Usually on this blog we try to spread the love around, with a variety of posts in any one week—from interviews to book reviews to op-eds to reprints of cool stuff you might have missed elsewhere. If you get our posts by email (and if you don’t, you should) you may have noticed that I broke that rule this week,…
I once knew an assistant coach who had a copy of a book entitled Your Body Believes Every Word You Say on his desk. It appeared to be both an old book with a dated cover photo and an unread volume with a pristine binding, which led me to ask him about it. He told me it was a great book and…
This week I was on a conference call with a bunch of fellow faith-and-workers, and one person said that a certain theologian has done a lot of work on vocation “because he’s a Calvinist.” I commented that it would be better to say he’s done a lot of work on vocation in spite of the fact that he’s a Calvinist,…
The New York Times published an article in July called “Work and Reward: The Great Disconnect.” * Basically, the article’s argument is that people tend to assume that harder work will bring them more renumeration, but that, even if ever true in the past, this is becoming less and less true today. This leads to an overall sense of discouragement:…
We ran into this somewhat disturbing story at the website of the BBC recently: Even when they’re able to do the job competently, obese people routinely face discrimination in the workplace. While discrimination against employees because of their sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion or disabilities is illegal in a growing number of countries, including the UK, many businesses…
Jonathan Malesic, one of our bloggers, recently sent out a note alerting his mailing list to a paper he’s written for the Journal of Religious Ethics on resources from Thoreau for dealing with the “suckiness” of work (TGR’s term, not Malesic’s). The paper is behind a paywall, but if you belong to an academic institution you may have access to the…
By Greg Forster; part six of a series. This is a post about ruling the world. This series on suffering began with the two horns of the dilemma facing the faith and work movement: we want to help people suffer but without helping people suffer. Then it went through the three major theological areas where there is, in general, a…
By Greg Forster; part five of a series. You don’t work in this movement for long without hearing about eschatology. But we don’t connect eschatology to suffering as often as we should. If we did, I think we might find that our differences over eschatology can be fruitful rather than destructive. So, let’s bicker about eschatology! (The previous post in…
By Greg Forster; part three of a series. Here’s a faith and work leader who knew how hard it was to help people endure suffering and also challenge the sources of their suffering: I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some…
By Greg Forster; part two of a series. How do we help people suffer without helping them suffer? That is, how can we help people persevere through suffering, and even “rejoice in our sufferings,” without becoming complacent about their suffering or even – God forbid! – contributing to social conditions that increase suffering? This is a paradox the faith and…
The Green Room 