Reprinted from the Theology of Work Project, lead contributor Alice Matthews. People everywhere have always worked. And when we turn to the New Testament we find women engaged in all kinds of employment. For some it was the work of bearing and rearing children. For others it was bringing aid to folks in need. And for still others it was as…
By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life. See previous posts in this series starting here and continuing here and here. Too often Americans think vocation is… Summing up, probably the most common bad vocational theology I’ve found among Christian students is the lie that we must discover “the” one, mysterious vocation God has for us. For some students, even…
By Steve Rouse, reprinted from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light…
By Jordan Ballor, reprinted from the Oikonomia Network. The Economic Wisdom Project is best known for our Economic Wisdom Project Talks, which are short, accessible, engaging and rich presentations suitable for use in classrooms and group discussions. But the EWP also features print resources, including our vision paper and our twelve elements of economic wisdom. Economic Wisdom for Churches, our…
Reprinted from the Chalmers Center; part one of a series. Ministry focused on addressing poverty is fundamentally about promoting change. It’s about helping people and communities move to a better situation than their present one. Effective poverty alleviation requires us to know where we are trying to go and how we can get there. In other words, we need a “story of…
By Pam Tinsley, reprinted from Living God’s Mission. A priest I know recently attended a meeting of local business leaders who were struggling to comprehend the many changes that are being thrust upon our nation. The meeting included an elected official who was also struggling for answers and how to respond in such times. The leaders conveyed a sense of…
By David Williamson, part one of a series. From the beginning, at the dawn of history, men and women are called first into a relationship with God. Then, secondly, they are called to participate with God in exercising “dominion” – managing, shaping, designing and developing the world that God has created and entrusted to humans. The creator God is an…
By David Gill, reprinted from our archives; originally published by Workplace 313. J. Daryl Charles is an affiliate sholar of the John Jay Institute and the author of twenty books, including the superb Wisdom and Work: Theological Reflections on Human Labor from Ecclesiastes (2021). In Our Secular Vocation, Charles draws again on Ecclesiastes but ranges far wider in scripture and history to provide one…
Reprinted from the Theology of Work Project, lead contributor Alice Matthews. From time immemorial men and women have worked together in whatever enterprise they’ve found themselves. In the early American colonies women worked at tasks ranging from attorneys to undertakers, from blacksmiths to gunsmiths, from jailers to shipbuilders, from butchers to loggers. Some historians tell us that women ran ferries and…
By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life. See previous posts in this series starting here and continuing here. So far we’ve looked at a few definitional aspects of what the Christian tradition has to tell us about vocation. Now what about popular understandings of vocation that may or may not align with those Christian understandings? We’re going…
The Green Room 