Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what you are expecting in life.
One of the functions of leadership is to lead, and weak managers may simply check and check and check with others because they are not capable of leading when it is required of them to lead. Benedict...
Everywhere I looked, hope existed - but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. It was a theological concept, not a spiritual practice. Hope, I began to realize, was not a state of...
The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.
We fail to move beyond what is safe, we abandon our dreams in favor of what is sure rather than strive for what is best for us.
Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what y ou are expecting in life.
To pray in the midst of the mundane is simply and strongly to assert that this dull and tiring day is holy and its simple labors are the stuff of God's saving presence for me now. To pray simply becau...
Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.
Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, We must be willing...
Humble people walk comfortably in every group. No one is either too beneath them or too above them for their own sense of well-being. They are who they are, people with as much to give as to get, and...
Most significant of all, perhaps, is that, of the 613 laws in the Torah, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, not one uses the word obey. God, the rabbi says, does not impose the intractable on Isra...
This compulsion to look back, to explain to myself, to others, why I did what I did—or, worse, to justify why I didn’t do something else—is one of the most direct roads to depression we have. Our thou...