By Mike Metzger & John Seel Tides rise and fall. A rising tide lifts all boats. The converse however is reality for engaged couples. Ebb tides drop all boats. Most couples think that they can ignore the tides. They can’t. Consider any engaged couple in the U.S. These couples tend to be woefully naïve about…
“You say potato, i say potato. Tomato, tomato, potato, potato. Let’s call the whole thing off….” This Gershwin song loses its lilt right at the end. Sometimes, wrangling over the meaning of words isn’t small potatoes—it can be illustrative of what Philip Rieff called a “deathworks.” As go words, so go civilizations.
He never spoke of winning yet his teams won ten NCAA Basketball championships in 12 years. He never yelled at his players yet he commanded their attention. This past Friday, former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden passed away at the age of 99. It has been 35 years since Wooden coached. Thirty-five years is roughly…
“You think you can catch Keyser Soze?” In The Usual Suspects, agent Kujan thought so. Big mistake. He didn’t start with the right suspect—which is the unusual suspect in today’s culture. This presents a challenge, since problems are hard to solve with the right kind of suspicion.
“We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” The wonder of the Soviet system was its design and duration. A deeply flawed design meant Soviets played “Let’s pretend” for 70 years. It’s a similar challenge in business schools. They pretend to teach ethics, students pretend to pay attention. The wonder is that B-Schools have…
Tolstoy knew something about shalom that many churches don’t. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond cites the famous first sentence of Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Diamond goes on to write, “By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to…
So, Eve… how does this apply? The Bible equates sex with knowledge, as in “Adam knew Eve” (Gen. 4:1). Do you think Adam asked Eve afterward: So, Eve… how does this apply to our life? If this is how knowledge is gained, why do we talk about “applying principles to our life?” Could it be…
Seeing is believing. The best way to believe in shalom is to see it in Solomeo. Solomeo is a small hilltop village in a mountainous region called Umbria, north of Rome. It is where Brunello Cucinelli and his family make their home. It is also where his company makes high-end cashmere sweaters and other luxury…
Love isn’t blind, but it’s often nearsighted. It’s part of what makes marriages work, as in “I only have eyes for you.” But it can make institutions resist paradigm shifts, for when they only have eyes for what they love, they tend to only be nearsighted. This seems to be the case in three modern…
In 1954 Ted Williams batted .345, topping Cleveland’s Bobby Avila, who hit .341. But Williams didn’t win the batting title. He didn’t have enough plate appearances. Baseball measures consistency as well as connecting. If the same holds true for the Christian faith, this raises a troubling question: why are we so inconsistent in church attendance?