evangelicals—while generally supportive of working women—were the group least likely to support them compared with all Americans,” and she outlines several possible reasons why. Sign up for a free digital copy of “Change…
Author: Jennifer Woodruff Tait
Faith, Work, and Charlottesville
This blog is meant to be a space for faith and work leaders to think about the faith and work movement. We are generally not political (though we ask people to think about encouraging the ethical practice of politics for the common good of the polis) and we try not to post too frequently, because we know you’re busy people. We…
More Work, Less Reward?
The New York Times published an article in July called “Work and Reward: The Great Disconnect.” * Basically, the article’s argument is that people tend to assume that harder work will bring them more renumeration, but that, even if ever true in the past, this is becoming less and less true today. This leads to an overall sense of discouragement:…
The Curse of Hard Work, Reconsidered
Reprinted from MISSION:WORK at Patheos. Check out one response to this question here at TGR by Benjamin Norquist. So, if you’ve been reading this blog for long you know I have a lot of jobs. One is as an editor for The High Calling at The Theology of Work Project. (THC, for a long time, was solely a production of…
What the Faith and Work Movement Can Learn From #ThanksForTyping
A provocative article about the hashtag #ThanksForTyping recently appeared on the website Ministry Matters: It had started with a few tweets by Bruce Holsinger, a literary scholar at the University of Virginia, noting that the acknowledgments in older academic work often included the author’s wife for her work in typing the manuscript. In some acknowledgments, the unnamed wife did much…
Missing the Night Sky: or, the Industrial Revolution and the Stars
I started reading this recent article from The New Atlantis thinking that it would be mostly about the technology of why we no longer see the stars. It turned out to be as much about the philosophy, even the spirituality, of why: “We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars,” Matthew McConaughey’s character says…
Book Review: I’ve Never Pretended I’m Not Religious
This post was originally a participation in the Patheos Book Club on David Dark’s Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious. Since one of the things we in the faith and work movement are always agonizing about is the sacred-secular divide, I thought it was worth reprinting here too for further pondering of the lessons the book teaches about…
Why the election is a faith and work crisis
I’ve told the story before how a chance phone call from Chris Armstrong in late 2013 involved me, a nice moderate United-Methodist-turned-Episcopalian mainliner who was doctrinally orthodox but not culturally evangelical, in the faith and work movement. Even as a not-particularly-liberal mainline type, one of the barriers to involvement in this space that I had to overcome was my…
The Little Jobs Who Won’t Sing
By Jennifer Woodruff Tait A few months ago, I attended the Acton Institute (you can read more about my trip here) as part of my work with the Theology of Work Project. One of the things I did was attend a lunch where some other folks from TOW presented some of the resources on our site and talked about how…
Gender progress in the faith and work movement: or, I’d like to wait in line for the women’s restroom
By Jennifer Woodruff Tait A few years ago, some of us who are now connected with this blog, and who were at that time connected with another project, were having a planning meeting for the project. The first time we had a coffee/water/restroom break, I noticed something odd. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll remind you I’m…
The Green Room 