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…
Category: Theological Discussions
Just Imagine: God a Doctor!
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…
Book Review: The Church and Work: Ecclesiological Grounding of Good Work
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…
Human Work Should Be Fulfilling – So Why Does it Feel like a Burden?
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…
Just Imagine: God a Shepherd!
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…
The Duke Divinity Crisis and The Perils of Our Language About Vocation
One of TGR’s bloggers, Jonathan Malesic, has a provocative essay over at Inside Higher Ed, where he diagnoses the recent well-publicized problems at Duke Divinity School as stemming, in part, from what might be called an over-adequate doctrine of vocation: Judging from his emails, Griffiths seems to think of academic work as an exceptionally high calling, a vocation. He is hardly…
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…
Three Answers on Vocational Mysticism: Part I
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. Do I Have Just One Vocation – and Is that My Career? The traditional Christian (or at least,…
Just Imagine: God a Worker!
By Greg Forster: part one of a series. Do we really think of God as a worker? We may say he is one, citing John 5:17 or other passages. But does our concept of God match our theology? How we imagine God is one of the most profound formative influences on our faith and life. That’s why scripture gives us…
Book Review: Liturgy Of the Ordinary
One of my oft-expressed critiques of the faith & work movement is that it is largely a privileged conversation. This does not mean that I do not resonate with or appreciate this movement. I am very passionate about the integration of faith into every part of my life and encourage other people of faith toward the same. I do, however,…
The Green Room 