By Jeff Haanen, reprinted from Made to Flourish. Anne Bell, a recently-retired researcher at the University of Northern Colorado, spent one of her first years after retirement volunteering with the 5280 Fellowship, a leadership program for young professionals in Denver. Bright and soft-spoken, wearing dark-rimmed glasses that match her innate curiosity, she confessed one day to a group of early…
Reprinted from Jonathan’s eponymous newsletter. I’ve been thinking a lot about attention. My semester of teaching first-year writing just ended, which means I’ve been mulling over what went wrong during the class. And the things I think most went wrong had to do with attention. (Things went right, too, but I tend to dwell on the negative.) I won’t go into detail,…
Reprinted from Made to Flourish. Made to Flourish editor’s note: Barna Group just released a new study, Christians at Work, which explores how Christians relate to their workplace lives, and how their faith intersects with the rest of their lives. One main theme of this research centers around vocational discipleship. Made to Flourish executive director, Matt Rusten, sat down with Barna…
When I taught theology, the doctrine my students found most offensive was neighbor love. The idea that you are obligated to love the person right next to you, regardless of anything they might have done to “deserve” your love, was patently absurd to them. Now I teach writing. You have to have something to write about, so my students write about…
The Problem With Work (2011) by Kathi Weeks has been sitting on my desk now for some time in preparation for my reviewing it here. Recently, my 5-year-old walked by my desk. She is just learning to read, and she sounded out the title. “What is the problem with work?” she said. “Is it that not everyone has a job?” On the…
I am always looking for books that discuss neglected aspects of the faith and work conversation. Rest is certainly one such aspect and I’m pleased to see an increasing numbers of books (such as Garden City) discussing it. Rest is written for a secular audience, but it has lessons for the FAW conversation. The author, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, is the founder of…
Jonathan Malesic, one of our bloggers, recently sent out a note alerting his mailing list to a paper he’s written for the Journal of Religious Ethics on resources from Thoreau for dealing with the “suckiness” of work (TGR’s term, not Malesic’s). The paper is behind a paywall, but if you belong to an academic institution you may have access to the…
For all of the national conversations about a universal income, unemployment rates, the threat of automation, politicians’ promises for more jobs, etc., the daily experiences of individuals and their jobs can get lost. That’s one reason why Studs Terkel’s 40+ year-old interviews with American workers still resonate today. Terkel published his iconic book in 1974. It was called Working: People Talk…
In my previous post, I introduced a new framework for thinking about how people maintain and overcome boundaries between faith and work. I proposed we consider two simple categories: overlap and separation—states that may obtain in spite of our intentions to integrate or segment faith and work. In this post, I consider the first category of overlap: fusion. By fusion,…
Rice just announced this grant in late April: The comprehensive study will focus on U.S. workers and will comprise a broad-based national, random-sample survey of approximately 12,000 people from multiple religious traditions and no religious tradition. Research will explore faith at work as well as religious discrimination. It will include focus groups with both professional and working-class participants and as…
The Green Room 