Christian Living, Discipleship, and/or Spirituality

The New Year engenders a flurry of soul-searching behavior, earnest plans resolving to change current behaviors, introduce new habits and cease old ones. The practice is so common that the U.S. government even has a web page listing the statistically most popular resolutions, including links to resources that will assist in achieving the new goals. However, as interesting as change is in and of itself, it is incumbent on an ethicist to ask an even more fundamental question about New Year’s resolutions than the rather pragmatic and pedestrian “How?” We are called here to consider the questions “Why?” and “What?” Why should we resolve anything at all? What does a resolution signify within the overall scope of our daily intending and resolving as human beings? And what is a resolution anyway? What does it mean to resolve?​

[1] It’s November, Target has been full of Christmas décor since September, and the malls have been playing holiday music for a month. Thus we are typically singing the anthems of the Advent and Christmas seasons well before it is liturgically appropriate. Of all the hymns I am happy to sing outside of Advent, to […]

“We can’t go on together With suspicious minds, And we can’t build our dreams On suspicious minds” – Elvis Presley, “Suspicious Minds” [1] I must admit that despite my best efforts, this song was stuck in my head while reading the last chapters of Martin Marty’s 2010 book Building Cultures of Trust (Wm. B. Eerdmans, […]

[1] Do we trust this book? What an odd question! Books provide information, make arguments, tell stories. We evaluate them by verifying, assessing, and appraising — not trusting! We would be gullible to trust a book, right? [2] Not really. Books and media are constantly bombarding us – especially in an election year — with […]

[1] Let me begin by explaining my part in commenting on Prof. Marty’s work, Building Cultures of Trust.1 Prof. Marty uses the intersection of contemporary Western science and religion as a primary “case study” to explore the ways in which attention to building trust can enhance the common good. Over the last 20 years, I […]

[1] At the university where I teach, opportunities exist for students to receive funding to collaborate with faculty on summer research projects. This summer, one student working with me is investigating social forms beyond religion that provide non-religiously affiliated people (the “nones”) with meaningful community-based social ties and opportunities for civic engagement. To set the […]

[1] In Martin E. Marty’s Building Cultures of Trust, we, the readership, are initially introduced to a conversation between Marty, the historian, and several conversationalists who represent general exchanges that Marty has had with people about the focus of his book—building cultures of trust. These conversationalists inquire why Marty decides to write about trust. Although […]

[1] Near the beginning of her 1992 article “Trusting People,” Annette Baier notes that trust “cannot be given except by those who have only limited knowledge, and usually even less control, over those to whom it is given.” Therefore, she reasons, “an omniscient and otherwise omnipotent God will of necessity lack one ability that his […]

Baier, Annette. “Demoralization, Trust, and the Virtues.” In Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers, edited by Cheshire Calhoun. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “Sustaining Trust.” In Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1994. ———. “Trust and Antitrust.” Ethics 96, 2 (January 1986 ): 231–60. ———. “Trust and […]

Introduction [1] “The self and the social are the two great idols,” as Simone Weil’s memorable aphorism about our time puts it.1 In his compelling argument in Testing the National Covenant, William F. May explores how our current fears and appetites feed our collective idolatry of both the individual self and the economy in American […]