By Michaela O’Donnell Long, reprinted from the De Pree Center. Recently, I had young woman approach me after a speaking engagement and ask with admiring eyes, “How do you do it all?” When I prodded more, I learned what all meant: she liked the things I taught about, she thought it was wonderful that I have two young children, and she hoped…
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…
By Klaus Issler; part one of a series. Reprinted from the Oikonomia Network. For much of church history, pastoral leaders believed the Old Testament taught that no interest should be charged on any loans. The care and protection for the Israelite working poor was the main rationale for such a prohibition that no interest should be charged on such loans.…
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,…
Fourth in a series. To quote G.K. Chesterton, “the following propositions have been urged”: That we lack an account of what makes a social space a “public” space That this gap helps explain our failure to theologize well the particular kinds of social spaces in which most people do most of their work (business, government, etc.) That it also helps explain…
Reprinted from the Salt & Light Australia Daily Devotional. I was teaching a unit on Workplace Ministry at a theological college and I asked the class of 24 students how many had been visited in their workplace, by their pastor. Two hands went up. The first student told us how he was a barista in a café, and the pastor…
By Philip E. Thompson, reprinted from the Oikonomia Network. Previous articles on Sioux Falls Seminary have shared stories of how our innovative approach to theological education, Kairos, is enabling students to cultivate human flourishing in both ecclesial and non-traditional contexts of ministry. Since the Kairos model was launched in the fall of 2014, its success has required ongoing, overlapping processes of assessment, evaluation and…
See Part I here. I recently met a man who had worked emptying pig intestines in a sausage factory. Now that is a lousy job. But there are plenty of ways a job can be lousy. Whether it’s packing boxes in a swelteringly hot warehouse, listening to coworkers brag about one-night stands, or getting eclipsed for a promotion by someone…
Reprinted from Made to Flourish. A few years ago in a powerful op-ed in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote that “the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.”…
By Andrew M. McGinnis Review of Abraham Kuyper, Honey from the Rock: Daily Devotions from Young Kuyper, translated by James A. De Jong (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018). P. xviii – 741. In the academic world there are several well-known “twoness theses”—arguments by scholars that there are in one historical person two identifiable and contradictory lines of thought that warrant depicting…
The Green Room 