America! America! God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! –America the Beautiful (Katharine Lee Bates) It had been a long glorious morning full of adrenaline, symbolism, and splendid pomp and circumstance. Then we sang the second stanza of the hymn “America the Beautiful.” Confirming my soul in self-control and confirming my liberty in…
“In corporate industries, we’re all mercenaries,” laughed Ashwin Mathews. “We work for the money. Honest—honest truth! I don’t work for loyalty, right? I’m not loyal to the company. I work for the cash!” I interviewed Ashwin (not his real name) in India in 2012 when I was conducting research for my PhD dissertation in sociology. By that point, I had already…
Katherine Leary Alsdorf is co-author with Timothy Keller of Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (Dutton, 2012). She came to Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City in 2002 to establish the Center for Faith and Work to help people nurture a meaningful integration between their faith and their professional work. Prior to this ministry role at…
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…
By Will Messenger Fewer men are working now than used to. A long-term trend, which accelerated in the wake of the global economic meltdown of 2008 is that labor force participation by working-age men in the US has declined significantly since 1950 (see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001). Undoubtedly, there are many causes behind this, and no single intervention is likely to change a…
By Nathan Roberts; reprinted from Patheos. It’s a little strange to have your first 8-to-5 job at an online platform called “The High Calling.” Working for a website about work is weirdly meta, like a teacher teaching teaching skills or a salesperson selling sales tactics. I find myself writing sentences like “God inspires us synchronize the work of our hands,…
By Deidra Riggs One afternoon, I opened my email account and found this message, from a dear friend: “This kinda pisses me off,” the message read. “I don’t want it to, but it does more than a little. Pray for me.” I scrolled down to read the forwarded message my friend had received and, with a deep sigh, immediately understood…
When I was a teenager, I became enamored, as only an anti-establishment teenager in the 1970s could become enamored, of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. The cynical lyrics deconstructed faith and capitalism in a way profoundly appealing to a countercultural16-year-old.
But now I’m 45, and much more committed to human flourishing as well as deconstructing. Still, as I wrote in this post, I worry that my work with the faith and work movement is blinding me to things I should not be blinded to. I want the movement to reassure me that it isn’t, underneath, aiming for the world that Bernstein describes in this song. (The whole set of lyrics can be seen here on YouTube.) I’ll be watching my fellow bloggers eagerly for answers to that question. I don’t think the faith and work movement will make headway in the mainline until it can find a way to set pastors from my generation at ease on this question.
Chorus: God made it be good
Preacher: Created it good
Chorus: Created the gnats
Preacher: Gnats to nourish the sprats
Chorus: Sprats to nourish the rats
Preacher: And all for us big fat cats. Yow!
The Green Room 