(The following is excerpted from my forthcoming book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart (available in stores June 2, 2015). Pre-Order your copy TODAY!) There is an ancient, yet still surprising and little known Christian doctrine that asserts God’s intention to make each of us a god; perfect, immortal, and partaking in his very own divinity for all of eternity. This teaching, known by theologians as the doctrine of theosis or divinization is the... Read more
When things go wrong, we love having someone to blame. It’s a seductive game that makes us think that blaming others will give us control, but in reality, as long as we play the blame game–whether serving or being served–we have no power to change anything. We may manage to convince ourselves that nothing is our fault, but it also means that we won’t be able to do anything to respond to our problems because taking action would be akin... Read more
From The Science of Relationships In a recent study of about 300 college students, researchers wanted to find out if individuals are more or less likely to cheat as a function of whether their parents ever knocked boots with someone that wasn’t ‘mom’ or ‘dad’ (while married to mom or dad). Students were asked whether or not they had ever cheated on a romantic partner (30% said yes) as well as whether their mom or dad had ever cheated on... Read more
Hitmen succeed in contract killing where they successfully bury any feelings or emotions, a study into the psychology of novice assassins has found. Hired killers who consider themselves strategists or businessman, doing ‘just a job’ as one hitman described it, can convince themselves they are dealing with a target rather than a person, research by a team of criminologists revealed. Read More Wow. I’d love to see the Craig’s List ad soliciting people for this research project. On second... Read more
I regularly read blog posts from really great moms who tell some pretty disturbing stories of the things they put themselves through to try to attend to their children. All of the stories tend to follow the “I thought the only way to be a good mom was to do X, Y, and Z until I made myself sick because some expert/my friends/my mom group/some blog told me I had to do it that way and it almost destroyed my... Read more
It can be hard to love ourselves. Many of us are afraid that loving ourselves will make us narcissistic and selfish. Many others of us have too hard a time getting past our inner-critics to even try to figure out what it means. Despite popular fears to the contrary, loving ourselves is an essential ingredient in being a truly moral person. As Jesus, himself, observed, the Golden Rule states that we must love others as we love ourselves (Mk. 12:31).... Read more
(The following is excerpted from my latest book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart (available in stores June 2). Order your copy TODAY!) The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods. ~St. Thomas Aquinas Imagine that you were to wake up tomorrow to discover that, by some miracle, you had become a god overnight. Not THE God–omnipresent,... Read more
A new report from Pew Research shows that religion is losing ground as more people drop out of church. According to the report…. The shrinking numbers of Christians and their loss of market share is the most significant change since 2007 (when Pew did its first U.S. Religious Landscape survey) and the new, equally massive survey of 35,000 U.S. adults. The percentage of people who describe themselves as Christians fell about 8 points — from 78.4% to 70.6%. This includes... Read more
Despite what many popular authors propose, a new study finds that more sex does not necessarily lead to greater relationship satisfaction. In fact, in the particular study, couples who had more sex at the researchers request experienced a slight decrease in both sexual and general relationship satisfaction. In the words of the authors of the study… “The couples instructed to increase sexual frequency did have more sex. However, it did not lead to increased, but instead to a small decrease,... Read more
The following is adapted from my forthcoming book, Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart which looks at the longings that drive our deepest and even darkest desires and how God wants to use those longings to reveal his plan for our ultimate fulfillment. It is available NOW for pre-order! Christians have a complicated relationship with desire. We desire many things, but so often our desires get us into trouble. They can wreck our lives,... Read more
Faith on the Couch
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