By Greg Forster: part four of a series. Adam was not only a gardener; he was a farmer. He was called to bring the world under cultivation not only to make it beautiful but to make it fruitful. In this, Adam was like God. In many parables, Jesus represents God as the owner or manager of a farm or other agricultural…
If I do say so myself, Florida is the best place for flourishing to occur. Sorry, Denver; sorry, San Diego. When Juan Ponce de León saw our lush, florid coast blooming with fecundity during the 1513 liturgical season of Pascua Florida (feast of flowers) he declared the land La Florida. As an adopted Floridian myself, I can imagine what Ponce…
Story and metaphor are a powerful means for education on a variety of subjects, including faith & work. StoryCorps has published a book titled Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work whose purpose is to tell the story of individuals at work. Callings is written by Dave Isay. Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and the recipient of numerous broadcasting…
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…
What will the faith and work movement look like in 2067? What are we doing today that could genuinely last for 50 years, and even reshape American culture? These are tough questions. Not only because 50 years is such a long time, but it forces us to think not only of our own organizations, but the larger networks across the…
What does one say about yet another book in the never ending sea of books that discuss the integration of faith and work? Well, The Church and Work: The Ecclesiological Grounding of Good Work is distinctive for a few reasons. The book was written by Joshua Sweeden, dean of the faculty and associate professor of Church and Society at Nazarene…
Ray Bradbury’s dystopian story “The Veldt,” published in 1950, depicts a future in which technology does everything, leaving humans to enjoy their leisure. Of course, they do not enjoy it. The parents, bored and anxious, smoke and drink too much. The children, spoiled and detached, create disaster. The reader is duly warned. This and other dystopian stories (I, Robot; The Matrix; the…
A few weeks ago we reprinted a post from the Oikonomia Network by Ken Barnes about the beginning of his tenure at the Mockler Center at Gordon-Conwell. We caught up with him recently for more details. TGR: How are things going since you wrote that article for ON? KB: Things continue to move along. I’m very happy with the growth of the Ockenga Fellows program and the center itself. Our primary goal…
By Greg Forster: part two of a series. In a talk on Sending Disciples to a Pluralistic World, Vincent Bacote said: “Many Christians live in an imagination desert, unable to connect faith to vocation.” That’s a deep insight – that it takes imagination to make the connection between faith and work. And Bacote draws the work/imagination connection tighter when he…
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…
The Green Room 