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…
These questions and answers have been used in discussing vocation with college students as part of the Opus: The Art of Work program at Wheaton, and are presented here as a resource for others involved in similar work in colleges or churches. See the first post in the series here. Is My Vocation Mysterious to Me? Must I Wait &…
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…
By Greg Forster: part three of a series. If the profession of shepherd is “largely lost on us today” that of the doctor is not. To the contrary, the difficulty for us is to understand how remote and exotic – and shameful – it was in the biblical world. While the shepherd’s work is foreign to us, we are actually too…
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…
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…
