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Too often lately, it feels like the offices from which we’ve historically taken our cues — our political and community leadership, the punditry, local authorities and even some church groups — are populated with unserious people who can’t rise to a moment. Those who aren’t peddling pure boilerplate and calling it constructive thought are offering endless scolds about how we should live, think and speak, and how, if things aren’t getting better, it’s because we’re not doing enough of the right things. We should constantly be doing ever more of all these right things, it seems, until the world is saved and humanity perfected and then, finally, we may rest. These exhausting harangues have become as penetrating (and authentic) as prop knives. They fall upon our ears like an approaching storm w...

Welcome to Further Details, a series dedicated to ubiquitous but overlooked elements hidden on your favorite products. This week: something about your car’s automatic transmission you may have never noticed. If your car has an automatic transmission, the different positions you can shift into follow a specific pattern: P-R-N-D, usually followed by either a couple of lower gear options or the chance to shift it into a manual control mode. In case you’ve never driven (or, somehow, only driven cars with manual transmissions, in which place, god bless you), those four letters stand for Park, Reverse, Neutral and Drive — or, in layman’s terms, Stopped, Backwards, Free-Rolling and Forwards. You’ve probably shifted from Park to Drive a hundred thousand times, and from Drive to Reverse nearly as m...

Martin Seligman says, “Accomplishment or achievement is often pursued for its own sake, even when it brings no positive emotion, no meaning, and nothing in the way of positive relationships.” As human beings, we set goals and try to accomplish them. To fail to achieve our goals gives rise to a certain kind of unhappiness; to succeed gives rise to an element of happiness. Jesus’ parable of the talents points to the idea that Christians should make use of their gifts and abilities rather than allow laziness or sloth to get in the way of developing their talents. It would be wrong for someone, simply out of laziness, to fail to achieve what he could have achieved with his God-given potential. The Christian doctor should try to cure patients; the Christian teacher should try to instruct studen...

Skip to content Although we are halflings, we cannot remain halflings. We must either grow towards the wholeness of holiness or we must shrivel into the wreckage that Pride will make of our lives. Doing nothing is the sin of omission which leads to decay. We can either be Ring-bearers or Ring-wearers. We can either take up our cross or we can crucify ourselves. This week, I met a good friend of mine at a local restaurant, the first time we’d got together since before the onset of the pestilence. He is a Presbyterian pastor and a great lover of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It was, in fact, Tolkien who had introduced us to each other, in the sense that we first met at a local Tolkien conference a few years ago. During the course of our conversation, my friend wondered whether Tolkien had som...