Category: Vocation
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Econo-ethics
It is not clear to me what an economically well-ordered life looks like for a Christian in the West. I suspect that obedience to Jesus in our pecuniary affairs looks significantly more radical than what we have grown accustomed to, but as far as I can tell there is no…
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YOLO for Lent
The Christian season of Lent, which begins today and serves among other things to remind us for forty days of our mortality, has something to say about YOLO, and it is this: If we are mortal creatures living lives that could end at any moment, then the inclination to spend…
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What’s retirement for?
I think one of the reasons retirement is so hard for many retirees is because we haven’t wrestled very well with this question. And to wrestle with the meaning of retirement is really to wrestle with the meaning of three other words: work, rest, and play. Our lives are made…
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Want it
Much attention is paid–and often rightfully so–to habits and processes as primary means of achieving some end. But while it’s true that we can sometimes force character change by our behavior–e.g., we can become generous by simply starting to give, or become savers by starting to save–it’s also true that…
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Garbage in garbage out
Cable news channels, HGTV, and CNBC are all selling you something which costs more than you can afford, and which will prevent you from living in the real world in any purposeful way. If you keep your soul free from the distorted views of political parties, a strange feverish version…
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Hustling backwards
Hustle is not a virtue. Hustle in the context of a virtuous activity is good. Hustle outside of that context is just…window dressing at best, and detrimental at worst. The reason this is important is that too often hustling is just a form of hiding. We can rush and bustle…
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More than one type of debt
The Polish-American Jacob Mikanowski makes the case that in Poland, during the Holocaust, “the people who end up protecting the [Jewish] people they protect the longest, hold out the longest, hold out to the end, are usually people who live on the absolute margins: widows, outcasts, people with no money,…
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Go to nursing school
At a soccer game this afternoon I found out one of the other parents had decided to go to nursing school. She’d been in a marketing job for her whole career, and, in her words, tried to do convince herself she wanted to keep doing it until she was seventy.…
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Contagion
Complaining is contagious. Stinginess and scarcity and cynicism spread like wildfire. But gratitude, generosity, abundance, and hope, while perhaps spreading a bit more slowly at times, leave a more permanent mark on those who catch it, who find their lives marked by the love of those who care enough to…
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Thou shalt not steal
Comparison is the thief of joy, and a tyrant to boot. But comparison is not “out there.” Comparison doesn’t exist without the person looking at us in the mirror. So let’s own the fact that we are the robbing and thieving despots of our own lives when we engage in…
Meaningful Returns 