by Guy Sayles | Mar 15, 2012 |
When I was in elementary school, our report cards contained a section on “class citizenship.” We didn’t just get grades on spelling and arithmetic; our teachers also evaluated our character. There was a list of personal qualities; and, next to each one, a ranking: VS...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 9, 2012 |
This week, I had the privilege, along with about 60 other Baptist leaders, of spending several hours at a White House briefing and conversation about important domestic policy issues. The briefing took place in a fourth-floor conference room in the venerable and...
by Guy Sayles | Mar 4, 2012 |
We need community, but community isn’t easy. And it isn’t easy mostly because there are people in community, and people have a way of being predictably and messily human. Some of the people in community with us have strange ideas and unreasonable expectations. Some...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 23, 2012 |
We’ve all heard, “Denial is not just a river in Egypt.” As worn-out as that cliché’ surely is, it still serves to remind us of one of the most common dances we use to two-step around the truth about ourselves and the world—the denial dance. You can pretend not to know...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 20, 2012 |
In the late 1970s, when Anita and I were in seminary in Louisville, KY my maternal grandparents, who lived four hours away in Huntington, WV, were the relatives to whom we most closely lived. Whenever we could, usually a few times a year, we’d visit them in the modest...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 14, 2012 |
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. in After Virtue, claimed that two of our culture’s emblematic professions “the Manager” and “the Therapist.” The Manager is mostly concerned with technique—with turning raw material into products, turning unskilled labor into skilled...
by Guy Sayles | Feb 10, 2012 |
For many years now, I’ve had a growing conviction that the great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner was right to have claimed: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.” He meant that people will either have a dynamic, immediate, and...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 30, 2012 |
At a critical point in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, the Hobbit whose burden it was to carry the Ring toward its destruction—the destruction that would save Middle Earth—has grown weary and disheartened. He’s afraid and uncertain. He says to the wise wizard, Gandalf...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 16, 2012 |
I grew up in Atlanta—Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hometown—during the most intense days of the civil rights movement. The center of the movement was in Atlanta’s “Sweet Auburn” district, a vibrant African-American business and professional district, where the Ebenezer...
by Guy Sayles | Jan 10, 2012 |
I surely understand the opening lines of Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Self Portrait”: I lived between my heart and my head, like a married couple who can’t get along. . . My head says: “I think.” My heart says, “I feel.” Head says, “I’ve concluded”; heart says, “I wonder.”...
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