Most leaders motivate others by boasting of their accomplishments. They talk about past goals they have achieved, they reflect on how effective they were at leading others to meet those goals, they praise others for their efforts, they explain the virtue of their future goals, and they repeat the message over and over again to…
Category: 2 Corinthians
Life is Not Gray
People resolve the tension of diversity either by clinging to fundamentalism or by embracing relativism. Unfortunately, both approaches share a desire to be right: to have the right ideas, to associate with the right people, to know who is clean and who is unclean. The relativist, like the fundamentalist, is fine with “everyone,” so long…
Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It
We human beings love having an excuse; or having the opportunity to blame someone else for our problems; or having the freedom to blame our failures on unforeseen circumstances. Unfortunately for us, according to St. Paul, no matter who you are, no matter what you do in life, no matter where you come from, no…
The Great Divorce
In one of his most popular works, C.S. Lewis talks about the inevitable divorce between good and evil: a comforting philosophical notion that allows adherents to be right or to be able to choose the winning side–as the sons of men often and arrogantly boast–“to be on the right side of history.” But what if…
Don’t Get Comfortable
When Paul talks about being “absent from the body,” our Hellenized ears want to believe that he is talking about a dualism with some version of a Platonic soul inhabiting (or exiting) our “earthen vessel.” As appealing as this may be to some, it has nothing to do with St. Paul’s letter. Paul is not…
Which Life is Life?
When someone sets out to do something difficult, they console themselves that their sacrifice is worth the effort because of what they will have achieved or attained. The problem, of course, is that we humans are as much aware of our own futility as we are comforted by delusions of permanence. In other words, no…
From Glory to Glory
When St. Paul contrasts tablets of stone with the human heart, or the letter inscribed in stone with the Spirit, or the Old Covenant with the New, Christians are quick to assume that the Old is incomplete without the New, or, worse, that the human heart is preferable to following the letter of the law….
Who is Testing Whom?
It is common for students to judge their teachers. Worse, students today are encouraged to do so, being routinely asked to fill out teacher evaluation forms. Some have even created websites to aggregate student gossip about their teachers. In a culture that lauds greed and shames mothers, it seems that everyone has an opinion…
Wax On Wax Off
According to human standards of leadership, when Paul changes course midstream, it appears to his disciples that he is vascillating between “yes” and “no,” like a man who can’t keep his promises. In reality, it is the church that is wavering because Paul’s disciples are unwilling to place all their trust in the instruction that…
The Blessing and the Curse
When Paul talks about comfort in 2 Corinthians, it is easy to receive his words as much needed nurturing, as though we have suffered unjustly and are in need of God’s intervention. But what if God has already intervened? What if the difficulties in our life are not unjust? What if the suffering of which…